I have recently purchased an Apple MacBook laptop, this was all well and good but a little issue has been annoying me and that was the quality of the screen. When displaying simple things like a Finder window with Leopard’s smooth gradient at the top of the window there seemed to be banding visible, this wasn’t really too annoying but once you noticed it was there you couldn’t help but keep looking. I decided I was being too fussy and told myself that I would just have to get used to it.
After upgrading the RAM to 4GB I thought it would be a perfect chance to give PhotoShop CS3 a go on it, the performance was great, PS3 was loaded and ready to go in less than 10 seconds but when opening the colour palette to choose a colour believe it or not it became apparent that I had a much more serious banding problem than I thought. The smooth gradients in PS3 which showed fine on my Mac Mini with Dell 2007WFP display had suddenly became a blocky mess. I thought about what I was going to do for a few days and then I came to the decision to return the laptop for a refund as £1000 was too much to spend on something with quite a big flaw.
Overall I am disappointed with Apple, recently they have came over as money grabbing, when I purchased my Mac Mini there was no problems and no upgrades released the following week etc and it’s a great machine for the price, I would buy an upgraded version without thinking but with newer products like the MacBook and iPod Touch etc they have made money out of anything. For example the release of Applications for the iPod Touch, new users get them free but current users need to pay £12, this in my eyes is unfair as Apple had no work to do, the iPhone is exactly the same platform as the iPod Touch so it’s not as if they needed to rewrite the applications etc. Also the new Apple SDK, again free to iPhone users and not to iPod Touch owners, Jobs blamed this on “accounting”, what a load of rubbish, at the end of the day I paid for a 16GB Apple iPod Touch and should be entitled to any future upgrades for free as long as they do not require something like new hardware or massive code overhaul.
Now onto something more positive, I have just finished signing up for a LoveFilm subscription, this allows me to rent DVD’s and other disks for a set cost per month, they seem to offer a great deal:
+ Free Postage (Both Ways)
+ No Late Fees
+ Set Amount Each Month (No Matter How Many DVD’s You Rent)
+ You Can Keep Disks For As Long As You Want
I choose the unlimited disks per month subscription that allows me to have 2 disks at a time, once I post one back the next one on my list is dispatched, I can do this as many times as I want, this is great for movies etc.
As I have just purchased a PS3 this will come in very handy as they allow rental of Blu-Ray disks which are expensive considering they will only be used once and also PS3 Games (for a slightly increased monthly payment) which remember don’t have any time limits. Overall this is exactly what I am looking for as I like watching films etc but grudge paying for them especially with the huge costs of Blu-Ray disks compared to standard DVD’s when most of them will be used once. As for games, this allows your to give them a go and if you really like them and don’t want to hold up your rental queue while trying to complete them you can always post back and buy the real thing knowing that it will be liked and played.
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