Especially on Verizon:

Why My Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone

My favorite part:

A friend of mine has a Nexus S and it is a pleasure to use. The UI is elegant and functional. The battery lasts for days. In short, it is everything that the Charge wasn’t. I’d love to see Google somehow mandate the stock Android experience on all phones, or somehow rigorously test all new phones before they could be launched. Why not standardize and mandate one or two excellent cameras, and then open source the drivers? Why not certify and approve a few of the best components and then place some sort of “premium Android experience” certification label on phones that pass tests and use components approved by Google? Right now it’s a crapshoot out there when you want a new Android phone, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

Let me excerpt that a little more clearly:

I’d love to see Google somehow mandate the stock Android experience on all phones, or somehow rigorously test all new phones before they could be launched.

You mean the way Apple mandates and regulates the entire end-to-end experience for iPhone users?

Not for nothing, but I’m slowly coming to the sad realization that my days as a self-declared Blackberry fanboy are numbered. I came to the party riding an Blackberry Curve 8310 and I’ll most likely be leaving it on a Bold 9700. Nothing rivals the build quality of RIM’s finer hardware, save for maybe the products designed in Cupertino. The experience of their keyboard is perfect, and gets better with every revision. My 9700 has never been short on horsepower, it can be quite snappy when the software takes proper advantage of the hardware; but that’s where everything breaks down.

So unless we somehow see a miracle pulled off, and RIM releases the Bold 9900 running Windows Phone 7, I’m probably going to end up with an iPhone 4Gs™ or iPhone [Next]. I’m going to miss my hardware keyboard, and I’m going to bitch about it every time I am forced to type an email, but I’ll enjoy being able to run apps that don’t suck, have more than 256MB of space for apps, email, contacts, etc, and generally having a more pleasant experience.

0.6

The parameters for the next iteration of CoRD continue to change for me. At one point, we had agreed that 0.6 was to focus on Groups. The plan, in its rarest form, was that we’d snap out the TableView, and snap in an OutlineView, and roll out 0.6.

Things are never that easy.

Currently, each server is stored in its own .rdp file, which are all lumped together in some forgotten directory (~/Library/Application Support/CoRD/Servers). Once we add groups, how we handle session storage becomes important all of a sudden. Originally we wanted to continue the file-based approach, and make a 1-to-1 relationship between groups and folders inside our Servers directory. With that tactic, in addition to handling the groups, we also have to obey and handle folder creation, deletion, renaming, etc,. inside of CoRD. I don’t really want to have to build a file browser (essentially) into it. Cocoa’s interfaces for file and folder manipulation aren’t terrible, but they are not lovely either.

The solution to this problem is easy enough, we dump everything into a plist (the recursive methods for that took me all of 15 minutes to write and test once I had a class established to handle groups, and I’m a n00b still), and gin up some little import method to handle things when the new version is launched for the first time. Easy peasy. So now, we’re implementing an OutlineView, for the actual groups people see, and we’re shifting our storage paradigm.

But wait…now that we can group servers, we should be able to do bulk updates of the server info in groups.

And while we’re doing that, we should fix how we’re storing credentials, so that people with a 30 day password policy and 30 servers don’t have to manually update 900 passwords / year.

Also, with the current plan for groups, we’re losing the Connected/NotConnected paradigm of CoRD 0.3-0.5. Sessions will only show their state via their icon (and probably some other visual cue). This means sessions could be connected but hidden in a collapsed group and makes iterating through connected sessions unnecessarily complex. Perhaps we should re-evaluate how we handle that?

I could go on for a while with this kind of stuff, but I’ll stop there.

Rapidly, what seemed like a simple change, spins out of control into something far from simple, especially for an open source project. It could be argued that all of this is feature creep, but I don’t agree. This is a major overhaul of code, and should be treated as such. If we’re not overhauling the code specifically to implement these features, then how can we overhaul it, get it halfway there, release, and just expect everybody to be happy with it?

