Well blow me down.

As one originally trained in the discipline of mechanical engineering you would expect me to display many of the characteristics of that genre and you might well be right. These characteristics include:

• Attention to detail
• Refusal to let well enough alone
• A binary approach to problem solving – right or wrong, no grey
• A general conviction that I am right and it’s up to you to prove otherwise
• A fundamental belief in the empirical over the theoretical
• Horrible working in ‘teams’ or whatever the management-speak BS of the day is for shucking responsibility for your actions
• When something sucks, I will make it a point of telling you to your face

Now the desire not to retire as a ward of the state saw many of these tendencies moderated over the past years as I had to act the sycophantic fool to all and sundry in the process of relieving them of their capital and making it mine. And while I had some modest success in doing that I can’t say it was much fun. Now I’m a retired old fart I can happily default to the above traits and feel better for it.

Anyone who has done any serious work with machines, meaning building or repairing them, knows better than to skimp on tools, hard, soft or liquid. When it comes to the vast range of chemicals and related materials involved in cars, motorcycles and machines of all guises, the wise man pays a little more and buys 3M products. Whether adhesives, abrasives, solvents, tapes, coverings, you name it, the products from Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing remain the standard to judge by. Just recall the last time you chintzed and bought aftermarket Post-It sticky notes, only to find they stuck to nothing. Or refused to let go. That’s 3M for you. The standard.

Long time readers of this journal know that one of my areas of ceaseless pursuit is that of a good computer mouse for the Hackpro desktop. I much prefer a mouse over a tablet for Photoshop outlining tasks, for example, so a good mouse is a key tool. I have written of several here and am now happier than ever (maybe that should be ‘least unhappy’?) with the Logitech MX900 recommended by a fellow photographer (thank you, Roy!), allied with SteerMouse software. Having tracked down two of these, used, I am happy as can be. Or at least I was until a while back when the cursor of the one at the HackPro started jumping about like a crazy thing. I tried all sorts of settings on SteerMouse for sensitivity and speed, but no. Nothing worked. The jumpiness seemed random and not related to CPU activity or the presence of other devices which I cycled to see if there was any cause and effect to be found.

Then it occurred to me that I had not followed my own rule and had bought a chintzy mouse pad. Well, $6.88 later and Amazon delivered the 3M Precise Mousing Surface and it’s night and day. Very thin, with Post-It style repositionable adhesive backing, hard with no ‘give’, it has a lightly textured surface and simply takes away any erratic cursor behavior.

Further the (very) fine print on the packaging makes the odd claim that the surface improves battery life for a wireless laser mouse up to 75%. My engineer’s reaction was to discount this as something written at 1 Infinite Loop, the gold standard for BS.

Here it is, greatly enlarged:

That’s pretty detailed, naming names.

3M rarely lies, in my many years experience with many of its products. Follow their instructions and the product delivers what is promised. But as I share St. Thomas’s most laudable characteristic, his engineer’s side, meaning one of extreme skepticism, I cannot let that go unchallenged. As the Logitech MX900 reliably starts blinking its battery light after 5 days resting on the old mouse pad, it will be simple to prove. So revisit here in a few days and all will be revealed.

Meanwhile, even if the battery bit is untrue, get yourself one of these and, like me, stop complaining. At least for now.

Update after much use: The battery life claim is pure BS. But it’s still a great mousepad.

Another consumer unfriendly move from the fruit company.

I wrote of the clear evidence that the new iMacs continue to have cooling problems here.

Now yet another reason has surfaced to avoid these machines. You cannot change or add internal hard disk drives yourself!

While accessing the drives in an iMac has never been easy, the post-white aluminum shell models with the ghastly glossy screens are easier to dismantle than their white predecessors. The glass screen is removed with a couple of small suction cups, the glass being retained by magnets. (Talk of form over function). A bunch of Torx screws retaining the LCD in place is removed and the LCD carefully raised while connecting cables are detached. The drives are then easily accessed. There’s room in there for an SSD in addition to the HDD. SSDs rock and I highly recommend the use of one as a boot and application drive.

But forget about swapping the HDD for a bigger one or replacing a blown one yourself, because Apple has made jolly well sure that your replacement will not work properly. You see, the greedy fruit company has installed unique connectors in its machines and in the HDDs they use. The connecting cable to the HDD controls the cooling fan speed for the HDD. Install a regular off-the-shelf HDD and the fan will spool up to a roar at 6,000 rpm, rather than the <2,000 rpm at which it ordinarily runs. So the only way you can get an HDD exchanged is to tramp down to the local Apple Store with your whopper iMac and tramp back there weeks later when it has been fixed. And if your 'local' Apple Store is 200 miles away, well then you are going to have to move closer, right? Or would you rather drive 800 miles per round trip? All so that they can hose you down an extra $100 for installing a replacement drive. A supremely thoughtless move by Apple, which I can only think is motivated by greed. Hard to explain it any other way. Here's the scoop from the fine people at OWC where I buy all my hard drives:

Any hard user of a Mac should avoid the iMac like the plague. When it does overheat or blows out its HDD, you will be stuck without a machine for a considerable period of time. And if that happens after the warranty has expired you are looking at very high repair costs. Remember my old 20″ and 24″ white iMacs which fried their graphics cards? Apple wanted $900 to repair that and to this day refuses to admit fault despite widespread comment on the flaw. Ridiculous.

