MacRyu – The Worst Mac Blog in Singapore, and Some Say the World

On Tim Cook and others

Posted January 17th, 2013 by Ryu at 12:39 pm in Editorial. 2 Comments

Been a long long time since I last wrote here, and before I restart having more frequent appearances here I thought I will post some very short thoughts about everything happening at Apple for the past few months.

On Tim Cook:

There are men who are “leaders”, and there are men who are just “bosses”. Unfortunately our dear man Tim seems to reside in the latter camp. I’m not doubting his abilities as a CEO/manager for it has been proven that he’s one of, if not the best, operations man in the world. But a leader attracts and keeps talent through sheer charm, a manager can only do the same, much less successfully, through promises of wealth and power. While Tim is arguably one of those talents attracted to Apple, he is no Steve Jobs, and it’s apparent if you follow news of Apple’s management shifts.

Still, the guy is one hell of a CEO, having run the company’s operations during its crazy ascent in the last decade, and was the best choice that Steve had to succeed him.

On Scott Forstall:

Unlike many, I am quite a Scott Forstall supporter. I don’t hate the look of iOS skeuomorphism at all, and while many like to say shit about the guy, you cannot deny that the guy is smart, and good at what he does. Everything iOS is today can all at least partly be attributed to him, and the so-called maps screwup was not really much of a screwup at all, no matter which way you see it.

Problem though, is that many geniuses are also jackasses, and Forstall happens to be one of them. Steve was able to “control” and keep Scott working under him for all these years, something that Tim was unable to do. I see the loss of Scott as a loss for Apple, but neither Tim nor anyone else in Apple today will be able to control Forstall, and it is best for Apple’s internal stability that he was fired. Which is why Steve’s presence is missed so badly, not just because of what he can contribute to Apple’s ideas and lineup, but also because of his influence in other areas.

Whether iOS loses direction from now on without Scott at the helm all depends on his Hair Force One successor, and I am not very hopeful, looking at his work on OS X.

On John Sculley’s remarks:

The guy is the reason why Apple almost shut down in the nineties. When he gives advice on how Apple should act, the correct approach will be to do the exact opposite of what he proposes.

Remembering Steve

Posted October 5th, 2012 by Ryu at 1:24 pm in Steve Jobs. 1 Comment

Today is the day that Steve Jobs passed away, a year ago.

Steve was the only person I looked up to in this world, the one person driving the one company that made my life interesting while I wait for the next thing they dish up, every few months or so. For someone like me, that kept me going.

I love all the rumours, the stories about his personality, and while I was never trying to emulate any of that, I loved every part of it.

Can anyone imagine how I felt when he passed away last year?

To me, he was not the control-freak CEO of a powerful tech company that people loved to curse and make fun of even though he was dying.

To me, Steve Jobs was the only reason I found life interesting.

M1 and Singtel Price Plans for iPhone 5 in Singapore

Posted September 20th, 2012 by Ryu at 1:38 pm in Apple, iPhone 5, M1, Prices, Singapore and Singtel. 1 Comment

Ahhhhâ€¦ After a horrible day yesterday I am now sure I am switching from Singtel to M1. Why? You ask. Cause I just can’t stand Singtel’s ways anymore. Everything wrong with Singtel reflects everything that is wrong with this country.

And here are the M1 prices.

And here are the Singtel prices, sourced from Lester Chan’s site. As usual, Singtel has the HIGHEST prices with the WORSE service. Singtel’s mobile internet is completely unusable in many places in town, even if there are full signal bars being shown.

iFlexi Plans

iFlexi Lite â€“ SGD$39.90
2GB Data
100 Mins Outgoing Voice
800 SMS
iPhone 5 16GB Price: SGD$478
iPhone 5 32GB Price: SGD$598
iPhone 5 64GB Price: SGD$758

iFlexi Value â€“ SGD$59.90
3GB Data
200 Mins Outgoing Voice
900 SMS
iPhone 5 16GB Price: SGD$198
iPhone 5 32GB Price: SGD$308
iPhone 5 64GB Price: SGD$468

iFlexi Plus â€“ SGD$99.90
4GB Data
500 Mins Outgoing Voice
1,000 SMS
iPhone 5 16GB Price: Free
iPhone 5 32GB Price: SGD$48
iPhone 5 64GB Price: SGD$198

iFlexi Premium â€“ SGD$205
12GB Data
2,000 Mins Outgoing Voice
2,500 SMS
iPhone 5 16GB Price: Free
iPhone 5 32GB Price: Free
iPhone 5 64GB Price: SGD$58

The Parities of Steve Jobs and Hyuuga Tooru in “Rich Man, Poor Woman”

Posted September 12th, 2012 by Ryu at 2:14 pm in Editorial, Japanese dramas and Steve Jobs. 3 Comments

