I once was on my merry way to becoming a real Apple fanboy, but for several reasons I’ve turned into an Apple skeptic instead: I don’t like the closed Apple App Store ecosystem where you are at their mercy at all times, Apple’s quest to sue anyone and everything, the annoying fact that my iPhone got slower and slower with every update (with my Android phone it’s the other way around, for some reason) and how Apple reseller Humac handled my laptop battery issues. But the thing that grinds my gears the most when it comes to Apple are the Apple users themselves. A lot of you them develop an amazing tunnel vision: Apple products have no flaws whatsoever, and all other competing products are crap. Period. I’m even seeing this a lot amongst my industry peers, people who you’d expect would be open to the idea that Apple is not the only way to go. And it’s not. I’ve been on the other side of the fence, in many ways the grass is actually greener there.

That said, Apple do make some great hardware – when workers at the Foxconn factories are not busy throwing themselves off the factory roof. And the piece of hardware they’ve really hit a home run with is the keyboard. I’ve burned through quite a lot of keyboards in my time and the Apple keyboard is without doubt the best I’ve ever used. It’s responsive, the button layout is well thought through and it doesn’t make a lot of noise – I’m a heavy hitter when it comes to typing, much to the annoyance of people around me.

I think it’s important to break out of the tunnel vision. It’s not all about Apple or Android or Intel or Google or any other big brand for that matter. Take a look around, be a bit open minded. Maybe you’ll discover that there are some pretty great stuff outside of your technological comfort zone.

About a month ago, the new battery started to act up, too. My MacBook would suddenly turn itself off when running on battery power. Even though the symptom was another one this time, the cause as the same: The battery had started to expand a little, as you can see on the picture above. It had not expanded as much as last time, but enough to make it a problem. So I took the battery with me to an Apple store to get it replaced. Being somewhat naive, I thought that I would get the same great support this time, too.

Wrong!

The first time I got to the store, they told me I had to bring the receipt with me. Well, fair enough, I probably should have thought of that, even though I was trying to replace a battery, not the entire laptop and the receipt would not say anything about the battery. Neither was I asked for the receipt last time. But I went home, dug up the receipt and returned to the store the next day and handed it over to them. “Thanks for the receipt”, they said. “But we also need the serial number of the laptop.” This didn’t make that much sense, there is a serial number on the battery and there is – as far as I know – no link between the battery and the laptop.

Unfortunately, the fourteen year old behind the counter wouldn’t listen to my arguments and kept saying something about his boss and whatnot. There was, of course, nothing he could do. Regulation and rules, you know. And once again I left the store with my defect battery and went home to find the serial number on my MacBook. The next day, I entered the store for the third time, with both the receipt and the serial number and a slight hope of leaving a new battery that I could use without the risk of blowing off my nuts.

Wrong again!

This time I was told that the receipt I’d brought wasn’t actually a receipt. It was only the order confirmation from Apple and it was not valid as a receipt. After all, I could have “canceled the order afterwards and might be using the order confirmation to try to scam the store”. Their exact words. Yes, I dug up a messed up battery from a dumpster, went back in time to 2006, placed an order for a MacBook Pro, canceled the order, and now, four years later, I was trying to scam them out of a $129 battery with the order confirmation from the past. Thank you, Apple, for labeling me a time traveling criminal.

On top of this, they now – after my third visit to the store – told me that they didn’t replace batteries for free if it was older than two years. On my two first visits I’d mentioned the purchase date of the laptop and that I’d already replaced the battery once, in 2007. Would it have be so hard to tell me about the battery return policy the first time I came to the store? On my second visit, you even saw the order date on the receipt order confirmation. What they told me now was that they could of course send the battery to their technical support people, but I would have to pay for the repair or a new battery if they were unable to repair it.

What the fuck happened to you Apple? In three years time you went from being a nice guy to what you are today: An incompetent ass with little regard for you customers. For the third time I left the Apple store with my battery. By now I’d grown so tired of the whole thing, I decided I didn’t want to give Apple the $129 they wanted for a new battery and instead use my MacBook as a very flat desktop computer. The battery I left on my desk, wrapped in the order confirmation.

Today I was cleaning my desk when I noticed that the battery had actually continued to expand. Picture below.

What. The. Fuck? Tomorrow I’m going down to the Apple store again. I don’t really care if I get a replacement or not, but I’m sure as hell is not leaving with this battery. I’m not sure if it can be considered a hazard of some kind; explosive, fire or other. At least it has not gone through an explosive expansion, but who knows what kind of chemical reactions are happening inside it. Unfortunately, it’s not much I can do about the battery right now. It’s Sunday, all the stores are closed and I can’t just throw it outside either. Let’s hope it stays stable until tomorrow.

