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Monday, February 14, 2005

Parts is Parts

You might remember this from an old commercial for chicken. I thought of it alot this weekend, sorting out a color problem with my new Powerbook - perhaps you’ve been bitten too?

Like all good bloggers I’ll write little tomes of nothingness about my daily experience, but last thursday I happily had something decent to set to page: The new Powerbook arrived and there was much celibration (yay).

If you’ve experienced upgrading machines in the past, get ready for some new goodness - the Apple Upgrader. I had mirrored my system to a 60Gb portable drive, so I could work off of my girlfriends’ laptop by booting off of the portable. When the new PowerBook came, the 3rd screen in asked if I had an older system to get data off of. All you’d need would be the computer, placed in Target-Disk mode. For the uninformed, Target-Disk boots your computer up as a FireWire hard disk - your computer’s pretty much asleep while it’s disk controller does all the work.

Not having the old iBook anymore, I just plugged the firewire drive and off it went. The proceedure is simple - it asks which profile to import, if you want the applications, document and all preferences and then one click and it does its magic. It took about 20 minutes for the data to be copied over. Once finished it asked that the firewire drive be unplugged, which was odd, and then went on through the registration steps. You’ll see your familiar login and then, voila - it’s like you’ve never changed machines! Everything carried over perfectly except for Flash MX, which is failing on start-up (probably a font problem, I guessing). But this new Apple tool is fabulous.

One small side problem which I attribute to the process - the internal DVD didn’t work. It wasn’t seen on the bus and didn’t respond when a cd was carefull pushed into the slot. Ultimately I rebooted the machine and heard a “klick-klunk” as the dvd head reset itself and voila! It was seen by the system and burned 1 cd and 2 DVDs like a true pro. I believe the plugging-unplugging of the FireWire drive might have hung the bus, and since I never, ever have to reboot the Mac, I just forgot to give a reset a try. When was the last time a Windows user said that?

But it’s not been a perfectly wonderful experience so far. While the machine is wicked-fast, expecially compared to my iBook and G4 tower at work, the screen color is waaay off. There’s very poor contrast on the screen compared to the 6-month old 15” PowerBook of my girlfriend, and most annoyingly a smudgy magenta cast over the entire display. The poor color immediately caught my eye on poweup and no amount of calibration would solve it. I asked 2 other designers to try and that didn’t work. I borrowed a Spyder 2 screen calibrator and even it couldn’t improve the visual appearance! I was bummed beyond bummed.

So now I have a problem - how do you design on a screen whose color is just terrible? After a frustrating weekend reading about a spattering of similar complaints from other 12” users, I was about to launch into a fight with the Mother Ship on what I should expect. I called Apple and…“Sorry ot hear that, but hey - no problem. We’ll send you a new one. If you don’t like it, you’ve got 10 days from THAT one to call us and we’ll refund your money.” I’m paraphrasing of course, but it was a pleasant and supportive experience. Damn Apple - I so *wanted* to get a good fight in.

So the new one will arrive and the old one gets used for the time being, as per Apple. In a week I hope I can end writing in my lonely blog about aluminum dreams lost, But on the whole you can still count me in as an Apple fan.