Those of you who know me personally know that in addition to being an Apple freak, I am also more Japanese than most other Singaporeans. This drama season (summer, running roughly from July to September), I am addicted to “Rich Man, Poor Woman” a “Getsuku”(Fuji TV’s most famous timeslot for Japanese dramas, Monday 9pm, also the time slot that usually garners the highest TV ratings, and dramas in this timeslot usually receive the biggest budget from Fuji TV every season) drama about a love story between Hyuuga Tooru (Oguri Shun), a young and famous entrepreneur, and Natsui Matoko (Ishihara Satomi) a college student from Tokyu University who is unable to find work as graduation approaches. It’s my favourite drama of the year so far.

Being an Apple freak and “Chief Steve Jobs Worshipper”, I can’t help but keep noticing the blatantly obvious parities between the lead character, Hyuga Tooru, and Steve Jobs.

It’s highly probably that the scriptwriter, Adachi Naoko, wrote this script as a tribute to Steve Jobs.

*SPOILER ALERT* Those who are interested to watch the drama please be warned that there are a lot of spoilers below.

The Parities of Steve Jobs and Hyuuga Tooru

1. Steve Jobs behaved like a tyrant in his original stint at Apple, which he co-founded. So did Hyuuga.

2. Steve Jobs’ second company is called NeXT, Hyuuga’s company is Next Innovation.

3. Steve Jobs fell in love with a college student from a top college, Stanford. Hyuuga fell in love with Natsui, from Tokyo University, the most prestigious school in Japan.

4. Steve Jobs was forced out of his original company by a man whom he then trusted to be his partner, John Sculley, and Hyuuga was forced out of Next Innovation by Asahina Kousuke, his co-founder and partner.

5. Apple went downhill after Steve left, and so did Next Innovation.

6. Steve Jobs is all about Simplicity in all his products and UI(User Interface), and Hyuuga’s Personal File data system’s strongest point is the super simple User Interface that can be understood and used by everyone from young to old.

7. Steve Jobs’ crazy attention to product details and admiration for well built products (including the story about him spending a lot of time studying the construction, design and details of mercedes cars in the carpark) is matched by Hyuuga’s crazy attention to details about his furniture, and how he spent two years looking and thinking about the table that he wanted to buy.

8. Steve Jobs, in his younger days, stayed in a big house with very little furniture. So did Hyuuga.

9. Steve Jobs looked like a hippie in his early days before he founded Apple. After he cleaned up, he was a very charming and handsome guy who looked great in a suit. Hyuuga looked like crap before he started Next Innovation as well, and he too look great in a suit.

10. Steve Jobs loved Japan, especially Kyoto and its old temples (even though he did proclaimed that he will never visit Japan again after airport officials at Kansai International Airport ill-treated him). Hyuuga’s “place of peace” is in a Zen temple.

11. Steve Jobs was given up for adoption when he was young. So was Hyuuga. Steve eventually searched for his real parents but kept a distance, and so did Hyuuga, having found his real mother in episode 10 but not telling her that he is her son.

12. Steve Jobs founded Pixar during his exile, which became very successful, and Hyuuga founded Wonder Wall, which became quite successful during episode 10. Why do I call Wonder Wall the equivalent of Pixar in the drama? There is one very obvious fact;

John Lasseter, who is an important member of the Pixar team, looks like this with his usual dressing style:

and here is Hosoki, an important member of the Wonder Wall team, with his usual dress style:

The parity is so obvious that any REAL Apple historian can’t help but notice.

13. After his stint at NeXT and Pixar, Steve Jobs became an even better leader than before, and do did Hyuga after starting Wonder Wall.

14. Steve Jobs returned to Apple to save it from bankruptcy and turned it into the greatest company ever in tech history, and Hyuga is seemingly going to do the same to Next Innovation from the preview of episode 11, the last episode, at the end of episode 10.

These are just some parities that I can remember from the top of my head, and I’m sure there are even more. Will update as I remember.

While obviously the main story here is the crazily cute puppy love between the two leads and almost everything is fictionalised, I can’t help but feel consoled that Apple supporters are all doing their own tribute to Steve Jobs in their own ways.

Those who have yet to catch Rich Man, Poor Woman, please do! It’s my favourite Japanese drama of the year. The theme song by Miwa is crazily nice too. Though it sucks that Samsung paid their way into the product advertising for this show. It does serve as a reminder that this is all a parody of the real world.

Launch date for iPhone 5 in Singapore and other iPhone 5 tidbits

Posted September 12th, 2012 by Ryu at 11:43 am in Apple, Apple Singapore, iPhone 5, Launch and Singapore. 3 Comments

Just a few hours left to the iPhone 5 introduction tomorrow early morning, so let us run through some information that we already know as fact.

