Ed Bott asked how one could buy Apple computers at discounted prices. I myself recently faced this same question, and I’m pleased to say that it is possible to buy Apple computers for below retail, despite the company’s strict attempts at pricing controls. I bought my own 15″ MacBook Pro last month for a full 25% less than the retail price. I learned a few things during my hunt - read on for my advice!
![](http://blog.fosketts.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/08mbp_15.png "15\")
It turns out that Apple made at least a few errors in designing the hardware of the MacBook Pro. After living with it for a solid week, I can report that, along with the useless ambient light sensor and wimpy power cord, both of the ‘Pro’s USB ports are compromised! The left side doesn’t have the power to spin up a disk drive, and the right side shares bandwidth with the iSight camera built into the lid. Why would Apple make this kind of mistake when PC vendors get these things right?
Just a quick tip tonight about something that’s been nagging me. I love my IOGear MiniView Micro GCS632U KVM, but I’ve had a weird problem since hooking it up to my new MacBook Pro. See, the IOGear uses a double press on the Scroll Lock key to switch views. But every time I type this while connected to the Mac, the screen dims two notches. Pretty quick, it’s completely black!
I just solved the problem. The old Apple Extended Keyboard, as revered by Apple fans as my IBM Model M, continued the function key mapping past F12, adding F13, F14, and F15 where Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Pause/Break is on an IBM 101-key layout. Then they mapped F14 and F15 to dim and brighten the screen, respectively. See the problem? Yeah, the IOGear hotkey is “dim dim”!
It turns out that this is easy to fix. Leopard’s Keyboard & Mouse Preferences panel includes a tab to remap Keyboard Shortcuts. Down at the bottom of the list is “Display”. Expand it and you’ll see the two mappings in question - just un-check them and you’re good to go!
While you’re there, marvel at how none of the other function key shortcuts match up to their functions on the pre-2008 MacBook uses! It’s a really bizarre oversight on the part of Apple to map bright/dim to F14/F15 and to F1/F2 on the same computer at the same time, depending if you’re using the built-in keyboard or not! Apparently, the company shifted all the mappings around for the late 2007 desktop and early 2008 portables, too.
By the way, about that KVM - it’s pretty good, especially for the money. I previously used a GCS62, which is a PS/2 in and out model with no audio, but the GCS632U is more suited to weirdos like me that like to use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse with a modern computer. It takes PS/2 in but sends USB out to the connected computers, and includes audio, too. It’s rock-solid, unlike the Belkin Flip I tried before, but I do wish the audio cable wasn’t captive to the video like it is - it’s just not long enough for the Mac.
The lowly computer keyboard is so ubiquitous that it can seem unchanging, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is one of the most important components of any system, and has survived all assaults by new technologies from the mouse to the pen to the microphone, yet its evolution is marked by legacy functions and terminology that can leave computer users scratching their heads. Today we deal with an issue that has faced many over the past decades: How to use a PC keyboard with a Macintosh and vice versa. Continue Reading »
It’s official, I am a switcher. A splitter. An ex-Windows user (at home, at least). Today I bought my first Mac since the SE that still haunts our basement storage room in its cute gray carrying bag. Come Friday, I will be an official Mac user!
How did it come to this? It’s not really Microsoft’s fault. I use Vista every day for work, and have come to terms with it (most of the time). And much of my work revolves around Server 2003 and other Microsoft server and storage technologies, which I have come to respect. No, it’s not because of Microsoft’s software; it’s all about hardware.
Attrition was the instigator. My home machines have been slowly dying, killed off by old age. Last to go was my home-brew Celeron 4-powered desktop, which recently ate its second power supply, and the fact that my work laptop kicked the bucket last week. This left me with an ancient Pentium III laptop to struggle with, until Dell fixed the work lappie (it cooked its CPU!). But I like to keep work separate from pleasure, so I saw this as a sign that I had to get busy and get a new home machine.
But what to get? I do lots with the home PC - video editing, photo manipulation, web work, and writing. I’ve always relied on a desktop for these things, and have built a series of them from components over the last decade. But I’ve become less interested in tinkering with hardware lately and more interested in having something that works. And while there are certainly hundreds of choices for sweet pre-built and supported rigs, I finally admitted to myself that I would use a laptop more than a desktop, so the field was narrowed.
