New Apple Lust Objects

The stock market is full of idiots. So the reason it's dropping is because their servers weren't able to keep up with people trying to activate every new iPhone at once? That kind of ignores the fact that nearly every new iPhone is getting purchased, meaning the sales are through the roof.

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/1125.gif

well i got in line at 4:15 am this morning at the AT&T store. i made a quick drive-by at 11:00 pm last night and saw there were about 5 people camped out. three morbidly obese teenagers wearing "gamer joke" t-shirts (one said "i rolled horde" (?!?)) and two sad looking grown men. i figured that this was the full contingent of crazies so i tried to figure out when the merely sub-normal would show up. i planned to get up at 4 am and be in line by 5, but i woke up at 3:30 am and so i was up and out the door quite early. by about 5:30 am the line had doubled, and by 6:30 doubled again.

at 7:30 there were about 200 people in line and it was wrapping around the parking lot. the staff came out and said they only had 50 phones, none of them black 16 gb. collective groan through the crowd (i wanted white, so i wasn't bothered). there are about six AT&T stores and one apple store in a 10 mile radius of where i live and the AT&T corporate ambassadors (they all had coiffed hair, like ice skaters) said the lines were even bigger at the other stores.

so they opened the store at 8:00 am. i was in the store - fifteenth in line - at about 9:00 am. there were two teenagers in front of me who had showed up with their parents. they sold their spaces for $60 apiece and let their parents go in to buy them iphones (strict one person per phone policy). some people further back in line were pretty enraged about that but i figured what can you do? it took 30 minutes to activate my AT&T account. most of that was the clerk hitting refresh. even the credit card interface was slow: it took around two minutes for the signature window to come up after i ran my card. i got so bored that i let one of the corporate ambassadors talk me into buying a "jawbone" bluetooth headset.

now i am sitting at home waiting for the itunes store to load so i can activate my phone. which is a lost cause, i take it?

Well yep, me too. Managed to get down to the DHL office and pick mine up. Have in im my hand etc etc...but now failing to log into the apple store to activate it, just like anyone else.

Trying hard to stop myself looking at the current ebay rate for un-activated 3G iphones, cos that's very tempting.

in im? it in.

mjtb pls take photo of white one in real life

with the phone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh boy, yep, ebay auctions are currently at £450-650. (I couldn't resist looking).

All with a day or two still to go.

re: apple stock

Stocks fall sharply on Fannie, Freddie worries (AP)
AP - Wall Street sank further into a bear market Friday, as investors dumped stocks on troubles at mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and oil's continuing climb into record territory. The Dow Jones industrials slid below the 11,000 mark for the first time in two years before paring their losses.

re: Fannie and Freddie

Yeah, that accounts for the first dip at open.

Activation is working!

So it is! Bonzer.

yes, working! can you make calendar do manual fetch?

i'm probably going to buy a new iMac next week (well: now i'm officially a grad student, i need something new and shiny to write all my essays and lab reports on, right? right? yeh, i do. definitely. no doubt about it.)

question: is it worth going for the 24"? work-wise, it'll be used for a lot of writing, quite a bit of spreadsheet work and maybe some statistical analysis (though i think i'll be doing most of that at the university, rather than shelling out for bloody SPSS). fun-wise it'll be web and music, mainly. i'm not even serious enough about photography to have a copy of photoshop.

there's a 200 quid difference between the 2.66 20" and the 2.88 24" -- those four inches and .22Ghz are the only differences between the models. part of me thinks that's a lot of cash for something i really don't need; part of me thinks ... if you're going to shell out and buy it, buy the bigger one.

any thoughts? anyone find the 20" too small? i'm 99% convinced it'll do me fine but i'd appreciate any thoughts.

I bought the 24" about six weeks ago and haven't had cause to regret that decision.
I came to my decision after spending some time with the different sizes in an apple store and for what I do with the machine the 24" has made perfect sense.

yeh, i need to tool about in the apple store for a while :)

Hmm, have to reformat my laptop and restore from bootcamp for the first time ever, because bootcamp won't make nice and parition. Worth doing a Carbon Copy Clone as well? (just in case).

does the iMac support a second monitor? Because then I'd get the smaller one and with the extra money buy a cheap LCD monitor to go next to it...you get much more screen real estate and as a staunch supporter of dual screen set-ups, there's this whole psychological thing about being able to split info onto two monitors, like having iTunes and email open on the side monitor while whatever I'm working on is on the front monitor, you really feel like you have two computers and you aren't constantly hiding windows to switch about. It's also great for copy and pasting things, for referencing other documents, etc.

