iSight rant
Oh, back-to-back hardware rants! Whee!
So my wife’s buddies “all” seem to have these mac webcams, and so she needs one too, right? Well, ok, it sounded cool so I didn’t need a lot of persuading. So I drop by Fry’s and pick one up (they’re essentially $150 no matter where you buy them), and plug it in. Nothing. No iChat love. No, well, much of anything! Which is kind of weird.
I do a little reading and realize that actually, you need iChat AV to make use of it. Which comes “free” with the Panther upgrade (OS X 10.3), which costs $129. Or, you can get iChat AV alone for $29. Well, I know I want some of the goodies in 10.3 anyhow, but was hesitant to upgrade before because I didn’t want to risk anything going wrong to her beloved Mac. But, I decided should just go for it…
So I’m off to the Apple store (happened to be going by on the way to the bagel shop in Burlingame, actually) and decide to play stupid to the sales staff, and see if I can get any useful help. Oh, it humbles me to do so… but here we go (my side of the conversation in bold). “Need any help?” “Yeah, I’m thinking about getting 10.3 upgrade from 10.2, but wait… when will 10.4 Tiger be out?” “Not until next year” “OK. I’ll take it. Now how do I back up my data before upgrading, just in case?” “Oh, well, do you have an external firewire drive or some blank CDs?” “Sure, I have an external FW HD”. “OK, copy some stuff from your home dir onto it first”. “Uhhh… like what stuff? Everything? What if it wipes my drive and I need to do a full restore after the upgrade” “Uh, that won’t happen.” “But I thought 10.3 had a habit of doing that with there was an external FW HD attached?” “Oh, yeah, well, you want to detach that drive before upgrading.” “Oh.” “Yeah, but actually, the version in this box is probably a slightly newer version than just 10.3, so it’ll not have that problem.” Riiiight. So, out I went, for the second time in as many days having tithed Apple $130+..
After uninstalling and deleting some junk, in an attempt to free up some diskspace on her Mac (it was down to about a gig free), and apparently convincing Finder to no longer be clueful about blank CDRs inserted in the slot (”No volumes that can be recognized” instead of the usual “Do you want to initialize this new disk”), which made it difficult to copy stuff off onto CDR… I finally bit the bullet and started the upgrade. This actually took a couple of tries, because the first time it couldn’t find the internal drive on the notebook to install from, even though it had been thrashing on the CD and disk for a while up to that point. Anyhow, about 90 minutes and 2 CDs later, it was done. And the CDR-recognition thing was fixed, and lots of niftiness ensued… Panther is cool. Although of course, it was stock 10.3.0 on the CDs; it needed about 150M of additional software updates to be downloaded and installed (and a magic file trashed to convince it to install Java 1.4.2, because it didn’t believe me that 1.4.1 was installed, even though it clearly was during the upgrade; this was 20 minutes of hunting on the net to figure out how to make this work, and 3 times downloading 28M of updates… more money for Speedera I suppose.)
So, on to iSight / iChatAV. It works well enough, but got a little tiresome. Let’s see, let’s use the iSight camera to make an iMovie. Nope, not possible. Only your DV camcorder via firewire can be used for that… what? OK, well, maybe I can take snapshots with it for iPhoto… well, if so, I can’t figure out how. So basically, there is a $150 webcam, and I do mean webcam, usable only for iChat, sucking down a bunch of current (and getting a bit hot, I might add) on the notebook’s solitary firewire port. Hmm. It’s now sitting the drawer, actually. I guess she’ll hook it up when she really wants to chat with someone, but… that’s kinda lame. It won’t even work with iMovie?! Come on, Apple, really!