I have a marvelous late 2008 “Unibody” MacBook Pro 15 which has fallen into disuse. Problem is, it was the hub of my Apple Universe. It only had a 256GB hard drive, so I offloaded its iTunes library to a network drive, which I never quite got running the way I wanted. The goal was to be able to use any sort of media procuring activity to drop files into a folder that would be monitored by iTunes on the MBP (MacBook Pro) for automatic addition to iTunes. Any device that I wanted to use to “consume” media would use the iTunes server built into the network hard drive. This is such a great idea that there should be a patent in it somewhere. Or maybe it’s not possible. Either way, I never got all my stuff hashed out, and this project never took off the way I wanted, which is bad.
Also, the battery on the MBP died from being plugged in all the time (it was my desktop replacement for quite a while), and once the iPhone became so stable that it stopped needing to sync with its home station (I haven’t sync’d in over two years and the phone is FINE), there went the rest of my motivation for upgrading the MBP. Long story short, the network hard drive died, the MBP’s own drive is too full to upgrade, the iPhone is too full to upgrade, both are years out of date, and I’m stuck. Except I finally broke down and bought a new external hard drive (now one of four sitting on the desk), and have JUST begun to back the thing up using the magnificent “Time Machine” utility. There are more issues, including a huge bag of photos and some early software mishaps, but today, I began the long road to recovery.
“Backing up 1,050,815 items. 4.27 GB of 178.66 GB.”
The MBP is on 10.6.8, and the iPhone is on iOS 6. I think these are high points of design and function, but being a tech realist, it is time to move on.
Moving on. A pic from about an hour in, should be done somewhat after 7PM (1900):
And tracking pretty well:
(As it turns out, it finished at 6:57)
Next thing the MBP will get is a FREE upgrade (I shudder) to Mac OSX something. (I think those upgrades are all free now. I blogged about this quite a while ago — I’ll reproduce that here.) One big reason I never go ton this earlier was that I liked MacOS less and less with each upgrade. I loved 7, worked well in 8, stumbled through 9, caught the wave in 10 (10.2 “Jaguar” was wonderful!), and it’s been downhill since there. Don’t get me wrong — I love the functionality improvements, and the ability to Automate / AppleScript things, and it just didn’t help at all, because I didn’t understand the file system, and my mistake was WANTING TO UNDERSTAND.
I work in IT. That means I work in Windows and maybe other things as well. I used to be an Apple evangelist — I have two MP 110s and an eMate 300. I *now* have three Macintosh laptops; the MPB, and early MBA, and an ancient MacBook from before they were making MacBook Pro. SO I get it! Except I don’t get it anymore, and of all things, frigging Microsoft is making things easy.
Why the hell is an operating system named “Mavericks”? What’s the damned version number? What comes before and after it? Scoff if you like, but if I don’t know these things, I cannot make it sit still in my head. And so forth all the way throughout my Mac experience.
So I still don’t know if this is a jailbreak to liberate all my stuff from Cupertino’s smiling tyranny, or a revival of the Insanely Great. But I’m fixing the hell out of this Mac.
The download is going nicely — this is for the OS update from the “App Store”:
Guess we’ll be done something like 9PM.
Once it’s up and healthy, and I’ve recovered all my stuff (crossed fingers) from the dead network drive, I’ll finally let this iPhone upgrade. This thing is so stable that I would let it do it on its own, if I had the disk space on board.
Well, we’ll bomb that bridge when we come to it.
So far, so good. For me, 9PM will be 5AM (Monday 6 JUL) in Carlyfornia.
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So, the new OS is installed. First thing I notice is everything seems washed-out and flat. Second thing, iTunes is showing me everything in fricking pictures, like I can’t read. Why do I have to go online to find out how to get a proper list view?
People pay top dollar for Apple stuff to not suck, and this sucks.
I am definitely NOT a tech guy. When I was in residency (’76) the guy who would end up my partner and life-long friend brought an Apple computer to work. It wasn’t an Apple Anything – just plain Apple. He had been hard-wiring his own computer in his basement and was going to attack writing a base 8 OS when Apple came out – cheap! He bought the additional memory sticks from other sites (for lots less than Apple wanted) and was off.
So our early office computer was an Apple. Greg wrote the programs to run it, and I acted as his “regular guy” conscience to straighten out stuff he thought “was obvious” – but only to him. A year or two into the process he gave up and bought an IBM as it was known at the time – an 8086 I think. I, too, bought one for my home and started working with that.
My son is an Apple guy. He is forever lauding its benefits. But I bought a MacBook Pro when they first came out, then upgraded the OS (through Lion I think). It is now dead on my shelf, a battery that won’t work anymore.
I have to say, I never got the hang of Apple OS. It seemed strange. Everything that I wanted to do I had to search for how to do. I couldn’t get the hang of its filing system – what copied, what moved, how to easily access, where to store automatically. I did like Pages because of being able to easily insert pics (I was writing a column for a shooting newsletter), but much else was unusual.
I now have this crazy-fast custom built desktop I got from NewEgg. It has a plexiglass side so you can see in, multiple fans, and this purplish accent lighting when it’s running. It’s OK. But I decided not to pay Microsoft for Works and instead use a free similar program. STILL haven’t figured out all the parts to that. Can’t seem to use the scanner part of my old HP printer although it prints fine.
IT is for young people. I’m just glad that I know how to turn mine on and use it for the basics I do. Wish, though, that my iTunes library from my old computer could be brought over to the new one; it had a lot of CD’s I put on it, and I don’t really want to go through reloading all of them again.
Dev, you can of course move that library over. There is a way, you just have to be careful. Give me some specs (exact version of OS and iTunes on both machines), and I’ll dig up the right how-to.