Not that I can see the screen or anything, but I’m now the proud owner of a new 3gs. I was having coffee with my wife at Starbucks this morning when we decided to go next door to the AT&T store and see about fixing her dying cell phone. She had been wanting an iPhone to blog and tweet on the go and we both were aware AT&T had a current $50 iPhone 3GS promo. We walked in thinking we’d fix her phone and walked out with a pair of new 3GSs. I was teased by my friends in the past for still clinging to my first gen iPhone and I now understand why. Now if I can get figure out how to get my apps transferred…
Installing Leopard on a G4 from an Intel Mac over Firewire
LRH uses a Powerbook G4 running Tiger. For various reasons we both wanted to upgrade her Powerbook to Leopard and last night was my first attempt. It turned out to be an exercise in frustration and stupidity. Frustration for 3-4 hours lost on the project and stupidity for not realizing why it didn’t work the first time.
Usually, installing an OS on a computer is a straightforward process, especially with a Mac. However, we had the unfortunate added complication of a defective CD drive, so the install media had to be remotely mounted and used.
1st Attempt:
- Connected G4 Powerbook to Intel Macbook Pro with a firewire cable and booted the G4 Powerbook into target disk mode. Note that target disk mode is a way of turning a Mac into a giant external hard drive.
- Booted the Macbook Pro from the Leopard install DVD and formatted the remote drive on the Powerbook G4 to GPT. Installed Leopard.
- Reboot the G4 Powerbook only to find a welcome screen consisting of two buttons displaying a curved arrow and a right-pointing arrow respectively.
It turns out that the open firmware on the G4 does not understand the GPT partition structure used by Intel-based macs. Booting from Intel hardware invoked this method of installation that required GPT to be used before the OS could be installed.
What I Should Have Done:
While it should be possible to install Leopard by booting from the Macbook Pro a much easier solution is to just make the Macbook Pro appear as a disk on the Powerbook.
Booting the Macbook Pro into Target Disk Mode should make its DVD drive show up as a bootable drive on the Powerbook and the install should happen with the correct hardware being identified so the older partition structure will be used.
Sacrilege?
I’ve been seduced by the dark side and installed an unholy computer virus on my brand new Macbook Pro. This virus is commonly called Microsoft Windows Vista. Yes I did it… I installed Windows on my Mac.
::sigh::
Apple Remote and Front Row
One of the projects I worked on at Apple has finally been announced so I can talk about it openly. I think this is the most significant project that I worked on since I wrote all of the firmware and worked on the circuit board. Apple will be making millions of these and shipping them all over the world. Its called the ‘Apple Remote’ and you can see it here http://www.apple.com/imac
An Apple Remote will ship with each iMac and can be magnetically attached to iMac when not in use (check out the picture on the bottom). It has a very simple design with only 6 buttons but only 6 buttons are necessary since the UI is designed so well. In fact Steve Jobs compared it to a 40+ button Microsoft remote and pointed out that it exemplified the Apple design philosophy of simplicity without sacrificing function.
If you have time, I highly recommend you view the keynote where Steve Jobs introduced the new iMac and Apple Remote. He starts off by introducing 3 new features and the remote is covered in feature ..3 so you can skip ahead to that part if you don’t care about the rest of the iMac. You can download the keynote here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/specialeventoct05/
The keynote also introduces the new white ipod which supports photos, album art, and video (like music videos, home movies, etc) so its definitely worth a look.