A few quick thoughts on how to make Apple a little greener:

Over the last few years, Apple has been reducing the size of it’s product packaging. Some packaging has been reduced by well over 50% – iPod/iPhone cases, MacBook and MacBook Pro boxes, etc. Software packaging (like that for OS X Leopard, iLife, iWork, etc.) has been dropped by about 75% in size, which is really great for the environment (and for Apple’s profit margin – win win).

After getting a new MacBook Pro, I was looking at the installation DVDs for OSX and iLife. They’re still DVDs – ostensibly an aging medium, especially with USB sticks and other flash memory becoming so widely available and inexpensive.

I think it’d make sense for Apple to ditch future OS X installation DVDs in favor of a locked USB installation device (or even SDHC card with a USB reader). Every Intel-based Apple computer, whether an iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro or Mac Pro, comes with USB ports and can boot directly from those USB ports. USB data transfer speeds are much better than DVD transfer, so theoretically, OS X installation or repair could be greatly improved via USB.

Price is one thing to consider. I know USB flash memory is higher priced than DVD disks, but in bulk, USB drives can’t be too expensive. Besides, Apple would be able to drop packaging sizes by at least another 50-75%, saving more money and earning an even better reputation.

I’ll bet even Greenpeace would give a thumbs-up. Maybe. Those guys are tough to please! (I remember when Greenpeace was warm & fuzzy, all about hippies saving the whales and seal cubs. Seems like such a long time ago.)
 

AKA: Yet another reason to love Apple, Inc.

After experiencing months of crippling trouble with the video card in my 2.4GHz MacBook Pro laptop (resulting in multiple logic board replacements, LCD screen replacements, etc.), I was generously given a replacement laptop from Apple. Yes, a full replacement. Stunning level of customer service and tech support – clearly above and beyond the norm.

Here’s the new machine. So nice! This new design and the new specs are so far advanced that I look back to my “old” MacBook Pro with a sense of analog nostalgia.

P.S. By way of Google, I found this image of the new logic board for the latest MacBook Pro. Pretty crazy shape!

P.P.S. The only bummer about getting a replacement computer from Apple is that one’s Apple Care warranty doesn’t follow to the new machine. I’ll have to buy another extended warranty asap. It’s a minor factor, but still – darn.

The very day the Apple TV was available in Apple stores, I picked one up. I reviewed it, even made a video about it (which wound up on some big websites). I loved the Apple TV madly. There were a few flaws – like no on/off switch, heat problems and no native capability to watch AVI files – but those little flaws were overshadowed by the wonder and joy of having home videos, movies and TV shows streaming from my computer to my HDTV.

Fast forward a year or so, and you’d see me sitting at my computer, cursing the task of converting AVI files to Apple TV friendly format so I could watch important videos on my TV instead of my little MacBook Pro screen. Curses, wasted CPU time and wasted disk space from double files… that was the price I had to pay for the pleasure of watching AVI video content. Sometimes I would spend as much time converting a video as I would spend watching it. Bah.

A few days ago, I stopped by Best Buy (I’m slightly embarrassed admitting that I went to that store) and found a very nice Pioneer DV-410V DVD player with a little USB input on the front of it. The DVD player handles DVDs and DivX videos among other formats. It also has an HDMI port for connecting video and audio to my HDTV in one tiny cable.

I set up the DVD player and popped in a micro USB flash drive loaded with a few of my favorite AVI videos and voila! it played the video cleaner and better than the Apple TV ever did! Imagine my surprise! A weight was lifted off my shoulders – the world seemed bright and warm. No more wasted time converting files. No need to stream video. No need to keep my MacBook Pro turned on while I watch videos. Sure, I lost the ability to rent movies from the iTunes store directly from the Apple TV, but I had only done that a couple times in 18 months, so it’s hardly a sacrifice.

Now I can quickly load a dozen or more AVI files on a stamp-sized USB drive and watch amazing quality videos. Buh-bye Apple TV – hello HDTV sneaker net!

