JohnBs personal blog

I’ve been using a Mac mini at work for a few months now mainly for testing purposes and i’ve really been liking the simplicity of it all - plus Leopard looks great….so at the weekend I took the other half to the Apple store and showed her the new iMac and said it would look great on the desk in the office, she agreed - so one iMac 2.4ghz 20″ 2gb 320gb is currently on order. We have an aging laptop from my last place of work and what with getting married next year and who knows what after that it seemed sensible to sort ourselves out with a new bit of hardware.

Massive news, EMI is to remove DRM from content on iTunes and provide high quality (DRM’ed) tracks for 99c as opposed to 79c for DRM free tracks!!! THIS IS MASSIVE NEWS FOR THE MUSIC INDUSTRY!!!

So someone who learned from my LearnFB series was kind enough to pop me an Itunes gift certificate today, i trundled over to iTunes only to find out that vouchers are not usable across stores…..huh? So now I have an iTunes voucher which i can’t redeem, any ideas?

This week i’m on a VB.Net (Gasp!) course up in London so i’m having to catch a train then the tube to get me to my destination…I love my iPod so naturally it’s with me each day but i got fed up of having my iPod at max volume (The French are to blame for EU wide volume limitations) and still being able to hear the train noise etc etc….so in my lunch break i nipped out to the Apple Store on Regents street and picked up myself a pair of Sennheiser CX300 Noise Isolating earphones. Oh my god - the difference between the £20 stock headphones and these little beauties is phenomenal - for a mere £40!! They sit right in your ear canal and block all external noise (be careful crossing the road) consequently you feel totally immersed in the music and I tell you, you can’t hear a tube training approaching over music! Hey Apple, what about a headphone free iPod option….? Let the consumer decide what eaphones to get maybe?

Interesting tour of the ‘Apple’ lab at Microsoft - I particularly like the bank of 150 mac minis!

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Apple have just annouced BootCamp - dual booting Mac OS and XP .

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Seems like leaving work late I still managed to miss the announcement of the Intel powered laptops and iMac’s - boy do they look sweet, see the new line up here shipping in February.

Some great news emerging from the MacWorld keynote happening right now:

• Awesome figures on sales and units shipped of iPods - 42 millions units shipped, 32 million shipped in 2005. iTunes has 83% market share. 8 millions TV shows downloaded since debut. 850 millions songs sold via iTunes
• At last an inline remote control for the iPod video - this has been high on peoples criticism list of the new iPod video which doesn’t have a remote connector like previous generations next to the headphone jack - the new accessory also brings an FM receiver to the iPod.
• Mac OS X 10.4.4 available immediately
• iPhoto now features ‘PhotoCasting’ for sharing photos - MAC Only
• Where are the Intel Power Books Steve?