Wow, two updates from Apple in the same week. I was a little leary about the Mac OS X 10.7.4 update for my MacBook Pro simply because it was 729.6MB in size!

The good news is that it installed just fine and my laptop still works. This is deja vu from decades of using Windows computers where I received at least two updates per month and have to reboot my computer to complete the installation. It’s so odd to reboot because other operating systems like Linux hardly ever require a reboot to install software.

iOS 5.1.1

My iPad is another story because I just bought it on March 16th and have never updated the iOS before. All went well with this install and I have to credit Apple with being thorough in telling me what is being updated with the iOS operating system, plus they noted that I should have my iPad plugged in.

Thank you Vitamin T for providing free pizza and drinks for the evening.

Stephen shared real-world examples of frictionless purchasing:

• Starbuck’s (coffee loyalty program, easy purchase process)
• Amazon.com 1-click (quickest way to checkout on the web)
• Google Payments
• Chirpify (Using Twitter and PayPal to make payments)
• PayPal
• Twitter (Nike tweeting hashtags to let you schedule when to buy a new shoe)
• Square (credit card swiping with lower fees using any cell phone)
• Apple Store (Use an app to buy anything in the store and charge it to your card without a sales clerk)

Our group also was interactive and stared a lively discussion on the security concerns of the different approaches, PCI compliance, and how to basically replace our wallet with a smart phone instead.

I have multiple email accounts and use Outlook to manage all of them, and I receive many emails every day that I just need to quickly read then delete. After a while I have thousands of emails in my deleted folder. When I would want to permanently remove these deleted emails I would find the folder, then choose Delete. Outlook would start to delete them then crash after deleting only a dozen or so messages. Not friendly.

After the latest update I can now permanently delete hundreds or thousands of email from my Deleted Items without a crash.

Thank you Microsoft for fixing a bug in Outlook that helps me.

My first step was to double check that I could run Windows 8 Beta on my MacBook Pro using the Parallels virtualization software. Yes, according to Parallels this can be done.

From Parallels I went to my Virtual Machines list, then clicked the + button to add a new virtual machine, then clicked the Windows 8 choice in the lower-right corner. The 3.3GB download said about 4 hours of waiting. At the end of the download was a lengthy “Validating” phase, followed by “Your download is corrupt, try again.”

My second download ended in exactly the same state as first, failure.

Since the Parallels auto-install wasn’t working I just looked in my download directory, located the 3.3GB file, renamed it windows8.iso, then asked Parallels to install from an ISO file. Installation was straight forward after that. A bit of Microsoft humor shows up in the install because this is a Beta release they used a beta fish icon:

While waiting for the Windows 8 install to complete there’s an animated swirl of five stars to mesmerize you into a hypnotic state and forget about time passing.

The background color scheme can be selected among a dozen earthy choices:

The opening Metro screen uses tiles instead of icons, and you can make them wider, narrower, re-arrange, or un-pin them.

Microsoft has you login with your LiveID, so that it can remember your preferences in the cloud:

You can customize the lock screen with some beautiful photography included:

With the Parallels software on my MacBook Pro I now have many Operating System choices including Windows 8:

Just like Windows 7 you will find that Microsoft has many updates it wants to install, and with Windows 8 Beta I get failures to update for an HP Laserjet printer (never been attached, so unsure why it thinks that I need it at all):

Start Screen

As you setup accounts in Windows 8 the Metro UI becomes more personalized to your tastes and habits:

I setup accounts for:

• gmail
• Weather zipcode
• Google calendar
• Visited the Finance tile
• SkyDrive (like DropBox, except from Microsoft)
• Flickr
• Facebook

SkyDrive

I downloaded the SkyDrive app for Mac then added photos from a weekend trip, and my profile photo:

I found that the background color is constantly changing in Metro. The first time you visit the background is a style pattern and solid color, then in SkyDrive the background is white, but when looking at Photos on SkyDrive the background changes to black. Thank you Microsoft for the very liberal free storage capacity of 25GB for me, that is just wonderful.

Apps

In Metro you will notice that Apps need to be updated with a number inside of a circle, clicking Store shows you:

Once you’re in an App and using a Mouse/Keyboard it’s not real intuitive how to get back to Metro, so after a Google search I discovered that I had to move my mouse to the far right side and select Start:

Once in the App called Store you can scroll horizontally to the right to see lots of App categories and suggestions. I added the free Kindle App and it looked just like what I use on the PC or Mac:

Windows 8 adds every App and Program on your computer to the Metro start page, so it’s a hassle when I downloaded the Kindle App because it gets added to the farthest right of the screen, causing my to scroll about 8 pages to even find it. I would prefer that new Apps are pinned to the Start screen on the far left with now scrolling, not the far right. On the Android when I add a new App it gets added alphabetically, while on iOS new Apps get added to the farthest right screen (still don’t like it, too much scrolling).

