Dear Mr Jobs,

I've had my iPhone since day dot–the day it came out. It is from the Palo Alto Apple store, you and your wife were there, and so were a hundred odd-people that had waited outside all night.

I've had a Macintosh since year dot. I used one with a laser printer to layout and publish a newspaper in the Haight/Ashbury from 1987 to 1989. I've used PCs too but I've always had a Macintosh and in the past year I'm back on Mac so that I can do video editing.

Loyal Apple customers have been your strongest evangelists. And they usually pay top dollar for Apple products when they first come out. Yet they also have to put up with lots of criticism from non-Apple users, being called zealots, fanboys, etc....

It is high time that Apple recognized this demographic and offered discounts on new products, such as the coming G3 iPhone to its most loyal customers first. Why should the Johnny-come-latelies get the discounts? It doesn't make sense.

PS: I set up a Facebook Group: "Apple Should Reward Loyal Customers With FAN Discounts."

I recently had a genius idea for boosting my writing productivity: I would park accessible extension cords or AC power supplies for one of my older Mac laptops in a couple of strategic locations (one that could be reached either from the dining room table or the futon in the living room, and one near the bed) and drag out an older 'Book to use as naught but a writing tool.

My stated excuse for this was exactly what I admitted above: An older Mac would keep me from being distracted... and this would help my productivity. No more being interrupted by a research check at Wikipedia that turns into a two-hour Wikiwander. No more stopping what I'm doing every 45 minutes for a quick ego check at Sitemeter or Technorati.

But that wasn't the whole truth.

If all I wanted was a distraction-free environment, I'd pay $5 plus $20 shipping on eBay for one of the early Pentium laptops out there that have miraculously escaped the landfill. A bare-bones Win98 installation, delete Solitaire, make sure that it has no wireless card in it, and down the road I'd go - except that zero distractions was only a part of the equation....

I do my best writing on a Mac.

Something killed my MacBook Pro hard drive yesterday and I can't figure out what did it.

The machine in question is a third generation MBP (Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz, a.k.a. Santa Rosa) originally shipping with OS X 10.4.9 (Tiger), manufactured between May 2007 and October 2007.

At first I suspected MBP EFI firmware 1.5 (released two weeks ago) caused the problem because it was the last thing I installed, but now I don't think so. ...

So, I'm lost on this one. Can connecting an external USB hard drive corrupt my HDD this bad or was it the EFI firmware update?....

After installing the Leopard Graphics Update for Mac OS X 10.5.2, customers may report they are unable to wake their MacBook Pro from sleep in closed clamshell mode.

Products Affected
MacBook Pro (15-Inch 2.4/2.2GHz) , Mac OS X 10.5.2

Resolution
Apply the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.5.1.

I was visiting my mother-in-law (hi, Bev), who went out and bought an iMac while I was there. She got the smaller 20" version. I'd seen these before in the Apple Store, and they are nice, but I'd never used one or was interested in them.

Well color me impressed. These things are great fun to use....

Once you get one of these on its own, away from the store where it is just ordinary and to your house, where you may have a 15"-19" LCD monitor (or worse, a clunky CRT monitor), it starts to shine...

It's that time again. Time for me to check out the current status of creating an emergency boot drive - this time one with Leopard installed. Let's cut right to the chase: the ease of creating these startup drives continues to move in one direction: from bad to worse.

Creating a pint-sized custom startup drive, with your own selection of utilities, was a breeze in Mac OS 9 or earlier. It became much more difficult in Mac OS X, but was still manageable, all the way through Panther. With Tiger, most previously successful methods would no longer work; you had to be increasingly "creative" to find anything that would get the job done. I detailed this unhappy trend in a pair (one and two) of previous columns here at MacFixIt. In a further article, I provided step-by-step details for a workable solution — installing a version of Tiger on a relatively meager in size (but cost-effective) 1GB flash drive.

When PayPal's information security chief recently outlined new measures the company will take to battle phishing attacks and online frauds, it became evident that Apple's Safari browser lacks certain basic security features. Some predicted PayPal will block Safari users from accessing the online payment service altogether. A company spokesperson now reassured users that this wasn't the case. However, there are no security features in Safari to protect users from online scams and identity theft.

It's hard to know where to categorise Apple's Time Capsule. It combines a 3 port gigabit router, USB file and print server, dual-band wireless access point and 1TB NAS appliance. For many home users, the Time Capsule will be the only device they'll need to manage their connectivity and shared data storage. If you're trying to manage costs, there's also a 500GB version.

Psystar, a small Miami company which has met with much attention for offering cut-price Mac clones, has said it has resolved problems related to its online store and physical location, and is once again ready to accept orders.

"It is our pleasure to inform you that our store is up and running, thanks to our new, high-volume payment processor," the firm wrote in a statement on its website. "Regarding shipping, orders placed the week of 7 April are currently being shipped."

Much like the fascination one finds when driving by a traffic accident, the Mac community is abuzz with questions of whether or not the supposed Mac cloner Psystar is a real company and will sell real Mac clones. But the real question is whether anyone in their right mind will consider buying one.

This is certainly a much different situation than the Mac market faced back in the mid-1990s, when a small group of clone makers kept taking share from Apple, especially in the high-margin top of the market....

So, really when we get down to it, this clone machine is all about being cheap. That would appear to be a problem, since cheap the very thing that Mac users don't want. If you want cheap, get something else. But not a Mac.

Behold the terrifying, er, beauty of the Frankenmac!

A company called Psystar claims that it's selling a "generic Mac" for $549 (or $399 without OS X). While such a move seems to violate Apple's end-user license agreement, it indicates just how the age-old topic of running the Mac OS on non-Apple hardware has mutated in this modern, Intel-Mac age.

While I'm not going to advocate that Apple's users rush out and configure a faux Mac of their very own.... But it also lets me explore a topic that, prior to Apple's switch to Intel processors, I could only speculate about: The performance of Mac systems that simply don't exist.

Take the "mythical mid-range Mac minitower".....

The Mac clone company said Monday that it had begun shipping PCs that had been ordered during the week of April 7, while a news outlet confirmed the company indeed is building an office at its Miami location.

If indeed true -- it is not known yet since no one has reported receiving the Open Computer yet -- it would end a tumultuous week for the Florida company. Its online store was down Friday, but had returned Monday.

Behold the terrifying, er, beauty of the Frankenmac!

A company called Psystar claims that it's selling a "generic Mac" for $549 (or $399 without OS X). While such a move seems to violate Apple's end-user license agreement, it indicates just how the age-old topic of running the Mac OS on non-Apple hardware has mutated in this modern, Intel-Mac age.

While I'm not going to advocate that Apple's users rush out and configure a faux Mac of their very own.... But it also lets me explore a topic that, prior to Apple's switch to Intel processors, I could only speculate about: The performance of Mac systems that simply don't exist.

Take the "mythical mid-range Mac minitower".....

Intel has tweaked its processor price list, knocking up to 50 per cent off what it charges for desktop CPUs.

The headline reduction came to the 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700, which now costs $266, down from $530. The 2.4GHz Q6600 is also cheaper now: down 16 per cent to $224.

The other big reduction was applied to the 3GHz Core 2 Duo E6850, which had 31 per cent taken off its price, bringing it from $266 to $183.

Welcome my second "peek behind the scenes" for Cocoa developers.

Having got the compulsory caveats out of the way, let's take a look at how to implement the so called "media browser" feature inside your own application. As the name suggests, a media browser is designed to let the end user browse for media - meaning things like photos, movies and audio files - before selecting a wanted item and incorporating it into their document.

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