iPhone 4S
I've had the chance of receiving my iPhone 4S on Friday afternoon. Since then I've just spent loads of time setting it up by restoring from my previous iPhones backup (last one was lost 4 months ago) and binning the mountain of apps which I had previously installed but which it turns out are absolutely useless and I don't actually use.
iOS5 and iCloud integration is awesome. Though having to sign in 5 times with your Apple ID to all the different Apple services doesn't really make sense (Facetime, iMessage, iTunes/Appstore, Gamecenter, iCloud,...).
Siri is a good laugh when you take the mickey out of it. Though I haven't really taken it and the new camera for a test drive in real life settings I think it's a nice to have update though nothing extraordinary and definitely not worth upgrading too if you already have an iPhone 4. If not then it is the best phone out there and glad I got it, though I probably shouldn't have waited 4 months to get it and should have just gotten an iPhone 4 to replace the one I'd lost.
Macbook Pro RAM upgrade
After a 15 months of owning my awesome Macbook pro I finally decided that it was time for me to get more RAM. Not because the system was desperate for it, but because I've grown used to having 4 browser windows with 2-30 tabs open in each all the time. So that when I try and open a VM to test the Windows 8 Developper Preview or run some of the annoying programs which don't run in OS X, I don't have to close everything else. Yes I now have 8GB of DDR3 RAM!!! This seems unbelievable when my last machine had 1GB of DDR2 RAM and my second to last machine used to have 64MB of DDR1 RAM!(Yes! It was horrendous and it ran windows 98!)
So how was it?
As easy as it gets!
I just popped in to Amazon ordered the Kingston Apple 8GB Kit
and the Silverhill Tools Deluxe Apple Mac Tool Kit
, everything arrived the next day. A quick google search and I found a how to provided by Apple. All in all, the unscrewing, RAM switching and re-screwing took me 10 minutes. After that I switched it all back on and am I enjoying the performance boost!Dual Boot Windows 8 Developer Preview
I've had the Windows 8 developer review running for a while in a Parallels VM but I thought I'd also have it running as a second option in the boot up process. Since I'd already downloaded the iso image it all went quite smoothly. Launched the Boot Camp Assistant utility and created a second partition on my main drive. Burned the Windows 8 image to a DVD. Rebooted, which launched the Windows 8 installer for my Bootcamp partition. And all went through smoothly.
Quite like the idea of linking the account login with the Windows live ID though security will probably become an issue (as usual with Microsoft). The whole Metro UI is also very nice though I'm not sold on the making the desktop so secondary. If this is to be used on a tablet. Then it is an awesome interface which rivalises with iOS and offers a much more full featured OS with support for all the regular Windows compatible programs. However, since most people will be using Windows 8 on a laptop or a desktop computer at work this is just going to get in everyone's way. Most annoying of all is the extreme complexity to turn off the computer: one has to leave the desktop, go into the start menu with the metro UI, log off and then once the log in screen appears click on the shut down button. Awfully complicated for such a basic task!
