Tag Archives: apple

When Tech Breaks – How My iPad Randomly Broke

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Over the weekend one of the strangest things happened to me. I found it so strange because not only have I never experienced this before but I’ve never heard of anyone else experiencing it either. Even after searching online I couldn’t even find anyone that had experienced this same problem.

Over the weekend my iPad randomly turned off and wouldn’t turn back on.

I did the perfunctory reset trick, where you hold the power button and the home button at the same time for 10 seconds. Nada.

I tried plugging it into a power charger. Nada.

I tried plugging it into my computer. Nada.

From every possible angle it appeared my iPad was dead. It didn’t respond to any outside input and the screen remained as black as the night.

There was no water damage, it wasn’t dropped, and it was used with only Apple chargers.

So what happened?

I have no idea, and that’s what’s driving me mildly nuts. I can have an insatiable curiosity at times and this has become one of those cases.

After I took the iPad to the local Apple store I was fortunate to find I had 13 days left of my warranty, so I got a replacement without any grief. I asked the Genius if he’d ever seen anything like this before and he said no, only in iPhones.

I asked him if he knew what caused this and he said he had no clue, it was impossible for him to open the iPad as it is sealed shut.

So my curiosity remains irked, searching for some sort of closure to this weird aberration of Apple product quality. If you have any idea why and how this happened please leave a comment and let me know.

Personally I’m going to hold onto the belief that it was the drive to PA that caused the iPad to become borked. We crossed into PA for a wedding and the magnetic poles zapped my iPad dead.

Of course that can’t be true but it’s the only semblance of closure I’ll get at this point.

So no matter how well I took care of my iPad it still managed to succumb to Murphy’s all powerful law that when something can go wrong it will go wrong.

I just thank the stars that I still had my warranty.

I still have 13 days left to get an extended warranty but I don’t think I will. There was no reason this should have happened and if it happens again in the future I’ll be forced to sell the iPad for parts.

But man, that was the weirdest thing. When does an iPad just up and off itself? Strange things man, strange things.

Amazing Lytro Camera Now Available

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Lytro is one of those amazing companies that has created a new piece of technology that is wildly like nothing else. Lytro’s cameras are able to take a picture that can later be refocused to any point in the image.

What does that mean? If you took a picture of someone and found out later their smile was out of focus you would be able to refocus the image so that their smile would be focused and crystal clear. No other camera can do that.

If it didn’t start at $400 I’d probably snatch one up, but as it stands it looks to be more of a niche purchase. Although…

There have been whispers that Apple is interested in lytro’s technology. Imagine lytro’s technology in your next iPhone. How wicked would that be?

Initial Reactions to OS X Mountain Lion

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Well I can’t say I’m not surprised. Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we’d be hearing about an OS X update in February, nor that it would come with the oh so obvious title of Mountain Lion.

But here we are, just two days after Valentines Day. A brand new version of OS X ready for developers to start munching on, learning its new capabilities and how to include it in their apps.

Everything about Mountain Lion seems obvious. There isn’t one curve-ball that has left me scratching my hand. It is the obvious evolution of OS X as it grows alongside iOS.

It’s wonderful that Apple has gotten around to removing a lot of OS X’s cruft. This cruft was not only outdated but also a source of confusion for new OS X users – especially when coming from iOS.
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iPad 3 Coming Soon

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The biggest news item today is from none other than that little electronics company Apple Inc. According to AllThingsD Apple is planning to launch the iPad 3 in the first week of March. This isn’t that surprising as the iPad 2 was released during the same time last year. What remains a surprise is what the iPad 3 will contain.

Current rumors point to a quad-core processor and longer battery life. I’m hoping for one more surprise that’ll make me yearn that much harder to pick one up.

Apple Releases iBooks 2 With Textbook Support

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Today Apple released iBooks 2 with support for textbooks. Along with this announcement they showed off a new video describing why they created support for textbooks and how they went about doing so. The video is typical Apple quality: endearing and uplifting. Overlook the length of the video and let yourself be captivated. This is some stuff that I wish I had growing up.

P.S: I just downloaded a sample textbook to try out. It’s pretty damn cool. You can expand and minimize pages and images just like in the video and everything is so snappy. You have to give it to Apple: when they set out to do one thing they get it done so right.

Today’s Top Tech Headlines

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Today was an insanely busy day for tech.

Let’s recap just so our heads don’t spin off our shoulders:

Apple Released iOS 5 to the public. This set off riots of upgrades, overwhelming Apple’s servers and preventing hundreds of thousands from upgrading to the goodness that is iOS 5. Dark times.

Apple released OS X 10.7.2 which brings iCloud compatibility to OS X. Now you can access all the neatness of iCloud directly from your iMac or MacBook. One of the coolest goodies is photo stream: take a picture on your iPhone and zap! It’s waiting for you in Aperture or iPhoto. Nice one Apple.

Google was rumored to buy Akamai, one of the largest CDN’s around. Then the rumor said they aren’t going to buy Akamai. I’m hoping for a new tech rumor to come out tomorrow that Google is going to buy Exxon Mobil to power their new data centers with gasoline. That’d be amazing.

Renown author Steve Yegge accidentally published a Google+ rant about Google’s institutionalized inability to become a platform like Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. He took down the mistakenly public post only to have it reposted across the interwebs. As the old saying goes, if you want something to be private don’t put it on the internet. Then again, the rant was excellent, and a very fun read.

Every blog under the sun had 20+ posts about Apple’s new launches today. I swear to god, I’m never going to see a doctor again for as long as I live. (That is in reference to the old saying, ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’.)

Oh and I’m proud to mention that GetGlue and company (that means me!) released some new code into the wild, making our site the best its ever been (just like what every code release does: make things better). [Of course that’s ignoring code regressions, but those don’t count - rather I’m not counting them here.]

So that’s the world of tech, today, October 12th, 2011. Tune in next week folks!

Update: In more somber news Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language, passed away today. A moment of silence for this great and hugely influential man.