But what laptop to get? There’s such a variety these days, from the ultra-light to the budget/mainstream to the workhorse to the crazy. I’ve always liked my Dells, but the XPS M1210 I rely on for work hasn’t been as stellar a performer as I had hoped. I used to be an ultra-light aficionado, with original HP OmniBooks (300 and 800CT) and Toshiba Portege 3010 haunting my past, but this class could never keep up with demanding apps like video editing and encoding.
Yes, it had to be a powerful “desktop replacement” machine with fast storage, lots of RAM, and good video hardware. Hello, MacBook Pro! Not being totally insane, the 15-incher would have to do. And not being made of money, I was looking for a good deal. Although Apple just updated the line in February, the modifications were slight - a smaller and cooler Penryn CPU, a larger hard disk, and that weird too-small multi-touch trackpad.
So I decided to pick up an “outdated” mid-2007 model instead, saving 20% in the process and still getting a killer machine. I went with the 2.2 GHz model, betting that the 4 MB of cache in its Merom core would bring it close to the performance of a 3 MB-equipped 2.4 GHz Penryn, and would certainly be good enough for my use. I don’t think I’ll miss the additional 128 MB of VRAM in the new ‘Books either, and the old model still has the 800 MHz Santa Rosa chipset and LED backlight.
Looking around, I found that Mac Connection and Amazon both had good prices on older gear, but MacMall had the lowest price (after a $150 rebate) and wouldn’t charge sales tax. They talked me into a $100 RAM upgrade (to 4 GB), though I balked at their $40 installation charge. It may be harder to swap a hard drive in a Pro, but RAM is simple to install. I’ll live with the 120 GB 5400 RPM hard drive for a while. But I’ve already got a 160 GB drive on the shelf, and might even skip that in favor of a 320 GB or even 500 GB Samsung at some point.
And Mac OS X? Well that will be a learning process for me. I like the idea of UNIX internals, being an old-school UNIX-head, but am concerned about just how good the OS integration is. Is it lipstick on a warthog like so many other “desktop UNIX” systems? It sure looks pretty, and I love the bundled applications, so we shall see.
And I can always run Vista or XP, since the machine will definitely be a dual (or triple or quad) booter. I went ahead and picked up VMware Fusion at the same time, hedging my bets on the state of Mac applications.
So tune in over the next few months and I’ll let you all know how it progresses. At the very least, I got a killer new laptop!
Note to subscribers: If you’re not interested in Macs, iPhones, home media servers, and such, you can subscribe to my Enterprise Storage-only feed. Alternately, if you’re interested in the tales of a switcher more than Fibre Channel and iSCSI, you can subscribe to my Terabyte Home feed instead.
Macintosh PowerBook Pro image courtesy of Apple. Macintosh SE image from Wikimedia Commons, taken by Danamania.
It seems that there is another iPhone gremlin, this time in the interaction between the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store (as seen on the iPhone and iPod Touch) that can cause your purchases to vaporize. This only seems to apply to folks who have unchecked “automatically sync” and have not previously clicked “Transfer Purchases From…” in iTunes.
Here’s the situation: You are tired of iTunes syncing whenever you drop your phone into the dock, so you uncheck “automatically sync” in the iPhone Summary page. While at your local Starbucks, you decide to download the latest from KT Tunstall. Yup, it downloaded, and you can listen to it. Later, you place your phone back in the dock and go about your business. But, surprise surprise, Katie’s song is now gone from your world! Somewhere, somehow, the iPhone deleted it! Continue Reading »
Network Appliance is no more. The company that made the second enterprise storage device I ever used, added the terms “filer” and “appliance” to the enterprise IT lexicon, and long suffered from a confusing array of names, is now officially called NetApp.
This is probably a good idea. A company needs a single name, and NetApp is what lots of people (even me) have long called the company. Plus, it’s never good to have your company name be the same as one of your products, at least when you make more than one. And NetApp has lots of different products, many of which are not network appliances…
They’ve added a new logo, too, which ironically looks like a thick blue dolmen to me, but was probably supposed to evoke a door and the letter, N. I always liked the old round peg in a round hole idea, myself… But then again, I always kinda liked yellow and purple and silver storage devices, too!
Remember the old days, when it was Apple Computer, HP still stood for Hewlett-Packard, Sun for Stanford University Network, and EMC for Evil Machine Company? (Just kidding, guys, I know it was Egan, Marino and Einstein’s equation…) But the world will end if IBM ever changes its logo!
