My MacTracker shows that I have owned 11 different models starting with the 128k original in 1984. Four are in the house with me right now (PB G3, PB G4, iMac G5 and MBP Core 2 Duo). I have dealt with the upgrades to System 7, 8, 9 and OS X as well as the jumps to PPC and Intel.
Through all of this I have been generally happy to be a Mac owner and user. For the past several years I have worked in IT Support in a Windows-only environment, which has given me a bit of healthy perspective about the pros and cons of each system, but my own investments have been in Mac hardware and software.
With that in mind I am truly amazed at how short-sighted it is of Apple to knowingly specify built-in DVD hardware that penalizes law-abiding citizens for the illegal activities of others. I’m referring to the built-in encrypted firmware that locks in the choice of DVD regions to a single region after a few switches. In my older machines I have circumvented this by using third-party software to reset the counter, but this option is not available on the latest hardware from Apple, and should not be necessary at all.
I am from the United States and return often for both business and pleasure, but I’ve lived in Europe for most of the past decade. My family and I have a variety of legally purchased commercial DVD’s from both sides of the Atlantic. I have yet to see any evidence that US or European law requires that DVD players be locked in to a certain region, and region-free players are legally available in all countries.
Steve Jobs has done more than any other single person to make legal, DRM-free music downloads available worldwide. If he is looking for yet another way to win friends, influence people and sell more hardware he can start by:
A) Declaring Apple a region-free company, specifying that all future products will not have DVD regional restrictions built in.
B) Making software updates available to remove OS-level regional restrictions on past and current machines.
C) Pressuring Matshita to develop firmware upgrades to disable the locks built into recent machines, and
D) Using all of the considerable means at his disposal to continue to work towards a truly global distribution model for digital entertainment that does not include regional restrictions.
By taking the lead in this he could make supporters of such restrictions seem to be hopelessly out-of-date obstructionists. Points A, B, and C would cost very little, and if presented in the right manner could create massive goodwill among current and potential future owners without severely damaging relations with key movie executives because, let’s face it, region-free DVD players are essentially ubiquitous in any market where they are necessary.
Point D will require a longer-term approach and considerably more finesse, but offers an even larger payoff for consumers and a massive potential simplification for Apple’s iTunes. Slogging through the quagmire of launching separate iTunes Music Stores in a variety of different European countries, each with it’s own separate legal issues has given Apple the experience and perspective needed to tackle these issues. No other leader or company is hip, smart and potentially profitable enough to alternately shame, goad and entice the music and movie industries towards a future that will work better for consumers, the creators and those who help put those respective groups together on a worldwide basis. (Submitted by Dane Thomas)

I’ve been a Crackberry addict for about eight years, back when they only did email. My 7250 died this week (In the eight years, I’ve had three blackberries), so I took it as a sign that God really is an Apple user and I needed to take a hint. I had a Blackberry 7250 with Verizon EVDO and got an iPhone 8GB to replace it.
While AT&T’s coverage isn’t as good for me, that’s clearly a “your mileage will vary” point and not my focus.
Please understand my perspective: I’m a road warrior powergeek type that uses this stuff for his job, not fun. I’m looking at this as someone who has to travel/fly every other week to places with no Wifi.
0) Wireless tether
On the Blackberry, I could tether via parallels, and share my network to my Mac. I can’t even dial out using the iPhone. Believe it or not, it’s still possible to end up in places that don’t have Wifi or Ethernet. Yeah it’s slower, but it’s better than nothing. If you don’t understand the “why” on this, you’re lucky.
1) Find
I already posted this, but where’s spotlight? On my Blackberry, I can find a message, contact, etc..
2) Check mail
Blackberry does a good job of pushing data to you when you get an email. It’s one of those things you get spoiled with. iPhone won’t let me check faster than every 15 minutes unless I manually check. I guess they’re compensating for the slower network, but to not giving me a choice irks me. I don’t want to switch to IM for this, cause the business world is still email, I just want more periodic checking options.
3) Auto-spellcheck UI
This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen on the iPhone. I use a lot of TLA’s and abbreviations in my emails. And I’m looking at the keyboard to type, not the screen (Blackberry was a different story, but I had haptic feedback). So when I hit the space bar, don’t AUTO-correct what you think I meant. I have to re-read the whole email to make sure that it didn’t decide to change SAN with sans just because I hit the space bar to continue to the next word.
4) Mark All As Read
I get a ton of SPAM. And I have no interest in going through them all to mark them as read individually (20+ every time I check mail). But if I leave it be, iPhone lists my new messages at a 100 in no time. Just give me a mark all as read button, and even if I can’t get the junk filter, it will at least clear the new email alert.
If Apple told me, you’ll have these things when the next OS comes out, I’d be totally cool. But with the policy of not talking about new features, even the obvious ones, I have a hard time seeing the justification in hanging on to a product to hope that it catches up to the competition. I understand not talking about the double secret probation super cool feature sets, but I have a hard time understanding why they can’t say, yeah, our bad, you’ll have find soon. No comment, makes no sense.
Outside of those initial reactions, I really like the iPhone. But those five things are each small walls in converting over, and might be large enough to force me to go back to crack, despite how happy I was to get off it.
Contributed by: ecuguru