I know more than a few developers who’s mantra is “just ship it!” which is a mentality I can’t stand, especially on a project like this, where A) many people LIVE in this app, and B) My name is in the code. I don’t want it to be a “work in progress, we’ll fix it in the next release” kind of overhaul. Mac users demand more, and Mac apps deserve more. Releasing half finished products is something I see too much of in the Windows world. I don’t want to be party to that kind of nonsense in the Mac world.

0.6++

The more I review crash reports, bug reports and feature requests, and the more I use CoRD day to day, the more I find I want to change. Full screen and the current inspector setup are our two single biggest causes of crashes (by far). Those need to be fixed soon. Most of the fullscreen code we’re going to rip out in favor of using the new fullscreen mode that all views get for free in 10.5 and up. I would like to somehow find a way to implement bindings, or at the very least significantly clean up the code that handles the inspector and manipulating sessions and try to isolate the potential for future crashes.

I want to eschew the drawer, and the rest of the current model really, and adopt more of a tabbed approach to the unified server window(s). The server list would/will remain completely independent, and pretty much exist purely to list servers, manipulate server data, and launch sessions. Individual sessions or groups of sessions live in Safari-esque windows with tabs, minimal bezel (read: no toolbars), and controls (disconnect, etc) for each session/group would be integrated into the perimeter to handle changing view modes (see the location of Safari’s new tab button), etc. The windows would be ginned up on the fly and tabs (active server connections) could be drag and dropped between them (just like Safari 4.x). Quick Connect would become a modal panel that would drop down overtop of whatever the active window was.

0.6--

The problem with this dream is two fold. First, that’s a shitload of work, and much of it is beyond my current abilities as a programmer (the latter part isn’t insurmountable, it just extends the development time significantly while I learn-as-i-go).

Second, I am becoming more and more disillusioned by the handicapped feeling I have because of rdesktop. The project is/has stagnated considerably, and attempts to fork or revive it have left me startlingly unimpressed. I think there’s a serious need for a code library, cross platform, and preferably BSD licensed (if it comes down to it, I could give a damn if it’s GPL, since CoRD is already GPL’d), to handle RDP. There are features in new versions of the RDP spec that CoRD can’t (and at this point could never) support due to its dependency on rdesktop, and some of those features are becoming essential to function in many environments (things like Network Level Authentication, SSL/TLS, stable printer support, etc).

Problems like the most recent cursor clusterfuck (that we’re still shoveling through fallout over), which caused cursors to render improperly on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 machines and the recent patch to rdesktop to support RDP’s reconnection feature via a local session “cookie” serve to highlight my frustration. Such changes proved challenging, and to some extent incredibly problematic, to integrate into CoRD due to rdesktop being built with a typical X environment in mind, and not more generic like a library would be.

So where are we?

The likelihood of an open source library being generated in the near future is very low. I would love to spearhead such an effort, but I have neither the time, nor the experience necessary for such an undertaking. I’m doing well to accomplish what I have thus far on CoRD. I’d settle for a couple of motivated guys who would want to help implement the RDP spec in Cocoa (which I think could be awesome as hell and fun to work on)

Most likely we’ll just shim in groups, and try to integrate as many of the necessary changes as we can into the codebase. At some point we’ll self-impose a deadline on ourselves, then we’ll back fill the remaining time with a couple of beta releases to identify any showstopping bugs before releasing 0.6 sometime this summer, around a year after posting 0.5. Our goal was to be on a much faster release cycle by now, but demands on my time and Dorian’s have caused a lapse in significant progress. Hopefully we can work to remedy that in the near future.

In 0.5.x news, we know there are several (rather large) bugs on 0.5.3, including but not limited to:

• Time Zone Sync doesn’t work
• Saved/Stored Passwords are broken for some sessions
• Cursor problems still exist

The top two are regressions, they worked in 0.5.2 but some of the rdesktop code we imported in broke them. The latter is something not many people will see, and we’re having a bear of a time troubleshooting it.