What we already know as fact;

1. iPhone 5 will be released in the States on the 21st. (WSJ)

2. iPhone 5 will be released in Singapore on the 21st as well. (Hardwarezone thanks DHL for leaking the info, lolol, and some other sources)

3. iPhone 5’s screen resolution is 1136X640, features 5 rows of icons instead of the usual 4 (multiple sources)

4. iPhone 5 has a brand new, 9-pin, UNI-DIRECTIONAL (this is freaking cool, you can plug it in both ways and it will work!) dock connector that will be featured probably on the new iPods as well (iLounge, you can count it on them for such news)

5. iPhone 5 will look like these two devices in the picture;

Picture from 9to5Mac obviously.

When 9to5Mac broke the news months ago about the above being the new iPhone 5 designs, I personally checked with supply chain sources who gave me the “ermâ€¦ I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING!!!!” reply which basically means “duhâ€¦”, yet many didn’t seem to believe me or 9to5Mac’s pictures. But then, as more and more leaks appear, I guess people finally know.

What we have no idea of;

1. If SPG’s iPhone 5 screen protector is precise and accurate, since Apple doesn’t seem give device dimensions to third party manufacturers in advance

2. If Apple will be the only one selling the new dock cables/adapters, thus making cheaper low quality-controlled cables impossible to buy for the time being.

3. If M1, currently the only telco in Singapore with 12GB iPhone data plans remaining, and the telco I am going to switch to thanks to shitty service and shitty coverage from Singtel, will kill its 12GB plans the very day iPhone 5 launches on M1. Or if Starhub and Singtel will backtrack and offer 12GB just for a limited sign-up period in order not to lose hundreds of customers to M1. Edit: M1 already dropped their plans to 2GB, 3GB, 5GB and 12GB. Too late.

4. iPhone 5 has LTE that ~~works in Singapore.~~ may work in Singapore. (As pointed out by Ivan in the comments!) However, some sources closed to the telcos say LTE on the iPhone WILL work in Singapore, so we’ll see.

Some Apple Store (retail) related news

Posted August 8th, 2012 by Ryu at 7:26 pm in Apple Singapore and Apple Store. 1 Comment

The Hong Kong Apple Store at IFC

This came in recently from another source (not the same one as my previous article on the Apple Store in Singapore). Do take it with a pinch of salt though, I’m not sure how accurate this is.

In the latest report released in June on the next batches of Apple Stores to be opened around the world in the following months/year, Singapore is suspiciously absent from the list of countries. Hong Kong’s second store still is on the list though.

Strangely though, around the last one or two months, chatter about the preparations for the local Apple Store has completely stopped, with some people close to the situation commenting that plans might have been delayed due to problems of site allocation and the general reseller situation in Singapore.

However, none of them are absolutely sure that the project has been shelved.

That said, it’s already August and there still isn’t any news on recruitment for a possible Apple Store.

Will we have an Apple Store soon?

Updated: Yes, we will have an Apple Store, just slightly delayed to next year. It will become very obvious in two months’ time.

First looks at the Google Nexus 7

Posted August 8th, 2012 by Ryu at 7:01 pm in Google, Nexus 7 and Product Reviews. 0 Comments

Mine came in late last week, thanks to the help of a good friend. Been playing with it all weekend, here are the first thoughts;

1. It’s slightly faster than the Galaxy Nexus on Jelly Bean, but when you have lots of widgets on your home screen or try to do multiple actions at one time, the lag is no joke. So much for Jelly Bean’s Project Butter (edit: It’s pretty fast generally, you can’t see any legginess in the interface so long you don’t push it)

2. It’s supposed to be a tablet, but in reality it’s really a giant Android phone, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Certain apps with tablet interfaces don’t work very well on the small screen, especially due to the crazily short width of the tablet in portrait mode, so apps work way better in “phone mode” (you can choose).

3. It’s pretty light, and I’ll love to bring it everywhere I go, until the iPad Mini (definitely coming out, thanks sources) debuts of course.

4. Build quality is a bit shoddy, I can hear the screen moving every time I touched a certain spot on the screen.

5. Every single bad point about the Android OS remains, such as the ability to do work on it due to the lack of proper apps, fugly app interfaces, irritating country-based restrictions on what you can or cannot buy from them, which means in Singapore you generally get NO CONTENT to buy. No books no music no movies no nothing.

Conclusion: This is just a first look, but I doubt my opinions about it will change. The Nexus 7 is a toy. A toy you can bring along on overseas trips together with your MacBook Air because it’s so small and portable, to watch videos that you torrent off the net because Cathay’s In-Flight Entertainment is a joke. And there’s really nothing bad about it being a toy. I love toys. It’s just not an iPad, and will never be in the next 5 years or so.

