Showing posts with label apple service. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apple service. Show all posts

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Apple peelings for 29 Feb 2012

On this special day when the real date and the celestial dates are reconciled a couple of Apple peelings come to mind.

Apple stock price goes well over $520 and hits another peek. I have made a bit of £$ on Apple stock over the years, and probably should have held for longer. With the iPad3 poised for launch now is bound to be a volatile period. I have always thought that playing the stock market is like betting on horses except that you can choose when the race starts and finishes.

Was in the local Apple store just now to get the other half's Mac Book Air repaired under warranty. The trackpad has lost it's click and the touch to click mode is rather tiresome. The MBA is only a few months old but was repaired soon enough by the Apple Genius behind the bar. Am considering getting the extended warranty for my MBPro as that is an expensive beast to repair. My experience with Apple hardware over the years IISi -> Q650 -> G3 -> G5 has been good but when push comes to shove electronics are just electronics and do burn out unexpectedly.

Whist waiting at the Genius bar a lady came in requesting service on a iPhone that was dead. The tech checked the records and noted that the iPhone has been reported stolen. Service was declined. This is a good thing. Before yours gets stolen or lost read this article. After your phone gets stolen or lost please report for deactivation via an app or phone carrier. The more the ThievingUnderClass (tm) learns that shiny tech is only valuable to those that own it the better for all of us.

Still feeling the love for TimeMachine backup service. Moving whole environment between hard drive and SSD was a breeze. Time machine even rescued my extensive book mark list after I toasted it using Plist editor. Welcome back ~/library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist.

And finally a couple of wonky screenshots both genuine and not pShopped at all. One a customisation of application fail and the other generated by empty the trash on a remote server.












Saturday, 29 March 2008

What a disk worth ?

A friend has a newish Power Mac and loves the box. Unfortunately it crapped out during an upgrade to Leopard with a hard disk error and had to be reinstalled losing all the data. That was a warning, as just this week the disk died completely to the point of not being seen at boot time or by disk utility. An Apple-care call to Apple was made and a disk exchange was agreed. The standard exchange a faulty part was dispatched under the "DIY repair" process that removes the need for a "return to base" repair but the faulty drive has to be sent back in exchange.

There has been recent concern about returned hardware being "re manufactured" back into the field and service folks rummaging contents so there is reason to worry about data security.

All very good so far but what is that returned disk worth ? The dead mechanicals not very much but the data on the drive can be priceless. It has all his email, password vault and documents. Chances are that the data is not recoverable but that could not be said for some drives returned under warranty. There is now no chance to wipe the disk and mechanical destruction would invalidate the return. He could of course buy his own replacement drive but then that is a waste of the extended warranty payment.

I guess it comes down to a matter for trust or using a drive/account encryption program such as Filevault to prevent data recovery from a lost hard drive.

Gannett