Apple has been making some noise lately with the new iPhone 3G. While I’m a die hard keyboard fan, I rarely talk on my cell phone but carry around my iPod Touch everywhere and its easily my favorite gadget. Why? It works with my business stuff and it lets me enjoy the nice part of this business - the friends.

So last night I checked the Apple iPhone inventory and they had iPhone in stock. I showed up at about 8:20 am this morning and got into a line. Don’t get me wrong, I live in Disney World and standing in a line for 90 minutes for 45 seconds of fun is just a part of the magic.

I stood there and typed a long email to Howard and by the time I looked up nearly 30 minutes had passed and nobody had walked out the store. Finally, one person out with his iPhone 3G. I was not about to wait and figure out how long the 100 people would take to get through the line.

Just how hard did Apple and AT&T work to screw their customers? It’s pretty amazing, and intentional, to force people through the in store process and not rely on the online system that was used in the original iPhone launch. Is the iPhone that special that over a week after the launch they cannot properly stock and distribute the iPhone? Not really, they just don’t want to. They know that people standing in the lines are there just chomping at the bits to get the iPhone, so why not take the opportunity to make you stare and play with the entire Apple assortment of solutions while their 16 year old “geniuses” learn how to type.

Needless to say I left, but you know who I feel bad for? Microsoft. How demoralizing must it be to work there and see their competitor bash them in the press and television, come out with crippled services, uber-closed devices matched with extensive inability to meet the demand for both the hardware and software (Google for Mobile Me woes). You break your back working on Windows Mobile, team up with companies to build hundreds of solutions and offer variety and choice - just for the clients to vote with their feet away from you, away from your solution and away from your partners.

As tough as this may be for Microsoft, it’s an inspirational event for the rest of us. If you design a killer product that people want, they will take the abuse and tolerate problems because only you have what fits their needs.

As an entrepreneur, it is a pleasure to see that a giant multi-billion behemoth is unable to compete when customer is king.

Apple is coming on strong. Read the live coverage of the WWDC Keynote. Most paralyzing thing for me as a Microsoft Partner?

“You’re witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone”

According to the new business at Own Web Now that’s very true. Microsoft is definitely losing their grip on the dominance and the app space is opening up. Microsoft PDC can’t come soon enough.

F me running, now we’re going to have to support Entourage instead of treating it like Outlook’s retarded half-cousin.

Over the past year or so I have been trying to offer an amplified voice to the challenges the ITPRO community is feeling around the Microsoft brand. One of my major gripes with Redmond is the near absence of marketing or competitive response to the constant beatdown by the competitors. At this point it is probably too late for Microsoft to respond as millions of dollars have already gone far enough to encourage people to look at something other than Microsoft when it comes to technology spending for their business.

However, I would like to personally congratulate Andy Lees, Sr. VP of Microsoft Mobile Communications Business for figuratively whipping out his big fat black dick using it to bitchslap the Apple iPhone crachwhore up and down the 36 cracktown blocks.

That’s how I’d put it, but for a more PC version check out Fortune Apple 2.0: Microsoft packs 36 iPhone digs into one 7-paragraph letter. So far this is the best blog post of the year, and definitely the best news release of the year. It’s not every day that Microsoft brags about having an open platform and 150 different phone choices (none suitable for even basic web browsing but let’s not nitpick).

Is this letter too little too late? Time will tell, I for one will get the iPhone the moment they deliver full EAS support. Let’s hope Microsoft figures out how to take a few of those billions of dollars in the bank and spend it on customer-facing marketing instead of waiting for its partners to do it.

Dave asks in my WHS Unplugfest post if hating Mac’s is a religious bigotry:

Why are you turning your nose at something that a) works and b) does what you want. That’s religious bias…

He is right. AntiMacFanboism is a religious decision but I think it has more merit than the MacFanBoism where hordes of people line up for no reason at all to buy a device just because of its design. When confronted, they always compare their current Apple Experience with the crashing and blue screens of Windows 98. Yes, “It Just Works” because you have no choice but to run anything but the Apple software and when you try the other options they crash just as ugly as they do on Windows.

