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

iPhone Updates?

Posted October 7th, 2007 by Ryu at 10:33 pm in iPhone. 0 Comments

One might be wondering why I have not been posting about the iPhone or the iPod Touch. Well, here’s the update.

I’m officially not interested in the iPod Touch anymore.

Am now officially hoping for the dev team to continue with their breaking in of the iPhone’s new firmware, and am actually hanging out in irc every night just to check on the progress. After all, who won’t be excited if their first visit to the iPhone-dev channel is the same night that the recent biggest iPhone hacking progresses happened.

Hell that night was exciting.

MacRyu loves the iPhone. We want one.

Bungie, Microsoft, Halo – Yeah right

Posted October 7th, 2007 by Ryu at 9:45 pm in Microsoft. 0 Comments

So Bungie left Microsoft (sort of). Finally. What’s on the radar for them next then?

One wonders if Apple will be benefiting from this split. After all, it’s not so long ago that we were watching Bungie talking to us about the great new Mac game Halo on the Mac platform during one of Steve’s keynote, and then all of a sudden they were bought up by Microsoft, and that’s it. Pro-Apple people resigned and left after a while, and Bungie was never the same again. Halo became a hit series, as we all know, but that was about it. Bungie was just living off the earnings of a great hit made many years ago by people who left the company, with little or no new ideas. Now that they are independent again, one wonders if they will be able to churn out anything other than more Halo spinoffs.

And I wonder if they’ll ever be a major Mac game developer again.

Heck. I don’t even like Halo.

Apple Store’s down. Is Leopard coming?

Posted October 4th, 2007 by Ryu at 7:05 am in Leopard. 1 Comment

Thursday morning 0735hrs. A strange hour and day for the Apple Store to be down, as that is usually reserved for Tuesday nights.

Is Leopard coming?

Edit: Nothing again.

Official Unlocked iPhones in Singapore? Sounds fishy

Posted September 30th, 2007 by Ryu at 2:07 am in iPhone. 1 Comment

Over at the hardwarezone forums, someone by the nick of mrxhub1 is claiming that a local distributor is bringing in unlocked versions of the iPhone, and that these are local sets with local warranty. He also claims that all the iPhones are approved for sale in Singapore by Apple Singapore, and that they are currently undergoing checks by IDA for approval right now.

If you ask me, this whole thing reeks of rotten sashimi, as many of his claims are possibly nothing but pure bull. Let’s just take 2 simple points for example;

1. He claims that the first country in Asia where the iPhone has been released unlocked is Thailand. So far what we have heard is that the iPhone is sold in Thailand, but those are hacked, and not official stuff.

2. He’s selling the 4GB iPhone?! Why the heck will Singapore get a discontinued product?

Here’s a pdf file of the first page and second page of the thread.

You can view the whole thread at
http://forums.hardwarezone.com/showthread.php?t=1738691&page=1&pp=15.

iLife@iShop event by MacNUS

Posted September 29th, 2007 by Ryu at 10:22 pm in Events. 0 Comments

MacNUS held a closed-door hands-on seminar entitled iLife@iShop, just one week after their “Welcome to the Mac, Again” event, at iShop. This event was limited to a small number of participants and was given by Mr. Junior Tan of Apple Singapore.

Some images here. More on their flickr site.

Brand new Aluminium (silver and black!!) MacBooks in October!!!

Posted September 22nd, 2007 by Ryu at 4:45 am in Leopard and MacBook. 0 Comments

I am very very excited about this piece of news.

According to 9to5Mac, the same guys whom, with the help of their chinese spies, revealed to the world the shape of the new iPod Nano and the presence of the iPod Touch way before everyone else, Apple is preparing to ship brand new MacBooks in the 4th quarter of 2007, which starts in less than ten days!

The great points about these new MacBooks?

1. Aluminum Enclosure instead of the current Polycarbonate ones

2. 2 colours, Silver and Anodized Black Aluminum (Black Aluminum!!! This thing is going to be really beautiful!)

3. Priced AGGRESSIVELY (Which may mean even cheaper prices than today!!!)

4. Similar design to the current one, but with a smaller bezel and thus a smaller footprint

5. Considerably Thinner!!!

6. Lighter!!!

7. Special Touchpads!!!! (Multi Touch functions? Backlit Touchpads?)

As you can see, I have every single right to be damn hell excited about this piece of news. And according to 9to5Mac, their sources have already seen the MacBooks in physical form, which will indicate that production is already in progress, and that their sources are probably people working in the china factories.

