The Life and Times of Elliot Pike

Well, my Apple troubles are still going on with new unpleasantness every day.

• My iPhone still wont sync calendar items; and now if I make an appointment on the iPhone not only does that appointment not show up on my Mac’s iCal application, but the appointment vanishes from the iPhone as well next time I sync it.
• My iPhone unexpectedly decided to power itself down last night after I went to sleep. The disturbing thing was that I had set a wakeup alarm right before going to bed. Needless to say the phone didn’t wake me up at the appropriate time. (Fortunately, I have a freakishly-accurate clock in my brain, and I woke up on my own 3 minutes after the alarm was supposed to go off.)
• Last night my Wacom graphics tablet decided it’s driver was going to stop working. I get a crash message upon boot-up. Tried reinstalling the driver but to no avail. The only relevant system change is I installed the recent Quicktime+iTunes update a day or two ago. Anyway, the tablet had a mouse that came with it that I liked, and now I can’t use it so I had to pull out an old leftover mouse until someone comes up with a fix.

I’m not writing to suggest that Apple makes buggy products as much as I’m reaffirming the conventional wisdom: unless you are an early-adopter computer professional, never upgrade your Operating System (Windows or Mac) until at least the first major patch is released. Actually I’d suggest the first major patch or four months, whichever is later. In other words, I wouldn’t recommend people upgrade to Leopard until about Valentine’s Day next year.

I don’t know if anybody is going to believe this, but I have a confession: Apple software isn’t perfect, and lately it’s been getting worse. (more…)

I’m guessing I fit in with the “majority” out there when I say I’ve been sick of the iPhone obsession for a long time now. Frankly as a computer geek and a Mac fan, I was miffed when Steve Jobs spent the entire January Keynote talking about this phone and the only computer-related item was that the company was taking the word “Computer” out of its name. (Then I waited for the June WWDC Keynote, hoping he would make up for it with some cool Mac/OS X stuff and found myself again completely disappointed.)

Now the darned iPhone is out, and I grant you there is a lot about the device that looks cool. (Disclaimer: I still haven’t seen one in person, but I’ve read more than I care to about it.) Since I have a blog (and haven’t used it much) I figured I would write my initial reactions to what I believe the device is like.
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With a title like this I’ll bet you’re expecting some rapid evangelical Apple-activist rant on one of the many themes you’ve heard time and time again. You know, Macs having fewer viruses, having a superior UI, etc. And granted, I do very much love working in my Apple world. Whenever I have to “slum” in Windows, and especially if I have to work on someone else’s computer where a zillion little apps and utilities have been installed (willing or not) by the owner’s ISP or Real Player or some anti-virus software, and where the IE toolbar has been polluted with half a dozen ROWS of little controls by Google or Microsoft or whatever… ack! I want to pull my hair out.

But all that notwithstanding, I wanted to blog about something that few people—even few Mac users—are aware of: the magic that’s “under the hood”.
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