If you own an Apple laptop with a battery, maybe it’s about time to have a look at it? Yes, it probably is.

Now, with the brilliant work of the Russian iPhone Dev Team, the process of updating the firmware is a breeze, simply just click around a little in a graphical tool and the phone is updated, jailbroken and unlocked once again. Thanks to the unlock I can use the phone with any operator and the jailbrake makes it possible to install unsigned applications that are not available through Apple’s own App Store (which iPhone application sucks monkey balls, by the way).

The most popular installer on the first generation iPhone firmware was Installer. Perhaps not the most imaginative name, but you knew what it was doing. On the second generation, however, Installer has been surpassed by Cydia as the number one choice of application for managing applications not officially signed by Apple. The beta version of Installer is just a shadow of it former first generation self.

Everything that is distributed by the official Apple App Store is checked and validated by Apple, this probably to make sure that the applications are not stuffed with code to steal passwords, personal notes and whatnot. I’ve always blindly downloaded and installed all kinds of applications from Installer and Cydia, and only recently the thought of malicious code struck me.

Am I getting old and paranoid? Maybe being a bit paranoid is healthy.

Apple will release its phone in several new markets, including Norway, where the operator NetCom has struck a deal through their parent company, TeliaSonera. It will be interesting to see if they can cope with the demand on the release date. Perhaps it will be even more interesting to see if there will even be noticeable demand. Norway is a tiny country, and without TeliaSonera I doubt that we would have been an interesting market. We are, however, first movers when it comes to new gadgets, and a lot of people have already bought an iPhone despite the fact that it has never been available for sale in the country. That makes me think that the people who will queue up for an iPhone already owns one.

Maybe the GPS is what will make them replace their old first generation unit.

And this site design? Getting mighty tired of it already.

While discussing that – yes, this is the kind of discussion we have at our place – we also talked about data safety and backups. It’s mighty important to have backups of all critical data since 2.5 inch laptop hard drives tend to malfunction quite often. I have lost 3 so far – and I’m still not backup up regularly on my MacBook Pro. Apparently, I don’t learn anything from past experience. VBOX has a RAID 1 setup, which at least gives me some hope of recovering lost data.

With Apple’s new version of OS X, Leopard, they introduced Time Machine, a feature I wrote about a while back. I had planned to put off getting Leopard for a few months, maybe even to spring next year, to give Apple time to remove the most critical bugs that would surface after the OS was released. But when I though about it I could really need to start taking regular backups and Time Machine was exactly what I needed.

And when you think about it, $129 is not a bad price for a little peace of mind.

After having cloned my laptop’s hard drive on an external hard drive with SuperDuper!, I inserted the Leopard DVD and began the install process. Coming from the Windows world, I prefer to do clean installs whenever I install a new version of the OS, so I erased the hard drive and began installing.

Time then came to migrate the user and application data from the external drive to the freshly installed OS, and for that Apple has an application called Migration Assistant. Simply let the assistant know what you want to migrate and everything is done automagically. A great idea, but did it work as expected?

No, it didn’t.

At one point when migrating applications the “time left”-indicator got stuck on “Less than a minute left” and it stayed that way for two hours until the external hard drive shut down in the same way it does when the laptop is powered off. So I did another clean install without migrating the applications and three hours later I could finally log on to Leopard. Migrating the network settings and user files worked like a charm, though, but all the applications had to be reinstalled from the external drive manually.

Now there are only two things left to fix before I can use Leopard properly:

• The Netatalk daemon that comes with Debian Etch is not compiled with the modules required to encrypt passwords and Leopard only wants to authenticate with encrypted passwords. I have tried both this and this but no success thus far. Because of this I’m not able to access the files on VBOX. Solved.
• Leopard tries desperately to sync my laptop with .Mac everything i log on in spite of the fact that I don’t have a .Mac account and I have no idea how to stop it from trying to sync.

And now for a follow up on yesterday’s iPhone entry. As you know, I got the chance to test one of them for a few minutes last week because our resident phone nerd at work got one from a guy who had a friend in the US of A. I was not very impressed, really, but yesterday we talked some more about his iPhone, which he had now sold to someone else with a NOK 2000 profit.

Come again?

