Since Apple’s iPhone has been released in the summer of 2007, the device has risen through the ranks of acceptance. After consumers flocked to the phone, the companies that employ them  had to enhance iPhone support and acceptance. Early releases of iPhones arrived with many browser breach-points. But regardless of the security or how familiar IT staff is with Apple, the latest iPhone advance will give Apple more oomph to lift itself over the corporate ramparts by way of consumer demand.

Apple will generate demand at Wal-Mart as of this weekend, when the Big Smiley starts selling iPhone 8GB units for $197. Analysts say that consumer acceptance of Apple products is pushing Macs and iPhones into the corporate tool chests. Wal-Mart promises to match any price on an iPhone, so the nation’s biggest retailer is serious about moving units.

At $197, this iPhone is one-third the price of the product released in June, 2007, twice as fast and now offers the vast potential of the App Store. It doesn’t hurt that the iPhone has a customer satisfaction rating about twice as high as the new Blackberry Storm. The major changes have made the iPhone the fastest selling product in the Apple’s price list. Whether you want Wal-Mart’s electronic wizards to supply your activation expertise is a question to consider carefully. No source is perfect for sales assistance, but in order of savvy, I’d rank Apple’s Stores on the top, followed by AT&T outlets or Best Buys, followed by Wal-Mart for now.

It makes a fellow teary-eyed to think back to the days when Apple only had Macs to sell, and gaining shelf space in places like CompUSA was a profound accomplishment. Now places like Fredericksburg, Texas will offer Apple’s products on retail shelves, right down the aisle from that classic Vlassic $6 jumbo jar of pickles.

Replacing notebook components is no small matter, even if the screws take on the tiniest of proportions. I’ve upgraded the hard drive in my MacBook Pro, and so I have weathered my struggle with 2.55 mm Phillips screws. Opening the case of the MBP accounts for two-dozen of these fasteners, most of them at 000 size of the screw-head. Work slowly and set everything out in a pattern to keep the four differing styles of screws organized. My friend Steve Hardwick said he puts out a strip of duct tape, doubled over to expose its sticky side, and put the screws onto the tape.

Small businesses and independent creatives consider this kind of self-service, perhaps to replace a failed Superdrive like mine, because self-service saves a lot. This was an $85 repair at the Apple Store, and might have been more at a provider unfamiliar with the MacBook.

Other World Computing offers replacement components for Macs as well as tutorial videos on how to install drives and memory. The video makes the process seem easier than it looks; your garden-variety computer tech spins a 000 Phillips screwdriver a lot faster than a frugal small business owner. But there’s a feeling of clever accomplishment when you snap the MacBook back together and punch that start button to hear the signature chime of Mac startup. Read the rest of this entry »

An article in yesterday’s Computerworld highlights the push for more Macs in corporate workplaces. Laura DiDio’s analyst report from Information Technology Intelligence Corp. says that Apple hasn’t done much to double the demand for Macs in enterprise settings. Instead, satisfied consumers bring their need for Apple’s systems to the IT department.

I’m not going to proclaim that Macs are going to sweep Windows away in a tidal wave, but this is clearly Apple’s best showing in the enterprise in the last 20 years. And Apple hasn’t done anything to actively promote this.

The article calls the phenomenon the “consumerization” of IT, adding that computers at home are now more powerful than those in the workplace. That’s probably true on desktops and in laptops, since corporations are parsimonious about power because they keep an eye on profits.

The bottom line, as we noted a few days ago, is that twice as many companies (68 percent) say they’ll allow Macs in the workplace next year as the companies that were polled in 2008. It’s not Windows, but OS X is Unix, and that environment is a corporate standard. The rise of the iPhone to the top of the mobile phone heap isn’t hurting, either.

MacBook Pro owners face an eventual failure from their SuperDrive CD/DVD reader-writers. The 2006 batch of MB Pros all shipped with a fouled run of optical drive hardware. User after user complained and found failures in the only device that would load their new applications like Adobe’s Creative Suite or Microsoft’s Office Applications. Read the long and sad tale of failures at the Macintouch Reader Report Forum. Even the new MacBook Pro owners are getting bitten.)