Some people may argue that the DVD USB option is lower tech and doesn’t really constitute an “upgrade”. In my opinion, anything that produces remarkably better video, faster prep time, fewer steps, less hassle, consumes less electricity and allows more free time for enjoying video… well, that is truly an upgrade; the best kind of upgrade.

If you’ve never tried one of those DVD players with an internal USB reader, you absolutely MUST. It’s awesome.

P.S. As for the $90 in my pocket, I promptly sold the Apple TV and had $90 left over after the cost of the new DVD/USB player. Nice.

P.P.S. The aforementioned $90 lasted about 12 minutes as I bought another cool gadget that I absolutely had to have. C’est la vie.

After learning that Verizon’s FiOS service was made available in my neighborhood, I scheduled installation of the 15/2mbps service. The excitement was nearly unbearable!
 

Pre-pre Installation

On June 13th, the first Verizon tech showed up to run a line from the sidewalk to the garage. The house is less than 3 years old, so there was already conduit prepped. The only problem was that the builders didn’t have the brains to mark where the conduit terminated inside the garage wall.

The Verizon tech had to guess where the termination was and I wound up with a 6"x6" hole in my sheetrock. Wrong spot. Wrong spot means big hole in the wall and no cable drop. After fumbling around for another potential drop point, another 6"x6" hole was cut into the wall. Success on the second attempt.

As for the holes in the wall, I was told that such booboos were commonplace and that Verizon would send someone out to fix the sheetrock the following business day (Monday), free of charge. I waited the whole day and no one showed up. Nice.
 

Pre Installation

On June 17th, two more Verizon techs showed up to string the fiber optic line from the street to the second of the two holes in my sheetrock. It took them 3 minutes. Not bad. They didn’t repair the sheetrock. They stood in my driveway smoking cigarettes for about 15 minutes. Nice.
 

Installation

The very next day, I got a call from “Paul”, a thick-accented guy. He said he was running 15 minutes early for my appointment and asked if it was ok for him to arrive early. I agreed. After all, how can one argue with that? Paul turned out to be Pavel, a very nice Ukrainian guy. We got along great – I spent time in Kiev, so we had plenty to talk about while he was setting up the TV and modem.

Despite the 3 hours allocated for the entire installation, Pavel got his whole job done in less than 45 minutes – that’s full installation of the Verizon FiOS service box, TV, modem, everything. He was smart, quick and very professional. He even turned down a nice tip.
 

Property Damage

After Pavel left, I called to see if someone would fix the sheetrock. After 8 or 9 phone calls and over 5 hours on the phone (much of it on hold listening to awful, brain-melting, self-congratulatory Verizon ads and Muzak BeeGees), I failed find someone who will take responsibility for fixing the sheetrock. I got passed around from support people to supervisors to techs to regional support folks. Total incompetence and “I don’t give a shit” attitude by everyone on the phone.

I finally landed one support guy in Texas who said that I should just have the sheetrock repaired myself and Verizon would reimburse the costs. At the same time, he said he’d submit a “ticket” that would require a guaranteed call-back from a local supervisor within 48 hours.

I got the two gaping holes repaired for $112.97. I called Verizon to request reimbursement, whether by check or account credit. Another dozen calls ensued, with everyone passing the buck to the local Verizon dispatch/support manager. They eventually gave me his cell phone number. I called, left a voicemail and never heard back from him.

4-5 days later, I called Verizon again – nada. Total lines of crap from everyone I got passed to. The mandatory 48-hour call-back gets extended by 48 hours each time I call.
 

Property Damage, Follow-Up

After seemingly endless calls to Verizon to get a reimbursement for property damage done during the initial installation, I managed to track down the Verizon tech that came out to my house to do the install. She agreed to find someone at a local command center who’d look into the issue. As a result, I got a call from a nice lady with local Verizon management. According to her, Verizon isn’t responsible for damage done to the property by the original installation contractor.

When she was informed that a) three Verizon techs and four support reps acknowledged that they were responsible, and that b) the “original contractor” was Verizon (duh!), they agreed to a reimbursement. I was told a check would be sent to me right away. Three weeks later, a check arrived. Issue successfully closed.
 

