After much taunting from the lure of Mike's PowerBook, I too have become Steve Job's bitch.
Friday was the grand opening of the *official* Apple Store in the
Birmingham Bullring. Apparently, over 7000 people passed through the doors from 6pm through to midnight, with the first 1400 being lucky enough to snag themselves a commemorative t-shirt of some kind. Sadly, I wasn't able to pick up any freebies on Saturday morning, despite buying an iBook. I'm now the proud owner of a 12 inch 1.2Ghz model with 512Mb of RAM. And it only took two hours to get it!
I met up with Khang at 9:30am and we both went inside to have a peruse around. After about 10 minutes, I was ready to make a purchase and thankfully, they did offer the educational discount, albeit less than what it is online. I enquired about financing since £700 is a lot of money to put down, especially since we're almost at the end of the academic year; after a few false starts, we finally worked out a nice payment scheme spread over 2 years at £27 a month. This would have gotten me the 12 inch iBook with 60Gb hard disk and 512Mb of RAM.
Now came the first hurdle, the online financing system had gone down due to the traffic from the store, and from people dealing with Mac OS X Tiger. After 15 minutes or so, they'd found out a guy from the financing department would be appearing to deal with such issues in person. After a few minor introductions, we got underway and I began to fill out a number of forms. Then came the next hurdle; they wouldn't accept "student" as an occupation. Reluctantly, I had to list down Quizno's as my part time job to be able to get the financing *makes angry fist motion*. Then came the credit check... which I passed!
"Finally!" I thought, something was going right for a change. Sadly, I
spoke too soon since I was then told that they coudn't do the hard disk upgrade in-store and that it was an online only option. I now had to go all the way back to the beginning and recalculate my payment plans as well as filling out another copy of the form. At least I didn't have to go through another credit check since the new sum was lower than before. We returned to the sales desk to confirm everything again, and
this time the order did go through, only to be told it would be a further 20 minutes for the RAM upgrade!
Not wanting to stick around anymore, we decided to head off and check out what else was on offer in the Bullring. We headed over to Selfridges tech section and then to grab some lunch at my OLD workplace, Quizno's. They don't know I'm not going to return, but they still give me the staff discount. Bless.
We decided to visit Forbidden Planet since it was fairly close by; Khang spoke to his friend with the crazy hair, whilst Mike and I had a look at some manga.
Next stop was the Sony Centre, where we had a look at a number of mini hi-fi's for Khang. Then it was over to Rackhams to check out their selection, which was pretty cack in all honesty so it was back to the Sony Centre we went. Sadly, it seems Sony have been cutting corners everywhere as of late and it became apparent with the specs of their hi-fi's. My one which was bought 5 or 6 years ago has two line-in's, and one line-out. All of the sub £200 ones on offer came with merely one line-in, and all relied on the headphone socket as a line-out. After demo-ing a few in-store, Khang settled on a £159 one which seemed like the best for the price and size. Now came the predicament of how we were going to get from side of the city to
the other, carrying a large and heavy hi-fi box...
20 minutes or so later, we returned to the Bullring where Mike and I split up from Khang who went to drop stuff off in his car. We both headed back to the Apple Store to pick up my iBook, as well as 2 neoprene cases to store an iBook and PowerBook in. Now, despite the staff's lack of experience, they were all nice people when it came to customer service; just as I was leaving, I was congratulated by a number of them which was both pretty cool and pretty awkward feeling at the same time.
We met up with Khang again and decided to head over to Nostalgia & Comics which is my loitering ground whilst back home. They currently have a pretty nifty anime and manga bargain bin which is a new addition. I found an awesome Negima calendar in there for only £3.99. It features a few of the more prominent girls from the show (yay for Ayaka!) and can be made into posters once the year's over with. Much better value and higher quality than that shitty Love Hina one I bought from MVM for £8! I also picked up the latest issue of Newtype which I haven't had a good chance to sit down and read yet. We went upstairs to visit my friend, Dave, who I'd bumped into earlier that morning in the Apple Store. Had a brief chat, but it was time to go again so we made our way over to New Street.
