Performance
On paper the Macbook Pro 13″ is a good system, and should have more than enough power to do everything I wanted. But after getting it home I noticed that Firefox was sluggish, especially when trying to play flash video. When opening lots of tabs (like I do very day when I start up my browser) there would often be hiccups for a couple of seconds when the computer thought about opening them. I gave Apple the benifit of the doubt because my desktop system sometimes has some problems with Firefox and Flash video too.

After doing a clean install of Snow Leopard everything is faster, and I was especially happy and a little surprised that Firefox and Flash are a lot faster too. On top of that all apps and general system usage seem to be noticeably snappier.

Printer Support
I am running a Windows Home Server as a file and print server and have had a lot of problems getting everything to play together. For some reason my Brother Laser printer would never even show up in the Leopard print setup dialog. After installing Snow Leopard I went to install the printer again and had my samba address and printer name ready. To my surprise the server was already listed, so I just clicked it and went all the way to the Brother Printer. I was then prompted to select the printer from a very long list of printers. The driver was then installed and it work right away.

Heat and Power
Another thing I did not like in Leopard was the heat and power usage. I had decent power usage, but I noticed that after being off power for just a half hour the meter said I only had three hours left. With Snow Leopard I have been using my system for over an hour and a half and it says I still have five and a half hours left. Now I am not sure if this is an actual change in battery drain, or if they just tweaked the battery meter code. But either way it makes me feel much better about my battery.

In Leopard I also noticed that the fan would come on quite a bit when the computer was idle and would get quite hot from time to time. Now I have not heard the fan get loud enough to hear one, and the weather here is hotter than ever. The system feels a little cooler too.

My Thoughts
As you can tell from my comments so far I am happy with Snow Leopard so far. Personally I only paid $10 for shipping so I have been looking forward to it for a while. But to be honest I would have been happy if I had paid $30. Maybe because I have programming experience I appreciate smaller more efficient code just as much as shiny features.

A few caveats though, I do not have a large library of Apple software I use all the time. Everything I use is pretty common and frequently updated. Also the Macbook Pro 13″ is very new, so it was unlikely it would have any compatibility problems. So after doing a clean install I had no issues with compatibility or stability.

If you have a lot of legacy software or hardware devices it would be a good idea to research support for your stuff before wiping your system. But when you are pretty sure all your stuff will work Snow Leopard is well worth the $30.

Everything they did in Snow Leopard seems help both the desktop but mostly the tablet. For example:

• Smaller Footprint: A new Tablet will most likely sport an SSD so the few extra gigabytes we scoffed at on the desktop become more relevant on a tablet.
• Faster: Faster code means they streamlined and made their code run more efficiently. This means much better performance for us on laptops and desktops, but would also mean that the full OS will run better on smaller devices. A tablet will most likely have a lower powered embedded CPU, like a Atom. So efficiency would be important.
• Software Support: A tablet would probably not like running emulation software like Rosetta. So this clean break mentality of Snow Leopard will help force developers to update their applications to the latest Snow Leopard API’s, and get rid of as much legacy apps and drivers as possible. Then when the tablet launches it will have as much software support as possible

These are just thoughts about where this could be leading. Even it a tablet is not coming I think optimizing code is a great thing, especially when the results are so noticeable. Personally I am not even all that excited about a tablet unless it costs around $300, which I am pretty sure it will not. My Macbook Pro and PC serve me well.

After using it for a couple of days I thought I would post some inital thoughts on the system, and compare it to my limited experiences with the Dell XPS 13.3.

The first thing that hits me as a new Apple owner are some of the intangible things. For example, just opening the box and seeing the well designed and thought out packaging made me excited. When you open the lid of the box you are presented with your system right on top, no flyers for free virus protection, or extended service. Just the clean lid of your system with a little pull tab to help you gracefully lift your system out of the box.

Then when you start up your system you are presented with a short movie which serves no purpose other than being a flashy intro. But it works well because when it was playing I was drooling at the glossy screen. In short it is a stunning screen, I have the system next to my two Dell 24in monitors right now. The Dell monitors look flat and soft compared to the MacBook Pro. Ofcourse they do not produce any glare though, which the MacBook Pro does.

