St. Louis Wedding Photography and Event Photography

About a week before I left for my vacation to St. Thomas, I stopped by the Apple store in St. Louis and picked up the new Macbook Pro.  It is definitely a big step up from my Apple Macbook that was roughly one year old.  The biggest difference is the video and screen.  The new Macbook Pro has 512MB of dedicated Video memory on the NVidia 8600 chipset.  The Macbook has integrated graphics which shares RAM.  I also needed more hard drive space and the Macbook Pro is a big upgrade with 250GB over the 80GB that the Macbook has. 

I transferred all my files and settings from the Macbook to the Pro using a firewire cable.  The process of copying the data was very easy but it did take about an hour and fifteen minutes.  The  Macbook Pro restarted after the data transfer and worked like a charm.  The only thing I had to do was install my network laser printer and configure my Sprint EVDO USB card. 

I installed Windows XP using Boot Camp and it runs very well.  I also have Parallels installed running Windows which makes it very easy to check my design work in multiple browsers. 

One nice feature that the Macbook Pro has is the ambient light sensor.  There is actually a sensor mounted under the speaker grill on each side of the keyboard.  The sensor is located roughly an inch and a half from where the grill starts by the screen.  It is pretty accurate and it dims the screen and turns on the keyboard back light as light dims.

I carry my laptop (Apple Macbook) almost everywhere I go and while I don’t have any highly sensitive or confidential information on the computer, I still don’t want it to be easily accessible even if it is sitting on my desk at the office or at home.  I use a login password and set the screensaver so that after 10 minutes of inactivity, the computer locks itself.  The login screen appears immediately every time I try to unlock the machine when the screen is not closed.

I tend to have problems when I close the lid and want to bring the laptop out of sleep mode.  Frequently the login screen does not display for a long period of time - it has taken as long as a few minutes. Other times the back light will turn on and the machine will go back into sleep mode a few seconds later.  The best remedy that I have found is to close the screen and reopen it a few seconds later.  This normally remedies the problem but in some instances I have open and close the screen multiple times.

I know that the problems I have are not isolated to this Macbook laptop because I have a 12" Powerbook G4 that exhibits the same problems. 

Overall I am very happy with my Apple Macbook laptop. The machine is fast and responsive. I upgraded it to 3gb of RAM which helped a lot. I can only make two minor complaints about the machine and usage. I have noticed that sometimes it does not want to prompt me to enter a password to log in when opening the lid or bringing it out of sleep mode. The remedy is to close the screen and wait about ten seconds to open it and it will immediately prompt me to log in. I have noticed this problem occurs more frequently when a USB device is plugged into the computer.

My second complaint is about a problem that occurs when plugging the power cable in to the computer. When you connect the mag adapter to the laptop, the Macbook will sometimes turn on when it was in sleep mode. It should not do this and it does not do it consistently. I’m not sure why it happens but it is annoying.

I just wanted to point out that the 16gb Apple iPhone is now available through Apple’s website. View the 16GB iPhone detail online at apple’s store.

The new 16GB iPhone is selling for $499 and the 8gb model is $399.

I use my Treo 700p as my primary phone and I recently purchased an iPhone for a separate business venture. I am very satisfied with the iPhone but there are a few features that I feel it should have for it to be consider truly better than my Treo. Of those features, my number one request is an application that will allow the iPhone to act as a remote control for any Apple bluetooth enabled computer.

There is a Palm based program that works on most newer Treo models called Clicker. The company that develops this software is called Salling Software. The program is very well written and supports Applescript. It can control iTunes, iDVD, Powerpoint, Keynote, iPhoto, and many more applications. The interface is clean and easy to use. The program works very well for controlling presentations - I have used them for school and work. Once Apple releases their iPhone SDK, I really hope to see a program of this type to be released.

This post will explain my experience with Apple when my Macbook laptop hand rest started cracking.

I use my Apple Macbook laptop as my primary computer and I use a couple Windows machines for various other tasks that I do. I use my Macbook daily and it probably averages two to three hours of use per day. I carry it with me to work and almost everywhere else I go.

About a week ago as I was using the laptop I felt something scrape my hand as I adjusted to use the touchpad. At first I didn’t notice what it was but after closer inspection I realized that the handrest had actually cracked on the right side of the touchpad where the lid closes and meets the hand rest. The crack was about two inches long. The crack looked like it would expand from the pressure of my palm as I continued to use the machine.

Three days later I was near the Apple store at the West County Mall in St. Louis, MO and I stopped in to show the damage to the technicians at the “Genius Bar.” Because Apple is becoming so popular and there are only two locations in the whole St. Louis area, the technicians are typically pretty busy. Apple suggests making a reservation in advance but since I live an hour away it is hard to find a time to stop in. Needless to say I walked in without a reservation and was told I could be put on a walk-in list. I said that was fine and waited about fifteen minutes.

I showed the crack to the technician and asked and asked how long it typically takes for the parts to arrive and how long I would have to leave the machine. I am heavily dependent on this machine because all my applications I use on a regular basis are on it. The technician spent a minute looking into the system to check inventory and he told me they had the parts in stock. I was surprised at this since it seems this is an infrequent problem (no results on a Google search for “Apple Macbook handrest crack”). I was ecstatic when he told me they could fix it right now and I could pick it up in an hour.

I went to dinner at the Elephant Bar and less than 45 minutes after I left the Apple store I received a call from the technician telling me the computer was already fixed. I picked it up after dinner and was good as new. In fact they replaced the plastic hand rest, the keyboard, and touchpad. The old keyboard and touchpad showed some staining from the heavy use and I was very happy to see that everything was in great shape again. Kudos to Apple’s continually great customer and technical support.

Update: after doing a google search today on this topic I started finding a handful of results so I’m not sure why a previous search found nothing…….