If your Launchpad was a mangled mess with 8 pages of everything that could possibly be ran as a program on your Mac like mine when you upgraded to OS X Lion, you’re annoyed you didn’t find this before you spent a ridiculous amount of time organizing it to accomodate your OCD tendencies. Wait, maybe that was just me. Either way, it would have been nice to know this before, still glad I know it now though.
Run this command in Terminal.app to wipe Launchpad clean
sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db "DELETE from apps; DELETE from groups WHERE title<>''; DELETE from items WHERE rowid>2;"; Killall Dock
Run this command in Terminal.app to rebuild the default database
rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/Dock/*.db; killall Dock
This morning I looked at my phone on the way to work to see what day it was. This was what I saw:
Thinking it was odd, but dismissing it as part of the beta possibly, I just unlocked and looked at the calendar.
A little later I was curious so I woke it up again. This time:
Really? “I want a parrot?” It also occurred to me that I only had the beta on my iPad, NOT my iPhone.
When I got to work I did some search engine work and came up with nothing. I was starting to wonder if my phone had been hacked but it wasn’t doing it anymore.
Then when I searched the Octopus line again, it came up with Mastodon. My memory clicked in that it was what I was listening to on my drive to work. “I want a parrot” is a song from the new Aristocrats album.
Mystery solved, but begs the question.. is this the best way to reveal the song title? Remove the date and put no indication that it’s a song title? The music was new so I didn’t recognize the songs.
This weekend I embarked on Major Suckage. I had outgrown the OS drive on my laptop again, and decided that it was much safer to reinstall my entire system from scratch rather than just clone my hard drive for the 3rd time.
I ordered a 750GB 7200rpm drive from Other World Computing and when I got home from work Friday I began the process. I immediately realized a huge problem with OS X Lion as an upgrade.
I had to install Snow Leopard, download 3GB of updates to get it up to App Store compatibility, then immediately upgrade it to Lion.
That’s right, my goal was a clean start and before I installed my first application, it was already upgraded. Grrrr.
I get it was only $30, but I was really missing the disc and only on principle. I am sure the upgrade went smoothly and all is well, but I’d rather not start a new computer build with outdated stuff potentially scattered on a brand new drive.
This laptop is used for music and video production and by the time I got everything back to status quo I had spent 20 hours and reduced a 750GB hard drive to 370GB without a single bit of my own data on it. Yikes.
I am ok with delivering the upgrade through the app store, but there needs to be some way to go to Apple.com and download a burnable or thumb bootable ISO you can use to install from scratch. Asking a user to recover from a hard drive failure or data swap by having to install, update then upgrade is more hassle than it should be. Agree?
Friday I finally got around to replacing the drive that died in my Macbook Pro. I decided to get the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive as the prices for 256GB SSD drives were just way too far outside my price range. That laptop has a full load of Creative Suite, Logic Studio, Final Cut Express, Office, iLife, iWork…pretty much everything, 120GB of just apps and OS.
The Momentus XT is a 500GB 7200rpm laptop drive with a 4GB Solid State Disk on board, that intelligently caches your most used apps. Instantly my Macbook Pro was a beast, loading apps like Photoshop in 4-5 seconds. The problem was that now my Macbook Pro was faster than my Mac Pro!
Even though I had just replaced the boot drive in my Mac Pro with a 500GB physical disk, I decided it was time to have a little fun with it.
The Mac Pro runs a much smaller load, the boot drive, when cleaned up was just a shade over 30GB. Given that a 40GB would be a tad too small, I decided 80GB was the number.
Which SSD For Me?
A quick search revealed that the Intel X25M 80 GB Solid State Drive was the top contender for price and performance so I started there. $200 wasn’t too unreasonable, so I did a little reading to make sure it was what I wanted and found something very interesting.
The Intel X25V 40 GB Solid State Drive, in a RAID 0 pair, is the same price with even better performance. Given that is way nerdier than only one drive, my fate was clear.
I picked up the drives, came home and realized I had to take a quick detour, the Mac Pro only had one HD power connector in the spare drive bay the second optical drive should fit in. Both the Intel drives came with a standard to SATA power connector however, so a quick solder job and I had a splitter cable.
Using the included SATA cables, I routed them to the two unused SATA connectors on the Mac Pro motherboard. That works out great because you have two SSDs in RAID and still have all 4 drive bays for traditional 3.5” disks, no waste!