As always, thanks for all the support from our users, we appreciate the bug reports, and crash reports. Hopefully we’l be able to release 0.5.4 in the next month or so and fix several of the problems we introduced, as well as resolve some other stuff while we’re at it.

First!

Its been almost a year since I started working on the CoRD Project. In that time we’ve released 0.5, which was in “beta” for almost 18 months when I started tinkering with it in March of 2009. We’ve also released two minor updates that fixed major issues and added features, and are getting ready to release a third release (0.5.3) that will hopefully fix a few problems. Work on a 0.6 release has started, and rudimentary code has been put in place to allow groups. Going completely off of the amount of releases and code changes, it may seem like we’ve been resting on our laurels, but I wanted to point out the massive changes we’ve made on the backend in the past year that will help us accelerate releases and hopefully prevent another 18 month drought of updates and information.

Trac & Forums

This wasn’t an easy change though, as SourceForge could provide no migration of data from their Tracker to Trac. So I spent the better part of a month moving tickets by hand as I came across them, to the new system. We lost a lot of historical stuff in the forums, which sucks, but was a necessary evil. It was a ton of work to move this stuff, but in the end it turned out awesome and Dorian and I have been incredibly happy with it.

Crash Reporting

Prior to 0.5.2, Dorian had employed SmartCrashReports to some extent, but gathering and collating that data was incredibly difficult. Most crash reports we received either came in when a kind user attached them to a bug report they filed, or via email to one of us (mostly Dorian since his name and email are on the website ) In 0.5.2 we replaced SCR with UKCrashReporter and backended it with Dorian’s own CrashPool system. CrashPool, which will be going live soon for any interested developers, serves as a crash report aggregator, it handles sorting and grouping, searching, etc. Prior to 0.5.2, we both thought we were putting out a relatively stable app. Boy were we wrong!

We have a huge devoted group of awesome guys who are running the Nightly Builds (see CoRD’s preferences or this article) and reporting a ton of data back to us. And since 0.5.2 has been out we’ve gotten thousands of crash reports that we’re sorting through (it is really easy to spot trends; we know that guys who use Fullscreen heavily are seeing a metric shit load of crashes; and for some reason the inspector is causing some crashes that we haven’t been able to chase down (yet)). We definitely appreciate the guys (and gals) running the nightlies and providing us feedback and crash reports. Thanks!

Build & Deployment Infrastructure

This was all Dorian. He completely revamped his nightly build script and modified it to the point where we can release stuff practically on demand. The script will update the build the app, package it, upload it to the right places, update the appcasts, everything. He has a nightly task that runs and builds our nightlies, and by simply changing up the parameters we can dump out a release, either a beta or a full release, on demand. It is a truly awesome piece of code. Thus far he’s keeping is close-hold and not releasing it into the wild. But I think the eventual plan was to make it available, but it is his baby, a separate project in and of itself, so I can promise nothing, just give him credit where it is due.

VNC Requests

For those following CoRD on Twitter, I have wanted to make a tweet about this for some time now, but it is just too long of a thought for 140 characters. We see a lot of chatter, and the occasional feature request, about adding support for VNC connections into CoRD, theoretically making it a universal, kick ass, remote console tool. I share these thoughts. I would love to flip the magic switch, and allow CoRD to answer VNC requests. But I can’t, and even if I could, we’re not at a place where I would. There are many, many, many things I want to see in CoRD (including fixes for the aforementioned stability problems) before I see VNC support:

• Groups
• Better management of credentials
• Stable printer forwarding
• SSL/TLS support
• Smart Card support
• Autoreconnect support (rdesktop has this now, we have some code in place but no implementation yet)
• A complete rework of our drawing code to fix all the screen glitches people run into.

