Take a quick look at Google News to see how effective Microsoft’s PR team is. Nearly every headline by various journalists talks about the new Microsoft “iPod Killer” due to be released before Xmas ‘06. Meanwhile Apple is selling about 6-7 million iPods every quarter. Most owners would also be using the iTunes store, making it highly unlikely that they will ditch Apple and move to Microsoft. Just ask Sony how they are going with their supposed “iPod Killer”. Apple gets a rough ride in the business/tech media in the US as well as Wall Street analysts who still are trying to talk down their recent record profits as they don’t predict them to be sustainable. I look forward to Apple continuing to prove everyone wrong.

I’ve been posting a little light due to my brand new MacBook Pro having to go back to Apple. I’m upset, but I’m prepared to forgive this minor discretion given the years of loyal service provided to me by Apple products. I have had a bad run though, in the last 12 months I’ve gone through an iPod, and iPod Shuttle and now a MacBook Pro.

Still doesn’t help my productivity though. To top it all off, the same day I sent it back to Apple, Vodafone kindly switched off my Blackberry email service for reasons still unknown. All this while I was moving house and was without broadband, so really, really needed my mobile data. Now that is another story. I rang my broadband provider, Orcon, a week ago to ask them to switch over my broadband connection the day I moved house. They said they couldn’t do it because the connection was still live and they could only put through the request to Telecom once it was disconnected. Okay. So how long after they put in the request to Telecom will the change go through? Answer, 3-5 working days. I moved on a Friday, so that basically means up to 10 days without broadband. The sinister part of this story is that if I was with Telecom for broadband, they could do it same day.

I was tempted to move back to Telecom for this reason, but if you don’t support the competitors like Orcon, then where would we be? Despite voluntary and involuntary regulation I just don’t trust that Telecom to do the right thing. This is without doubt a deliberate anti-competitive policy designed to fustrate the customers of Telecom’s competitors.

Mark has just shown me this little plug-in for Mail (on Mac OS X), that allows you to have your preview pane on the right instead of horizontally underneath. This is a feature in Outlook 2003, which I really like and makes life a lot easier.

You can get Letterbox from aaron.harnley.net.

I got my new Apple MacBook Pro this week and loaded up Parallels and Windows XP on it. Running XP simultaneously with OS X is by far the fastest computing experience I have ever had. This is the the best notebook computer in the world without a doubt. I couldn’t install Boot Camp for some reason but Parallels is a much better solution anyway. My only problem is that it crashes every 5 minutes when I turn on WiFi. Having looked on the Apple support forums this looks like a bad batch of Airport cards, so hopefully can be easily fixed. I had to go away on business for a week so have got a workaround with a little D-Link WiFi router/ap/client device that lets me still connect to WiFi networks, but this is a little annoying. Oh well, I’ll live with this until I get home in return for the unbelievable computing speed and convenience of having both platforms on a single device.

Technorati Tags: apple

Boot Camp allows Intel-based Mac users to install Windows XP and have a dual-boot OS machine. Parallels have developed an application that will allow you to run Windows inside OS X. This looks very good, and it is very cheap (US$39.99). I look forward to trying this out when I get my new MacBook Pro.

Rick Benavidez (aka edgecloud) is certainly happy with MacBook Pro and Parallels by the looks of his post. I agree that for developers it is the perfect package for development and testing.

Technorati Tags: apple, boot camp, parallels

The music industry is struggling to shut down Russian MP3 store AllOfMP3.com. This site is now second only to iTunes in the UK market in terms of popularity. The range of music they have is very impressive and the site is very good looking and easy to use. So how can they charge only $0.30 - $0.40 per song? Easy, they don’t pay the record labels or artists a cent so it is still incredibly profitable. It is therefore illegal to use this site in most countries, but it isn’t currently illegal in Russia, where the company is based, despite the best efforts of the US to put pressure on the Russian government. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Technorati Tags: allofmp3, RIAA

Battlefield 2 is questionably one of the best online multiplayer military games ever released. It is really the only reason I have a PC at home. When my new MacBook Pro arrives I intend to install Boot Camp and then I should be able to play BF2 on it. I hope so, having just spent the majority of my Saturday night this week rebuilding my PC from scratch, I am ready to throw in my lot with Apple/Boot Camp for good.

Just ordered my new MacBook Pro today. I promised myself I would wait as Apple always bring out something better about 1 month later, but I couldn’t resist. I’ve currently got a 12″ G4 and before that I had the 17″ which was just way too heavy to carry around the world, but I reckon the 15″ will be juuuust right. Apparently I’m not the only one, as it looks like it is going to be awhile before it is shipped, but I’m happy to wait as I know it will be worth it.

The other day I was carrying my daughter, my Toshiba notebook, my Apple PowerBook, my daughter’s bag, my keys and trying to talk on my cell. Oh yeah, and it was raining. This didn’t really work. What I need is to ditch my PC and have everything I need on my PowerBook. It looks like the good folks at Apple have finally come up with the solution:

Boot Camp

Haven’t actually tried this yet as we only have one Intel Mac in the office, but it would definitely be ideal for me, assuming it all works. I’ve found one person that has found an annoying bug but hopefully this will get fixed soon. It might be better to wait until the next release of OS X, which I believe will allow you to switch between the two operating systems instantly, without having to reboot.