My AntiMacFanboism stems from tying software to their overpriced hardware and trying to lock content down to their software. No ability to legally use Mac OS X on a system that can hold 4-6 hard drives in a single chasis with my choice of RAID controller makes MacOS X absolutely useless to me. I don’t buy music on iTunes because I cannot move those songs to other devices. That, IMHO, is moving backwards, not forwards. It doesn’t matter how pretty your device is if you can’t swap the extra battery on your own on a long trip.

I’m not saying that Apple hasn’t done a great job of creating the baseline applications that most people use and dumbed them down to the core so that anyone can be immediately productive without problems — what I am saying is that everyone I know that exists even an inch off that computer newbie level is virtualizing Windows on top of their Mac anyhow. So what’s the logic there, pay for an overpriced Apple device and virtualize Vista/XP just because Vista/XP didn’t perform marvelously on your underpriced/underpowered Dell?

It’s not like I’m a naive Mac basher, I have two Mac’s in my office and use it every day, so far, nobody has been able to clearly and eloquently demonstrate to me that Mac is better on equivalent hardware.

It’s all the huge gaping unreasonable holes in what Apple delivers that really hold me back from taking them seriously as a platform. At the end of the day, they are both trash. For example, “just works” doesn’t apply to our Apple G4 iMac in the front office. It came without a wireless card so we bought a third party one from Dlink. It blows. It’s unstable. The iMac is visually stunning, but it’s CD no longer works. It has spots on the screen.

See, it goes both ways. Both are broken. AntiMacFanboism side is just more affordable, more versatile and on the OS merits alone more relevant since most of the other religion virtualizes out religion to begin with.

Courtesy of PC World, Apple today announced that 1.1.5 will ship with Exchange ActiveSync functionality which will, for all intents and purposes, make iPhone “business capable,” more:

Enterprises want great push e-mail–”huge request.” And push calendar information. And push contacts. And a global address list. And Cisco IPsec VPN, and a variety of security-related options. And automated configration options, and remote data wiping just in case the phone is lost or stolen.

“I’m really excited to be the one telling you today we’re doing all these things in the next release of the iPhone software.” Applause.

Back to push. Customers have asked for built-in Microsoft Exchange information. Apple has licensed the ActiveSync technology needed from Microsoft to support Exchange.

Schiller explains how old-school push is complicated and unreliable, then says that ActiveSync is modern, simple, and reliable. iPhone apps like its e-mail and calendar will support it.

He walks over to a podium to demo all this. His phone has no contacts, no events, and no e-mail. But the screen for adding e-mail has a new option: Exhchange. He’s skipping that, but is turning on an Exchange account he had pre-configured. He wants to use ActiveSync for contacts, calendars, and e-mail. He turns them on. “And that’s it.”

His contacts show up, as do his appointments and his e-mail. Apple’s Bob Borchers is in the audience on Wi-Fi helping Schiller with a demo. Schiller creates a new contact, and Borcher confirms that it was instantly synched via Exchange and has shown up on his device.

Next, Schiller goes to mail. Borchers sends him an e-mail. And there it is on Schiller’s phone. Applause. “This is exactly what enterprise customers have asked for.”

Schiller’s looking at his calendar. He asks Borchers to move a meeting up, and the schedule change shows up on Schiller’s iPhone. “All that is happening live.”

Schiller says the last part of the demo is the most fun. He’s saying that maybe he’s lost his iPhone. He asks Borcher to wipe the phone remotely. He does, and Schiller’s phone loses all his data. Applause.

Also interesting is the quote on sales. iPhone is now the second most deployed smartphone (28% market share), second only to Blackberry. I am not sure if Windows Mobile devices are counted under a single brand, or if Samsung Blackjack and AT&T Tilt are two completely different smartphone brands. However you define it, nearly a third of the smartphones on the market now supports Exchange along with its push email and remote wipe. That is… significant.