I’ve been a Crackberry addict for about eight years, back when they only did email. My 7250 died this week (In the eight years, I’ve had three blackberries), so I took it as a sign that God really is an Apple user and I needed to take a hint. I had a Blackberry 7250 with Verizon EVDO and got an iPhone 8GB to replace it.
While AT&T’s coverage isn’t as good for me, that’s clearly a “your mileage will vary” point and not my focus.
Please understand my perspective: I’m a road warrior powergeek type that uses this stuff for his job, not fun. I’m looking at this as someone who has to travel/fly every other week to places with no Wifi.
0) Wireless tether
On the Blackberry, I could tether via parallels, and share my network to my Mac. I can’t even dial out using the iPhone. Believe it or not, it’s still possible to end up in places that don’t have Wifi or Ethernet. Yeah it’s slower, but it’s better than nothing. If you don’t understand the “why” on this, you’re lucky.
1) Find
I already posted this, but where’s spotlight? On my Blackberry, I can find a message, contact, etc..
2) Check mail
Blackberry does a good job of pushing data to you when you get an email. It’s one of those things you get spoiled with. iPhone won’t let me check faster than every 15 minutes unless I manually check. I guess they’re compensating for the slower network, but to not giving me a choice irks me. I don’t want to switch to IM for this, cause the business world is still email, I just want more periodic checking options.
3) Auto-spellcheck UI
This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen on the iPhone. I use a lot of TLA’s and abbreviations in my emails. And I’m looking at the keyboard to type, not the screen (Blackberry was a different story, but I had haptic feedback). So when I hit the space bar, don’t AUTO-correct what you think I meant. I have to re-read the whole email to make sure that it didn’t decide to change SAN with sans just because I hit the space bar to continue to the next word.
4) Mark All As Read
I get a ton of SPAM. And I have no interest in going through them all to mark them as read individually (20+ every time I check mail). But if I leave it be, iPhone lists my new messages at a 100 in no time. Just give me a mark all as read button, and even if I can’t get the junk filter, it will at least clear the new email alert.
If Apple told me, you’ll have these things when the next OS comes out, I’d be totally cool. But with the policy of not talking about new features, even the obvious ones, I have a hard time seeing the justification in hanging on to a product to hope that it catches up to the competition. I understand not talking about the double secret probation super cool feature sets, but I have a hard time understanding why they can’t say, yeah, our bad, you’ll have find soon. No comment, makes no sense.
Outside of those initial reactions, I really like the iPhone. But those five things are each small walls in converting over, and might be large enough to force me to go back to crack, despite how happy I was to get off it.
Contributed by: ecuguru

As we here in the United States have been obsessing with Apple’s greatest introduction the iPhone, the rest of Appledom has not been languishing in remorse, although they have been anxiously following our inputs on the iPhone while eagerly awaiting the announcement of when it will be available in their region. One of the ways we can observe their activity is the recently released Apple ads. Our friend Coal in Japan (mikikaoru on YouTube) has graciously translated the Japanese Get a Mac ads and has given us permission to present them to you. For reference our brothers across the pond have also updated their Get a Mac offerings:
http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/
It appears that Apple is really targeting the bloatware trial software shipping with Windows PC in all markets. But, why do they get the “Office Posse” (UK,JP), “Art Language” (UK), and “Artist” (JP), we need to be reminded in those areas also. As more ads become available we will make them available to you.
(The four newly translated Japanese ads have been placed in Jason’s .Mac public folder/NewMacAds JP)
Contributed by: KennMsr

With your new iPhones in hand, the first thing you might not want to do is take them apart, especially after the lines and the waiting involved.
Reader Garrison Gunter thought otherwise and sent us this Flickr-based galleryvia J.C. “Sorcier” and his L’Apple Caf√© section.
And for those of you planning to embark upon this yourself, Anandtech has posted its iPhone “vivisection” gallery, complete with more thorough descriptions of each part of the process.
Given that someone snagged my cell phone over the weekend and I’m getting a replacement shipped along today or tomorrow, my brain kind of seizes up at the idea of dissecting your brand-new iPhone, but it’s a cool new tech device and the more you know about it, the better…

Reader Michael Long just pointed out the following:
A twenty-minute Quicktime guided tour of Apple’s new iPhone is now available online at their web site, illustrating nearly all of the phone’s features and functions. Go and see the tour here.
If you’re curious and can’t get enough of the iPhone between now and the 171 hours until it’s released, take a gander.