Update: More coverage:
Image by Andrew Dunn courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-sa-2.0
ZFS really piques my interest, so I just had to include it in my TechTarget storage virtualization seminar series.
Here’s a quick primer for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, and thus are wondering why anyone would get stoked over a filesystem!
ZFS (originally “zettabyte file system” but now just ZFS) takes the essential technolgy from file systems and volume managers and stirs it together into one important new way to manage storage. It’s an open source project started and managed by Sun, using the CDDL license (so Richard Stallman wouldn’t approve). It’s loved by both Sun and Apple which makes it much more important.
See, ZFS will probably replace UFS (on Sun), HFS+ (on Mac), and every other file system and volume management product out there, especially on these platforms. And I expect to see it appear on Linux once the tricky bits are resolved (which have to do with licensing not technology…)
ZFS creates a truly flexible, extensible, and full-featured pool of storage across systems and disks. No more (of the old) arcane syntax, commands, ridiculous GUIs (ahem, Sun), and unnatural limitations of old system storage management. With ZFS, you add some disks, get some space, and use it. But it gets cooler than that…
ZFS “zpools” (file systems) live on “vdevs” with striping and optional RAID-Z/Z2 (which is double-parity kinda like RAID-6). And, get this, every block is protected with checksums to ensure that the rapidly rising incidence of disk errors won’t bite you. Want capacity? 128-bit addresses mean near-infinite space (in theory). Oh, yeah, and all blocks are “copy-on-write” for snapshots and clones, something that barely works on most desktops and workstations.
But alas, there are some limitations… Adding (and especially removing) vdevs is hard (read: maybe impossible) depending on how your storage was set up. Stacked RAID is impossible, so no “Z+Z2″ for you! And, until Sun integrates Lustre, there is no clustering support.
And then there’s the fact that Sun and Network Appliance are actively suinging each other over the fact that the technology in ZFS has ended up looking an awful lot like their bread and butter super file system, WAFL.
So there you have it. If you’ll be in Washington DC on March 4, or Durham NC on March 6 and are interested in this topic, and the wider world of storage and server virtualization, I’d love for you to register and attend this free seminar!
Apple’s business customers do not appear amused at the company’s exit from the enterprise storage space, but it was the quiet way that the company dumped the Xserve RAID product from their lineup that really irked. “XRAID” customers were left wondering whether they made the right choice, and if the company’s support for the defunct storage array might dry up, too.
Apple pulled the plug in typical fashion on February 19, closing the online Apple store down and reopening without an announcement. Users were greeted by cheaper and expanded iPod Shuffles and a new rev of the Xsan SAN filesystem product. It was quickly noted that the latter now supported third-party Fibre Channel storage arrays, but little mention was made of Apple’s own FC array product, the Xserve RAID.
It turns out that there was a reason for the oversight. Visitors to the former home of the product on Apple’s web site were greeted instead with a splash page pointing them to Promise Technology’s VTrak E-Class array, and all documentation for Xsan 2 prominently features the Promise array. Users fumed, bloggers blogged, and Apple said nothing about the demise of their product.
Gizmodo finally teased something like an official statement from Apple later in the day. Apple’s Anuj Nayar admitted that the product was no more, and claimed the company would still sell drive modules “while supplies last.” SearchStorage.com got a much more official-sounding answer, but it remains the same: Xserve RAID is gone.
Users were having none of this. Although the Xserve RAID was outdated, with PATA disks and 2 Gb Fibre Channel, most expected a refresh. And they voiced exasperation with Apple’s quiet retirement and less-than-strong statements of continuing support for existing customers. A few users suggested stocking up on spares, while others defended Apple’s cutting off of a “non-core” product line.
At the end of the day, it does seem to be in Apple’s best interest to allow third parties to handle RAID array development and sales, as TidBITS points out. But it would have been a wiser choice to handle their often fanatical customers with more concern and forthrightness. At the very least, the company should issue a statement about the demise of the product and their continued support for existing customers.
Apple has an odd relationship with enterprise computing. Their Xserve server products are strong, as is Leopard Server, and they have an excellent SAN file system, Xsan, that they just updated. Yet, Mac OS X is the last major operating system with no volume manager (thanks to the antiquated HFS+), and it looks like the company EOLed their Fibre Channel RAID product, Xserve RAID, today.
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