There has never been a better time for demanding users to build a Hackintosh, at a fraction of the cost of the overpriced MacPro. Why, you could build two – talk of redundancy – and still have over $900 to spare, not to mention superior performance. Oh! and by the way, replacing an HDD in my HackPro takes two minutes – and that’s with one hand tied behind my back with breaks to play with the resident border terrier.

Overheating issues? Get real.

Intel SSD in the HackPro. Two 1 tB Samsung HDDs to the right. Drives slide in and out on spring-retained mounting plates.
The massive cooling fan at the top cost all of $10 and is many times the size of the one in any iMac. A replacement
can be found at your local computer store.

My HackPro has 2 x 1tB HDDs and the smaller SSD for the OS and applications. Replacing the HDDs with 3 x 3tB ones would give me nearly 10 tB of storage for a total cost of $575. I just don’t need that much storage (though my movie file server is now up to 10 tB!) but it’s nice to know I can use any off-the-shelf HDD if I ever do.

I take a leaf from the gamers’ book.

My initial enthusiasm for the Apple Magic Mouse has cooled.

There are three reasons.

The first is that it frustratingly loses the Bluetooth connection now and then which simply drives me up the wall. It does this both with my HackPro and, far more often, with the MacMini I use to watch stored movies. You would think it would work better with Apple’s hardware, but no. And that’s from two MagicMice – so unlikely it’s a sample fault. Go figure.

The second is that the ergonomics are not right. Even though the device is gorgeous to behold, it’s too low and I am developing wrist pain after extended use. And whoever designed that sharp edge – on a device meant to be held in the hand – well, the less said the better.

The third, another cause of extreme frustration, is that I cannot consistently get to the desktop by touching a selected point on the surface no matter how hard I try, using the MagicPrefs application I mention in my earlier piece. The touch point seems to change at random, working when it wants to. Just beyond irritating and the reason that finally made me change.

I checked around and one photographer friend recommended a Logitech model (the MX900) but sadly that is discontinued here. Others prefer to use the multi-touch pad on the MacBook Pro or whatever. However, I need a mouse for business use and also find it the easiest way to outline areas in Photoshop where localized manipulation is required.

So as those in the farming community like to say, I got me to thinking. Who would know most about mice? Why, the gaming community of course. They use them all day long, use them hard and are very demanding when it comes to smooth and instantaneous response. So I checked reviews of gaming mice with the following dictates in mind:

• Must be wired. I am through with batteries, RF and Bluetooth.
• Must have outstanding ergonomic design.
• Must be programmable for use with Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
• Must be super responsive.
• Has to have a scroll wheel.

I eventually settled on the fancifully named Razer Death Adder 3500dpi mouse, replete with glowing scroll wheel and adder design on the body. Mercifully, the glow can be switched off. On receipt, I downloaded the latest software from Razer’s site and read through the comprehensive instructions. The application runs as a stand alone program rather than installing as a System Preference pane. The Mouse pane in System Preferences continues to work so you can experiment between that and the settings in Razer’s application, though the latter has many more options.

The contrast in shape with the MagicMouse is clear from the picture:

Two side buttons circled. Illuminated scroll wheel and death adder (!) switched on for this picture.

The Death Adder is larger in all dimensions, maybe too large for small hands; most importantly it is far taller, meaning your palm rests lightly on it, which is impossible with the Magic Mouse. It’s some 1 3/4″ tall compared to 7/8″ for the Magic Mouse – that’s a big difference. The indented sides further aid comfort. The left and right buttons are discrete and a comfortable concave shape, unlike on the Magic Mouse which uses a contiguous convex surface and, although the Razer’s two programmable side buttons are on the left only, the mouse can be configured for left hand use. Nice. For serious lefties there’s a true left handed version with the buttons on the right. Every control surface can be programmed for any action and macro programming is also possible. I left dpi and polling at their maximum settings (only a slow CPU working near capacity would need these reduced) and simply programmed the side buttons for Desktop and Dashboard, respectively, and programmed a press on the scroll wheel for Exposé- all windows. I hop into the desktop and between apps often.

The dramatic height difference is clear.

