Sour Apples

Eighteen months old. That's the age of my wife's laptop - the MacBook Pro that we were going to bring with us on vacation. Turns out the day before we leave, all video output ceases. Kaput.

Interestingly, one of the symptoms (we've been told) of this NVidia processor is the computer randomly shutting down. We had that happen a couple of months ago. Something Apple did (or maybe it was just pure luck on their part) made the random shutdowns occur so infrequently (it only happened twice after getting it back) that we felt it was worth the occasional trouble compared to the hassle of the Apple store and their "genius" bar.

I have a feeling that unless you press the issue (and you know you're affected - see the KB article) that they will try to delay it in hopes that they don't have to pay for the repairs that they already publicly admitted the need for.

So we're out a laptop for this trip. Maybe that's for the best. More time with friends and family - less time blogging and flickring. I'll still use my iPhone for tweets, though.

-- UPDATE --

Apple accepted full responsibility for the defective manufacturing and repaired the laptop's motherboard. They even replaced the DVD drive that had been acting wonky since we got the laptop! Because of the problems we had experienced with the laptop and because it has been essentially replaced we offered to buy the extended apple warranty. They refused, saying that if we didn't buy it before the one-year deadline then we can't buy it at all. Too bad. They could have made some extra money.

iPhone 3.0 Update Woes and Work Arounds

It shouldn't take nearly 6 hours to update your iPhone to the 3.0 OS, but it did for me.

It started downloading the update and seemed to receive that just fine, and it claimed to have backed up my iPhone before installing the update, but somewhere in that mix the iPhone became completely deactivated and insisted on being connected to iTunes. You know - that annoying screen on the iPhone where it shows a USB plug.

It wouldn't give me the restore from backup option, either. It was a core restore to the "original settings". To me that means complete data loss without even the benefit of the 3.0 OS.

So I did what any other person who's sipped from the Pierian spring does... I pressed ALT-CTRL-Shift while clicking the Restore button. Voila! A file dialog box asking me which firmware file to use. I pointed it to the update that just downloaded and it seemed to go well ... except during this process it neglected to restore all my 3rd party apps and their data.

I was furious, then I tweeted, then I denied it, then I tweeted, then I cried (I didn't tweet that)... but you get the point. I looked long and hard and the only restore point that iTunes offered was right before this happened even though I did manual backups a couple of weeks ago.

After a bit of research, I came across a tidbit that said the restore only restores data involving Apple's iPhone apps. You have to restore songs and video clips separately. That got me to thinking ... what if 3rd party apps somehow bind their data to the app during a sync in such a way that syncing the apps would also restore their data.

So I began that process ... and iTunes decided to do a freaking backup! I'm thinking this would take no time at all - it's only 300 megs... but it took nearly an hour. Suspiciously the same amount of time it would take when my iPhone was 4 gigs full. So maybe when the firmware installs, and when we do a restore, the data is present but not accessible until the application that calls it is installed on the iPhone.

I don't know exactly what happened to fix it, but I have nearly all my data back.

Again, the steps - not recommended, but if something goes wrong for you, who knows...

1) Downloaded new Firmware Update
2) Installed new Firmware on iPhone (first generation)
3) iPhone went wonky
4) Restored the last available backup (this surprisingly did *not* revert to the prior iPhone OS)
5) Resync'd the iPhone apps
6) Waited two hours until I got sick of the whole ordeal.
7) Slid the "Slide to Cancel" switch on the iPhone
8) Like magic, the apps were there with their data.

Hope this helps someone else out there. Better yet - hope you don't have to go through the same ridiculous install.

Cheers!