Posts Tagged ‘Mac’

Damn you iPod

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Ok the title may be a little deceiving but my iPod finally gave up and died so I’m a little upset. I have had this 30 gig iPod video since my birthday 3 years ago and have loved every minute that it accompanied me in my car, on my bike, or just walking around to class. The iPod was, for me, musically, the best thing to ever happen, it meant that I could put my 5000 songs on a device and have the liberty to take those 5000 songs and play them with ease, in my car or as I said before, just about anywhere. When I first bought the iPod it was 300 dollars which was a little outrageous but actually turned out to be well worth the investment.

It started with a simple problem, I noticed that my iPod would be completely depleted of battery power after about 2 straight hours of listening, so I did what anyone would do, I looked on amazon.com and got me a new battery, costing about 12 bucks… what a deal! So I get the battery in the mail and I crack my iPod open and wire it up, luckily everything worked out just fine and it started working just as it did when I first got it.

Not too long after that, maybe 3 months, it happened. I told my roommate to eject my iPod and pass it to me as I was heading out the door to hit up the pool, he did then handed it to me, I immediately noticed that all my songs were missing… not a good thing, luckily I had taken all of the songs from the iPod and put them on my PC so I was covered, I thought oh well I’ll just plug it back in and re-sync it… not a big deal… wrong. After numerous attempts to re-sync I kept getting an error message, “Attempting to copy to the disk failed. An unknown error occurred (-69)”. I took the iPod into the Mac store, they poked and prodded and couldn’t get it fixed until something just happened and it worked for them, I took it home and thought, “oh wow I can finally listen to music again”, wrong.

So I’ve been doomed to the radio and cd’s for the past 5 months… that is not something that I enjoy, I’ve been virtually radio free for about 4 years and loved the freedom of listening to whatever songs that I want whenever I want, and to top it all off I found a torrent for the new Muse album that doesn’t come out for another month that I can’t enjoy in the peace of my vehicle, downright tragic.

So my solution, go back to the Apple store today and attempt to get the damn thing fixed one last time, if that doesn’t work I’d sure hate to drop another 200 or so bucks, but that may be the only viable answer =/. Maybe I’ll switch over to the Zune HD, it looks pretty solid and it’s got a good price, plus it has just enough space for me, none of that 120 gig nonsense that is a tad excessive for me. The Zune HD comes out on September 15th and comes in 2 sizes, 16 and 32 gig costing $220 and $290 respectively, check it out at http://www.zune.net/en-us/mp3players/zunehd/default.htm or if you have any idea of how to fix this problem please let me know.

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PC Gains Some Traction on Mac

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Everyone knows those, now, old Mac ads where Justin Long, playing the part of the Mac, would point out to John Hodgman, the portly, glasses-toting nerd portraying PCs, that Macs were basically error free and were much more stylish then the standard PC. These ads seemed like they were coming out by the week and they were great and a huge hit for Apple. Microsoft tried to fight back with a campaign where they had people with glasses saying, hey just because I have glasses doesn’t necessarily mean I’m a nerd, right? Oh btw I’m a PC. They later started mixing it up to show that not everyone who used a PC was a nerd.

Well recently Microsoft has hit the television with a slightly more successful campaign strategy, a string of films that you’ve most likely seen. The new ads are there to say that if you were given the money and the choice of any laptop out there that you’d probably walk away with a PC just because there are more choices and overall it’s a bit more personal. So Microsoft has successfully made a campaign that really rivals Mac’s, after all you probably haven’t seen a Mac ad in quite a while, and to top off that news, Microsoft’s COO Kevin Turner unleashed the fact that Microsoft stores are coming out this fall! Of course it doesn’t end there, to solidify the fact that Microsoft’s ads were working Mr. Turner told this story to a group of partners during his Worldwide Partners Conference.

And you know why I know [the commercials are] working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, “Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices.” They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I’ve ever taken in business. (Applause.)

I did cartwheels down the hallway. At first I said, “Is this a joke? Who are you?” Not understanding what an opportunity. And so we’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them.

A funny story, that if true, is a big win deal for Microsoft, afterall they’re not only going to have to worry about Apple in the future as Google is beginning to get into the OS business.

I’ve grown up with Windows so I like the fact that they’re starting to get a little more strength, they’ve never really been in danger but it doesn’t hurt to get ahead. The PC finally got it’s revenge!

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