I spent most of last week and will likely spend the rest of 2007 on the dark side.

Google

If you are looking to chat with me and don’t do business with OwnWebNow, you can find me on Google Talk. My address is vlad@vladville.com, which consequently is also my community-related email address. Please do not send indirect/junk/newsletters to that address, thats what v@vladville.com is for. Likewise, don’t send personal (or email that needs my immediate attention) to v@vladville.com because I am unlikely to see it.

The new company will run on completely open and free technologies. Considering that OWN almost exclusively operates and sells closed/Microsoft technology I feel this gives me a more balanced experience… and to that end:

Mac OS X 10.5

I have been trying to use it for the last few days and I must admit I am hating it. On the other hand, I am not nearly as disappointed with it as I imagined I would be. What I believe I am saying is that if you need a serious business collaboration platform, Vista is the way to go. But if you need something to do the basic computer stuff quickly (check mail, burn a DVD, browse the web and play videos) Mac is your tool.

I am half/switching to the Mac for 2007. I say I am half switching simply because the tools I rely on to do my business do not exist on the Mac and I can’t justify switching to the platform completely just so I could virtualize the production platform on top of it.

The biggest leg up Mac has on Vista is the elegance factor. Case and point, Katie came down to my Office yesterday to help me do some last minute things before skipping town. She sat at my table, I turned on the Mac, she turned on the PC. I remembered that I had completely powered things down so I cycled the router. The Mac immediately got the connection and started. The Windows, not so much. So, dig through four menus to get to the network connection properties. Disable adapter. UAC prompt. Enable adapter. UAC prompt. Nothing. Open properties, set static IP. UAC prompt.

Just a brief update on the progress as I’ve made some changes to the original hardware in my Building my Hackintosh blog post due to some unforseen compatibility issues. The major change is to the motherboard, I got a Gigabyte GA-945GCMX-S2 and it works flawlessly. The original Asrock motherboard worked perfectly fine as well but the kernel driver that was written for it did not support line in or mic, and the sound itself was shaky.. so $50 down the shute.

Few other notes:

• Nearly all motherboards need to be flashed back. Asrock ConRoe 1333 needed a BIOS of less than 1.50 in order to support Leopard.
• The vanilla rollout (default) needs to be tweaked to work with the standard PC AMI or Phoenix BIOS, so when you create the partition make sure you use MBR instead of the other options.
• The “hack” post-install scripts are nothing more than dd and bootloader provisioning, for some reason the setup doesn’t set the partition as active or bootable.
• While getting the boot loader to work can be challenging, you can just boot into the OS by using the boot loader that spins up on the DVD. Same basic process used on Linux, BSD, etc, go to the boot loader options and let it know where to load the kernel from. If you have a single hard drive and single partition this will do it: rd=/disk0s1
• Make sure your hard drive is on the first or second SATA port, if your board has more you’ll run into issues (or at least I did)
• There is a huge scene / community around OS X, perhaps its finest quality. One forum I spent a lot of time on was http://forum.insanelymac.com
• There is also an IRC channel, though as with all IRC channels, stupidity is not welcome and they won’t hug your dumb away like most other places tend to. So if you haven’t read every topic on the problem you’re having at Insanely Mac, don’t bother. The server is at irc.osx86.hu and channel is #leopard
• I was not aware that the beast works with AMD chips; Apparently, it does, there are a few cooked DVDs that will work.
• The basic requirement is SSE 2 / SSE 3 instruction set, so technically anything from a $35 Celeron on up will work. For home browsing purposes I don’t see much of a reason to go beyond it.
• The ICH7 chipset I picked worked out of the box, sans sound. The Realtek 888 chipset on the Asrock did not have the kext to make it work, but Azelia (880) does and requies just a slight patch. Video, network, USB and other fun stuff worked out the box without tweaking of any kind.