The only other things that stood out in my short time are the keyboard and trackpad. The trackpad is amazing, it’s a little stiff to click the whole thing, but I quickly fixed that. In the System Preferences you can simply set “Tap” to be a click. So now I just tap the trackpad with one finger and it’s the same as a click. Also gestures are very nice. Whenever I saw the demos of gestures I thought they looked cool but a little gimmicky. But even after a day I am already used to using several gestures all the time.

Two fingers to scroll windows is the most useful gesture yet. And makes using the trackpad almost as useful as a mouse. Other nice gestures are the four finger swipe for Expose, and for the app switcher. I have not found much use for pinch or rotate yet, hopefully when I play with Photos a little that will come into play.

The keyboard scared me a little when I first started typing on it, just because the keys seem to be so widely spread. There is atleast an eighth of an inch between each key. At first I found my self hitting the dead space between keys quite a lot, just because I am used to tightly spaced keyboards. It seems to be another none issue however, because as I type this post I am gaining speed all the time and find it quite comfortable to type on.

That’s as far as I have gotten so far. Installed Windows 7 via Bootcamp, and that worked well. So now I am just going to try and configure everything the way I like it and will post some more updates as I go.

Oh and for people who remember my problems with the Dell XPS 13.3″ you will be pleased to know that this system is near silent. I can barely hear the hard drive, and even the DVD drive is pretty quite. This fact alone made my day.

“HFS+ read support in Boot Camp.
Boot Camp now includes HFS+ read support that enables you to access the files on your Mac OS X partition from Windows. It

Multitouch has been worked on for many years by several different companies. Microsoft has had the Microsoft Surface prototype in development for years, and showed mature demos in early 2007.

I am not saying that Microsoft is innocent, just that neither is Apple or Linux. The point is that software only improves by taking things that work and improving on them. If no one was allowed to copy anything we would never make any progress in any field.

Can you imagine if you could patent an equation in Mathmatics? Then no one could use your equation to solve more complex problems in the future. Where would we be today? Probably still working with basic algebra.

*End Rant*

After seeing some new photos of the Moscone Center and new banners I am starting to think the rumors of an ultra portable Macbook with WiMax are looking more accurate.

“There’s Something in the Air” seems to imply a “new” WiFi technology, and the new laptop seems to fit the bill pretty well.

Anyway, I am looking forward to the keynote and to see what Steve has up his sleeve.

TV Shows

Recently with the start of the third season of Prison Break I decided to buy the episodes of Prison Break that I had not seen from Season two. That ended up being over half the season (I was in the process of watching them on Netflix DVD) and cost me nearly thirty dollars. When I started playing the first episode I was actually shocked by the quality, it was really bad. This is a relatively new show, shot in HD and should showcase the best that iTunes has to offer. Instead I got a blurry highly compressed mess.

Watching the show on my 24in LCD really showed the problems in quality. When viewing text on the screen the compression and artifacts really start to show. There were also some problems with graininess in the blacks on screen, but I will give Apple the benefit of the doubt and blame my monitor for that. Because some computer LCD’s (especially from Dell) are know for some problems with black levels etc.

The next problem was the copy protection. My plan was to burn a DVD of the shows after downloading and watch them on my big screen, like you would with a music file after you download it. I quickly realized that there is no way to burn a DVD that will play in my DVD player from iTunes. My only option is to pay for an illegal application that will crack the iTunes copy protection and burn DVD, buy an Apple iTV and stream the video over my home network, or buy a video iPod and a TV out dock. So I was pretty much stuck watching the shows on my computer monitor.

When I hit this road block and was unable to watch the shows I just paid for on my big screen TV it really highlighted the problem with iTunes. They are in the pockets of the movie and music industries, and they are playing off of our desire for online downloads of these shows to take our money and sell us sub-par products.

If I went to Best Buy and bought a DVD set for $30 and it had the same level of quality as the iTunes TV shows I would return it in an instant and demand my money back.

Breakdown:
Prison Break Season2 on iTunes $39.99
Pros: Relatively fast delivery depending on your download speed, can order single episodes.
Cons: Poor quality, over 11GB download, price, no viewing on big screen.

