{"id":1347,"date":"2009-11-03T21:52:48","date_gmt":"2009-11-03T12:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2009-11-03\/1347"},"modified":"2009-11-03T21:52:48","modified_gmt":"2009-11-03T12:52:48","slug":"my-new-mac-behold-the-awesomeness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2009-11-03\/1347","title":{"rendered":"My New Mac: Behold the Awesomeness!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\nNOTE<\/b>: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Well, I finally<\/span> got a new<\/span> computer, though the process itself wasn't\nparticularly smooth. Apple made it difficult for me to give them money,\nsomething that neither the consumer nor the Apple shareholder in me\nappreciates.<\/p>\n\n

As I\nmentioned<\/span> the other day<\/a>, I'm finally<\/span> going to ditch Windows, an\noperating system I've lamented having to use ever since, well, having used\nit. The new quad-core\nall-in-one iMac with a 27\"<\/span> screen<\/a> announced recently seems to be an\nincredible value, both in terms of performance\/price and of “tidiness”\n(since you need just one wire to it, the power cord). It was irresistible<\/span>.<\/p>\n\n

But I resisted. The geek in<\/span> me decided to pay an obscene amount extra for\nthe large, clunky, heavy<\/i> Mac Pro, because of how it can be expanded.<\/p>\n\n

The long tale of woe (and, ultimately, awesomeness)\nthat follows is mostly as a diary<\/span> entry for my own memory. Long story is\nlong.... and boring.<\/p>\n\n

Take My Money, Please!<\/p>\n\n

So, I wanted<\/span> the quad-core Mac Pro, with a few<\/span> simple customizations: I\nwanted<\/span> the US wireless keyboard instead of the Japanese wired keyboard, the\nnew Magic\nMouse<\/a>, and 6GB of memory instead of the 3GB that came standard.\n(Apple's prices for extra memory are hyper-inflated, but this particular\nupgrade cost the same as if I were<\/span> to do it myself.)<\/p>\n\n

So, I go to<\/span> Apple Japan's web site to place my order, and when I select<\/span>\nthe Mac Pro, it says “ships in 24 hours”. Cool. Shipping is extremely fast\nin Japan – you can even get same-day<\/i> shipping from places like\nAmazon – so I expected<\/span> to get it quickly. But after<\/span> choosing my\ncustomizations, I noticed<\/span> that it now said “ships in 3-5 weeks”. Doh!<\/p>\n\n

It turns out that selecting the memory customization makes it “1-3\ndays”, selecting the US wireless keyboard makes it “2-4 days”, and\nselecting the Magic Mouse makes it “3-5 weeks”. Yikes. After much\nexperimenting, I found<\/span> that if I ordered<\/span> the mouse and keyboard separately\n(as opposed to as part of the machine's customization), it would cost a bit<\/span>\nmore, but arrive much faster, so I did<\/span> that.<\/p>\n\n

At Amazon.co.jp I ordered an Intel 160GB solid state drive (SSD<\/a>). It has no<\/span> moving parts, more like a fast<\/span>\/big camera\nmemory card than a hard<\/span> disk. I intended<\/span> to use this as my main boot disk\nbecause its very low latency (its very quick response time) means that the\nsystem can access applications and data much more immediately than with a\nnormal<\/span> disk. I also ordered<\/span> four 2TB drives to be used for other\nstorage.<\/p>\n\n

We then left on a short trip about which I'll post once I get<\/span> my photo\nworkflow up and going, but while on the bullet train I got<\/span> a call<\/span> from\nApple: there was a problem<\/span> with my credit card and I'd have to contact the\ncredit-card company. Sigh. This is my own fault – the first 20 times\nmy credit-card company froze my account (“suspected fraudulent activity”) I\nwas<\/span> appreciative that they were watching out for me, even though it was\nalways just my normal day-to-day use that triggered it. But somewhere<\/span> among\nall the inconvenience they caused time and time and time again, I got sick<\/span>\nof it and should have<\/i> dumped them. Believe me, it's high on my list\nnow.<\/p>\n\n

Anyway, we returned home late the next day and I called<\/span> the credit-card\ncompany and cleared things up (and resisted the deep-seated desire to bite\nthe head off of whomever answered the phone). The next morning<\/span> I called<\/span>\nApple to have them re-process the card, but that department was closed for\nthe weekend. Rather, it would be quicker to cancel the order and resubmit\nit, so I did.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

The next day I checked the order status, and saw that it was again held\nup due to the credit card. Arrrrgh. I called<\/span> the credit-card company and\ninquired about any denied charges in the last day, but they said there was\nno activity except $300 from Apple. Apple had successfully processed the\nfee for the Apple Care extended warranty, but hadn't even tried submitting\nthe charge for the computer itself. Arrrrrrgh.<\/p>\n\n