With the current currency exchange rate, that’s about $370, not too far from the iPhone retail price. Of course, the $399 you have to pay for an iPhone does not cover the monthly fee for the AT&T subscription, but that’s not an issue since the iPhone can be unlocked in 30 minutes. When you’re done you can insert a SIM card from any operator.

I might be unlucky and get a phone with the new firmware installed, but it’s just a matter of time before someone unlocks that version as well.

To get the device from the United States to Norway is a breeze. I’m using a company called JetCarrier that let’s you set up a mail box in the New Jersey where you instruct Apple to send the package. JetCarrier then picks it up and forwards the package to my home address, at surprisingly low price.

If I’m lucky, I’ll have the iPhone in hand in about 14 days. If I’m not satisfied with the phone, there is a good chance I can also sell it to someone with a nice profit. If the iPhone is ever made available in Norway, I’m guessing the price will be approximately 4500 NOK ($835) and some people are willing to chop off an arm to get hold of one.

In retrospect they will probably realize that having only one arm is a bad thing since you need two hands to operate the phone.

Now the sensor is calibrated correctly, during the one test run I did around the track it measured exactly 400 meters, like it should. Now I can find check how long the routes I’ve been running so far really are. Excellent.

I had my first hands-on experience with an Apple iPhone today. One of the guys at work is sort of a cell phone nerd – which is a good thing since he is pretty much working with cell phone related tasks all day – and he knows a guy who knows a guy and so on until some guy is living in the US of A and that guy sent one over.

It’s thin for sure, but way too large if you – like me – sometimes have your cell phone in your pant pocket because you need both hands for something else. The phone is surprisingly fast, but then again I’m used to the sluggish Nokia and Sony Ericsson user interfaces. Still no real reason to really, really want one.

The Nano is tiny, has a large (at least compared to the casing) screen, great sound and lots of space for tons of motivational tunes. I quickly tested the Nike+ sensor and a couple of features and everything looks as expected, but I didn’t bother to calibrate it since I can’t use the kit until Wednesday anyway.

What has not arrived yet is the information I need to connect to our new internet connection. It’s now been 14 days since someone was here and checked the connection between the apartment and the company’s network equipment. Now I need the static IP address, gateway IP and other relevant information. If that’s not happening soon I’ll just use the information my 3COM router guessed and see what happens. I have sent 5 e-mails to their support department without a reply.

Yes, of course I should call them, but I really don’t like to talk to people on the phone. I have no idea why, that’s just the way it is. It’s a good thing, then, that I have a job where I have to talk to people on the phone every day. Or maybe not. In the end I guess I have no choice, and have to call them and ask for the information. Or else we won’t have an internet connection and that would more or less be the end of the world.

What is also somewhat interesting is that the ISP hasn’t sent me any bills yet. Maybe they are out of business. That would be a bummer.

Only one week left now and I’ve been running every other day for a month. The most interesting thing is that I’m actually seeing some progress. I run the route faster; I’ve cut the time down by around 40 seconds – not much, but I’m only running a mere 2.5 kilometers each time. My average and max heart rate is also decreasing, and for some reason I’ve gained about a kilogram.

In a world where you see talk about the dangers of obesity every day and where the average American is getting so fat there is a real chance the world will tip over any minute, you’ll probably think that gaining weight is not what I wanted in the first place. But I’m a bit underweight, of all things, and gaining weight – in the right places – is a good thing for me. No, I’m not hoping I get bigger breasts.

So, only one week, then, and the Nike Plus kit is mine! This brings us to today’s new Apple gadgets: A new iPod Nano, nick named “Fatty” by the Apple fan boys long ago, and a spanking new iPod, the iPod Touch. It looks a lot like the iPhone, has Wi-Fi support, and comes with Safari and Flash installed. All great stuff, but I doubt I’ll ever get one. My good old iPod – now called iPod Classic – is all I need and then some.

While we’re talking about music; if you’re looking for some good chillout electronica I have to recommend a project I just discovered, Planet Boelex.

Planet Boelex is an electronic music project originating from Finland, started in 2004, consisting of only one member. Self-taught, learning music by experimenting on computer-based “tracker” softwares. Planet Boelex released the first freely downloadable EP “Sinking in the soup” in Janurary 2005, on one of the oldest netlabels in existence, Monotonik. This five track release shaped the sound of Planet Boelex, which could be defined as melodic electronica fused with influences from ambient and idm. This release was followed by several new Creative Commons -licensed EP’s on netlabels Monotonik, Ogredung and Kahvi. In 2006, Planet Boelex performed live in Estonia, Italy, Croatia and England.

You’ll find even more excellent electronica over at the Kahvi Collective.