You can only stream I believe. It won't let you do anything else like dragging it to a local iPod. There is also a limit on how many different clients can stream in a day.

I'd wait for them to release iTunes 8.0.1. Too much flakiness in this release.

Yeah, right. I remember getting excited when RAM for my PC dropped to just $50 per megabyte. That's 5,000 times more expensive than it is today. I guess it is expensive if you compare it pound for pound with water or something...

tanstaafl.

That's how much I paid for memory in my first PC back in 1995. $1600 for 32MB to be exact. I don't even want to think about how much I paid to outfit my Amiga 3000 with 16MB and my previous Amiga with 8MB. Ouch.

That being said, they should still slap 64GB into an iPod touch and 32GB into a Nano. It's the only respectable thing to do. And then release an iPod Touch Max with that new Toshiba 240GB 1.8" HD.

I'd probably be happier to see a camera and GPS added to the Touch though, since as mentioned, I don't really have a need for a portable music device myself.

Another iTunes 8 bug. I lost the ability to control my AppleTv via Itunes from my MacBook. The fix was to go into the Security settings and change it to allow specific programs and then add iTunes to the list. The default of essential services wouldn't allow itunes to communicate with the AppleTv. Seem like iTunes 8 may have been rushed to market...

Totally believable. I don't have any insider knowledge, but I suspect that some of the iTunes team must have been busy in the past two years working on other projects. A bunch of back-end patches have been made to versions 7.x to support the new devices, but nothing much in terms of general features. I'd hardly call what's in 8.0 a heavy load of new additions either. Definitely not something they've been cooking since 7 came out.

People may want to check out Songbird if they're able to run it on their system. Seems like it's a decent music app modeled after iTunes in many ways. Open source however, so it definitely won't do Apple-ecosystem stuff like control an AppleTV. They do have iPod sync support for some models though.

Yea, I took a quick look at Songbird a few months ago. It was still very rough around the edges then. I may take another look now just for curiosities' sake.

Has the Vista + USB issue been resolved yet? Apple might want to slow things down a bit just to sort out the quality control issues. Things are starting to add up in that department.

Just be glad you're not running Leopard on a PPC machine like my PowerBook. It's multiple weekly Mail and Safari crashes. Once every few weeks one of them can bring down the finder and even prevent the machine from restarting or shutting down properly. That's on top of all the small bugs in nearly every single app that comes with the OS (including the Finder) and of course the many annoyances due to design issues.

Still a thousand times better than Vista though. I can't believe anyone can run that OS full time. I helped out a friend by installing and uninstalling some stuff on his new Vista system over the weekend. Wow, that OS is an ugly, unusable, bloated piece of crap. And companies like HP should be sued into bankruptcy for shipping systems with that much crapware installed on them.

The best thing to do would be to install a clean OS, but I wasn't about to do that for them. I've heard too many horror stories about trying to get all the hardware on cheap PC notebooks recognized by Windows.

What worst about the crapware, is how difficult it is to cleanly remove it. But it's well worth the effort to get a clean os install.

Are you sure something deeper isn't wrong? I've been running Leopard since release at work on a Mac Mini. Initially it was an Intel Mini for 2 months, then I took the Time Machine drive and restored it to a PowerPC Mini where it continues to run. It even is an upgrade install of Leopard on top of Tiger. In that time, I can't say I have ever seen any crashes like you describe. And my main use of the box is Safari, Mail, Adium, Linkinus, Perforce, and TextWrangler. I'll check tomorrow for crash logs, but from my experience the apps to crash have been minor Adium issues.

You're not seeing Safari taking up memory and freeing up next to none of it (both real and virtual)? Maybe it's the pages I'm loading. I notice especially how any activity on one tab can completely bring the whole browser to a standstill with a spinning beach ball such that you can't do anything in any other part of the program.

Closing the tab for the default Slim Center Interface can sometimes take 30 seconds or more.

I immediately noticed Safari response and hanging issues when I updated from the 3.0 beta to the final release. Every update since then hasn't been much better. At least most of the issues that resulted in some pages producing an error have been eliminated - The error wasn't a page issue because if you reloaded 3 or 4 times you'd get the page. A lot of people had that problem as it's documented up and down the net, I just can't remember what the error was right now.

With Mail it's not anything specific from what I can tell. It can just crash while sitting there. It's done this since I first installed Leopard, though not on any type of regular schedule. Mail also takes longer in Leopard to show folder contents. Of course it can crash when I'm closing a message composition window, or even just switching folders.

