Death of a MacBook Pro, rise of the iPad
Now, this should be interesting. My two and a half year old, 17" MaBook Pro just died, well, it sort of died.
I went to bed, put the laptop to sleep and in the morning, the MacBooks screen wouldn't come on. Not good. I thought that if the screen wasn't on, it might still be running, so I tried to connect to it from my iPad using LogMeIn Ignition. No dice.
What to do? I turned the machine off and on a few times, waggled the screen to see if there was a loose connection, took the battery out and basically did all the things you do.
I started to panic, I had just written my first iPad application and was about to send it to the App store - but my last backup was a week ago and I had not backup up the app!
No problem, Macs are famous for Target Disk mode. Put your Mac into TDM and connect it to another Mac as an external hard drive. I dig out a Firewire cable, rebooted, held down T and bingo! It came up as an external drive on my even older 15" MacBook Pro. I was even able to reboot using my 17" MacBook as the boot drive (I didn't realise this as the time, but I had just saved my digital life....)
A quick search on the Internet and I discovered that the fault was probably the Nvidia Graphics card and the good news was that Apple would repair my Mac for free, if this was the case.
I booked in an appointment at the local Apple Store and proceeded to try and do a backup of my machine. This didn't go well. I had an hour to do a backup of 500GB. I soon realised that I wasn't going to succeed, so jumped in the car and headed to the Apple Store.
After describing the symptoms, I suggested it was probably the graphics card and the Genius said he thought so to. I gave him my laptop, he turned it on and - it came to life. Bollocks. Utterly typical. Anyway, Mr Genius got out his diagnostic hard drive widget, rebooted my machine and my laptop died again. The diagnostic widget did it's thing and promptly crashed. He said it was definitely the graphics card and that it would be repaired for free and promptly took the laptop off me. No, no, no! I cried. I said that I needed to do a full backup and would return in the morning. He wasn't overly pleased, but took down some details and said it would be fine. There is no way that I am going to trust Apple to return my Laptop with all the data intact.
I got home and promptly turned my laptop on and put it into target disc mode. I plugged it into my 15" MacBook Pro and....... nothing. I waited a while..... nothing. I tried a few things and got frustrated and pulled the firewire cable out and the moment I did that, the 15" MacBook Pro registered that I had pulled out a drive. Okay, I thought, I plugged it all back in and waited...... nothing. I tried a few more things..... nothing. I gave up and rebooted the 15" Laptop and went downstairs to make a cup of tea.
Caffeine in hand, I trumped back up to the office to find that the 15" MacBook Pro was still in a bootup phase do a repair on the hard drive. WTF? There was nothing wrong with the 15" machine. I left it to do it's thing and returned a considerable amount of time later to find that the 15" and booted from the 17", found the HD was trashed and automatically repaired it!!!! HooooYaaaa!!!! I just loooovvvvveeeee Macs. You show me a Windows machine that will do that without asking! I realised that because I had earlier asked the 15" to reboot using the 17", it now had that as it's first boot option and as a result, saw the sick 17" HD and did it's thing.
So this is all good, I was able to use SuperDuper! to do an overnight backup and this morning I realised that I will be without a laptop for a week. Not too much of a problem as I head off to Bruges in Belgium for a long weekend and will only need to find a way to work for three or four days.
Then the lightbulb went off. I decided to see how much real work I can get done on an iPad. This article has been written on my iPad using Pages, the neat thing is that I have connected my Bluetooth keyboard to it and I might as well be using a laptop.
I have setup Gusto so that I can easily connect to my websites using ftp. The nice thing about Gusto is that you can pull files off the remote machine and edit them in a well thought out editor.
I have LogMeIn Ignition so that I can remotely access machines that I support and obviously have Safari for web based work.
I activated Mail to sync directly with MobileMe and to get contacts and calendars (I normally sync directly from my Laptop). I also did a sync with 1Password, which I use religiously on the Mac, so that I don't have to type in reams of website username and passwords.
I already have Pages and Numbers on the iPad, so any spreadsheet or Document work I have covered and I had already moved all of my MindMapping to the iPad with iThoughtsHD.
I teach dancing in the evenings and use my MacBook Pro to DJ with, no trouble, the iPad is already synced with music and the iPad iTunes allows me to * easily * edit and create playlists.
The only thing I can't do is to continue developing my iPad App.
When I am on holiday, I have a T-Mobile sim in the iPad for data connectivity and I recently bought the iPad Camera Connection kit, so downloading photos from my camera will be a doddle.
Luckily, I had already loaded the iPad up with TV shows and Films and bought some Lonely Planet travel guides to Bruges that I can read from iBooks.
All I need to do is find my European plug for the iPad charger and I'm in business.
So here we go, one week without a Mac and using an iPad instead. Should be interesting....