Double click speed, scrolling sensitivity, cursor speed/acceleration are all adjustable. I have scrolling set to the lowest speed otherwise it’s crazy fast. It’s a fraction heavier than the Magic Mouse which means just right. There’s a satisfying heft to it. The cord provided is very long at 7 feet – no issues reaching the HackPro under my desk. When shipped the lower surface is protected with clear plastic; once removed the mouse is wonderfully smooth on a mouse pad, resting on three protruding nylon pads. The side buttons are responsive and you can even adjust the delay before they kick in. There is no ball, a laser beam being used for tracking. Tracking is very smooth – I can detect no jerkiness or ‘steps’ as the cursor is moved on screen. It’s as good as the Magic Mouse in that regard, meaning excellent.

What’s not good? Vertical scrolling is stepped rather than smooth, something that only Apple seems to do right. The scroll wheel does not tilt sideways for horizontal scrolling, though it’s not a feature I miss. Let’s hope that the eventual ingress of dirt through the scrolling wheel will not wreck the mouse in the way the Magic Mouse’s predecessor, the Mighty Mouse, would fail. The Lazer’s body is sealed, so it’s not like you can clean it.

Other than that, the Razer Death Adder seems like a winner, at under $50. I had $20 left over after unloading both my (not so) MightyMice for $35 each. Good riddance. The only thing that ‘Just Works’ here is eBay.

The current issue of The New Yorker has an interesting piece by experienced technical writer Malcolm Gladwell about how a young Steve Jobs saw a prototype of the original mouse at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. He had his engineers make it mass produced and cheap. Too bad Apple has forgotten how to design a good mouse. Like its iMac, the Magic Mouse is a triumph of form over function, looks trumping all else in the design brief.

Looks like an easy ugrade.

When I first reviewed the new 11″ MacBook Air (MBA) I mentioned that a larger 256gB Solid State Drive (SSD) was coming to the aftermarket as a replacement for the small 64gB or 128gB versions Apple ships. Well wouldn’tyou know it, Apple put a kibosh on PhotoFast threatening to pull all their other procurement from the manufacturer if PhotoFast did not cease and desist from making the MBA a more useful tool. You can guess the rest.

Well, that tyranny just ended as MacSales now sells much the same SSD under the name of Mercury Aura Pro Express in capacities of 180, 240 or 360gB for $500 – $1,180. The 240gB is the sweet point in terms of gB per $ at $580. It ships with the required pentalobe screwdriver; Apple arrogantly thought that fitting these unique retainers would stop anyone from opening up the MBA (the company feels increasingly like it’s run by tort lawyers – so much for ‘Think Different’). This special screwdriver is used to remove the ten screws holding the rear cover. It will also work on the latest versions of the iPhone 4 which uses like retainers. Jerks. Removal of one more regular Torx screw frees the SSD for replacement, and MacSales provides that screwdriver also. Like drives are also available for the 13″ MBA.

The PhotoFast SSD promised to ship an external enclosure to make use of the removed original SSD; MacSales does not include that (shame) so you must first make a bootable backup before replacing the original SSD. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to do this. Hopefully aftermarket enclosures will crop up to make use of the removed SSD.

10 external and one internal screw, and the new SSD (circled) is a plug-and-play replacement.

So for $1,000 for the 11″ MBA and $580 for the 240gB SSD upgrade you have an extremely light and capable notebook computer which my earlier tests showed is more than up to the task of running Lightroom 3 and Photoshop on the road. You will need a plug-in adapter for CF cards on either the 11″ or 13″ MBA and an SD card adapter for the 11″ (the 13″ has an SD slot). That’s still a lot of dollars per gigabyte but in the recorded history of man slim, light and fast have never been cheap.

I am finding that the 11″ MBA is the perfect size for occasional computing, lacking the added optical drive and backlit keyboard of the MacBook Pro but weighing in at 2.3 lbs vs. 4.5 lbs for the 13″ MBP. The MBA has a 5 hr battery life vs. up to 10 for the MBP. This piece was written on my MBA.

If you want to make the MBA into your primary computer (it accepts external large displays for home use) the addition of increased SSD capacity described above may make sense.

Compared to the HackPro.

When FU Steve built the HackPro to replace my fried 24″ iMac the goal was simple – make something reliable and fast for photo processing with superior heat management and using inexpensive off-the-shelf parts.

Technology marches on and Apple has now released its latest iMac which in its best configuration includes the latest Intel i7 CPU and a 27″ display. Is it better than the HackPro?

Summer 2010 27″ iMac.

HackPro (under the desk!) running two Dell 2209WA monitors, fall 2009 vintage.

The proof of the pudding is in test scores using Geekbench (CPU and memory performance) and Cinebench (video and graphics speed).

