One of Each, Please

Apple.com Menu Bar

After the latest announcement, I had to do it. My iPhone 4 comes in tomorrow. Oddly enough, the number one feature I want on my phone is not multi-tasking, or voice search, or even the gyroscopometer (or whatever). I just really want the 5 MP camera and HD camcorder. Automatic HDR! That in itself sold me the phone.

I need one of each thing on Apple.com's menu bar. iPhone > iPad > Mac, in order of importance to me. My iPhone 3G is already more than two years old. My MacBook Pro is going on its fifth year. iPad with multi-tasking is amazing. And iPhone 4 just completes the set somehow. No more iProducts for at least two years, I promise.

50 Months with MBP - $1.80/Day

Some of you may know that my MacBook Pro has been slowly dying on the inside (literally) for about half a year now. After many instances of random shutdown and messed up startup screens, the computer will be 50 months old this month, September 2010. I first got it in August 2006, making it the first Intel Mac ever. It has lived through 3 major releases of Mac OS, starting with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

2.16 GHz Core Duo, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, 100 GB HDD

While it was covered under AppleCare two years ago, I had two batteries replaced, the power charger replaced, the logic board replaced, the LCD inverter replaced twice, the screen replaced, 1 GB RAM replaced, SuperDrive replaced, among four or so incidents. (I might be forgetting some.) All for free! Thank you, Apple. In all honesty, there was only two situations that really required service: 1) when the power charger cable burned, and when my screen was buzzing. Everything else, I must admit, was a little superfluous and only prompted action because I kept complaining. I'm pretty sure this is more indicative of really good customer service as opposed to shoddy Apple products. (P.S. I forgot that I got my entire MBP replaced the third day I got it back in August because it overheated and died. Shoddy Apple products? Maybe. Maybe it's just me.)

~$2500, including a free HP printer and an iPod nano 1G.

At about 50 months of use, that comes out to about $50/month, or $1.80/day in cost of ownership (assuming I stop using it this month). Compare this to a ~$800 Dell Inspiron E1505, a popular computer that 2006 high school graduates like myself get for college. It's used for only two years and is replaced by another, better computer. That becomes about $33/month or about $1.20/day for the Dell over two years. A typical user will then spend about $1000 on his next notebook computer. Bring these two computers to the 50-month time scale, we get $1800 (= $800 + $1000), over 50 months, i.e. up to the present. That comes out to $1.30/day for these two computers, about 50-cents cheaper than owning a Mac. So why even get a Mac? Seriously.

50-cents is an eighth the cost of buying coffee everyday (at an average of $4/cup/day). The daily cost of having a texting plan is about $0.57/day (at +$20/month for unlimited texting, via Verizon). 50-cents isn't all that much. I think it's worth the cost.

Now, I just need to dig up $2000 to get myself another MacBook Pro.

Photo Portfolio

Over the bridge at the Cornell Plantations.

For a while now I've been looking for an online solution to showcase some of the better photos I've taken. I'm using Flickr as a place to share my photos, using "sets" more like event albums, and I wanted a way to separate my favorites from the rest. I had originally created a separate set called [[ Favorites of Mine ]] to list them, but it didn't work too well, I think.

The solution I came up with is Tumblr, mainly because I tried several times to find a purpose for it and couldn't. I created a new account and figured it out. I call it k.Cheng Photo Portfolio, and it'll have just my better photos. Flickr for everything else (candids, vacations, photo of the day). Check it out.

(Sadly, there's no built-in way to post to Tumblr from Flickr.)

iOS 4 and iPhone 3G (Jailbroken)

Speaking strictly from personal experience, after upgrading to Apple's latest iOS 4.0 and 4.0.1, my iPhone 3G, originally on iOS 3.1.3., was unusably slow. It was disappointing to see the iPhone 3G become something I hated to use. After looking up several tips and tricks to speed up the iPhone, including disabling all my Spotlight search results and double hard resetting the phone (which didn't seem to work very well), I decided to give jailbreaking another chance.

It turns out that the jailbroken iOS 4.0.1 , even with multitasking and the background wallpaper service turned on, was noticeably faster than the official iOS 4.0.1 from Apple. I found this a bit strange. I instantly noticed it being slightly faster right after jailbreaking it. I still resorted to rebooting my iPhone a few times a day to keep it in working order. I used the jailbroken version with as full a feature-set my iPhone 3G can physically support for about a week, after which it begun feeling a little too sluggish for practical use.

Last night, I decided to re-jailbreak my iPhone 3G, this time disabling multitasking (because quite frankly, it was impractical on such a slow device) but keeping the background wallpaper settings (because I have grown used to having a non-black background). So far, so good, sort of. It definitely feels zippier than both iOS 4.0.1 by Apple and the jailbroken iOS 4.0.1 with mutitasking. Still, compared to the good and familiar 3.1.3, there is a no contest. (The only thing keeping me on iOS 4 are the folders and unified mailboxes.)

Supposedly, Apple's investigating this issue. I wait impatiently.

P.S. There's definitely some power issues that I've noticed with iOS 4, at least on iPhone 3G.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Earlier this summer, I decided to let eBook reading on the iPad a go, and I must say, it is quite nice. Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Nobles Nook and Apple's own iBooks on the iPad aren't bad at all. (For the record, I believe Amazon's Kindle is the eBook reader to have if reading is important to you. Personally, I don't read enough to justify a Kindle purchase. Also for the record, I am not a fan of the Nook's user interface; it's atrocious.) While I enjoy iBook's organization and ease of download, I could do without the fancy pageflip animations. They felt a bit too gaudy even for Apple.

My first real digital book (oxymoronic, perhaps) was Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's worth reading. And while reading on the iPad was a novel experience (oh, pun), this will probably be my last eBook for a while. I'm still a pencil-and-paper person at heart.