Desktop

From the Start screen you click Desktop and see something that looks just like the Windows 7 desktop.

The marketing folks at Microsoft want you to believe that Metro and Windows are now merged however I don’t drink that Kool-Aide because clearly these are two totally separate Operating Systems glued together, there is simply nothing merged about it. You are either working with the Metro UI or the old familiar Windows 7 UI. Honestly I am underwhelmed, but have no choice but to learn and use Windows 8 because my clients will be using it.

Microsoft documentation tells me to click the Windows button on my keyboard to switch back to Metro from the Desktop or App, however on my MacBook Pro the equivalent key is the right-hand Command button.

Finance App

Yes, the Microsoft folks went a little crazy for this App and provided maximum eye candy, charts, numbers, facts and figures:

Conclusions

Microsoft will certainly continue to extract their OS upgrade tax moving Windows 7 users into Windows 8. I’ve really just scratched the surface of what Windows 8 will do however I can say that this OS does have a learning curve, works OK with a mouse, and the Metro UI should work OK as a touch-based UI. Windows 8 works fast enough for me as a virtual OS under Parallels on a MacBook Pro, at least as fast as Windows 7 did.

Will your life forever be changed for the good after buying and using Windows 8? Uh, no.

Download Windows 8 Consumer Preview here, I would recommend on a PC to add a new partition and keep it separate from Windows 7, on a Mac get Parallels which will keep it separate from your other OSes.

After it finally reached the 10th update and completed, then it restarted and I saw DOS programs being run in the funky black screen with white letters. On reboot it had to complete the install, so more waiting. I should’ve checked to see how big these updates were, so I’m just guessing that they were hundreds of megabytes in size. Anyway, here are the 10 updates that took some 15 minutes to install:

Lots of security updates which are necessary because hackers are constantly looking for exploits in Windows 7 so that they can take over your computer, steal your credit information and much worse by destroying your credit or online identity.

Moral of the Story

Always update your Windows 7 computer, keep current, use common sense when receiving spam and phishing emails.

Here’s the HTML validation on my Home page from today:

It’s nice to see zero errors, however this morning my Home page had a handful of errors so I sat down and did some detective work. Sure enough I was getting HTML errors because a popular plugin called Easy Nivo Slider (some 45,000 downloads) was inserting CSS statements inside of the <body> when in fact they only belong in the <head> section. That’s a typical mistake of plugin writers that forget to see if their HTML is valid, or filled with errors.

So, being resourceful I deactivated the Easy Nivo Slider plugin and modified my custom WordPress theme to just use the jQuery-based Nivo Slider (over 1,000,000 downloads).

In my header-home.php file inside of the HEAD section I added some CSS and javascript:

Next, I modified in my header-home.php file the place where my banner images slide in:

I’m a happy camper again, and can say that all of my web pages are HTML error-free.

Today I decided to upgrade the iMac at home from Snow Leopard to Lion, and I did a little Google searching to find just the article I needed, “Make a Bootable Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Installer from a USB Flash Drive.” Using the details in that blog it showed me how to make a Lion backup and place it onto a 8GB USB drive. My local Staples store had a PNY brand 8GB USB drive for just $9.95 and it worked just fine for me. The whole process of downloading Lion, making a copy to USB, then installing Lion took an hour or so, most of which is waiting, so I could go off and do other things on my MacBook Pro.

Now I have a Mac OS X – Lion backup for when my next hard drive fails, which hopefully will be never. As the boyscouts say, “Always be prepared.”

My first test was to view a landscape photograph of the Tualatin River with an image sized at 2272 x 1704 pixels and 300 ppi.

I looked at this image on both the iPad and a MacBook Pro 17″ and to my amazement there was NO difference. Color gamut was similar, sharpness was similar, they looked the same.

OK, let’s be scientific and try a second photo, one that I’m very familiar with, my own portrait:

Once again comparing them side by side, iPad versus MacBook Pro I see very little difference. In fact I see more detail in the fine hairs when viewed on my MacBook Pro, not the higher resolution iPad.

A5X Not Faster than Tegra 3

Recent benchmarks by Gizmodo yesterday also prove that Apple’s claim to be 4X faster than the Tegra 3 are false.

iTunes Legality

During the setup process of the iPad you go through a handful of screens and what struck me as overly-zealous was the screen for iTune terms and conditions. Can you believe that Apple presented 42 pages worth of terms and conditions? I didn’t have that many T&C with my home mortgage. Perhaps the legal department at Apple has too much time on their hands in writing such an extensive T&C.

Vocabulary Builder

While reading the iPad documentation there’s a new phrase introduced, oloephobic coating. According to the Miriam Webster dictionary olephobic means: having or relating to a lack of strong affinity for oils. OK, don’t use solvents on your iPad screen, just use a slightly damp cloth.

Where’s the Documentation?