I thought that perhaps they had blacklisted my card, so I used<\/span> my card's\n“safe shop” feature to generate a new,<\/span> temporary card number that would\nappear to the merchant as an unrelated card, and re-submitted the order yet\nagain.<\/p>\n\n

It, too, was held up “due to the credit card”, so I was<\/span> stuck until they\ncame in to work on Monday.<\/p>\n\n

So, Monday morning rolls around and I call,<\/span> only to find out that the\n“ships in” dates they quoted were from China, and that it might\ntake quite a while<\/span> after that before it gets to me. There seemed to be no\nsanity in my immediate future. Dejected, I told the<\/span> guy to cancel my\norder.<\/p>\n\n

Amazon.co.jp had the computer in stock, with a note<\/span> that I could<\/span> get it\nthe next day if I ordered<\/span> within the next 3 hours. Schweet! I couldn't<\/span> do\nthe customizations, but those were small issues that I could<\/span> handle myself\nlater. In placing<\/span> the order, I was looking<\/span> around for where to choose the\n“expedited shipping”, and somehow ended up submitting the order\nwithout it. Oops. Amazon lets you change a lot<\/span> about the order after the\nfact, but I didn't<\/span> see how to change the shipping, so I canceled<\/span> it and\nimmediately tried to reorder.... but they didn't have any more in\nstock!<\/p>\n\n

I waited around for a while to see whether they'd put the one from my\ncanceled order back, but it never showed up, so I guess<\/span> someone else got\nit. Sigh.<\/p>\n\n

Time for Plan C, which should have been Plan A. I called<\/span> around\nKyoto-area stores and found one that had the item in stock, put a hold<\/span> on\nit, drove over, bought it and the US wireless keyboard, and took them home. As a bonus<\/span>, I got them<\/span> for less than I would<\/span> have at Apple or Amazon, and I\nhad<\/span> them in my hands now.<\/p>\n\n

Behold the Awesomeness!<\/p>\n\n

Apple's Mac Pro<\/a>\nis the physically largest home computer I've ever seen. It's forty\npounds<\/i> (as much as 7-year-old Anthony),\n20” high,<\/span>\n19” deep,<\/span>\n8” wide.<\/span>\n\nIt's huge. This is not a good<\/span> thing, except that at least they put the size\nto good use in that it's an absolute breeze to service. I thought<\/span> that the Dell<\/a>\nthat I got<\/span> three years ago was a beauty<\/span> of inner tidiness and\neasy-to-access precision, but compared to the Mac Pro it's a rat's<\/span> nest of\ncheap, chintzy kludge.<\/p>\n\n

The Mac Pro is precision machined and laser etched from a single<\/span> block\nof granite, or so it seems. Lift a latch<\/span> and the heavy brushed aluminum\nside of the chassis effortlessly falls away to reveal absolute order and\ntidiness. Not a single<\/span> cable or wire is visible.<\/p>\n\n

The first thing I did, before even powering it on, was to yank out the\n650GB disk that came with it, mark it, and place it into storage (where\n“storage” in this case means \"somewhere among the clutter on my\ndesk). I replaced<\/span> it with the 160GB SSD, then plugged it in and booted from\nthe OS-install CD. This was made somewhat more difficult than it should\nhave been by the fact that the instructions for booting from CD –\nhold down the C key while booting<\/i> – neglected to mention that\nyou had to already have the CD in the tray, or the whole thing would be\nignored. Once I figured<\/span> that out, I booted<\/span> from CD and installed OSX 10.6,\nSnow Leopard.<\/p>\n\n

Once that was done, I powered<\/span> off and slid in the four 2TB disks\nmentioned earlier, and booted again. The OS immediately<\/span> told me that they\nweren't formatted, and brought up Disk Utility to let me have my way with\nthem.<\/p>\n\n

It's shocking how easy the next steps were, even though I'd never done\nit before: I configured<\/span> two of the drives, Bay 1 and<\/span> Bay 2, as a 2TB<\/span>\nmirrored RAID array, and the other two drives, Bay 3 and<\/span> Bay 4, as a 4TB<\/span>\nstriped RAID array. The former<\/span> basically wastes the bay-2 drive to keep an\nexact copy of what's on the bay-1 drive: the redundancy allows me to\ncontinue working if the bay-1 drive were to fail. The latter<\/span> pairing\nessentially combines the two disks in such a way<\/span> to make a double<\/span>-sized\npartition that has no redundancy, but allows for fast reads and writes.<\/p>\n\n

I then named the first “Main” and pointed Time Machine<\/a>, Apple's backup solution, to the second.<\/p>\n\n

So, my setup is now like this:<\/p>\n\n