Download Speeds

In the mean time, our 15/2mbps service was averaging 5mbps down and roughly 1.2mbps up. That’s 1/3 the advertised download speeds. Calls to tech support were fruitless – reboot, reset the modem, blame it on the Mac OS, pass it off to a higher level support group, offer false promise of call-back. No one has been able to successfully troubleshoot the slow speeds.

Here’s a speed test (speedtest.net) done July 1st with my 15/2 FiOS service:

Here’s the last speed test I did while I still had Comcast running (test run June 16th):

According to Verizon FiOS support, FiOS speeds may not be faster all the time, but they’re consistent. Ha ha ha. Ouch. That kind of consistency is nothing to brag about.
 

Download Speeds, Good News Follow-Up

For some reason, the first 2-3 weeks of FiOS service sucked badly. Verizon techs couldn’t figure out why. Neither could I.

All of a sudden, with no obvious causation, the upload and download speeds normalized at 90% to 101% of the 15/2mbps account speeds. That’s right – I’ve actually seen downloads exceed the 15mbps download cap. I haven’t had a single service outage since the sudden improvement. Go figure.

 

Legal Bittorrent

I have tested a number of bittorrent services, downloading “public domain” movies, etc. I have seen 10-15mbps downloads on a constant basis. With Comcast, I considered myself very, very lucky if I was downloading at 4mbps. Upload speeds are also awesome. The main thing I really notice with FiOS and bittorrent is that when files are screaming up/down at near max speeds, the rest of my online activity is not hampered. With Comcast, if I downloaded at over 2-3mbps and uploaded over 400kbps, everything else would crap out. Email would fail, websites would crawl to a halt and the internet was essentially useless. Not so with FiOS.
 

Video on Demand – Foreign, Porn, Horror

Oh, Video on Demand. Free movies available all day, all night, ripe for the picking. Comcast offered 80-90 good movies for free. I was excited about the FiOS TV videos on demand. The sales reps I talked to explained that there are tons of choices. This evening, I checked out what might be available for free. Porn. Horror flicks. Obscure foreign films. Three odd-ball Disney films and a cornucopia of 3-4 minute shorts. What the f-ck?

I called Verizon FiOS support to see if I was missing something. I got a support rep who sounded like he was heavily stoned. After verifying every last minute detail about my account, he asked what the problem was. I explained the bogus selection. After a long pause (was he toking? eating? picking his nose?) he repeated my problem back to me like a junior high school counsellor, only he got it wrong. I explained again, telling him my options for free Video on Demand were Horror, shorts and Porn. When he heard ‘porn’, he asked me “for free?!” I said, “Yes, for free, but that’s not the point. Comcast has nearly 100 good movies – comedies, action, suspense, whatever. Where’s the selection on FiOS?”

Stoney suggested that I re-educate myself on the remote control and VoD settings. (Painfully stupid.) Another few repeats of my “actual” problem to dipshit support man left him slightly dumber than before. He concluded that it has to be a billing issue – that the monthly FiOS TV plan I’m on must restrict free Video on Demand movies. Good lord.
 

Channels Go Wacko

After 5 weeks with the Verizon TV service, and after having saved all my favorite channels for quick and easy on-screen access, Verizon changed their entire channel lineup with not so much as a ping for warning. No letter, no call, no on-screen “hey, we’re about to shuffle the entire deck, dude” – nothing. Now none of my favorite channels have the same numeric value any more. What the heck is that all about?
 

My Overall Observation of FiOS

Technologically, Verizon’s FiOS service is awesome. Download and upload speeds are fantastic. Speeds are consistent, too. As an alternative to cable high-speed Internet, FiOS gets a very, very good score of 8/10 or even 9/10.

Verizon’s main weakness is a confounding combination of corporate idiocracy, contradictory management policies and untrained/unintelligent support staff. Not all Verizon support techs are detrimental to the cause (honestly, some are very smart and helpful), but too many low-rent reps spoil Verizon’s potentially wonderful image.

It seems that Verizon is simply just too big and clumsy for its own good. It seems as though Verizon can’t manage itself worth a damn, and if it wasn’t for the solid technical delivery of its services, Verizon would probably implode or get eaten up by competitors.
 

