Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

Seriously tempted to nab a 13" MBP... If I do the new monitor's gonna have to wait tho'... Decisions, decisions...

Has anyone used Apple TV? Im thinking about buying one to stream my music from may Macbook to my stereo. Just wanted to know if was any good.

Yup, I have one.
I bought it purely to stream my Lossless collection to my AV setup. It works perfectly.

If you are streaming from your Macbook, it may be cheaper to get an airport express adaptor as you will have the Macbook in the same place as the stereo so you can use it to choose the music. All of mine is stored on my iMac on the floor above which is why i bought the ATV.

Cool, i never thought of that. Thanks.

Well, not Firewire in the sense of those old one, but they kept changing the design of the firewire port which is really annoying.

End up needing an USB > Firewire convertor so I can sync my iPod (it's that old).

eh? You mean there are two types of Firewire ports (400 & 800), that have been the same design for the last ten years?

Ooh I forgot about eSata. How does that stack up in cost/speed/availability on the new macbook?

My current 1TB Buffalo HD is both USB2 and FW. Doesn't allow you to connect it to both a mac and a windows box though :-)

eSata is as fast as having an internal hard drive. it holds the same bandwidth as your internal SATA. by far the fastest. You'd have to get an express card SATA port, but if you were streaming video / music for editing and you FW buss was overloaded, then this is the best option.

attaboy.

infact for the cost of Macs i'd expact blue ray players, when your blowing a cool grand on something it annoys my when things are left out

though i also expact to be able to drop it and it keep working

why would apple stick a blueray player in there when they rent movies out in iTunes? They got better business sense than that

correct me if i'm wrong as I've only bought a couple of bluerays, but the ones I have bought tend to come with:

Blueray
DVD
Data disc

so, wouldn't you just stick the Data disc in your MAC to watch the HD content rather than the blueray it's self. Any large installer programs will come on a dual layer DVD (8GB) and if it's massive i've seen stuff shipped out on hard drives.

Blueray is a answer to a commercial question, not a computer one...

i don't understand how that thunderbolt thingy is going to allow me to run my monitor and some kind of SSD external drive as a scratch/back-up from just the one port? is the bandwith limited because of where on the bus the in/out controller is?

^ it daisy chains like firewire.

isn't it two ports that just happen to have the same connector type?

this image suggests so:

actually looking at it, it doesn't suggest what i'm suggesting at all.

daisy it is then

infact for the cost of Macs i'd expact blue ray players, when your blowing a cool grand on something it annoys my when things are left out

You can't even buy the cheapest one for a cool grand.
Try a cool two and a half grand if you want an i7, a decent screen and a solid state drive.
Up the RAM and it becomes more like 3 large.

I want one less now I've played with the configure page.

Apple Store currently updating... I guess they'll be up shortly...

so back to the NAS vs external 3TB drive debate.
which be best?

Uh oh. Full bottle of beer spilt on macbook. Left upside down overnight to drain. Won't turn on or recognise a charge.
Have spilt a pint of water on it in the past but caught it as soon as it happened, the beer had time to soak in as i didn't notice it straight away. I pulled the charger out as soon as I noticed, thought this would help because it would stop everything short circuiting.

Should be able to recover data from the hd right? Something I can do myself?

Nearly 6 years old an on its last legs but still VERY annoying as I have a lot of work on at the moment.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Correct, remove the lead and battery, then press the power button a few times to force the unit to dispense any remaining power.

Leave it for more than a week if you can, as long as possible. Especially if you're going the "wash with water approach" (only advised for sugary liquids really, most people won't be able to open things up to clean things properly anyway).

HD will be fine unless you're incredibly unlucky (short circuit from main board hitting the HD controller board or similar).

so back to the NAS vs external 3TB drive debate.
which be best?

this is just a scoblefact not actual gospel so needs confirmation.
are NAS boxes running some kind of internal software (even if not in raid configuration) that means if the box dies you can't just put the drives in an enclosure and start using them?
if this is the case i would rather go down the JBOD route and have a 2 bay enclosure (usb for cheapness/ sata FW800 for speed) and let something like chronosync take care of making the back-ups and just put the drives off-site when full.

anyone with greater knowledge able to confirm this is the case? or not?

Cheers Tiswas and Jono, I've left the battery in unfortnuately, will take it out when I get home this evening.
Reckon I should just dunk it the sink or bath?
Fucking hope the HD is ok. Years and years of work on that and like an utter fucking bellend I never backed anything up.

Thanks very much for the help.

Ye the triple play ones are great for that and they only cost a couple of squid extra. I think apple will probably avoid BluRay: supposedly its the last form of disc storage. Apple will probably start phasing out optical drives soon, well I suppose they already have with the air. i think they intend to have everything streamed online in the future.

On the other hand youre not gaining much from watching blu ray on a 15-20 odd inch monitor anyway its too bloody small.

G

I kind of feel like I ranted there sorry...

this is just a scoblefact not actual gospel so needs confirmation.
are NAS boxes running some kind of internal software (even if not in raid configuration) that means if the box dies you can't just put the drives in an enclosure and start using them?
if this is the case i would rather go down the JBOD route and have a 2 bay enclosure (usb for cheapness/ sata FW800 for speed) and let something like chronosync take care of making the back-ups and just put the drives off-site when full.

anyone with greater knowledge able to confirm this is the case? or not?

We're getting into some serious stuff now with JBOD.

if a drive is configured for NAS, then you wouldn't just be able to stick it in a USB caddy. It would be an SMB based file system, which you would have to tap into your MAC when addressing the IP over the network.

I love the idea of a hdd sitting somewhere else in the house streaming stuff, but it seems like you put a lot of trust in to a system that might not be up to the task.

I worked in a 4 people company for a while and we had a netgear NAS thing, it went down at least once a month so that has put me off for quite a while. perhaps they're better now though?

For now the best solution for me seems to be 2 mirrored 4TB disks running half as time machine and the other half as a library

sorethroat: Remove the battery asap and leave the unit without power for a week or so (in an airing cupboard or similar).

Don't dunk it, that won't do much anymore, any residue from the beer (sugars) will have clung on by now and the water doesn't naturally penetrate anything, etc (it's mainly used as a technique to dilute/wash away liquids immediately after a spill). You could open up the unit and use a mixture of compressed air and deionised water to give everything a once over, but you may do more harm than good (depends on your level of competence).

If you're lucky it'll boot up just fine once completely dry, if you're unlucky the main board will be damaged, if you're really unlucky your HD may be caput (you can still recover data from it though, but would have to pay hundreds of pounds for a specialist).

also thanks hael for my new power cable.

it works!!

no prob, cheers for the cans of black stuff - I had them for my tea! ah lovley

if i've downloaded a film on my iphone, can i watch it on my ibook g4?

all i seem to be able to see is the extended features....

is your Iphone jailbroken? if so you can SSH to it and transfer files - let me know and ill ping you some instructions.