With just Dorian and I working on CoRD in our free time, we have to apply our time to where it makes the most sense and can do the most good. So just to put an end to any nonsense before it gets started, we’re not against being a good RDP/VNC app. But we want to be a robust, kickass RDP app first. In the mean time, there are plenty of really decent VNC apps out there.

For those not aware, there was a recent mess started by Brent Simmons on creating a new open source email client for Macs, to be called Letters.app. I’ve been following the carnage since Monday and just wanted to lay down some random thoughts here.

I will call right now that its doomed to fail. Why? Because the clients aren’t the problem.

SMTP Sucks

SMTP and this retarded communications method we are all bound to is the problem.

Example: Do you top-post replies or bottom post them? Should it even fraking matter or should the protocol provide message threading for you and let such behavior be a user preference?

Example: SPAM. A decently designed protocol could curb unsolicited messages; not eliminate them entirely, mind, but drastically reduce them.

Example: Message content and attachments; SMTP was designed for plain-text transmission of simple messages, which has hamstrung both the protocol and the clients ability to distribute and display rich content and files. The concept of ‘file sharing’ using anything but email is lost on most non-geeks.

All that said, the point is moot because SMTP isn’t going anywhere for a while. A successor isn’t even on the horizon.

However, the advent of services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Droplr, Google Docs, MobileMe, etc. is making the sharing of pictures, documents, etc. easier via web technologies. Perhaps if these services can take over enough of the burden, the dependency on SMTP-based messages can be reduced to the point that it will eventually die or be replaced by a new protocol that is more secure and better engineered for modern (and future) communication needs. Could happen in 5 years, might happen in 10, or it could never happen.

Bitching about Nothing

Regardless of the inherent failures in the protocol itself, this troop of developers and laymen are hellbent that there is a great need for a new Mail client; even though for the most part people are wanting email clients to do things that they was never intended to do and shouldn’t be used for anyway…

Example: Organizing/aggregating/viewing crash reports; this was given as an example in several threads (by multiple users) on the mailing list of “something this client should handle well.” If you want to use email as the medium in which you receive crash reports fine, but why should it have to handle the indexing/cataloging/etc for you as well? Why not write a good, scriptable CrashLogTracker that you can then write a script or service and extend Mail to accommodate it? Maybe I missed the boat on that point, but it was suggested along with the idea of creating a “theming” system for messages ala NetNewsWire, which can apply custom templates to RSS message bodies.

And More…

Most of the bitching about current clients seems to stem from Thunderbird’s lack of Mac-ness, and Mail’s lack of “power user” abilities, its slowness, or its crashes. Other clients are often mentioned as having high points, but nobody outright addresses the pitfalls of each client. My thoughts?

Thunderbird: I don’t deny that Thunderbird doesn’t have much Mac flair. But why not band together and work towards FIXING it, rather than creating something new? Yeah…since its a Mozilla project, that’s probably not such a good idea. T-bird is all but dead to me, much like Firefox.

Mail != PowerUser: As a huge Mail proponent, I’m quite happy with it. I use a boatload of rules to direct messages to various folders, and I have a metric shitton of email (rough estimates, I’ll put it at around 50-60k messages). The elegance and simplicity, yet robust capability of Mail is the *definition* of a PowerUser’s application. The editor lets me compose in plain text, but doesn’t castrate HTML or RTF emails when I try to forward them on to people. I apparently don’t have the issues with quoting or conversation threading that other people do.

Mail != Performance: As stated above, I’ve got 50-60,000 messages in Mail and it rarely balks at me. The app itself is responsive and operations are performed quickly. Thanks to the power of Spotlight I can search that entire archive in a matter of seconds. Bottom line is, if Mail was the worst performing app on my system (like some people claim it is for them), I would be a very happy nerd.

