apple

Thoughts on the Apple TV

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So now the Apple TV only costs £99, am I about to buy one? Afraid not.

Long-time readers will know about my various abortive attempts to turn my spare Mac Mini into a media centre (which I’ve given up on – I just have Boxee running on my main desktop). The Apple TV was always interesting but the price tag meant I wasn’t so interested.

The new Apple TV is much cheaper, but it’s also a simpler device with no hard drive – or the means to connect an external hard drive (there’s a Micro-USB socket but it’s for ‘service and support’ only). So rather than being a media centre, it’s more a ‘media extender’ – it lets you view media stored elsewhere (on your computer or on a streaming service) on your television. If you want to watch a film you own, that film must be on another computer and that computer must be turned on and running iTunes.

Like the previous model, it does support HD but only at the lower rate of 720p, not 1080p which is what most decent HD televisions use; consequently any 1080p television will have to do some upscaling which may effect the sharpness of the picture; thus negating some of the benefits of HD. I suppose streaming 720p video requires less bandwidth than 1080p video but a 1080p option for content on your own network would be nice. HDMI support is welcome though.

One of the biggest new features is Netflix streaming. Alas, Netflix doesn’t yet operate in the UK, and Apple hasn’t signed up any similar services like Lovefilm, so we have to buy all of our content from the iTunes Store.

In fact, there’s no other region-specific services, despite the Apple TV now running on a similar operating system as the iPhone. An App Store for the Apple TV would be great, potentially allowing users to install apps specific to their country; Brits could install applications for the BBC iPlayer, 4oD and SeeSaw for example. In the US, Hulu could launch an app as well.

Then there’s the price. It’s certainly cheaper than the its predecessor, but £99 and €119 are much more than its $99 price tag in the US (who also get the Netflix features). While all Apple products cost a little more in Europe – even after sales taxes are taken into account – the new Apple TV costs 30% more. To give some perspective, the iPad Nano is only 15% more expensive after tax and is at a similar price point, and most of Apple’s desktop computers are under 10% more expensive. So European customers pay more than their US cousins, and get less.

And one final reason why I wouldn’t buy an Apple TV is that the Boxee Box is coming to Europe in November with pre-orders starting in the US now. The Boxee Box is twice as expensive as an Apple TV in the US – $199 – but it has a very large application library (including BBC iPlayer), 1080p HD, support for a wide range of codecs, USB ports, and and SD card slot. Still no internal hard drive but at least you can connect one. Of course, I’ll be a bit peeved if it goes on sale for £199…

And now it’s the Mac Mini’s turn

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As many of you will know, as well as my MacBook, which I use as my main computer, I have a Mac Mini as well – this was my first Mac which I bought in 2005. It has spent the past year or so searching for a purpose – I was, and still am, hoping to turn it into a media centre but I’ve neither had the time or money to go ahead with it, and to be honest, I don’t really need to either.

Anyway, after yesterday’s shenanigans with my MacBook, it’s the turn of the Mac Mini to refuse to work. It’s actually not a problem that developed today – I noticed it wasn’t working last week, but as I run it headless I didn’t have a computer monitor to plug it into. All I knew was that it wasn’t registering itself on the network.
Today I had chance to use it with an external monitor. I heard the startup sound, saw the Apple logo on the screen, and then, nothing. No status indicator, just the Apple logo.

So, I zapped the PRAM – Command+Option+P+R. This time, the status indicator appeared for about 10 seconds before the Grey Screen of Death appeared, showing a kernel panic. This happened with subsequent boots.

So, I tried booting from the OS X CDs. Same problem. In fact, after a while, all I could do was access the Open Firmware command prompt.

This therefore means that there’s something wrong with the RAM or another component. Over the Christmas period, I took my Mac Mini with me to my parents in York, rather than leaving it in Bradford as I figured it would be safer. I’m guessing that it may have got jolted in transit and one or more of the components is out of place. It could also be bad RAM, but the RAM was only replaced in November 2006 and it was good-quality Crucial RAM. Plus, it’s a faff trying to get the damn thing apart and will probably require the purchase of another putty knife seeing as my existing one has gone missing.

In the meantime, I have a nice iOrnament.

How to: fix your MacBook screen

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Had a bit of a panic this morning when I let my MacBook go to sleep, and upon re-awaking the screen’s backlight would not come on. The screen itself was working, as I could see a small portion of the desktop in the middle where the Apple logo is, but the rest was un-viewable.

It’s working now, but not after trying almost every trick in the book. I’ve listed all of the methods here, mostly for my own reference in case it happens again but also for anyone having a similar problem.

Diagnostics

First of all, make sure that the rest of the computer is working. If you have an external display handy, plug that in and use Fn+F7 to activate it (you may not need to hold down the Fn key depending on your Mac’s settings). If you can see your desktop on the external display then the problem is with the display – if not, you computer may have deeper problems. If you have VNC set up, you could try this too.

1. Set your brightness

Sometimes it’s the basic things – your brightness might be set to minimum. Use Fn+F2 to turn up the brightness (you may not need to hold down the Fn key depending on your Mac’s settings).

