angrys0ul

I bought an Apple MacBook. Even though its the cheapest Apple laptop I bought and even though I could have got something really more powerful if I chose to buy a Dell or a Toshiba its really cool. Thats no surprise I guess. But I am not sure if the coolness is due to the Mac factor or due to the laptop factor because I have never owned a laptop before. One of the main reasons I like Apple laptops is because of the design (not because of Leopard). By design I mean the hardware design, and by hardware design I don’t mean how the parts are hand picked and fitted together with craftsmanship so that they work seamlessly. By design I just mean the look and feel. Just take a look at it. Its just an inch thick. It weighs just 2.2 kgs (5 pounds). Has a 13.3 inch screen, this might depress some but thats what portability is about, right?

The power adapter (Magsafe adapter) is an innovation in itself. It connects magnetically and unplugs when someone trips over it. It has a slot loading optical drive, there is no drive bay that you need to push.

The main thing where other laptops miss on is symmetry. With a Macbook as with all other Apple products, they are symmetric, the keyboard looks the same from any direction, no out of order special keys, the keys are all equally spaced. Its not just the keyboard, when you look at the laptop from any angle it looks the same. At times I get confused which side the display opens. When I say from all sides, I don’t really mean from all sides, its a cuboid, it can’t look the same from all sides. When you look at a Dell or a HP you can easily say which is the front and which side is the top (when the screen is closed).

But the problem like the others argue is Apple products are expensive. And yes they sure are. The beautiful design has to come with some overhead. Thats business logic.

After a lot of moving back and forth I have decided to get a MacBook. I wasn’t completely ready to get one untill I saw one and felt it with my hands because I was having a feeling that the 13″ screen might be a bit too small. But once I went to the Apple store I was convinced that this is the one for me, its the one im gonna spend the rest of my life(1-2 years) with.

And Apple offers student discounts on select products. Check the Apple online store and compare with the Apple online student store to see the discount. In case you are going to buy at one of the retail stores Apple has, you better check the discounts online because I had some bad experience while buying my MacBook with student discount.

Its official: I got a Macbook. I bought one like some 2 months ago and didn’t have time for a post.

Bought the basic $1099 MacBook.

And by the time I am posting this to my blog Apple has updated the MacBook lineup and you now get a 120GB hard disk instead of the mere 80 mine has and a 2.1GHz processor instead of a 2.0GHz and its the new Penryn lineup from Intel, launched only this Jan.

And if you didn’t know, Apple offers discounts for students, $100 off on all MacBooks and $200 off on all MacBook Pros at the time of writing, go to the Apple online store. Don’t go to the Apple retail store to know about student discounts because people who work there sometimes have no idea what the exact student discount is on a specific product and they just tell you the amount they know which might not be true. I had a really bad experience while buying my MacBook and I had to go to the store 3 times to buy and get the right discount. I wrote about how Apple screwed the student discount on my MacBook.

I was in a dilemma weather to buy a MacBook or a Sony VAIO or a Dell. I didn’t research on the lineups of other brands, but i found some interesting laptops from these brands. But the reason Why I chose a MacBook over the Dell and the VAIO is the design.

The following text is NOT about some ground breaking evidence to prove an Apple scam, its just a bad experience I had due to the behavior of some incompetent Apple employees.

How to buy a Mac?

• Go to the Apple store
• choose the Mac you want to buy
• pay for it
• and you have a Mac.

How to buy a Mac with student discount?

• Go to the Apple Store
• Choose the Mac you want to buy
• Ask for the student discount (You have to show some proof though)
• Pay for it
• and you have a Mac

For me it wasn’t as easy. I went to the Apple store at Stoneridge Mall, decided to buy a MacBook, the basic one, it costs $1099 and then asked for a student discount. The woman who helps people out said I will have to show some ID or they will need a print of some web page on the university website which says I do go to that school. What I did was login to the MyUnivname site and showed them my ID, the names matched and they were convinced so I was eligible for the student discount.

Then they told me about the printer rebate(buy any printer and you get a $100 mail in rebate) I didn’t see a need for the printer but then I was like, hey its free! So lets get it. Got a HP printer for $99 (Effective free when the mail in rebate is used) and the MacBook. I got the laptop and then checked the bill they gave me at the parking lot, just to make sure everything is right. This is when I noticed that the student discount was only $50 but I was almost half-sure that it has to be $100. So I went back to the store and talked to the guy that billed me and he said, the discount depends on the model and its $50 for the basic MacBook and $100 for the other two MacBook models. I was still in doubt but but was not very convinced as I have seen the price of the MacBook on the online Apple Store for Education to be $999. Its quite possible that they might have changed the discount so I didn’t insist them to re-check the correct discount.