Mail != Stable: Issues that I have had I’ve filed bug reports with Apple on and they have typically been addressed…perhaps not always in what I would call a timely fashion, but they DO listen. I have never had Mail crash and corrupt email on its way down (can’t say that about any other client I’ve used). I’ve never had Mail crash during a routine operation (it usually takes something out of the ordinary, attaching or opening an odd or malformed file, for example).

On HTML Email

I don’t really give a damn about the format that people send me messages in. Its text. It may look different, but its text. Going from App to App and webpage to webpage my eyes adjust to different fonts thousands of times a day. Bitching about HTML email fucking up your Qi is just retarded. On that note, any client that doesn’t support it properly is going to look like it fell out of a 2001 time warp. Nobody is stopping you from using TextMate as your mail editor. But when a client hamstrings my ability to do my job (in this case, forward mail coherently, regardless of formatting), it ends up in my Trash folder.

Performance vs Plugins

There is a ton of support behind basically creating an email client that is but a shell, wherein all but “core” functionality is provided by plugins or bundles, keeping the “program” (it can’t really be called that in that instance) “light and fast.”

I call bullshit.

Performance, Functionality (read: bloat), and Usability are not bound by any relationship that I have ever been able to discern. There are many, many, many incredibly complex programs out there that perform EXTREMELY well. Most of those programs remain incredibly useful. There are poorly DESIGNED programs that are full of bloat, with ill-construed features that cause more harm than good. I don’t think you should attempt to handicap a program’s functionality from the get-go for the sake of some mythical performance level you hope to achieve.

Since I doubt my response to Keith will make it through his filters (though maybe he’ll allow it) I’m posting it here.

It is in response to this ridiculous article about his first 24 hours on Snow Leopard:

http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2009/08/30/apple-os-x-snow-leopard-the-first-24-hours.aspx

And My response:

Keith…Some fast notes and your “solution”:

I have been running 12GB of ram in my Mac Pro happily for quite some time now on a 32-bit kernel. VMWare’s happy to tap into it, almost as happy as Windows 7 is to gobble up whatever i give it.

OS X in general has been running 64-bit applications side by side with 32 bit applications, seamlessly, since Tiger.

2 minutes on google shows me that your machine (MacbookPro3,1) isn’t in the table of capable machines for a 64-bit kernel:

http://www.osnews.com/story/22009

Also, why can’t you run 8GB of RAM? Because the hardware doesn’t support it, regardless of the kernel. Its even in the Technote YOU link to in the article. The max RAM of that particular series of MBP’s is 4GB. I believe that is the line of machines you can do some tricks to bypass that, but the official party line is they have a 4GB cap. And even IF you get it enabled, and use a supported set of SO-DIMMs, you STILL don’t need the 64-bit kernel to utilize it, the 32-bit kernel works just peachy.

And as to why they boot to a 32-bit Kernel by default, for the same reason that Windows 7 still has legacy code in it dating back to Windows 3.1. 64-bit kernels break stuff. VMWare refuses to start under a 64-bit kernel. Mouse drivers that use kernel extensions, etc, ALL of which break under a 64-bit kernel, UNTIL the ISV’s recompile them for 64-bit (which they should have been doing since Tiger anyway, but whatever).

But, much like Apple does with EVERY major change like this, they stabilize the feature, and put it out there for the geeks and the tweakers under the assumption that anybody who knows enough to CARE to run in 64-bit mode will know how to enable it. Everybody else will be happy cooking along with their already bad ass operating system.

Please, before you knock something, do your homework. I’m running 64-bit kernels just peachy on my Pro and my 13″ Macbook Pro. I have been compiling and running 64-bit software for 3 years now.

And lets face it, NOBODY out there expects you to find 10.6 to be the most advanced operating system. Especially when the one time i’ve seen you not tow the party line on this blog, the post was removed within the week. Google can forget, but my NetNewsWire cache is forever.

And in the interest of backing up my threats, a screen cap from NetNewsWire of one of Keith’s posts responding to the “Laptop Hunter” ads where he doesn’t tow Microsoft’s party line and support them blindly. He actually calls them out on bending the truth, and says he expects them to have more integrity.