2. Zap your PRAM

One trick to deal with minor hardware problems is to reset your PRAM and NVRAM. To do this, power down your Mac, then, turn it on and hold down Command+Option+P+R at the same time, until your Mac makes the ‘ding’ noise again. Command is the Apple key, Option may be labelled as ‘alt’ on your computer.

3. Reset your Energy Saver settings

You may need to use an external monitor or VNC for this. While you Mac is booted, open System Preferences and choose Energy Saver. Under ‘Put the displays to sleep’, set the timer to 1 minute, and then wait 1 minute for your machine to go to sleep. Wake it up, and hopefully your screen will spring back to life.

4. Take out the battery

If your Mac is a portable, turn the computer off, unplug the AC power cord, and take the battery out. Next, hold down the power button for 5 seconds, and the re-insert the battery. Then boot up again. In my case, this is what worked.

Here’s what you could have bought…

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Apple has updated the MacBook range again, this being the third revision since they were launched last year. Mine is a first revision, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, had I waited 9 months I could have got (for the same price that I paid):

  • A 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, instead of a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor
  • 80 GB hard drive, instead of 60 GB
  • 802.11n Wi-fi, instead of 802.11g (108 Mbps instead of 54 Mbps)
  • Faster writing of CD-RW discs (16x instead of 10x)

But never mind. It’s had 9 months of very heavy use and yet doesn’t seem to be suffering – the battery is still at well over 90% of its original capacity and everyone else seems to work fine. I guess I’m just envious.

It’s here

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The MacBook is here, and currently downloading about 10 system updates. Unfortunately, I have an exam in 3 hours so I can’t play with it much, but for now I can say the following:

  • Wow, it’s so small and light
  • The battery seems to be charging up really quickly
  • I really wish my Mac Mini had an Apple Remote

More later (including photos), after I’ve spent 2 hours sat in a room writing about internet security and encryption protocols.

Mac Stuff, again

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I think this will be the last post of this series for at least a few days now, since I’ve pretty much explored the OS now.

  • Managed to get 10.4.2 to install. It turns out I needed the ‘Combo’ update and not the standard one, which is presumably only for US English users or something. It would have been nice for the non-Combo installer to tell me this though.
  • I also managed to finally sort out the keyboard mapping problems using this UK keyboard map. It’s a shame I had to resort to third-party software to fix the problem – Apple should really have addressed this in the operating system, especially as one of the selling points of the Mac Mini is that you can bring your own keyboard and mouse.
  • Now my next keyboard problem: getting the Home and End keys to do as they do in Windows. In OS X, they do nothing. Any ideas?
  • One of the flaws I heard about the Mac Mini was its headphone socket and poor quality output. This is something I’ve noticed as well; there’s not nearly the same depth of sound as on my laptop. It sounds very muffled when hooked up to my stereo, for example. Sure, it’s only supposed to be a headphone socket but it is the only built-in audio output, and when you consider it comes with software like GarageBand and iMovie you would expect something a bit better. I may have to consider the Griffin iMic (£30 or $40), especially as the Mini has no way of inputting sound (no microphone or line in).
  • The network tools applet in Utilities is awesome! Whois, DNS lookups and allsorts, all in a nice interface. Nice one, Apple.
  • I gave in and downloaded StuffIt Expander for the Mac. Even though the StuffIt web site uses browser sniffing and will only let Windows users download the Windows version. Thankfully I have Chris Pederick’s User Agent Switcher installed so I pretended I was actually a Mac user and it was okay.
  • The main reason for this is so that I could install Windows Media Player 9 for OS X since I imagine I’ll need it to view some movies. Alas VLC doesn’t yet support many of Microsoft’s proprietary media formats (or at least not on its non-Windows builds) so I’d better get it just in case. And you need StuffIt to be able to open WMP since it doesn’t use a disk image like, um, just about every other piece of Mac software I’ve downloaded recently.
  • I also have a feeling that I’ll need to get a copy of RealPlayer for OS X. Unless, of course, anyone can suggest another program that plays RealMedia files?

It’s here!

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All booted up

So, it’s here. Actually, it would have been here yesterday but no-one was in when the delivery guy called.

First impressions

Setting up was pretty easy – not much more than a case of plugging everything in and pressing the On button. Which, confusingly, is on the back.

It picked up my mouse and keyboard fine, although it did ask me to press the key next to my left Shift key just to verify the layout. Even then, it’s on the US layout and not the UK one, despite saying I was in the UK the whole way through the setup. Will have to adjust that later on.

Network settings were picked up no problem and it detected the wireless network in the house too. It couldn’t actually connect to it but then neither can my laptop so I’m guessing it’s an issue with the base station. It probably needs a firmware update but we’ve not been able to get on the internet to do it.

The first-run installation looks very nice, with the revolving dialog animation. All in all it took under 5 minutes, after which I was looking at the OS X desktop in all its white and silver glory. Work commitments have meant I haven’t been able to explore much though.