The included device gained some stability in later MB Pro units, so by 2008 you had a better than even chance of having a SuperDrive remain operative within the one-year warranty. But hundreds of thousands of MacBook Pro SuperDrives went out the door with a Mean Time Between Failure  (the old MTBF ranking for professional storage) of well under 20,000 hours. A weak figure at best, and unacceptible for small business or enterprise use.

Replacing these units can be simple, or not too costly. But not both. By simple, I mean the $310 replacement drive from the Apple Store, plus an $85 replacement fee. “It’s pretty much $400,” the Apple Genius Bar tech told me tonight. (Then there’s the tax, but at least there’s no shipping.) That’s a total cost of 40 percent of the price of a new MacBook, and about one-third the cost of the lowest MacBook Pro. But this solution is easy, so long as you can do without your MacBook for a week or more. (This is where having the Apple Pro uplift on AppleCare gets you to the front of the line, I’m told.) Read the rest of this entry »

I managed to schedule a One-to-One training session at the local Apple Store today. The first available date was, sure, the Monday of the week following Christmas, December 29. What a coincidence, a date that follows the ultimate purchase and return week.

Anyway, for my meeting I’ll try to make some sense of what Apple has done to the iMovie in iLife ’08, at least what I can understand during my 50-minute session. This baseline movie app for creative types who still don’t have Final Cut Express in their budget got gutted in its latest version, all to make it behave more like the Final Cut series. Somewhere in Apple’s software management this made sense, probably because nobody there ever spent three years working with the perfectly-useful iMovie from 2006.

I probably will come away from the training with a yen to move up from iMovie to the $199 Final Cut Express. That’s one thing you could learn from 50 minutes of training.

Let Jack hold the buds

Selling accessories for Apple’s non-computer offerings like iPods is tough. There’s vast competition, and the big boys like Belkin, DLO and Kensington command ample retail shelf space. Retail doesn’t carry as much weight with enterprise purchases, though. And with iPhones becoming an approved corporate PDA choice, it’s likely that you’ll find the need to carry a set of buds along with your mobile device. Enter Jack, a clever design that promises to spread the wealth as you purchase it.

Earbud JACK is a little blue plastic guy that keeps earbuds organized, and it’s being introduced and made by San Francisco start-up What If Widgets. Widgets says that 5 percent of JACK’s sales are donated to hearing-related charities, “so he really is a gift that keeps on giving.” Sports talk host Jim Rome likes to call cash “jack,” a way to make money seem more casual.

It’s easy enough to buy one of these Jacks retail in the Bay Area, but you can order online from Amazon, too. $9 for the hippest holder you can own, if you have the pocket or purse space to carry it. Maybe a stocking stuffer “for the kids,” as Norville Barnes said in The Hudsucker Proxy. Or for the boss, even if that turns out to be you, the independent or small business owner.

Business Week has posted a brief item about the success of the Mac in the corporate world. A lot of older IT mangers still put the Mac in the ghetto when it comes to desktop systems and enterprise servers. But an independent study shows it’s the rare corporation that doesn’t have a Mac working somewhere.

Four of five companies are now using a Mac, and more than two thirds said they’ll allow employees to use a Mac as an enterprise desktop client in the coming year. That’s a number which has doubled from a prior survey by Information Technology Intelligence Corp.

The Mac is a Unix system, after all, when you tunnel under the elegant interface which coats OS X. Corporations running some of the biggest enterprises in the world are not shy about deploying Unix. Apple hasn’t been aggressive about placing its X Server in companies, at least not with the ardor of HP or IBM Unix solutions. But unlike those vendors, Apple doesn’t have an “industry standard” environment to siphon off its enterprise sales. Hewlett-Packard and IBM can fall back on Windows, or Linux, when their Unix products flag in the future.