After that post was removed, I stopping Following Keith. THAT kind of censoring is ridiculous, especially when there’s nothing in there that isn’t true. I just stumbled across this latest mess and had to respond.

It’s been said before, but the Windows Registry is the Mos Eisley cantina of a Windows computer.

You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

As somebody who has made their fair share of registry hacks before, I have been to places most people don’t dare to tread, changed and added keys with impunity, and…*gasp*…deleted things without backing them up first! This isn’t some average joe we’re talking about; I had a documented series of registry hacks that I had to do to every time i reinstalled Windows, and it got to the point where I was needing to use nLite to integrate them all for time’s sake (at one time I was on a 2-3 month reinstall cycle for my main workstation).

This kind of relationship usually is fruitful, a geek and his operating system. So intimately entwined in each other they are; the geek knowing the deepest secrets of his system, the system knowing precisely how to piss off the geek in as few CPU cycles as possible. But my relationship with Windows grew bitter in its waning years. I started to detest the behavior of the Alt key, with its toggling on/off state rather than being a simple momentary key like Shift or Control. The sheer and utter abuse of having a dedicated Windows key, and only being able to use it with 3-5 of the other 90+ keys. The systemwide penchant for inconsistency and bad program design. But none of this compared to the hatred of the registry.

The amount of bloat, the difficulty of manipulation, a single source of failure for the entire system, the abuse of putting things in registry keys that should have been in files, the use of GUIDs and SIDs for key names with nary a DWORD inside hinting as what it actually exists for and why. How about the ability to hide data? Yep, the registry, in all of its girth, is the perfect place to bury things, since so many legitimate programs do just that, why not illegitimate ones too?

As somebody who regularly supports other users, particularly those who, shall we say, are not as technically inclined, the registry posed a huge problem for remote troubleshooting. Here are some scenarios:

Think there’s a virus? want to disable any startup items?

Well is it in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, or RunOnce, or RunForFrakingEver or is it a *system* preference, so it’ll be under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run or RunOnce? This is assuming you can get the user to open RegEdit, since its buried in some scary system directory that Windows warns you never to touch (because THAT is security…a clickthrough warning barrier…to hell with intelligent permission levels and on-demand privilege escalation).

Trying to troubleshoot wireless problems?

We should just blow away the wireless settings in your registry and see if it recreating them fixes it. Are you using a 3rd party wireless configuration program or the Windows one? At that point i’d hear an unspoken “WTF?!” in the silence, or maybe it was static from my cell phone, either way, I got the point.

I highly doubt I will return to any Windows platform as long as the Registry exists. The Mac’s primarily file-based approach for configuration data is vastly superior in terms of supportability, stability, and security. Throw in an amazing user interface that is both simple and powerful, not to mention customizable, and a growing number of applications that, unlikely their Windows counterparts, do not make me want to put a gun to the head of the people coding them, and you start to get a picture of why I have moved my entire family to Macs.

My Adium Xbox 360 Soundset is back on the rise! After creeping upwards in rank for a few months now, it has now reached the top 5 ranked Soundsets on the AdiumXtras page. At this writing its up to 2346 downloads (though admittedly probably 5 of those are mine…) and is current ranked at 4.4/5 Ducks, and is getting better!

Check it out, if you’re using Adium and you like the modest sounds of the Xbox 360′s dashboard (pre-November 2008 upgrade), go grab it, and rank it please!

http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=cats&cat_id=3

Courtesy of Gus Mueller:

Adobe Reader 9 is out!

I had a long rant typed up, but I just deleted it in favor of simply saying (once again):

I Hate Adobe.

And also that if at any point in the future I am presented with a way to never use anything related to CS3 again, I’ll take it, run, and never look back.

Looks like I finally got approved!

Check out my Adium 360 Soundset here.