Since my monitor has DVI inputs as well as VGA I’m using a DVI cable to connect the two together and this seems to work fine. OS X even defaulted to the 1280×1024 resolution, which is the highest the screen can take. Using DVI has the added bonus of not needing a KVM switch when switching back to my laptop; I’m hoping to use Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse between the two machines.

So yeah, I’m pretty happy right now 🙂 . Unfortunately we still have no broadband, and now the phone line itself doesn’t seem to want us to make calls, so I’ll have to keep using my laptop in the library for now. Small though the Mac Mini may be, when you include the keyboard, mouse and screen the package gets somewhat bigger, and not exactly portable.

Here’s a Flickr photoset of the unpacking.

iPod Recycling Programme

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At the risk of annoying Dave, who’s just bought a iPod Mini to replace his 2G iPod, Apple have announced an iPod recycling programme, whereby if you take your old iPod to an Apple Store in the US, Apple will recycle it free of charge and give you 10% off a new model (if you buy one on the same day). The old iPod will then be dismantled and recycled within the US, so that no hazardous chemicals, such as lead, are shipped overseas.

It’s a good move by Apple. On the one hand, they’re ensuring that unwanted iPods are disposed of and recycled properly, instead of being dumped on landfill sites. And at the same time, they’re encouraging users of old iPods to upgrade to newer models, thus bringing the company more revenue.

Let’s just hope that Apple extends this to other countries and that other manufacturers take a hint and adopt similar policies.

My iPod Mini arrived!

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A photo of a green iPod Mini being held

At long last, my iPod Mini arrived this morning. It’s now on charge, connected to the bundled transformer that is almost as big as the device itself. Unfortunately I won’t be able to do all that much with it until my laptop is repaired because neither my dad’s laptop or my parents’ PC have USB2 ports, although once I have iTunes installed and have the device fully-charged I’ll try anyway. Experience tells me that if you charge the device fully on first use you can greatly extend the battery life of a device so I’ll wait a few hours.

Still, I’m excited at the fact that I can call myself an ‘iPod owner’ 🙂 .

Apple Lossless Encoder

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One new iTunes feature that slipped by me was the new ‘Apple Lossless Encoder’. Unlike music formats like MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis, lossless encoding results in no loss of quality – the music file sounds exactly like the original. The downside to this is that files compressed using lossless compression are typically quite a bit larger than their lossy counterparts.

With the largest iPod topping 40GB it’s hardly surprising that Apple have adopted this – I’m sure the majority of people will never fill that much (even I have only 6-7GB) so the extra space can be set aside for higher quality files. What is surprising is that Apple chose to adopt their own format, and not one of the (many) other lossless encoding formats.

If you thought there was a format war amongst lossy encoders then you’ll be knocked back by how many lossless ones are out there. There’s at least 14, although not all of them are as good as each other. Thankfully, lossless formats are easier to compare since output quality isn’t a factor, but a good format will have quick encoding, a small output file size, many features, and would preferably be open source too.

The most popular is FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), which is now being steered by the Xiphophorus Foundation who are also steering the Ogg Vorbis format. It’s arguably not the best format out there but it’s good enough and it’s entirely open source. It’s well represented on almost all platforms and is even in some hardware players. Monkey’s Audio is a little faster but isn’t so well supported, being restricted to Windows and a command line encoder in Linux. Although it is open source, development has been a little slow of late, and it lacks some features compared to FLAC. Shorten is another popular format.

Apple Lossless Encoder (or ALE for short – nice acronym), is, sadly, based on none of these. It’s a new format which is closed source and currently only works in iTunes (Mac and Windows) and through QuickTime, although a dBpowerAMP codec is apparently in the works. It is quite well featured, offering streaming and seeking support (which a surprising number of other formats lack), and is obviously supported on the iPod with the addition of the latest firmware update, so on paper it has a similar number of features to FLAC. It is, however, slower at encoding and decoding, and files are typically a megabyte or so larger, according to this comparison provided by the FLAC project, however this HydrogenAudio topic suggests it is faster. I’m guessing Apple may have optimised it for the PowerPC processor, in which case compile times on Mac OS X would be better than in Windows.

It’s just a pity that Apple took the decision to re-invent the wheel when good alternatives already exist, although this Macworld column reckons this is because Apple may want to add DRM to it in future so that punters can buy higher quality files from the iTunes Music Store. AAC was an open(-ish) format and look how quickly that was cracked. On the other hand, I doubt the record labels would be interested in giving away their songs on the internet at full quality, based on their previous boneheaded decisions.

There may also be reasons, such as patents or problems with embedding FLAC in the iPod firmware, but seeing as other hardware manufacturers have managed it this seems strange.

In any case, it’s an interesting development. Any support for lossless audio in iTunes is a good thing, I just wish that Apple had gone with the herd rather than go on a tangent and then confuse people. What I would like to know is whether the WMA import function of iTunes allows you to convert them to ALE, since then you wouldn’t lose any quality – I couldn’t find anything that suggested this in my research for this article.

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