Sparrow Mail sells out to Google, scams its loyal users

Posted July 21st, 2012 by Ryu at 1:03 am in Complaints, Editorial, Evil Devs, Google, Google is Evil and Sparrow. 2 Comments

Today, Sparrow, arguably the best third party mail client on OS X and iOS (there aren’t many really) right now, sent its paid users this email;

This is great news for everyone in the company (big cash out), but for most of their loyal users, this not just a clear act of betrayal (who could blame them? Google probably threw hordes of cash at them for the sale “Not enough money? How about another million for kicks?”), but also kind of scammish.

Just less than a month ago, they heavily discounted both their iPhone app and OS X app one after the other, while around the same time promising new features such as an iPad version and push notifications in the future, on both their site and their twitter account. Both the promise of new features and the deep discounts lured lots of new users into running a third party mail client instead of the usual Mail.app.

It’s quite impossible this sale happened within a day or two, so Sparrow should have already known that they will be cashing out in late July, so looking back, those deep discounts were not to simply lure new users, they are really more of a “closing down sale”, an opportunity for Sparrow to maximise profits before the sale.

Which would have been fine should they have communicated this to their users, but they specifically misled their new users into parting with their cash for the apps, thinking that new features are coming in the next few months. This is the worst kind of sell-out any OS X developer could have ever done.

Seriously, Sparrow? Damn you.

P.S. Boing Boing has a video up about how to deal with this acquisition and prepare for all the upcoming innovations from the sell-out.

What I want for WWDC 2012 is a new iMac and the curious case of the 15″ MacBook Pro

Posted June 11th, 2012 by Ryu at 1:42 pm in Rumors, WWDC and WWDC 2012. 0 Comments

The past few days had seen a crazy mix of rumors about the exact new Macs that will be announced during the keynote tonight, and much of the rumors are about the big possibility that the new 15-inch Mac notebook will not be a MacBook Pro, but instead a new “MacBook”, and that the MacBook Pro line will live on a bit longer with only updates to the internals.

This mean that the Macs codenamed J30 and J31 in my previous post could instead be updated MacBook Pros as opposed to actually being new and redesigned iMacs.

Having absolutely no rumors/news about redesigned iMacs besides extremely vaguer mentions in the major rumor sites isn’t helping either. In the days leading up to WWDC 2012, we have heard a great deal about the new Mac Pros, the new 15-inch Mac notebook, and lesser about the updated MacBook Airs, but almost absolutely nothing about the iMacs, rather than some unverified news that redesigned iMacs will not make it in time for WWDC 2012.

However, something about the whole MacBook Pro line being retained despite having a new 15-inch Mac notebook stinks though.

Apple is not a company afraid to cut old products when they introduce new ones.

Apple is also not a company to keep complex product lines.

A 11/13 MacBook Air line, with a 13/15/17 MacBook Pro line, with a new 15 MacBook line, all for Apple’s notebook lineup, is absolutely nonsensical and not in Apple’s fashion to do.

What Apple will be in favor of, is a product lineup which they have implemented since day 1 of their big switch to intel more than 6 years ago.

6 years ago, there was a 13-inch MacBook, and a 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro.

Yes, this means that the notebooks are separated into two lines based on the size of the notebooks, which made sense since Apple could really only put in Pro-level graphics cards in the bigger Mac notebooks.

If you recall, Apple was all ready to follow that lineup when they introduced the unibody MacBooks (13-inch) and the unibody MacBook Pros (15-inch and 17-inch) in late 2008. But then they realized they had to have a Mac notebook under 1000USD, and thus the MacBook White was revived, and the 13-inch unibody MacBook became the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which in itself isn’t very “Pro”, being the only MacBook Pro without a dedicated graphics card (yes there was an oddball 15-inch without a dedicated card for a while, but nobody except Elsie Law wanted one).

If the Apple today is still the Apple of Steve Jobs, I believe we will be seeing this new MacBook line-up tonight;

11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air (with Retina Displays)

and

the all-new 15-inch MacBook Pro (redesigned, with Retina Display)

And then I’ll have my redesigned iMacs too. Yay~

The new iPhone part

Posted June 9th, 2012 by Ryu at 3:11 am in iPhone 5 and Rumors. 0 Comments

The new iPhone back case machined out of a single piece of solid aluminum, I wonder if the black means it’s anodized.

What a beauty.

Take this and compare it to the pebble-shaped, faked “metal” plastic shell of the recently-released Samsung Galaxy SIII running the ugliest version of TouchWiz ever, and I seriously wonder if anyone can still tell themselves that the SIII is even a choice.

Then again, lots of commoners have no taste.

As I have previously stated, I truly believe this is legit.