Prison Break Season2 on DVD $49.99 from Best Buy
Pros: High quality, big-screen viewing, packaging and extras.
Cons: More expensive, you have to leave the house to buy it.

Music

The next problem was with the music. I have become so used to the average quality of the music downloads from iTunes and many other services that I was shocked to hear the difference in quality when I used dbPowerAmp to rip my CD’s and using Apple Losslesss to encode the music.

For a long time as soon as I get a new CD I would just rip it using iTunes, and a pretty high quality setting. Then burn mix CD’s from my download and burnt songs. After seeing the quality of the TV Shows from iTunes I decided to try dbPowerAmp to rip a CD I had just bought. I used the Apple Lossless codec to get maximum quality, then burnt a custom CD to play in my car.

Luckly I had actually bought some of the same tracks from iTunes before, so I could compare both. Playing on my cars Bose system the difference between the non-iTunes and iTunes versions of the same songs was great. There was a whole level of detail in the highs and lows of the songs that just does not seem to be present in the iTunes versions of the songs.

Breakdown:
iTunes Songs:
Pros: Can buy single songs, download immediately.
Cons: Low quality, most songs still have copy protection, have to use iTunes.

CD’s
Pros: High quality, can rip and burn songs all you want, can use any music player.
Cons: More expensive, have to buy albums, can not instantly download.

Copy Protection

With my recent experiences I realized how Apple has been slowly getting us used to living with Copy Protection and I was almost at the point where I had accepted the limitations they are forcing on us. Movies have always had copy protection on them, but you could always go to your friends house and take your DVD with you to watch, and the big thing you can watch it on your TV with out jumping through hoops! With the TV shows I just downloaded not only could I not goto a friends house and watch the shows, I was forced to sit in front of my computer to watch them.

As for music we have it good right now with CD’s. Yeah they are expensive, but when you get them you can still RIP them to your computer, burn custom CD’s for your car, and download them to your music player.

If we keep supporting iTunes and other services that support copy protection then we are just helping the music industry kill off CD’s and slowly ease us in the frying pan of digital copy protection. Before we know it we will all be neck deep in it and cooked.

Yeah Apple has started to release some non-protected music, but it is far from their whole library. Also you still have the same problems of lower quality than CD and it’s possible that the music industry could change their minds at any time and just stop selling un-protected music.

iTunes the Application

iTunes has always been bloated, but now it is beyond the point of bloated and is entering the relam of Microsoft Office for built in crap. I have always been forced to download Quicktime with iTunes, which was not too bad seeing as iTunes is a music and video player. But now Apple is talking about bundling Safari for Windows with iTunes, and I have to download a new version of iTunes every time apple adds something for a product I do not own and do not want. Why do I have to have a whole Ring Tones section in my iTunes UI when I do not have an iPhone? Why am I forced to download a 60MB file every time Apple adds a new feature to one of their other products I do not own?

Right now iTunes is open and just playing a song, and for that it is using up 82MB’s of RAM on my system, the iTunes Helper application is using up 12MB’s of RAM and the iPodService is using up 4MB of RAM. That’s a total of nearly 100MB’s of RAM for a music player!

For comparison the latest version of WinAmp uses just 19MB’s when playing music.

In Closing

For now I am going to be looking for a light weight music player that just plays music. I will be buying CD’s and DVD’s instead of downloads, and I will be using dbPowerAmp to rip my music into a high quality lossless format (probably FLAC).

Before now I still saw Apple as the underdog, and more worried about their customers than the bottom line. But after some of the recent events with them bricking iPhones, and releasing sub par iPods I think they have started to turn the corner and are looking more like the big corporations we have all come to loath, where a buck is worth more than keeping people happy.

Seeing as I no longer use the ITunes Store, due to aversion to DRM’d content, this review will be based more on my impressions of the actual applications design and performance.

Appearance

Overall ITunes got a subtle face lift from its previous version. When the application first starts up you are greeted with a familer interface. The main change I noticed was a move away from the shiney glass look of aqua, to a more subdued flat look. The new color scheme reminds be a lot of Web 2.0 color schemes, more subtle shades and less contrast of colors. This is a much better look overall, also due to its less stylized theme it blends in much better with both the Windows and MacOSX environments.