I have no doubt this Leopard install is completely bunged, but that's a Leopard thing, not an issue with my hardware/system. Repair permissions took 30 hours when I last did it 3 weeks ago.

Ideally I'd like to buy a new Intel machine and then install Tiger on this one. While my Intel mini doesn't see the kind of use as this PowerBook, I've never experienced a crash running Leopard on it. Just have to put up with the same smaller bugs and design issues.

You might want to wait until next month, provided the burning sensation is tolerable until then. I'm in the MBP market as well, and am hoping for a significant revision.

Exactly, iPod events are always just about iPods. Never has a Mac, portable or otherwise, been announced at a special iPod event. Macs are announced at trade shows or their own events. iPod design refreshing is done once per year, but something less significant such as a memory/HD bump can happen again at a later time.

People forget that there are always two notebook refreshes per year. Excluding announcements at Macworld in January, these are usually in the spring and fall. Take a look at the history of announcements over the past 8 years if you don't believe me. The biggest announcements have tended to be done in January at the Macworld keynote.

I have had some issues with Safari like that, but generally only after leaving it open for more then a day, with a tab on a page that refreshes every 15 seconds. Memory is pretty tight on the Mini since it only has 1GB total, but restarting Safari once a day seems to ensure this is not a problem. Safari 2 had a definite noticeable memory issue with the refreshing page, and 3 did improve it a lot for me. And generally when Safari is getting fussy, it would only beachball for a bit if I opened a new tab to load a new site.

I just checked my crash logs, and it looks like these go back to January of 08, around the time I restored using the image from the Intel Time Machine backup.

Apple Processes
1 crash in Finder
1 crash in iCal Helper
1 crash in Mail (with 3 bundles loaded, GrowlMail, Mailtags and Widemail)
10 crashes in ManagedClient
7 crashes in mdworker
1 crash in nmblookup
1 system panic in smbfs

3rd Party Processes
11 crashes in Adium
1 crash in GrowlHelper
5 crashes in LCCDaemon (Logitech)
4 crashes in Microsoft Sync Services
1 crash in P4V
2 crashes in Quicksilver
9 crashes in Remote Desktop Connection
1 crash in SynergyKM

For Mail, I use it many times a day, have 1.8gigs of e-mail across 2.5 years, and use 28 smart folders of various complexity to manage it. In addition to the one actual crash, I can recall a few times I've had to restart Mail from it being in a bad state, usually just spinning some thread in a loop talking to the Exchange server via IMAP. Never had it explode on me just by changing folders or composing mail.

I've been running leopard on a powerbook G4 (1.5Ghz) since release day (fresh install).

7 Crashes in safari
9 Crashes in quicktime player
1 iTunes crash
1 iPhoto crash
1 Xcode crash

And that's about it. I can't ever recall seeing mail crash under leopard (or tiger) and I don't think I've ever seen finder crash either.

Adrian

It's a raging internal debate. I'm a university employee so eligible for the back to school special. I'm tempted to buy a bare bones MB and get the touch free after rebate, then sell the MB when MBPs come out. Given the resale value and academic discount, I suspect I wouldn't come out that far behind.

On the other hand, I can keep The Loaner from work, and suffer with the 1.3Ghz Celeron M for a month or two, depending on how soon the really cool MBPs are available.

BTW anyone else with a Touch wonder why Apple can get away with selling a 7GB iPod as an 8GB?

I haven't installed anything on it yet and there's obviously the overhead of 100MB or so shown by iTunes, leaving me with only 6.91GB free. It still says right at the top and in the meter, that this is a 7GB iPod.

Has anyone launched a class-action lawsuit regarding this yet? How about for hard drives in general? It used to be this crap flew only with HDs but now it's being used for flash devices as well.

But with the this iPod, accounting for 1 million byte Gigas should still leave one with a 7.8GB iPod.

I'm game to jump into a class action suit for a few bucks back and to finally get manufacturers to top up their storage to actually match what they advertise.

As I also said previously about the iPhone keyboard, it's IMPOSSIBLE to join a wireless network with a decent passphrase using the iPod/iPhone. Because you can't see what you're typing there's no way to know if you've made a mistake and no way to correct it.

Hiding password fields on a handheld device is an absolutely idiotic design decision. Thank god this is a development machine and there are some good apps, because lately, when it comes to design, Apple has had their heads up their collective arses.

Its 8 real GB worth of flash in there. Not all of it is used for music storage. The OS alone is nearly 300MB by itself. Add on formatting overhead. Data files used to manage your music etc...

