Hawk Wings » MacBook Pro http://www.hawkwings.net Tips and add-ons to make Apple Mail / Mail.app even better Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:44:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 The two faces of Apple http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/05/05/the-two-faces-of-apple/ http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/05/05/the-two-faces-of-apple/#comments Thu, 04 May 2006 23:51:46 +0000 Tim Gaden http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/05/05/the-two-faces-of-apple/ jekyllandhydeApple’s schizophrenia is getting worse.

One the one hand, the company has long traded on the image of the unconventional, creative, innovative outsider, the computer company that thinks outside the box and is not shackled by the corporate culture of other IT businesses.

This reached a peak in the Think Different advertising campaign of the late 1990s. Remember the manifesto?

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.

They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.

They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can
change the world, are the ones who do.

This message was reinforced by the choice of suitably innovative and creative individuals who made a name for themselves by thinking differently.

Apple has continued to sell this dream. It works.

On the other hand, woe betide any blogger, forum or individual who actually tries to embody any of the qualities in the manifesto. Apple’s ugly, über-corporate face is waiting in the wings.

It would be tedious (and lengthy) to record all the occasions on which Apple has displayed its vicious streak. Pointing you to today’s news is enough.

A poster in The Something Awful forums reproduced some information from one of Apple’s Service Manuals to help people rectify what seems to be some shoddy work with thermal paste in the latest MacBook Pros.

In a flash, Apple Legal had the take-down letter to serve on the site, thundering that “the Service Source manual for the MacBook Pro is Apple’s intellectual property and is protected by U.S. copyright law.”

Gizmodo puts the real significance of the letter rather well:

Of course the real problem isn’t the single excerpted page being linked from Something Awful, but instead the fact that the image shows the extremely sloppy manufacturing process that is causing the MacBook Pro to run at temperatures as high as a 95 degrees Celcius under full load. (A temperature so high that the processor is at risk of malfunctioning.) Rather than addressing the problem of the shoddy workmanship, documented not only by those who purchased Apple’s $2,500 laptop but by Apple’s own service manual, Apple is trying to silence those from the Macintosh community who are trying to help other Mac users fix Apple’s mistake.

Maybe I’m slow on the uptake and everyone else has already twigged to this, but never has the persona of Apple’s advertising seemed so cynical, so corporate.

(I don’t usually do opinion pieces on Hawk Wings. Others do it better. But gradually over the last twelve months, as I read all the RSS feeds from which Hawk Wings is gleaned, this one has been gathering steam inside my head. It was time to get it out.)apple, public relations, advertising, think different, corporate culture, legal, macbook proSimilar Posts:

]]> http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/05/05/the-two-faces-of-apple/feed/ 5 Zooooooooooom!! http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/04/26/zooooooooooom/ http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/04/26/zooooooooooom/#comments Wed, 26 Apr 2006 11:08:18 +0000 Tim Gaden http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/04/26/zooooooooooom/ macbookpro

Apart from trying to work out what optimisation is, a second reason for the brief posting break is the arrival of my new MacBook Pro. Gee willikers, it’s fast!

And quiet too. I was scared off buying one earlier by Daniel Jalkut’s series of posts about his hyper-noisy MacBook Pro.

Fortunately, this one has a serial number beginning with W8615****, which tells me that it was made in the fifteenth week of 2006 and that it contains the updated “Revision D” logic board that fixes the problems. And so it does. (Fingers crossed!)

Just a few “real-life” stats: My old 1 GHz, 1 GB RAM 15″ PowerBook takes 10 seconds from the launch of Mail until the end of the initial mail-check. This 2 GHz, 1 GB RAM 15″ MacBook Pro takes 5 seconds. The old one took 23 seconds to search for “hippopotamus” in the entire message in every folder; this one takes 7 seconds.

Repairing permissions on the old one took 118 seconds for a 54GB hard drive. This one does 92GBs in 62 seconds. I’m a happy boy.

[Thanks, Wifey]macbook pro, ahhh lovely, lovely

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]]> http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/04/26/zooooooooooom/feed/ 5 MacBook Pr0n http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/02/22/macbook-pr0n/ http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/02/22/macbook-pr0n/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:42:13 +0000 Tim Gaden http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/02/22/macbook-pr0n/ Jason O’Grady undresses a new friend.

Mmmmmm……macbook pro, apple, unpacking pictures, green-eyed monsterSimilar Posts:

]]> http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/02/22/macbook-pr0n/feed/ 0 The Hawk Wings Top Ten and Intel Macs http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/01/14/the-hawk-wings-top-ten-and-intel-macs/ http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/01/14/the-hawk-wings-top-ten-and-intel-macs/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:23:28 +0000 Tim Gaden http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/01/14/the-hawk-wings-top-ten-and-intel-macs/ So, you’re thinking about buying one of the new Intel Macs announced this week in San Francisco?

I am. There’s a shiny new MacBook Pro with my name on it out there somewhere. Or there will be.

The big question for me is not whether I’ll miss the FW800 port as much as I think I will (probably not), or whether I will kick myself for not waiting for the Rev B (probably), but whether Mail.app with all my favourite things bolted-on will run natively.

So I asked the developers of all the plugins and addons on the Top Ten things every Mail.app user should have list, how ready they were for the Intel Macs. Here’s the good news:

  1. MailTags. Scott Morrison says that a universal binary will be available “hopefully” in two weeks. And as Version 1.2 with a killer new feature as well!

  2. Mail Act-on. Two weeks will see a universal binary of this plug-in as well.

  3. MailAppetizer. This has been a universal binary since July last year. Ready to go.

  4. Mail Scripts. This has also been a universal binary since the middle of last year. Andeas Amann says that “the only potential problem might be the “Archive Messages” script since it packages some pre-complied Perl packages as well”. But if any problems exist, they’ll soon be ironed out.

  5. Mail Stamps. Version 2.1 was compiled as a universal binary for Intels and PowerPCs. And it worked fine on his developer Intel Mac, Andrew Escobar says.

  6. MailUnreadStatusBar. Masaru says that it’s not clear whether this utility will need a recompile or not, “because it isn’t supposed to depend on architecture”. It should work equally well on a PPC or an Intel.

  7. JunkMatcher or SpamSieve. Michael Tsai says that at the moment SpamSieve runs in Rosetta with Mail.app and the SpamSieve plug-in running natively. But a recompiled version of SpamSieve is due out in two weeks and will be available as a free upgrade.

    JunkMatcher’s developer Benjamin Han wants to address some issues with his app before recompiling for Intel Macs. Due to time pressures, “it’ll probably be a while”, he says.

  8. Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger. It is my understanding that this excellent ebook will be just as helpful on an Intel Mac as it is now.

  9. QuickSilver. Quicksilver and all its plug-ins were recompiled earlier this week.

  10. Spell Catcher X. Evan Gross says he will post a recompiled beta of Spell Catcher X next week (when he gets back from MacWorld) that will also contain some new features and few minor bugfixes. The final release will be polished up and available long before most people get their hands on one of the new Macs.

Now there is no excuse for restraint.

You can find a longer list of all recompiled applications that are ready to run natively on VersionTracker’s MacIntel Resource Center.
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