The next thing you will notice is the addition of headers to the left sidebar that breaks it up into more manageable sections. There are sections for you music library, the iTunes Store, devices, and playlists. This is a pretty obvious next step which is already in quite a few other players. It should have been like this from the start. It always looked a little cluttered in previous versions having all the items just crammed into the sidebar.

Features

Cover Flow is probably the biggest new feature. It is basically a virtual CD rack where you can flick through all your CD covers and pick a disc to listen to. At first I thought this was pretty gimmicky and I could not see myself using it much. However after a week I find that I am using that view nearly exclusively now. I find that it is much easier to recognize the cover art of your favorite CD than it is to find the name of it. When you have a list of hundreds or thousands of songs it can take a while to zero in on the one you want. Cover Flow allows you to quickly skim your collection and find the album you are looking for.

The other feature I noticed was the iPod summary view. It gives a nice breakdown of how your iPods capacity is being used, and provides easy access to options controlling how iTunes interacts with your iPod. Nothing ground breaking, just a nice usability feature.

That was about it, if you are not interested in using the iTunes music store there really are not that many new features for you. This update, like many updates in the past, is aimed mainly at supporting new features in the iTunes store, in this case it’s support for movies.

Performance

iTunes has always been known as a memory hog, and iTunes 7 takes this to a whole new level. When I was playing with the cover flow feature my memory usage hit nearly 170MB’s. During normal use in list mode it went down to around 120MB’s. That is 50MB’s more than Firefox which was recently slammed for it’s memory usage (which was actually an optional page caching feature), and three times more than OpenOffice writer which I am using to write this review. On my system this kind of memory usage is not a problem, hell that’s why I bought a lot of RAM is so I can use these hogs. But for a lower end system with only 512MB’s of memory, like a lot of default Dell and Apple configurations, it can really affect your systems performance.

CPU usage is also high when using the new Cover Flow feature, but seemed comparable to iTunes 6 when just playing music. Seeing as you only really use the Cover Flow view when you are directly interacting with iTunes it probably does not matter if it eats up extra CPU cycles. A few exceptions might be if you are playing games in windowed mode and browsing your music collection.

Overall though I would have to say that the application feels more responsive than version 6. Even though it uses more resources, I found that it seemed more responsive where it matters, in the user interface. In version 6 checking for new podcasts used to bring my system to a standstill until it was done. Now iTunes does a much better job of staggering the podcasts so that it only checks three or four at a time, and does not attempt to hit all fifty at once.

Scrolling large lists of music or podcasts is also much smoother than before, and switching from one view to another is quite a bit snappier. This boost in perceived performance is probably due in part to the increase in system memory usage.

Final Thoughts

iTunes 7 is a pretty minor update from version 6, most of the changes are all in the Store. The actual application has only seen minor feature updates, and performance improvements. If you are iTunes user then I would say it is a worthwhile update. So far I have had no problems with it, and it seems to run quite a bit more smoothly than prior versions, even if it does use more resources.

The new look is also a minor improvement, but it is still an improvement. The color scheme and theme fits in with the look of windows much better than version 6, and I looks better in OSX too.

All of the minor improvements are not enough to keep me as a user though. Over the years I have made an big effort to stay DRM free by only buying a few songs from iTunes, and the rest on CD. Now I am free to change my main player and operating system whenever I like.

Even though iTunes has a few decent improvements the idea of one huge application that does it all does not appeal to me. It goes back to the old days of the Mozilla browser, when they had a huge application that did everything from browsing, to web development, to chat, to e-mail, when all you wanted to do was browse the web. This is the same thing when I want to listen to music I do not want to have to load a huge app that can rip/burn CD’s, download podcasts, buy music online, sync my portable device, play TV shows, and everything else iTunes does. In the end I just want a small player that allows me play and organize my music.

This is even more important when it comes to music, because the music player is not the only or even the main application you have running on your system. You normally always have your music playing in the background when you work or play on something else. So the last thing you want for that background program to be a huge beast.

If you like using iTunes or a just forced to because you have a investment in their DRM’d music and proprietary music players then 7 is a decent upgrade for you. But if you prefer simpler more efficient applications, then iTunes 7 just adds more bloat to an already obese application and does not really provide any new features that justify its huge size.