Ins@nity Complex

I'm am happy to announce that last Friday I finally upgraded the phone I've had for the last three years. I've never be a person onboard with the whole smart phone thing before, and certainly while I saw people with MP3 players, snazzy cameras and (lol) WAP internet in phones much better than mine, I was pretty content with the ability to... you know, phone people and send text messages at the cheapest rate I could find.

The iPhone in my mind is simply much more than a smart phone. It's basically a computer in your pocket, and as someone who has lugged a laptop around for the last four years, it's such a brush of fresh air. And God damn, at £440 with no contract, this thing better be amazing. I've been waiting some months for Apple to upgrade the iPhone 3G (because if your going to get a Jesus phone, it has to have a decent camera people) and while I wasn't particularly please that O2 upped the pay as you go price for the new hardware rather than lowering the price of the old model, there was little question about whether I would be in line to get one come launch.

In the UK only three retailers are selling the device; Apple (whose online store was not accepting pre-orders and closest retail location is London), Carphone Warehouse (who only accepted pre-orders on contract phones, and turned out to have no PAYG devices in stock on launch morning...) and the carrier themselves, O2 (who accepted no pre-orders). The line even for a small town like mine was surprisingly long, although nothing like say the release of the Wii, but what surprised me the most about the launch of the 3GS was the amount of people getting the phone on contract.

The biggest shocker though, was seeing an old man (who I suspect to have been at least seventy by his zimmer frame) who was not only so up with technology that he was getting a 3GS on launch day, but was prepared to buy out the rest of his previous iPhone contract so that he could start a new one. When I get old, I want to be that guy.

In fact, I was the only person in store that morning prepared to hand over the cash for the device on pay as you go. My experience once I got to the front of the line lasted no less than five minutes, most of which involving waiting for a cash register to become clear. I had previously watched the people ahead of me spends forever sitting with O2 staff as they signed forms, had credit checks and sat glum faced on the phone waiting for a response from head office, while I trotted out with my handset ready to go quicker than you could eat a sandwich.

It makes me laugh because in both the O2 store and in Carphone Warehouse (where I was previously told they only had contract phones), I was asked by the employee whether I was aware of the price of the PAYG device. In both cases this was an obvious lead in to trying to get me a contract phone, and while it would have seemed great not to spend £440 on a phone that morning, I'm sitting here now with the knowledge that I have a phone that has free internet access, 300 free text messages and that I will probably top-up £10 once a month. Those suckers who got their "free" iPhones on the other hand are stuck in a two year contract, paying at least £40 a month. I'm no mathematician but I think I know who got the better deal.

As for how is it? In a word, amazing. When I start commuting two hours to work next week (thats another rant entirely) I will have the ability to phone, send text messages, chat on instant message, check e-mail, use twitter and facebook, listen to my iPod, browse the Internet, take pictures and play games all from one little pocket sized device. I've never been a fan of the "all in one" device before, but I think Apple hit the nail on the head with this one.

It's awesome.

So the day after my rant about their shipping, I have to eat my own words as both my MacBook and iPod nano arrive at six in the evening. My complaint about their tracking still stands, but at least their shipping time wasn't as bad as expected!

So here they are. Yuffie and Highwind, my new best friends :P

As much as I love Apple and their products, I have to say that shipping from there online store to the United Kingdom sucks more than you can imagine. Not only does there tracking site deliver helpfully titbits of delight such as "In Transit to Customer - Shipment on Schedule" and "In transit to final destination - carrier details to be updated shortly" a week and a half after order, but there hilarious claims on there online website that all products "ship in 24 hours" could have me rolling on the floor for hours.

Okay, I get it. Your shipping the laptop from China, however a week and a half later Apple have confirmed over the phone that my MacBook has indeed "not entered the country of destination". Which has me asking, where the hell is it? I'm not even bothered that its expected arrival date is now next week, two weeks after order, but it drives me up the wall that Apples customer service is so shit that I cant find out A) where the machine actually is after a week in transit and B) a specific day that it might arrive. A vague "beginning of next week" is all well and good for them, but I'm the one who has to sit in every morning waiting to see if they bother to turn up.

You could track dog shit in the postal system easier o_O;

But what truly pisses me off? My Apple Care coverage started on the 24th September. By the time the MacBook arrives, over two weeks of that coverage will have already been used. That’s class A ballshit.

Yes, I'm impatient. But for Christ sake, an Indian Takeaway gives me better customer service.

Remember back in 2003 when EyeToy was released for the PlayStation 2? Probably not, as it was much popular in Europe than it ever was in America (similar to SingStar and Buzz), however it turns out that the game and camera bundle has some pretty good replay value.

With my brother off at University it’s clearly a lot more difficult to speak with him (I've never been a big phone chatter myself) however thanks to the EyeToy our whole family can see him whenever he's online, and it didn't cost me a penny extra. Combining Skype video calls and some PC drivers for EyeToy that I found online, coupled with his MacBook Pros built in iSight camera, we have a pretty awesome makeshift camera that works surprisingly well. Even the in-built microphone is good enough for all your light conversation needs.

