At Work On a Mac

I ran into this New York Times article comparing Obama’s web site style to a Mac…ish interface and Hillary’s to a PC frame of mind. Get serious, none of them are neither, nein. Look at Obama’s site it is definitely crowded, busy, presents too many concepts and ideas on the home page and runs forever, all the way down to the New York Subway. Perhaps all candidates should attend the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June in San Francisco, to obtain some guidance as to what the quintessential Mac attribute is when it comes to designing an interface. The journalist also adds that being compared to a Mac is somewhat derogative as it remains a marginal choice of computer “but the Mac is still a niche computer”. All epochs have had their massively adopted beliefs awaiting enlightenment. I’m just not sure it is coming from either Hillary or Obama…

Hey PC guy, thanks but no thanks for the choice as I ended up not buying because I was caught in a one sided dilemma. Perhaps this is a new Microsoft e-commerce OS option? In any case thanks for the laugh. I can’t believe I spent so much time in the Windows environment. I must have had no other choice…

The iPhone is continuing its impressive incursion in the mobile phone industry. Apple is expecting sales to reach 12,9M units in the calendar year of 2008 alone. It now ranks second next to the Blackberry in terms of sales in the United States. Not bad for a year’s efforts. RIM must be nervous. Apple is addressing “corporate” issue like being able to erase remotely all data of a lost or stolen iPhone. I guess I’m next in line for purchasing one.

Apple is releasing its SDK and expect amazing apps to surface soon. The Beta release is ready and the real thing should come out in June. Apple will be promoting the applications and handing 70% of sales back to the creators on paying apps. Talk about a revolution. Game designers had already succeeded in converting it into a Wii like device to play in a three dimensional space. Nice application of the accelerometer technology. Proximity sensors, you’re next. Jonathan, you should tell us more about yours…

One of my daughter’s CD game allegedly MacOSX compatible got stuck into the so-called SuperDrive of one of my MacBooks. It has found its kryptonite and nemesis.

Apparently, sometimes disk copy protection on certain audio disk will generate an error that will cause the CD to stick in the drive. I’m not sure this is a rational explanantion. No matter what, the CD was stuck.

I tried the usual tricks. The first thing to do is to reboot while maintaining the left mouse button pressed. That didn’t work. You can also maintain the trackpad button clicked and reboot. Didn’t work.

Next I tried obscure key combinations. Pressing the option key (alt) while rebooting normally looks for all possible system disks. Apparently this routine must start with the CD/DVD drive because nothing but a black screen appeared. Next I tried looking through the drive’s door and tilting the MacBook. No avail.

Why did Apple remove the paper clip hole that would eject anything from previous drives? Design? Change of supplier? Blind faith in Chinese production quality check?

A Google search lead to nothing except many finds for similar problems. Is this a general issue with bad drives?

I tried rebooting the p-ram (legacy habit) thinking I was lucky to have ten fingers and ten toes for the key combination. No result.

Alright, it was time to get busy and bring on the torque artillery. It must be easy to get at the drive, surely designers had anticipated an eventual drive replacement. Is every one at Apple’s so optimistic as to bury a SuperDrive under ten feet of micro technology for Lilliputians (why don’t we ever cite the Blefuscudians)? You need surgeon’s hands to get at it.

When you open your 13″ MacBook (at your own risk as you will read) there is a very good source of play by play commentaries here at IFIXIT.

I thought I could do it myself. I was wrong. I did succeed in removing the CD after having dislodged the “SuperDrive” successfully, even if it did put up a Super good fight. But, I am sure that Steve Jobs who is known for spending days looking at screw details had no intention of me ever servicing my MacBook, had complete faith in his SuperDrive supplier or was so busy designing the iPhone that he missed on the replacement procedure for a SuperDrive.

It is a painstaking procedure better left to professionals who like me must have also missed the lower left hand side, glued, useless bracket supported by 2 Philips screws on their first MacBook opening. Everything went fine except for the keyboard lid being stuck and not popping open because of that bracket. I had to use force and that never goes too well with micro scale anything.

Next, I will take the MacBook to an expert along with three screws, a dent in my pride and afterthoughts for copy protection and the SuperDrive…