I put it all back together, booted the Snow Leopard disc, created the array and started a restore from my OS drive to the new drive. It took 12 minutes to copy 31GB from a 7200rpm 3.5” disk to the array of SSDs.
Once done, I opened the select boot disk preference pane and switched my boot drive. The first time, it booted up in about 20 seconds.
I took a slight detour to do some jiggering with my physical drives also, so now all of my data is on a 2TB RAID 0 array also giving me slightly faster speeds.
A Quick RAID 0 Lesson
RAID 0 is not REALLY RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) in that it’s not at all Redundant. If one drive goes, the whole volume is toast. In my case I decided to have a slightly unusual strategy to deal with that. I used the old 500GB boot disk as a Time Machine backup of my operating system drive, and I have the entire 2TB disk backed up to Mozy, yikes!
The bottom line is that you do RAID 0 for speed, striping data across disks increases the bandwidth for writing and reading data. Make sure you have a backup plan in place to take care of a data loss.
The Results
The results are nothing short of stunning. After a disk repair, the computer boots in 15 seconds flat, all of my apps just open in seconds, I created this quick video to show how fast, this is Adobe Photoshop CS5 loading after a clean boot.
If you are watching the counter, that’s 3 seconds. Given that I am writing my data elsewhere, the relatively (for SSD) slow write speeds of the 40GB lower end disks just doesn’t come into play. I get tremendous read speeds and my Mac Pro is snappier than ever.
Today it occurred to me, Google has taken a play directly from the Microsoft playbook. These days there is a prize fight being fought between Google and Apple for the heart and mind of smart phone users. Apple has a head start, but that doesn’t historically mean a whole lot.
A Brief History Lesson
Back in 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer. There had been home computers before, but the Macintosh was the first computer that anyone could just sit down and use. Before the Macintosh, computers were obtuse, they required knowledge of arcane commands and were accessed in a, and I am being nice here, less than approachable interface.
Apple came back from Xerox after seeing the mouse and graphical user interface and in perfect Steve Jobs form set out on perfecting it and making it as sexy as possible.
The problem that Apple has never managed to solve is that sexy is expensive. In 1990, 6 years after Apple had released the Macintosh with great success, Microsoft released Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 was the first version of Windows that had a true graphical windowed environment and it was the first version of Windows that truly caught on with PC makers.
You can practically thank Windows 3.0 for the birth of several major computer manufacturers, namely Gateway, or Gateway 2000 if you are old enough to remember them then.
What Windows 3.0 managed to do was put a computer in your home, with roughly the same capabilities as a Macintosh, but at almost half of the price. Computers were still very expensive then compared to today. A Macintosh went for about $2,495 and a PC with Windows could be had for less than $1,500.
Isn’t This Article About Phones?
Oh yea, that’s right. So what does this have to do with phones? The Apple pundits will tell you “Price doesn’t mean much, you can get an iPhone on contract for $200 and they are selling light hot cakes. That’s true, but there is quite a long tail on that user acceptance curve and the real wealth of users are not yet holding smart phones.
As of 2010, ComScore says 45.5 million people in the United States own smartphones. The mobile phone market is comprised of 234 million subscribers. That’s just in the United States! That means all of the smartphone OS’s, and Palm, Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM are the biggies, are fighting for less than 20% of the available market. Are these numbers starting to sound familiar?
Today that means 80% of the market aren’t willing to pay for either the phone or the data plan. Google is already trying to figure out ways to subsidize the data plan with advertising, and you can already get Google Android based phones free on contract. This year Best Buy had an Android phone free with contract for every major carrier.
That means we aren’t too far from free Android phones with cheaper data plans. Once Apple has soaked up all of the tech savvy people with expendable income, Google or Microsoft (I hope!) can walk in and just sweep all the remaining people into customers. If you think this sounds crazy, it’s happened before.
It’s like déjà vu over here if you ask me. A “good enough” competitor, prices that attract the consumer at large, and a willingness to let anyone build on their platform to build devices that fit whatever the user wants.
I don’t know about you, but if I was Apple, I’d be looking in the rearview mirror. And in case you think the iPad is any different, read this article again and replace iPhone with iPad in your mind.
was the top contender for price and performance so I started there. $200 wasn’t too unreasonable, so I did a little reading to make sure it was what I wanted and found something very interesting.