By the time I reached home, I was feeling more hesitant about the discount and went online to check the discount and there it was, a sweet $100 discount on all MacBooks including the basic model. I immediately called the Apple store where I bought the MacBook and asked them what the discount for a basic MacBook was, the guy just said $100.

Oh really, I bought a MacBook few hours back and you only game a $50 discount

We are sorry about that come on over, we can rectify that

I forgot to ask him if I had to bring the computer along when I come for the correction, its obvious that the computer won’t be necessary because its just a change in the billing system that needs to be done, I called them back to make sure I didn’t need to bring the computer. This time it was a different guy on the phone and I had to tell him the whole story and what he said was just shocking

Actually the discount on the basic model is only $50

What???? The online Apple Store says $100

Oh, let me check (music)

……….

We are sorry, we confused it with the student discount for the iMac, come with your bill and we will credit the money back to your card.

I went back after a few hours and every employee was different than the ones I saw while buying the laptop, may be there was a shift change in the mean time. I directly went to the billing counter and told the guy about the $50 vs $100 issue and then he was surprised to see such a grave mistake

Who the hell did this? We are very sorry, let me correct this for you.

He typed something on the computer and then gave a new receipt with some $54 being credited back to the card. I guess the extra $4 should be for the tax they charged on the $50. So now I have got a $100 discount as I was supposed to. Its not such a bad world after all.

You may say why do all this when you can easily buy on the Online store and Apple will ship it free to your place in a day. It was actually a Saturday and I just couldn’t wait until Monday to get my MacBook so I decided to go straight to the mall and get one instantly.

Its Diwali today, one of the most exciting festivals in India. India is a country dominated by Hindus but still people from other religions can never find a better place with such cultural harmony. Every religion’s major festival is a national holiday for us. Diwali is the festival of lights, people celebrate by lighting candles and is now more of a multi religious festival with everyone enjoying the spirit. I will stop talking about Diwali here and you can find more about the festival at the Wikipedia page for Diwali.

Okrut today had a link in the top header when clicked toggled the theme to a Diwali theme which lookied like in the screenshot below.

Much attention has been paid to the footer to make it look more web 2.0

The logo has been slightly changed to belnd with the theme

Incase you don’t use Orkut, this is how the original theme looks like.

This Diwali theme just showed how ready the site design is to implement clean and blended themes. It might as well be an indicator that Orkut is getting ready to be themed. And the recent Open Social launch makes the okrut team more busy as they have to make it Open Social ready. Till now there is no sign of adding applications to Orkut.

Orkut does not allow customization like MySpace, but they have recently added many features like ability to embed media in messages, show updates from friends in the user’s homepage, ability to add feeds to user’s profile and more recently an Ask Freinds feature.
Orkut is one of the major social networks and is watched closely by analysts because its from Google. Intially Orkut was like a Brazilian social networking site but the scene is fast changing. It noew enjoys a strong presence in India. The Demographics page from orkut proves the point.

In India you can rarely find students who don’t have an Orkut profile. There are many home grown social networking sites trying to get a pie of this but most of their users overlap with Orkut. Online social networking is more a wild phenomenon among the youth and the college going crowd than with the working class. This might be more because of the censorship at offices than lack of intrest to network online. More schools and colleges are starting to block the use of social networking sites in India.

Google is silently rolling out a new version of their email offering. GMail has features that made the competition jealous and forced them to build new easy to use interfaces. GMail has been and is still popular because of the wonderful interface with an intelligent use of AJAX.

Today my account was automatically upgraded to the new version and though the features or UI have not drastically changed they have left an option to switch back to the old version.

The more actions menu has new options added to it. Select a message and select Filter messages like these from the menu and you are prompted with a new page to create a new filter.

There is also a mute option which allows you to stop the message received sound alerts while you are using the Google Talk integrated with Gmail.

GMail’s contact manager was definietely better than the competiton and now it gets even better. Earlier Gmail added the option to group contacts and new the contact manager in itself is a great applicaiton.

Click on image to view larger version. Sorry for the crappy editing, was feeling a bit lazy to edit in Photoshop.
Google announced introduction of IMAP for GMail and if you havent got the upgrade yet you are going to get it in this big upgrade.

GMail is the first web based client that changed the way people thought of email storage or may bethe one that made people to never think of storage. And whats a GMail upgrade without a storage increase. The new version has added 2GB to the existing 2.7GB making email storage more ridiculous to be worried about.

And changing between Basic HTML version and the standard AJAX version is easier than ever. There are links in the footer to make the switch.

The colors are now a bit softer. The notifier which used to tell us of our actions now uses a lighter yellow and it sure is better looking now than earlier.