Yes it does support an external monitor.

Yeah, dan OTM.

Ed I'm a fan of SuperDuper for copying a hard drive. But to each his or her own.

Never used it, but CCC has never done me wrong.

dan, that's a pearler of an idea. thank you.

using a shitty monitor with my apple display sucks for color stuff

that's why I do all my retouching on my 22" CRT and keep my email, iTunes, palattes, source material etc on the second monitor, a 17" Samsung LCD.

ew 17 inches?

i like this two monitor idea

Go for the 24', you won't regret it. Internet lore says the 20' monitors are inferior build quality. Plus you're stuck with the monitor for the life of the computer, so why not?

the 24" is awesome
when I got it I was like wtf my gmail is in IMAX

that's why I do all my retouching on my 22" CRT and keep my email, iTunes, palattes, source material etc on the second monitor, a 17" Samsung LCD

could a MBP do this, too?

MBP can drive only one external monitor, but you could use that with the onboard screen

Select your incoming mail server:

- POP3
- IMAP
- IMAX

i did a lot of video editing on my powerbook hooked up to an external. it's a good way to go, actually.

h'mmm. maybe i ought to do that.

I ordered my iphone through the only provider which offered a decent deal. The provider which offered the WORST deals, e.g. 50Mb of data per month on an expensive plan, bought literally thousands of them from Apple.

So, what this means is I've got to wait weeks for a phone I've already bought whilst the rip-off provider hoards crates of them just to be pricks.

I am REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY pissed off about this.

who is the decent deal provider, and what is the deal?

Optus offers 700Mb data and included calls for say $59/mth. Vodafone offers less for twice the cost.

Telstra is the one hoarding literally thousands of iphones and selling them on plans that would make your nose bleed. A $100 plan gets you 5Mb of data per month. Yes, that's megabytes. An extra 200Mb of data sold as a 'value' pack costs $59. You would want to be receiving very good oral sex on a daily basis for that price.

sooooooo my pb 12" shat the bed the other day. the HD failed. in a funny bit of irony, the reason it failed was because i backed it up to a new external hard drive i got to protect against such an eventuality. that is, according to the service dude, the act of doing a 30gb iTunes backup in one shot overworked my ailing little HD and it crapped its pants. like having a cardiac patient run a marathon. oops!

anyway: rumor is that new macbooks are coming out next month, in a new AL case. supposedly there will be an overhaul of the Pro line as well. here's my pickle: wait a month and lay out cash for what might be first gen hardware OR snap up the really, really good deal my dad is offering me on his "old" MBPro (2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM) and wait a year or two and spend my cash on a few peripherals (Dell monitor, keyboard, etc). i mean, this is a stupid question, isn't it?

also i m dum and bought a drive that only supports FW400 and not FW800 >:(

Don't rely on those rumours.

This is what MacRumors thinks.

I would go with your dad's machine. And if you buy the macbook, they only support fw400.

You also have to keep in mind that Jobs often likes to save the coolest product announcements for himself, usually at Macworld.

the rumors seem pretty reliable. i've checked macrumors a bunch, and the release would coincide with the end of the back to school promotion they're running right now (ends sept 15).

still, i'd be saving a ton of money....h'mmm.

good point, lib. like, i doubt they're dropping touch screen laptops on us, but something similar to my old 12" but faster would be dope. this 15" i'm using (dad's) is really nice, but maybe just a hair big? but gift horses, etc.

Dude, 4Gb RAM and 2.4GHz processor. You'd be nuts if you didn't take it.

As a side-note: With Vista being the train wreck that it is, Apple would be bonkers if it didn't exploit the opportunity it has right now by being a bit more aggressive in its Macbook pricing. Just a bit, but enough to really get people thinking.

rumor is a $200 price drop on the new macbooks. I killed mine a week ago and am borrowing a friend's old barely functioning powerbook just hoping that they push out the new ones in the next month or so.

yeah i think i'm gonna go for it

holy shit

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/28/bloomberg-accidentally-pu_n_122044.html

woops