The specifications compare as follows, both machines using Snow Leopard 10.6.4:

HackPro:

CPU: 2.83gHz Intel Core2Quad, Q9550
GPU: EVGA Nvidia 9800GTX+ with 512mB GDDR3 memory
RAM: 8gB DDR2 800mHz

iMac 27″ i7:

CPU: 2.93gHz Intel QuadCore i7
GPU: ATI Radeon HD5750 with 1gB GDDR5 memory
RAM: 8gB DDR3 1333mHz

Here are the test results using Geekbench and Cinebench, both in 64-bit mode:

Geekbench 2.1.6 64-bit:

HackPro (my tests):

Overall: 6731
Integer: 6430
Floating point: 10142
Memory: 3385
STREAM: 2545

iMac (Apple Insider tests):

Overall: 10052
Integer: 8868
Floating point: 15764
Memory: 5028
STREAM: 4258

Cinebench 11.5 64-bit:

HackPro (my tests):

OpenGL: 23.44 fps
CPU: 3.16 pts

iMac (Bare Feats tests):

OpenGL: Not stated, but I would guess 20-30% faster
CPU: 5.50 pts

What’s the fastest that Cinebench has tested? Here are the results from their database (12C/12T means 12 Cores and 12 Threads):

Cinebench R11 OpenGL test results – HackPro in orange.

Cinebench R11 CPU test results – HackPro in orange.

The bottom line is that the top of the line iMac i7 CPU model smokes the HackPro with faster video, CPU and RAM performance. The price is competitive too. The top of the line iMac i7 with 8gB RAM sells for $2,399. The HackPro with a like screen (the Dell U2711), CPU, GPU and RAM would cost $2,000 to make.

So what’s to choose?

• The iMac is $400 more
• The iMac needs zero construction time. It takes an experienced worker 3-4 hours to assemble the HackPro, and klutzes need not apply
• The iMac uses an LG 2560 x 1440 IPS display with a glossy glass cover; the screen only accommodates 72% of the AdobeRGB gamut. 1 year warranty.
• The Dell U2711 uses the same LG display with a matte plastic cover; the screen accommodates 96% of the AdobeRGB gamut. 3 year warranty.
• Reliability of the iMac is unknown.

So the iMac is a good buy if you can get over the unanswered reliability issue and think you can properly profile that garish screen with the very limited adjustments provided. My experience is that Apple makes some of the most unreliable hardware on earth, with heat managment consistently compromised at the altar of appearance. However, if this new iMac proves reliable then it’s getting very hard to justify the 100% premium asked for the separate box MacPro.

There’s no arguing with the value this time around. Further, if you want a second 27″ display, Apple’s newly announced (glossy, of course) Cinema Display will run you $1,000, which is much the same that Dell is charging for its comparable Ultrasharp 2711.

Am I tempted to upgrade? Not remotely. While I can increase the HackPro’s CPU performance by 20% by simply overclocking the CPU there is no incentive to do so, given my needs. The enhanced speed means little to me as my primary use is Lightroom 3 (where everything is super fast on my rig) and I do no video processing; were I doing the latter for a living I would certainly think about it, if I could get comfortable with the glossy screen and its poor handling of the Adobe RGB gamut. The most likely upgrade in my future is to a pair of larger Dell monitors – either the 24″ U2410 ($500 each) or the 27″ U2711 ($1,000). But that’s a discussion for another day. Stated differently, for my use the HackPro’s processing speed is at the point of diminishing returns, meaning I would have to spend a lot more for a relatively modest increase; the graphics display card remains state-of-the art and can drive anything out there but there are now considerably better and larger displays available, albeit at a price. Indeed, for my day job of money management, which uses lots of stock price, bond yield and live news data feeds, the only thing I would like in the HackPro is more screen real estate. It seems there’s never enough display space available in our information overloaded world.

As a matter of interest, as the HackPro is assembled from readily available off-the-shelf PC components, upgrading to the CPU and RAM specifications of the latest top-of-the-line iMac would necessitate a new motherboard, CPU and RAM at at total cost of $700. The GPU in the iMac is close in specs to that in the HackPro so no upgrade is called for. Everything else in the HackPro – case, coolers, drives, card reader, wireless, can be reused. Not something you can say of the iMac. And given that most of the HackPro’s components come with 3-5 year warranties, a fairer price comparison suggests adding AppleCare at $169 to the cost of the iMac which extends the one year warranty to three years.

How cool does the HackPro run with its five fans (two set on medium – case cooler and HDD cooler, three variable speed – CPU, GPU and power supply coolers)?

The spikes are from running the demanding Cinebench video benchmarks.

Sure would be nice to have that data for the new iMac; when running Lightroom the temperatures barely budge on the HackPro.

If you are spending someone else’s money, not your own, here are the latest MacPro prices, all without a monitor:

Prices for dopes.