Again and again and again and again
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Seems like Steve Ballmer deserved the egging, pity the guy had such a bad aim.
Sex and the City
Link
Apparently she's still on Tiger.
Vlad Studio
You will have to pay a registration fee for the high quality pictures to support the artist and have no signature in the corner, but the free low quality versions seem perfectly fine to me for a desktop.
Rating iTunes
Facebook Security
In other social networking news, it looks like they've had to downgrade their ad revenue forecasts, boohoo. You know you're there to be monetarised right?
MacBook Black & Blues
It
matches my clock
Eventually I bought the
MacBook from John Lewis in March, taking
advantage of their extra 2 year guarantee (which
you’d have to pay extra if you bought direct
from Apple). I’d recommend, if you’re
not a student, not buying direct from Apple.
Buying from a John Lewis meant that if something
goes wrong you have someone else who can moan at
Apple first before you have to.
Talking of things going wrong, they did:
My first impression of the MacBook Black was how
dirty it gets, any smudge finger print on the black
is just far too obvious. Apple do provide you with a
handy cleaning cloth, and you’re going to need
it. Unless you’re less anal than me, and deal
with it looking a mess. My second impression was it
being a speedy machine, just what I needed. Had
things not gone awry, I’d’ve kept it.
However; after a few weeks it started to make some
strange static sound from the left speaker area. The
sound was audible just before the start-up chime. A
static blip (bip, pip, difficult to describe a static
sound) followed by the chime. The sound also occurred
just before any other warning sound. e.g. turning up
volume, received email sound, incoming iChat message
etc. Each sound was preceded by the static blip,
followed by the standard sound for that application.
If the blip had just occurred, it didn’t do it
again for a few minutes.
What seemed more odd, was the static blip could be
heard even if the MacBook was muted.
Unplugging headphones would cause the Mac to do three
static blips in concession, whilst flashing the red
optical light inside the headphone port.
The sound wasn’t very loud, but loud enough to
be very distracting, especially when you knew it was
coming. It wasn’t the hard disk, I know the
noise a hard disk makes, even a failing one which is
more like a ball bearing dlrrrr.
I tried resetting PRAM/PMU, no change. I reinstalled
the OS, Mac OS X 10.5, no change. I even started the
MacBook in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) using external
FireWire drive and still it made the static noise.
I gave up and took it back to John Lewis. I tried
demonstrating the problem, which was difficult due to
the ambient noise of the shop, but the assistant did
manage to hear it. He pointed out that Apple could be
rather difficult repairing small issues like this but
said he’d talk to their main Mac guy, I also
had a brief chat with him and eventually my guy came
back and said they’d just replace it. That was
great news and a relief.
I picked up the replacement machine the next week
when they had stock. I got home and turned it.
Running through the welcome to Mac animation, the
music was scratchy sounding from the left speaker, uh
oh. It also made the exact same blip sound before the
start-up chime. This did not bode well, but it
appeared not to make the blip noise again whilst
running, I held my breath. The next day it started to
behave just like the first, just slightly quieter,
not for long. It then started to make a louder static
sound from the right speaker area, which stopped, but
then came back again, but even worse, alternating
from the right to the left speaker whenever you
turned the volume up (or as stated above, whenever
any "single" sound was made). Just to add, I’d
not installed anything or copied my data across.
That was it for me and I returned the MacBook for a
refund which John Lewis gave back without any
questions. Thank you John Lewis!
This appears to be a manufacturing fault, as it
happened on two machines. I made a recording using my
camera.
The noise could be replicated simply by clicking on the volume bar in System Preferences which is shown in this video clip. The sound once made would not occur again for a minute.
I recorded it a few times with my camera (hence it being wobbly, I was trying to keep it’s mic near the speaker area). - First with the sound on, which may be hard to hear, then muted. I cut it off a bit early so I did it again a few times with the mute on. You may want to put on headphones or be in a quiet room & turn up the volume.
Some may just think it normal, which it isn’t - neither my PowerBook 12”, PowerBook 17” or my girlfriends White MacBook (a 2007 model) made the odd noise. Maybe some have less sensitive ears and are willing to live with it. It drove me bonzo.
Thankfully I’ve been loaned an iMac G5. I’ll wait for Apple to make a real MacBook update, hopefully a new case or something. I may wait for a month even then to see if anyone has any problems.
Apple Defects