Look what 10.5.2 did!!, originally uploaded by leon.barrett.

I just upgraded leopard and look what its done.

If you can’t make it out it says “Leopard is better than Vista”

Even Apple can’t resist a digg!

Just to prove that I don’t just rave about Mac’s and slag off Windows, this post is about Apple’s latest treat - The MacBook Air. Apple is back at doing what it does best. Marketing a product that isn’t that great, so well that you feel you can’t live without it (iPhone, iPod Touch).

I’ve decided to gloss over the good points in favour of the bad.

After purchasing a MBP last year, I was jealous to hear that a newer and sexier model was out. The jealousy soon turned into glee as I read the specs.

However Apple may like to jazz it up, the MBA (MacBook Air) is crap. As a mobile machine, carrying an external drive, usb hub and god knows what other peripherals around is just silly. The lack of an optical drive Apple says is due to the fact that you can download your Movies right from iTunes. But what if I need to rip a CD or burn a DVD when I forget to take my external drive with me?

What if I want to use my Mighty Mouse, and my USB stick at the same time?

What happens when I decide I need a boost of Ram or increased HDD?

Apple has created a wonderful machine, but it’s only good if you already own a desktop Mac. My point is that if you would use a desktop and notebook, then your the type of user that demands a higher spec than the MBA currently offers.

Saying that, with the lack of peripherals it will still run better than any Vista based machine!!

I’ve finally joined the iPod revolution, by purchasing a new (ish) iPod from the Apple store. Up until now, I have been using the rather pathetic 2Gb of storage on my Nokia N73.

For not a lot of money, I picked up a reconditioned 30Gb iPod video from the Apple Uk website. If your thinking about getting a reconditioned iPod, and are worried about the build quality - don’t. The iPod has a brand new casing, with not a scratch in sight, and came packaged in about a million pieces of protective plastic film.

There wasn’t a fancy looking box, instead a rather boring brown box (very well packaged though), but who care’s about the box? However I must say, there is something quite sexual about the way Apple present their goods. Any Mac owner, will remember the smile on their face, when they opened their new product.

Anyway, i’m off to fill up this baby with all of my *legally* downloaded tracks!!

Just a quick note. On the Apple site, it states that you must have an Apple Remote in order to use Front Row in Leopard. This may be a bit of a bummer for you guys that don’t own one. Fear not, Front Row is always there and can be accesed by hitting Command + Esc. You may already know this, but I thought i’d share it anyway. I wonder why Apple haven’t publised this?

By the way the Command button is the one with the ⌘ logo. You could also press F1, depending on the age of your machine.

If you do have an Apple Remote, head here to see some nifty little functions you may not know you can do with it.

Also this blog is brilliant for adding functions to Front Row, such as internet radio. Cheers guys.

I purchased my spanking new copy of Leopard today.I say purchased its more of a pre-order, and i’ll get it when i get it. This is pretty clever by Apple, build lots of hype, get everybody to pre-order and then leave them gagging for it. As if thats not bad enough the postal strike in the U.K could see me waiting well into November to install Leopard. I checked out a few American sites (including Amazon) and they all seem to think Leopard is out on the 31st, while the officicial Apple site is saying the 26th. Either way I can’t wait. My Windows machine is also no more as of Thursday as I am about to install the new Ubuntu Release. Finally Windows is out of my life (well almost, I still have to put up with it at work). Forget browsing the web for porn, sorry art, and instead head over here. I have had many hours of ‘joy’ reading up about Leopard. My appetite is well and truly wet soaked now! Just for info these are the minimum requirements for Leopard:

• Intel, G5, or 867MHz+ G4 processor
• 512MB of RAM
• DVD drive
• 9GB of free disk space

In addition some features have further requirements:

• Time Machine requires a hard drive in addition to your boot disk (external or internal is fine)
• Photo Booth requires a camera and a processor better than a G4.
• Screensharing requires a speeding net connection (300 Kbps is Apple’s recommendation)
• DVD player requires a 1.6GHz or better for de-interlacing

Probably the best feature is that I don’t need any fancy graphics card updates, extra RAM or anything to run Leopard on my machine (cough cough Vista)!

Check this out: VoIP on the iPhone Pretty cool