EMC started a good service in Mozy Home last year, offering offsite storage for Macs and PCs for only $4.95 per system per month. EMC bought Mozy Inc. and PI Corp. in 2007 to bring out the service, the classic tale of a large corporation buying novel assets. All this was rolled out with unlimited storage. But now with precious little warning, Mozy has become PC-centric as it dropped its Home version this week to force Mac users to switch to Mozy Pro, a solution using an under-developed Mac client.

The Mozy Pro software, at least on my systems, is not working worth a damn. About three hours of calls to support and at least as many hours of tests, downloads, library folder emptying and uploads of my log files later, Mozy Pro 1.2.0 simply won’t select what I want to backup. Mozy Home 1.2.0 never had these problems; in fact, it kept working when I’d re-install it on my OS X 10.4.11 system, after Mozy Pro failed.

EMC didn’t give me a choice. On December 3, EMC told all Mozy Home users they’d be frozen out of offsite backup processes by December 10. Switch to Mozy Pro, they told us. I did immediately and found my backup selections either froze the Pro client, or would only let me select nonsense like backing up all of my Pictures and Movies folders — the two biggest on my system, among others. Like lots of independent businesses, I have to push files upstream at a fraction of my download speed. Pictures and movies should be avoided when doing online backups. Online backups are for point solutions, the files that change often — not pictures of mom’s 80th birthday.

I won’t carp on why the default configuration for an online backup service now grabs your biggest sets of files. I think it’s obvious what’s intended when EMC sells Pro storage space at 50 cents a gig per month. So after close to a week, I ended my Mozy services today. There’s a better online backup solution, BackJack, one that understands Mac engineering. Mozy has become so PC-driven that when you sign on for the Pro service, the e-mail link to the client you must install is an .EXE file. That’s sloppy transition, to be generous. Read the rest of this entry »

The screen you want to see

I just put the Adobe Creative Suite 4 applications on my laptop, upgrading from the CS2 Design applications. I got lucky; not a single failure or demand for multiple license authorizations. One set of license numbers off the back of the CD case — and about 45 minutes of loading off a new Sony 840U DVD burner-player — and I was editing my CS2 document. It’s worth the upgrade, so far, since the interface is vastly improved. The palette-happy apps of two years ago have been reined in. I don’t even feel cramped on a MacBook Pro 15-inch screen.

Of course, not all is simple as it has been. Help is a genuine boondoggle now, a melange of Adobe pages, support documents, Community-written advice and more. There’s a good reason there’s no more printed manuals these days, but the definitive (if sometimes cryptic) vendor-written help files are only one player in the documentation sideshow.

Cost: $492 from Amazon, but watch out for the signature-needed requirement if it’s arriving via UPS. And if you’re debating a point-upgrade like ID4 only, rather than the full suite, remember that the new CS4 suite now includes the full Adobe Acrobat. That PDF engine is important than ever for us print-to-Web publishers. Read the rest of this entry »

The greatest value in the Apple store is no more, at least not until 2009. One-to-One personal training, crazy cheap at $99 for up to 52 weekly sessions of 50 minutes, has been suspended until after the holidays. Apple sent a message advising everybody their one-year subscription to the service has been extended by one month. It’s a little secret, but Apple will even find trainers for you to learn Adobe products, not just the Apple software and basics like “how to clean up your desktop.”

Now, there’s no official shutdown of the training. But just try to get any class scheduled at all from the Concierge of your local store’s Web page. “Try again later.” Or, “Just come on in and buy something, already.” It’s okay; both Austin stores are cattle-cars of consumers by now, hipsters three deep shopping for the perfect iPod or laptop.

When you come back in January, maybe the din of the commerce will have worn off. One story from this fall at Softpedia reported that the aluminum and hard plastic dens of sales which are Apple’s stores make private lessons a challenge. Headsets for trainer and student solved the problem. So you can feel like a bomber crewman steering that new application.