After many months of waiting for somebody else to do it (what can i say, I’m lazy), and with the dumb luck of finding most of the sounds i needed hidden inside the MC360 skin for XBMC, I created an xbox 360 SoundSet for Adium. It is still pending authorization before it gets posted to the main site, but it is available for download here:

Xbox 360 Adium Soundset

Its pretty slick, I love it so far as my personal set, and there are a few sounds (the sounds made when the blades switch on the home screen, for example) that are there but are unused, if anybody comes up with some cool uses for them

Hope anybody who follows my tiny feed here enjoys them

Any Mac geek should read John Welch’s blog. Love him or hate him, agree or disagree, he typically has a point, and is almost always comical and profane. Some of his posts of the last week (I was behind on my news feed and was trying to catch up tonight) have been downright hilarious and bang-on as far as bitches and gripes go. I spent many days weeping at my desk over Adobe‘s sheer and utter failure to at least listen to Apple’s programming guidelines, let alone their deployment, packaging, scripting, etc guidelines. I pity their Mac team, as they seem to have lost their spirit to produce a good product and only want to produce ports of Windows apps, and bad ports at that.

The trackback linked here isn’t about Adobe, even though that topic is near and dear to my heart / jar of anthrax and box of envelops, its his recent article on how languages, both programming and scripting, aren’t the issue, its how they’re supported and the environments we’re forced to use to develop in that create the major hurdles. A great read for anybody smart enough to agree that there is no ‘magic bullet’ language, and that being proficient in as many as you can manage and need to accomplish your job is all that really matters. Between rudimentary C, Java, Javascript, PHP, Perl, Applescript, a dabbling of Python and Ruby, and beginning into ObjC, I’m trying to cover as many of my bases as I can. One day I might even install Visual Studio (in a VM) and play with .NET again (last time that happened was 2003), though it will have to be a particularly long stretch of boredom before that happens…

A great video from Google. I can’t wait to see where Mr. Jitkoff takes things.

I just wanted to plug Mushkin.

I’ve been a fan for a while because their price for PerfectMatch Mac memory (which used to be such a commodity it was usually twice the price of comparable memory) has gotten ever cheaper, and you can now load out any newer iMac or Macbook [Pro] with 4GB of RAM for < $100, typically < $90.

Ever since the 2008 Mac Pros came out and I got mine, I’ve been on the lookout for 800Mhz FB-DIMM memory to load it out with. Finally not being able to take the sluggishness of such a high performance machine (I tend to stretch my Macs…2-3 Windows VMs, and anywhere from 6 – 18 apps open and doing stuff at any given time…) I took the hit and ordered 2GB of ram to complement the included 2GB of RAM already in place. Newegg promptly dropped the price $10 AND bumped the rebate amount by $10, like literally within hours of me ordering the memory, effectively screwing me out of $20. To add insult to injury, the damned DIMMs didn’t work when i got them! They were DOA!

First i submitted an RMA with newegg, which I found they wnated to charge me for shipping back. Then I filed an RMA with Mushkin, hoping they would be willing to foot the shipping. Then I found a number in a customer review response on newegg and called the company rep who was promising to make good on some bad 4GB kits. Turns out Mushkin had a couple of bad batches and they knew about them, but found out too late to recall the shipments apparently. They FedEx Overnighted me a new pair, given the size and weight of the box, that alone cost them ~$40. I promptly canceled the newegg RMA. They forgot to put a return label in the box, so they USPSed a label, a Mushkin T-Shirt and some pens. Color me easily impressed, but they took the time and tried to make good on it, about the only thing they could have done to make it better was to ship me a 4GB kit instead of the 2GB kit i bought.

Kudos to Mushkin. If newegg keeps dropping the price of the 4GB kits and I pick up a decent job over the summer my Pro will probably jump to 8, or maybe even 12GB of RAM. Eat that all you 32-bit, 3GB memory cap, Windows XP lusers!! :p