A mass email sent out by Apple and AT&T entitled “Get Ready. iPhone is coming July 29th” lists several suggestions as to how to prepare for the device’s arrival. Broken down into “Contacts,” “Calendar,” “Email,” “Photos,” “Music and Video,” and “iTunes Account” sections, the message explains how each category works on the iPhone.
According to an article on iLounge, the e-mail explains how each user will need to create an iTunes account in order to set up the iPhone.
The section by section breakdown:
Contacts:
Apple recommends getting your contact information up to date and prep your address book program (such as Address Book, Entourage, Outlook Express, etc.) to automatically synch with the iPhone.
Calendar:
The e-mail cites that the iPhone can import events from programs such as iCal or Entourage on the Mac or Outlook on the PC by synching the iPhone with your computer. Appointments can also be directly entered into the iPhone itself.
Email:
The announcement mentions that the iPhone can automatically synch e-mail account settings through iTunes and that popular email services such as Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL and .Mac Mail as well as POP and IMAP-based email will work on the iPhone. The iPhone will be able to automatically retrieve email on a set schedule if desired.
Photos:
The iPhone can display photos synched to the device via iTunes and iPhoto. On the Windows end, users can synch images to the iPhone from Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop Album or any picture folder. Apple suggests creating a test album of 50 to 100 photos as a test bed for the function.
Music and Video:
Like several of the other major features, the email cites that iTunes will be required to synch music and video to the iPhone. Apple suggests making a playlist of your favorite songs in advance.
iTunes Account:
Perhaps the most interesting part of the e-mail, users will need to create an iTunes account in order to set up the iPhone. Once the iPhone is in hand, fire up iTunes to create an account. Also double check your user name and password if any of these are in question for a smooth setup process.

Apple has caused a major disaster with the 2007-04 Security Update.
The 2007-004 Security Update replaced the ftp.plist in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons from Mac OS X server with the version from Mac OS X *Client*. There is no check in the installer if the update installs on client or Server, and it is the same update for both.
The problem this occurred is that when a client uploads something via FTP, the file permissions are wrong, and are set to -rw-r—– instead of -rw-r–r–.
Why is this a problem? My server, for example is a web server, and ever since I applied the security update 2 days ago, new files uploaded to the server would not work, resulting in this error:
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access [name of file] on this server.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.XXXXXX.com Port 16080
How do you fix it? The answer is to replace the ftp.plist file with the prior version. FTP services on client and server are very different. With the client ftp.plist from client on the server, it is ftpd which is launched, not xftpd.
The solution is to replace the ftp.plist with a previous version from Mac OS X Server. If you don’t have it, here is its content :

According to a post on GigaOM Netscape founder Marc Andreessen (bio) has come back to the Mac. Those who remember the net roots at the University of Illinois recall that there was a whole lot of Macs being used at the time. Sure the “systems” guys were using other products but the Mac platform dominated Web content development. I really think that those earlier products from Netscape were more user friendly. It’s nice to see you can come back home. Welcome home Marc.
Contributed by: Walter5555

According to a post on GigaOM Netscape founder Marc Andreessen (bio) has come back to the Mac. Those who remember the net roots at the University of Illinois recall that there was a whole lot of Macs being used at the time. Sure the “systems” guys were using other products but the Mac platform dominated Web content development. I really think that those earlier products from Netscape were more user friendly. It’s nice to see you can come back home. Welcome home Marc.
Contributed by: Walter5555

It should be simple. When your laptop battery dies, you go to the Apple Store for a new one, and leave old one behind for recycling. Mac users like simple, elegant solutions. That’s why we use the Mac.
But it doesn’t work that way. I recently went to the Apple Store in Toronto, and was told with a shrug that no in-store recycling was available. When I asked “why not?”, I was told “we just don’t do it.”
This is something that Apple should be fixing. The environment is a critical issue right now. Laptop batteries are full of toxins and become hazardous waste if improperly disposed. One would think that it would be a simple matter to expand their in-store iPod recycling project to include laptop batteries. Or adopt a “No Battery Left Behind” policy like Newer has done. Or even just sign-on to a national program like the RBRC, which provides businesses
with collection boxes and return forms. It’s a no brainer.
Al Gore, are you listening?
Contributed by: macldi

Ever since 10.4.7 or the recent iChat 3.0 update, video requests fail 80% or more, with the “Send / Don’t Send” bug reports to Apple. I have plenty of bandwidth, 8 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up on static ISP cable (Roadrunner So Cal).
I reboot my AirPort base stations, Sonicwall, everything and it only works once in a while.
Contributed by: Vic