Went to Coffee Republic for some fruit teazer fronzen slush drinks, brain freezes for everyone.
We then met up with Khang's friend, Joe, and Khang's brother, Viet, as we made our way over to Maplins. Bought a few items of audio equipment, as well as a pre-amp for use during screenings. Using this, we should be able to solve the low audio problem with some episodes whilst in A12 or A14.
Back at the Bullring, Joe and Viet wanted to check out the Apple Store, so Khang, Mike, and myself went over to Dixons (boo, hiss!) to see what was on offer. Had a look at a few mice, and peripherals but nothing of much interest came up so we soon left. We all went downstairs to see if Nando's was busy and damn, it was. Since we were going to the cinema later, we decided to head over to the Broad Street Nando's. Viet and Joe went in their car, with us three going in Khang's. The parking ticket came to £12 in total, which is damn extortionate.
None of us had ever been to the AMC cinema before so we were kind of lost in the car park. Nando's turned out to be quite far from the cinema, so we all went to the Outback Steak House instead. We all had refillable Cokes which we duly abused. Everybody except me
had steaks, I opted for the lamb chops. Along with our meals, we ordered a Bloomin' Onion which is one of the most visually impressive culinary wonders I've ever seen. It's basically a large yellow onion, which had been sliced up to resemble a flower, coated in a southern fried coating of some sort, and then deep fried until cooked. Khang, Mike, and myself had "Chocolate Thunder from Down Under"s which we all found absolutely hilarious, so much so that I couldn't even say it to the waitress whilst I ordered. Lovely meal, and I'll definitely have to take my family there some time in the summer when I'm back home.
Heading over to the cinema, we decided to see "The Interpreter" which was OK, if a little long winded. I think its main problem was that it became too clever for itself. I wasn't lost,
but I thought the movie was close to finishing despite only an hour passing by. Can't really recommend it, and Nicole Kidman's character was such a bad liar.
We went to check out some pool over at the bowling alley nearby, but the guy at the bar said it would be a £20 deposit on the table as well as £10 per hour to hire out the table. Wasn't really worth it so we all decided to go home; Khang taking Mike back to Walsall, and Joe and Viet taking me back to Kings Heath (and getting lost around Harborne - Quinton along the way).
When I got home, first thing I did was unpack my iBook and boot it up. Sadly, it wasn't until the following day when I was finally able to actually start using it since the upgrade of Tiger some got corrupted. I decided to format and do a clean install of Tiger with minimal applications installed. Everything I threw at Tiger worked, except video playback which for me is essential since one of the major decisions behind the purchase of the iBook was to use it for screenings.
I've now spent a good few days with Mac OS X and I think I am finally getting the hang of it. I'm still having some issues regarding Apple's document approach VS Microsoft's application approach, but it's horses for courses at the end of the day.
Anybody who claims Mac OS is rock solid is also telling rather large porkie pies. As with any operating system, you'll get well made pieces of software as well as poorly made ones. It just so happens that there's far more Windows based PCs around the world than there are Mac ones, so majority of the exposure will surely be with negative Windows experiences. As Khang and Mike will confirm, I've literally spent hours trying to get my head around very minor things in Mac OS trying to get the simplest of things to work. When things do work however, they work brilliantly. Hardware wise, Apple's stuff is superb. The battery life on this iBook is nothing short of stunning, I'd probably say I can get about 3 hours use out of it at medium to full load, and maybe 5 to 6 hours on minimal power usage; this is how a portable should be. Expect a more in-depth critique of Mac OS and the iBook at a later date.
I've not really gotten much chance to watch anime lately, though I have now seen the Naruto movie. I think Mike and Khang agree with me that it's not quite the feature-length spectacular we were hoping for, but it's pretty close. Nice animation, some nice fights, Naruto doing what he does best etc, no different to most movies which are attached to an anime series.