From Wikipedia:
There has been lawsuit cases about it, like this one against WDC. Pretty much the result has been every storage product now has tiny print saying 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. It's even in small print on the back of my iPhone box.

8,000,000,000 / 1024 /1024 / 1024 ~= 7.4GB. OS size, plus probably a bit extra for future growth accounts for the 6.9GB usable for storage.

My number one annoyance is that SMS privacy can only be enabled when passcode is enabled.

Why isn't this option available regardless of whether passcode is enabled?

You *can* see what you're typing, at least on an iPhone and I'm assuming the Touch is similar. As you're entering the character, it displays next to your finger for a brief moment so you can see what's being entered. It's an important feature because while relying on spell checking for emails is fine, it's worthless for passphrases.

Thing is, NAND capacity isn't doubling every year - more like 18 months or so. The Touch is like the last-gen one, in that there are two spots for NAND packages (each of which has 8 NAND die in it), and the biggest NAND packages money can buy are currently still only 16GB... so 32GB is your maximum.

The only way to get 64GB right now is to find space for 4 packages, or a total of 32 NAND die!

Hugo

It's the same as HDDs... that'd be 8GB of "unformatted capacity". When you format it's pretty much like a HDD, ie 8GB = 8,000,000,000 bytes, or 7.45GiB (divide by 2^30). Subtract from that the OS (ISTR it's about 400MB?) and some databases and 6.91GB sounds believable. The chips are sold as 8GB chips by every NAND vendor.

It's always been this case for flash, have a look at the actual capacity of the average 2GB SD card, for example.

It's not so easy to "top up" the capacity - that'd be adding another chip to the board unless every NAND vendor - Samsung, Toshiba, Hynix, Micron, Intel, etc - agreed to add capacity to their die. Nobody is going to go out on a limb and do this in isolation, as it makes their NAND more expensive to make compared to the competition, and they're probably not exactly making piles of money on the current pricing...

Hugo
(speaking for himself, not anyone else)

Is it? My iPhone shows the last character typed (as opposed to a blob) so you can easily check what you're typing into a password field. The character only gets hidden when you type the next character.

Not releasing your finger from the keyboard allows you to check the key you're going to enter too, as you can see the popup. Only let go when the right character is showing.

Hugo

Even with both of those features, it's still incredibly hard to correctly type a long secure WPA key made up of hexadecimal numbers. More than about 6-8 characters and it gets nearly impossible. When they key gets really long, without the ability to look back and check what you typed already, you make a lot of mistakes. There's also the issue of the caps lock that doesn't "stick" when you go back and forth from the numeric pad. If your WPA key is all capital letters plus numbers (as it would be with a hexadecimal WPA key), then you end up leaving in the occasional lower case letter and the key doesn't work.

Split the key up into groups of 4-5 digits each then. You should be able to keep that many digits in your head at once.

Of course you can do that. In a quiet room with no distractions with unlimited time. But what if you are in a hurry, you get interrupted, or the WPA key is very long?

I swear there was this one WPA key that was many digits long and I literally tried entering it (unsuccessfully) on three separate occasions, and only got it to work on the fourth day. Admittedly, each day I tried it was only because I was stopping by the office for a minute to pick someone up. I had the key and wanted to check my email real quick while I waited for the passenger to get their stuff together. But each time, I had at least a few minutes, which should have been plenty to punch in a WPA key, even a long one.

For the laptop? Check the "show characters" box. Paste the key from the file I had, or type it in from a piece of paper. Done in seconds. iPhone? A few minutes' attempt each on four different days, and only on the fourth day was I successful.

You guys all talk like it's easy. Fine, you try it. Generate a random hexadecimal number that is 26 ascii characters long. Make sure all of the letters in it are upper case. Make that your router's WPA key. Write it down on a piece of paper. Now try punching that into an iPhone's WPA key field without making a mistake. Remember, the letters are case sensitive.

Sure you can do it, but after you're successful, note just how long it took you, how many attempts you made, and how much concentration it took to accomplish. Did you have to be in a quiet room with no one bothering you? Did you get distracted by anything? Did you ever have to stop and then count how many dots were on the screen and then count the letters on your piece of paper?

Now, try entering that same number into the iPhone's "notepad" applet, where you can see what you're typing as you do it. Sure, it's a pain, but not nearly as much of a pain as it was when the characters were hidden.

Its a WPA key. How often do you type these things in? Okay, it might be annoying to do the first time and require some concentration to do so but you're done after that.

Every 2-4 days when I'm travelling.

Any device that hides what one is typing from the person typing it is totally brain-dead.

Cheers