Overall, works as advertised. I am not particularly impressed with the operating system, way too cartoonish and simplistic, yet practically useless (something so simple as expanding zip files stacks them on top of one another, doesn’t expand the window as more files are populated, makes it impossible to tell what came from which archive); for the life of me I can’t figure out why people like this garbage but hack accomplished.

P.S. I can’t say enough good stuff about Arctic Silver, I love that stuff. I used the retail kit for the processor/heatsink/fan assembly and its provided thermal compound had the unit smoking at 46 on the average in BIOS (80% load); When I moved the processor and assembly to the new motherboard Katie cleaned off the stock termal compound and I applied AS5 – haven’t gone above 26 degrees. Can’t beat that.

HTH, Vlad.

Dear friends, it’s a sad day in Vladville if I’m putting together Mac’s. Sad as it may be, the customer is always right and the customer seems to be buying more Mac’s than Windows as of late and I too must become familiar with what they are using. As of late there has been a huge scene behind OS X on non-Apple hardware so I figured I’d give it a shot and put together a Hackintosh.

Hardware

First and most important part of the purchase was the motherboard. I chose the ASRock ConRoe1333 powered by the Intel 945 chipset and ICH7 southbridge which a number of people were successful with in their Hackintosh rollout. I chose ASRock because it’s an offbrand ASUS that can handle both beating and overclocking. Not to mention that this is a fully integrated board with video, sound, NIC, and more so no need a ton of other parts. On the other hand, two PCI and two PCI Express x1, x16 slots if I feel anything ought to get upgraded. Cost: $50.

Case was the second most important aspect because I wanted something cheap, something small, something adequate. I went with the Apex M-318 which is basically an Antec Minuet case with a 275W power supply. It will fit the MicroATX motherboard, has plenty of room for two or more hard drives and a handy loading steel chasis. I’ve used this case before and frankly the size sells it: 12”x15” and 4” high. Price isn’t bad either, with the power supply cost: $50. 

Now we’re at $100 for the barebones and frankly, for my purposes, the processor, memory and hard drive choices don’t matter at all as far as Hackintosh is concerned. Could have gone with a Celeron ($40), 1GB DDR2 ($20) and an 80 GB SATA2 ($40) drive for about $100 total. Maybe $60 more for an upgrade to an Intel Core 2 Duo processor if I wanted to replicate a Mac Mini, which retails at $699. So total cost could have been between $220 and $280 shipped if I went with the Mac Mini approach. But I figured if the Hackintosh doesn’t work out I could always use another Linux box as there is always something to play with. Here is what I actually went with though keep in mind that these are pretty much all performance games. I went with the WD 250GB SATA2 drive ($70), 2 GB DDR2 Ram ($50) with heat spreaders, and the Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz (E4500)  processor ($124) bringing the grand total of my Hackintosh to $344. 

Tradeoffs

Now, I will admit that I could have saved maybe $50–100 if I chose less RAM, smaller hard drive and perhaps a slower Pentium D or Celeron processor. I also definitely could have spent a little more to get a 4MB L2 cache processor for $40 more 4GB DDR for $100 more but at the end of the day this was project for fun and I didn’t want to go for an overkill. With the current specs this is a hack of a lot more powerful than a Mac Mini for half the price, it would make a very decent Windows Home Server or Linux appliance and would be cheap to keep: 45W processor, 275W power supply. That’s not a lot of heat or a lot of noise either.

The grand total for this toy, shipped, comes to $367. Mac OS X 10.5 is $114 but I already have 10.4 sitting in the office which came in as an early Christmas from someone that I give free hosting to.  Tune in next to see the assembly. Will this be worth it, whats the end goal? Well, it will be worth it if the box powers on and runs Mail.app and Safari without much trouble. That alone is why I’ve built it. If that fails, I’ll just have another WHS or HTPC box.