Oh, and I just got another Verizon FiOS invitation letter encouraging me to switch from cable to FiOS.

I recently ordered a single DAT7 tape for a server. TechDepot had the best price at the time, so I went with them. When the tape arrived, it was packaged in the huge box pictured below. That box could easily fit 80 tapes, maybe more.

What the hell is going on with these companies sending out tiny, near-weightless items in these massive boxes? The carbon footprint on stupidity like this is just sickening.

I wish someone at TechDepot (and plenty of other companies… Newegg, *cough* Dell *cough*) would take a little responsibility and stop the madness. Items like this could go out in little bubble-wrap envelopes. Big savings (and more profits) to the retailers, major relief to the shipping companies, less gasoline used for transit, less waste in landfills (or recycling depots) and fewer pissed-off consumers.

Back in January 2008, I wrote about a great customer service experience with Parallels. Out of the blue, they sent me a $10 Visa gift card as a thank you for buying Parallels 3.0.

This afternoon I opened my mailbox to find an envelope from Parallels. When I opened it, I found another surprise – a $10 iTunes gift card. That’s $20 in customer appreciation on a $79 purchase from 2007.

This seems rather unprecedented, doesn’t it? I like this trend!

After testing the OCZ 32GB USB 2.0 flash drive for backing up some servers (and being disappointed), I thought I’d try to use it as a bootable drive for OS X trouble shooting. Here’s a quick overview of how things went.

Formatting the 32GB OCZ Flash Drive for booting into OS X. In this example, I split the drive into an OS X partition and a Windows-friendly data-swap partition.

 

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy a fresh image of OS X to the bootable partition on the 32GB drive.

 

The cloning took hours and hours. Painfully slow. This speed (or lack thereof) is consistent with the speeds I experienced with data transfers on my Windows servers.

 

Booting to an external drive is easy – just hold down the “option” key when starting your Intel-based Mac. When the available drives appear (internal, USB or FireWire), select the one you want to boot from and hit Enter.

 

It took over 5 minutes to boot OS X from the OCZ flash drive. Ouch! For sake of comparison, it takes about 25-30 seconds to boot from the internal SATA drive, and roughly 45 seconds to boot from a 5400 RPM SATA drive in an external USB enclosure like the Thermaltake BlacX. 5 minutes is rather crappy, but the cool thing is that it actually works.

 

As you can see in this image, the MacBook Pro is running OS X via the OCZ 32GB flash drive.

 

The 32GB drive certainly “works” as a bootable drive, but its performance leaves so very much to be desired. Five minutes for boot time is really unacceptable (6-7 times slower than external SATA drives), although I’ll admit that USB flash drives still have a lot of room for improvement.

Despite the aggravating 5 minute boot, it was fun to see OS X successfully boot. On a faster USB flash drive, I’m sure the boot time could easily be reduced by 50% or more.

I recently purchased an OCZ USB 2.0 32GB shock-resistant, water proof flash drive from newegg.com for backing up critical files from several dual- and quad-core Dell servers. The drive was about $150 (now $179.99 and out of stock) – a little high for 32GB, but the convenience of having all that data on a keychain was simply too hard to resist.

When I used the drive for the first time, I was expecting some pretty impressive transfer speeds. OCZ, the drive manufacturer, indicates that the 32GB drive uses dual-channel tech to speed things up. In theory, it sounds great. In practice… not so much.

The first major chunk of data transferred was a 4GB folder with about 800 files. From the point of drag-and-drop to the moment the data transfer completed, the 32GB drive took just under 490 seconds, or roughly 8 mins and 8-10 seconds.

I thought this was a bit odd, so I made the same backup with a 500GB SATA drive using a Thermaltake BlacX USB 2.0 drive bay. The same transfer took about 128 seconds, or 2 mins 8 seconds.

I then repeated the backup with an old beater 8GB flash drive from Corsair. The same 4GB folder transferred in about 230 seconds, or 3 mins 50 seconds.

In this nerdy chart, shorter bars are better. Stats are in seconds.