Imagine my surprise to open up the iPad packaging to find zero written documentation, other than a small card showing me where the On button was. Searching on Google I did find the PDF user documentation, a well-written 144 page guide. In this regards Apple should take a cue from Amazon, because on their Kindle series of tablets when you first turn the power on you are presented with the online user guide. Amazon makes learning the Kindle intuitive, Apple guesses that you will somehow find their PDF documentation.

Reading about Cloud storage I found a humorous typo where the word “But” was incorrectly used instead of “Buy”:

Multiple User Accounts

Having used an iMac and MacBook Pro for years I kind of assumed that the iOS used on the iPad would support multiple users, especially since I wanted my 10 year old son to have his own account separate from mine.  Oddly enough Apple doesn’t support multiple user accounts on the iPad, so I’m unsure of how to keep my son and other family members from accidentally harming my Apps and documents. Apple, give us User Accounts in iOS 6.0!

WordPress App

I downloaded the official WordPress App from Automattic expecting to be able to view and edit Posts and Pages. Wrong. You can view but only in HTML mode, there is no WYSIWYG editor which makes the whole point of editing easily meaningless. Automattic, what were you thinking? I will not be using this App at all because it’s like getting into a car only to find out there is no steering wheel to use.

Summary

There you have it folks, my conclusion is that the marketing department at Apple have created Resolutionary and cannot prove the value of it and their speed claims are patently false.

Do I like my New iPad? Yes, but I am not drinking the cool aid that Apple is now serving up.

No problem, I’ll just reboot again using Command+R and plugin my backup hard drive. Then I could see the utility screen:

In the Disk Utility I clicked Repair Disk however it returned this ominous error:

Invalid B-Tree node size

A Google search told me that this meant that my 500GB hard drive was damaged. Wow, that drive was less than two years old.

This morning I drove to Fry’s in Wilsonville because they open at 8AM, while I really preferred to shop at Best Buy in Tualatin because they were much closer to my office in Tualatin however they open later at 10AM.

The tech guy at Fry’s showed me the laptop hard drive choices available and when I told him that I had a MacBook Pro he said, “Well, I wouldn’t use the 7200 RPM drives in that because Apple didn’t design it to remove the heat fast enough, stick with the 5400 RPM drive instead.”

So, I bought a Seagate 500GB hard drive, the 5400 RPM version and went back to my office to replace the dead 500GB hard drive. Sure enough, my dead drive was the 7200 RPM version from Seagate. Lesson learned, don’t exceed Apple specs in your MacBook Pro.

Replacing the hard drive was straight forward, with my small screwdriver set I unscrewed the phillips screws on the bottom of the case. Remove two screws on the hard drive assembly, popped out my old drive, inserted the new drive, the powered up. Uh oh, the new drive had nothing on it, so the MacBook couldn’t boot.

I powered off, the powered on while holding the Command+R button and did a reboot from my backup drive. Back to the familiar Mac OS X Utilities menu. Under Disk Utility I had to first Partition the new drive, then choose Restore from Time Machine. Now it’s telling me that a restore will take 4 hours and 23 minutes, hmm. I’ll let you know how the story ends.

This is not the first time that my MacBook Pro has given me woes:

What Can Go Wrong With Mac OS X – Lion?

After Lunch Update

Just before I left for lunch the Restore dialog told me that I had less than 1 hour to complete, so I felt excited to finish lunch and come back to a restored laptop. Not so. After lunch I entered my office to find that the laptop display was off, so I clicked the mouse but it didn’t wake the display. Hmm. Next I clicked the power button but it only showed me the start screen and never booted to the desktop.

I re-powered and pressed the Command+R key to boot from my backup drive but now that wouldn’t work. I’m going backwards here.

Jump in the car, drive home and fetch the old Snow Leopard OS which came on DVD, unlike Lion which has no DVD and requires that your laptop be healthy enough to boot up. Now I am starting my second Restore from backup and the dialog says 5 hours and 43 minutes…

The only thing that allows me to do any work today is my backup HP laptop running Windows 7 and accessing my email accounts through webmail. Now, why did I leave HP in the first place?

No go, the second restore will not boot.

Apple Store
At the Apple store now and Tony thinks it is an OS issue so he is loading Lion on my new hard drive. Success, my MacBook Pro will now boot after the corrupt Lion OS was re-installed. Tony is a genius, many thanks you found the issue and got my laptop back to life again.

When I returned from the Apple store I still had to do a recovery from Time Machine to get back my user accounts, programs and documents.

Conclusion
My MacBook Pro would not boot because the OS was corrupted and the Time Machine backup doesn’t include the OS, so my attempts to restore from backup didn’t solve anything. I still don’t know exactly what caused the OS to become corrupt.

In three years of owning MacBook Pro laptops I can say that they are as unreliable as any PC that I’ve owned for the past 30 years. So much for the fabled superiority of Apple over PC when it comes to running a business because I don’t see Apple as being more reliable than PC (HP, Dell, Toshiba).