The even more interesting thing here is, upon looking up some archives, there was a similar post by Cruchgear.com a few months back! They believed that the MacBooks are due for October. They were ready to ship them back in June together with Leopard, but now that Leopard is delayed, the MacBooks are delayed too.

So how accurate do I think this piece of news is? Extremely accurate. Looking by the products they have released in the past few months, it’s extremely clear that Apple is going to transit into using more aluminum for their production, as evident by the latest iPods and iMacs. And one does get the feeling that the iMac, the coming MacBooks and the iWork and iLife suites were actually planned to be released together with Leopard but did not managed to do so due to the delay of Leopard. iWork and iLife had to be released earlier, and to do that some code/library frameworks from Leopard actually has to be transferred into Tiger during OS X updates installation for them to actually work. Furthermore, the design focus of the recent iMac and iPod updates do prove that these new Aluminum MacBooks are coming. Remember the main points that Steve Jobs used to praise the new iPod Classics and the new iMacs (the MacBooks, iMacs, iPod always have the privilege of sharing the same design focus ever since the iMac G5 era)? “all-Aluminium construction” (okay for the iMac it was aluminum and glass, technically, but I guess you can agree with me that the glass was there to make the screen look glossy) and “they are thinner!”. Furthermore, the 2 colours of the iPod Classic fully explains the Silver and Anodized Black Aluminum colours of the new MacBooks!

Ahhh…. I can’t wait. This is so much more exciting than the iPod Touch. I totally forgot about that piece of iPhone wannabe crap already!

I should expect some of my friends will not be too pleased about the update since they have just purchased their MacBooks recently, but well, guess what? I think many girls will snap at the chance to buy what is possibly the last batch of lovely white polycarbonate MacBooks from Apple!

Life is great. And if you do remember, the first 30 years were really just the beginning. Welcome to 2007.

iPod Touch Screen Problems

Posted September 21st, 2007 by Ryu at 2:39 am in iPod. 0 Comments

The recent big news about the iPod Touch is that a lot of the 16GB ones reportedly have a hardware display problem which renders them almost unviewable/usable. However, apparently the hardware problem has been fixed in the latest iPod Touches that are made in production week 38 and after, as many readers on macrumors.com have affirmed.

According to them, week 38 iPod Touches can be differentiated from the earlier iPod Touches by the boxes they come in.

Pre-week 38 iPod Touch’s box is below with the picture of Corinne Bailey Rae

The boxes that came with the latest problem-free iPod Touches have Macy Gray in Bailey Rae’s place

This posses a possible problem for us in Singapore. While those of you who have pre-ordered with the online Apple Store (I cancelled my pre-order by the way) will probably receive the Macy Gray box, the few resellers in Singapore who already have their stock in will probably be stuck with the Bailey Rae boxes. And apparently iShop is one of these resellers.

I guess everyone should exercise caution when purchasing an iPod Touch. Ask for one with the Macy Gray box.

Coming writeup on iPod Classic’s audio codec “problem”

Posted September 19th, 2007 by Ryu at 4:47 am in iPod. 0 Comments

Seems that the iPod Classic’s been given the bashing by a lot of iPod lovers lately over Apple’s discussion to change suppliers for the audio codec from wolfson to cirrus logic, in order to maximise profits. I personally don’t think too much of the issue, but since it will be of interest to those who want one, I figured I can write about it.

First things first, anyone care to lend me one for testing?

New iPod Touch available in Singapore

Posted September 17th, 2007 by Ryu at 11:14 pm in iPod. 8 Comments

Finally, some reliable sources tell MacRyu.com that the iPod Touch will be on sale from tomorrow onwards, at iShop only! Who’s going down tomorrow to check the Touch out? ME!

Edit: Argh. Wrong info after all. iShop has the stock in already but they refuse to sell.

MacNUS Seminar Series No. 1 – Welcome to the Mac, Again

Posted September 16th, 2007 by Ryu at 12:34 am in Events. 0 Comments

So MacNUS, easily the biggest tertiary based Mac user group in Singapore, has started off the new academic year with the first of their traditional year-long seminar series. This one is entitled “Welcome to the Mac, Again” as opposed to last year’s “The Power of X”.

Last night’s event was split into 3 main sections, with one on the OS X environment, one on NUS’ various configurations and settings, and one on free OS X apps. Basically overall everything was more on the bare basics side of things, which obviously this seminar was targeted at, for the participants are all new Mac users.

Various announcement on future MacNUS offerings were also made at the seminar, and attendees were generally excited about them. In the end it turned out to be quite a great seminar overall for both MacNUS and the seminar attendees.