I got slightly better results moving larger individual files, like 500MB and 1GB video files. No major change when formatted and used on my MacBook Pro.

As for data storage, the OCZ 32GB drive is hard to beat. 29.86GB formatted, this thing will fit TONS of data. I could back up critical files from all my servers with this little drive. I could easily move my entire iTunes library off my MacBook Pro’s hard drive and free up many, many gigs of space. I can have my Win 2000, XP and Ubuntu OSes boot via Parallels from this drive. But because the throughput of the OCZ 32GB flash drive is nowhere near as fast as I was expecting, I’ll have to shelf my dreams of speedy keychain backups of my servers.

This is a brief commentary on corporate waste. Last summer, I bought a Dell laser printer. After moving my office, I accidentally damaged the installation CD. I checked the Dell Support website for a downloadable version of the CD, or at least the same network installation app on the CD. That critical app is/was not available online – only partial drivers and patches for older operating systems could be found on Dell’s site. I called support to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious. The support rep acknowledged that the network installation app and full set of drivers were not available online and that I would need to request a replacement CD. I was told the CD was free, so I put in my request.

The next morning, the CD was delivered to my door. It was sent overnight. From a service point of view, this was fantastic. I was expecting a week or so, but never 18 hours.

After the surprise and delight wore off, I got to thinking about the situation. The box was huge. A laptop would have easily fit in it. It also weighed a lot – much more than cardboard and a CD.

I opened the box and found a huge amount of wadding taking up 80% or more of the empty space inside. Below the wadding was a thick, heavy user manual for the laser printer, and shrink wrapped with the thick tome was my slim little CD.

Barring the fact that the CD should be downloadable in its entirety from the Dell website (costing Dell nothing), I thought the following:

I didn’t need or want a massive user manual. (Who would?!) The CD could have been sent to me in a smaller envelope, like a standard FedEx envelope or even a bubble-style envelope. It could have been sent 2-3 day air, or even by USPS media mail for about $0.60.

The expense involved in this sort of frivolous and wasteful shipping practice is staggering when you consider the number of similar occurrences that likely happen on a day to day basis. Even if there were only 20,000 such “lost or damaged CD” requests per year (roughly 50 per day worldwide), the overnight shipping, the cost of the superfluous user manual (printing and raw materials, not to mention deforestation), the oversized and wasteful cardboard box, and all the paper/foam padding.

At 20,000 estimated occurrences per year (arguably a low estimate), the cost could reach $400,000 or more. Nearly half a million dollars to send out replacement CDs.

Had Dell put a policy in place to not ship user manuals with each CD (ask the customer if he/she wants it – 99% would not) and use thinner, more efficient packaging and shipping methods, costs could be cut by 70% to 80% – easily.

Or, add the stinking CD to the support site for download – or make it a download-by-request email link. Cost = $0.

Another thought – the carbon footprint for sending out unwanted user manuals and other materials overnight is h-u-g-e. That big, fat, poisonous and lumbering carbon footprint could easily be reduced to near zero by Dell if they’d just pay a little attention to where they’ve got wasteful practices.

Too many companies are sticking it to their customers on a daily basis. Some are brazen enough to annoy their most dedicated patrons with really insulting fees for items that they give other customers for free. Quelle dommage!

In stark contrast, it’s a pleasure to see a company stand by its customers. It’s even more impressive and heartwarming when they voluntarily do something to show they appreciate your business. That’s what recently happened with Parallels.

I bought Parallels Desktop for Mac last year and have been using it daily. I long forgot about the $79 I paid for the program, partly due to the amount of time that had gone by, but mostly due to the program’s near flawless operation and the fact that it’s so incredibly useful. Why should I worry about a $79 purchase when it has probably saved me hundreds or thousands of dollars?

A few days ago, I was opening my mail and spotted an envelope from Parallels. I figured it might be a promotion for some new utility or maybe a notice of a future upgrade. It almost went in the trash. When I opened it, I was very surprised to see a $10 gift card; not just a “$10 discount on a future purchase”, but a $10 Visa card that I can use anywhere, for anything.

Wow! Now that’s how to show some customer appreciation!