Installing OS X 10.5.3

I installed the OS X 10.5.3 update over the weekend. This was a bit of a hassle. Most of it was my fault, as I only had about a gig of free space on my laptop's hard disk. Not cool! I had purchased an external disk, so I had someplace to move things, but still I had to do it.

The other problem wasn't my fault. When I would ask the Updater to install the update, it would give me a permissions error. That was rather annoying as I'd just given it the admin password. Some searching revealed that this was not an uncommon error but there was no consensus on how to deal with it.

Not surprisingly, that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. The best advice I found was to repair permissions. This is a good idea in general and falls in the 'can't hurt' category. But when I tried, the progress bar would move about 15% and then stall. Hmm. This led me to try 'repair disk', but that had the same effect. Some more searching turned up some hints, most notably the suggestion to disconnect any external drives. After all that, I was able to finally go through the repair disk/repair permissions tasks.

Of course that didn't solve the installer problem.

So I went to the backup plan, downloading and installing the update manually. That worked fine, though I'm never comfortable when something just doesn't work, particularly if it's that simple. Anyway, 10.5.3 is now running on my Macbook Pro.

As for the update itself? It's fine. Most of 10.5.3 dealt with fixes, probably for issues I wasn't seeing. At any rate, I wasn't having many problems before, and I'm not now. I will still occasionally see graphic spikes in World of Warcraft but that's been a long-standing issue. I am interested to try out the added calendar sync between iCal and Google Calendar, which would be quite useful. But all in all, there's not much to see there, and installing the update is more a matter of good hygiene.

Rumors are building that next week's WWDC keynote will include an announcement of 10.6, with the actual release coming as soon as next January. It should be an interesting announcement; 10.5 is still being digested by consumers, and the current rumors seem to say that there won't be much new functionality. That would put Apple in a bit of a tough marketing spot, and I'm curious to see if that's really how it will play or if there's more there than anyone's letting on.

Macworld 2008 Announcements

Several new things were announced at Macworld yesterday. Here's my brief, uninformed take on each.



MacBook Air: New ultralight laptop. The message boards are pretty negative on this one, but I think it mostly misses the boat. This is not designed for a tech-head or intensive user. Frankly, it's designed for people who could use the vanilla MacBook but want something cooler. I don't think they'll sell a ton of them, but they're probably good for staking out some more 'cool design' territory. It's eye candy for the coffeehouse set. And for that, it's pretty tasty. Very curious to hear about the performance of the 64Gb SSD drive option.

Time Capsule: Combined WiFi base station and backup device. If it works well enough, this could be well positioned. Home users are just starting to realize how much they need to care about backups. If it's really plug-n-play when combined with Time Machine, they might have a good lever to crack open that market.

iTunes Movie Rentals: Renting movies (both regular and HD) via iTunes. Personally I'm not a fan of rentals, I'm not a fan of DRM, and I'm not a fan of proprietary technology. So I'm not excited about this in a lot of ways. However I think it's the right move in the market. It will be very interesting to see how many rentals they sell.

AppleTV Take Two: Refresh of the set-top box that brings iTunes, iPhoto, and other things to your AV system. It's a very nice system, and integrates a lot of cool pieces. But I think that's the problem -- most people have some portion of these features on their DVRs or other tools. Without actually offering a DVR I think it'll be a tough sell. And they're probably going to run into annoying download problems, especially with people on slower DSL connections.

iPhone software upgrades: Some very good incremental upgrades here. The movable home icons are fantastic but also a no-brainer, especially with 3rd-party apps coming before long. The win will come from the position locator. If that works well people will love it. (A loss would come from the stability of the upgrade.)

iPod Touch upgrade: Some nice features that should have been in the original Touch. The $20 cost to upgrade will be a shock for most users. I suspect they'll not sell a bunch of upgrades, meaning they're now dealing with two versions of the software.

Just my initial take. I haven't used or downloaded anything yet. Maybe soon!

New Mac Pros

Apple introduced new Mac Pros yesterday. They look like reasonably useful upgrades to the previous machines, based on the new Penryn processors and including some tidy upgrades like bumping the front side bus from 1333 MHz to 1600 MHz. I've been considering a Mac Pro purchase for my Photoshop needs, and this would seem like a step in the right direction.

The interesting thing though is the timing, with Macworld less than a week away. I can't recall a time when Apple has released new hardware so close to the date of a Macworld keynote, except maybe when they were trying to kill off the summer Macworld in Boston/New York.

I think there's a few reasons for this. First, the Penryns were officially introduced at CES this week, and so every manufacturer is announcing their Penryn-based boxes. Second, Apple has very clearly pitched Macworld at consumers, keeping Mac Pro updates to separate events. For example, the January 2003 Mac Pro update was launched at a separate event on 28 January. Third, and most exciting, it's pretty clear that Steve Jobs will have a lot to talk about at the keynote. There are rumors of ultraportable Macs, movie rentals, a new version of iTunes, and updates to iPhone software. All of those seem relatively likely so there's reason to believe Jobs won't want to dilute the message with useful but straightforward updates to the pro platform.

There's a good chance I'll end up with a new Mac Pro this year. But I'm holding out to see what comes at Macworld. Because this is shaping up to be one with some very interesting developments.