In other news, Seti360 and Biccy (otherwise known as Dwayne and Dave from University) put some money together to get me Burnout Paradise for 360 as an early birthday present, which arrived in the post today. So far I'm enjoying it very much, as its a lot more casual, relaxed and mindless compared to some of the games I've been playing recently. So thank you muchly to both of you. ^_^;

Elsewhere, I got two e-mails today from Apple, one informing me that my MacBook + free iPod nano had been shipped, and the other telling me that my MacBook is covered by Apple Care until 24th September 2011. I'll be nearly 23 and hopefully graduated by then, which is a freaky thought o_o;

Plans for next week include drinking / playing pool on Monday (my birthday), returning (finally) to University on Wednesday and going to watch the British Open Knockdown Championship at the K2 in Crawly on Saturday. Until then, I will continue to sit here and impatiently wait for my new laptop to arrive.

So in my last post I was agonising over the idea of buying a Mac. My brother had just got his (free >_<) MacBook Pro in the mail, the University has continued to throw free money at me like there's no tomorrow and Vincent (my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop that after two years will no longer charge the battery, and can't be closed because the hinges are buckling to the point where the screen will be ripped apart) can no longer truly function as a portable computer.



To cut a long story short, I brought a 13-inch: White, 2.4GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Super Drive equipped MacBook today. ^_^;

The reason I bring this up (apart from pointing out how I'm diving head first into Apple Fanboy Hell), is to mention the awesome student discounts Apple offer. Not only was just over £100 chopped off the laptop's price, but the cost of Apple Care (the three year warranty) was reduced from £200 to just £40 and they chucked in a free iPod Nano 4th gen to boot. To get this great offer you have to access the Apple Store through an approved university network, but its well worth the trouble for the savings you can get.

So hopefully that will arrive sometime around my birthday (which is a week today btw, hint, hint) and all that remains is to work out who I pass on my old (not so portable) laptop and (not so old) iPod Nano 3rd gen too.

(...no, I didn't buy a pink nano. I got teh blue. I’m also not a girl, nor do I have MacBook balancing skillz)

Josh: I swear the people next door need to have sex quiter before I go round and murder them o_O;
Alex: go murder them then, it would make for interesting national headlines
Josh: indeed, but it would require so much effort
Josh: and... whats with the university just throwing money at me by the way?
Alex: I'm not sure! they must think you're very poor
Josh: Indeed o_O
Alex: drinks are on you
Josh: My brothers MacBook Pro arrived yesterday, which has like tribbled my urge to get a Mac now... and they give me a grand for free. its so anoying >_>;
Josh: yes.... tribbled is a word
Alex: I know :P
Alex: yes, they are sex on.... um, what do laptops go on?
Alex: no no, that doesn't work
Josh: sex on a mains power lead?
Alex: YES!

I may not have mentioned this before, but a couple of months ago I got myself a rather nice iPod nano on sale. Obviously now you'd think I would be as pissed off as I was when I purchased a Nintendo DS one week before the Lite was announced, but I'm really not. Personally I believe the stout fat shape of my nano is far more convenient as a small media player than the tall and thin design of the new ones, and I don't know about you, but I think I can just about "live without" the need to shake my iPod to shuffle my songs. I mean seriously? How annoying is that going to be every time my pocket or bag jolts enough to register as a "shake".

One thing this has leaded me to use is a lot of iTunes. While I had it previously installed it wasn't until I got an iPod that I started to use it as my sole media player. Not only do I enjoy having my music in one convenient place, but the podcast subscriptions through the music store are amazingly usefull.

This brings me on to "iTunes 8.0", a six hour experience of HELL. Not only did iTunes fail to update to version 8.0, but it corrupted both my installation of iTunes AND QuickTime. iTunes was relatively easy to remove, however any attempt to install over or remove QuickTime from my system resulted in a flurry of annoying error messages I couldn't make heads or tail off. To make a long story very short (this is six hours after I originally intended to update iTunes), it turned out that VB Scripting had somehow been disabled and QuickTime's installer is apparently reliant on it being enabled. Vista being the incredible user experience that it is didn't even allow me to activate this in the command prompt until after I had logged into safe mode and right clicked into administrator mode, despite the fact I'm the ONLY user of the system and already the administrator..... thanks Microsoft! o_O;

So yeah, iTunes is working again and (thank god) my library is intact. As for the 8.0 update that took six hours? Not really worth it... Sure I like the aesthetic changes to how you browse podcasts and music by album art, but the rather hyped "genius" feature boils down to just another way to sell me things on the music store. Not once has it recommended that one of the songs I already own would go nicely with the one I picked, instead it seems to just look up the musician in the store and list all their songs :-/

Speaking of Apple, my older brother (who started University at the start of the month) is being given a free MacBook Pro as part of his support because he has aspergers syndrome. Pretty cool huh? It arrives next Thursday and he won’t be back till the weekend, so I get to play around with it. ^_^;

Woot!