I bought an iPod Touch as soon as they were released. I loved the capabilities of the device and was especially impressed with the battery life especially when watching movies or listening to music.

When Apple released the second generation with double the capacity I quickly purchased a second one passing the first generation down to my kids. While I love the device, I am also scared to death that I am going to scratch it or somehow damage the device.

I decided I needed to somehow protect the iPod and so began my quest for the perfect case. I have only a few requirements for the case. First it must protect the device. That may sound obvious but given the number of cases on the market you would be surprised how many of them do not protect the iPod front and back from damage.

The case must not impede the use of the device. It must not hamper the use of the touch screen or the buttons on the top and side of the device. It should also allow easy access to the headphone jack, the docking port, and all other controls.

The case must be durable. I take my iPod touch with me everywhere and the last thing I need is for the protective cover to wear out.

Another rather obvious requirement is that the case cannot damage or mar the iPod Touch in any way. You would think that would be a given but I have had cases in the past where dye from the color in the silicone case has bled onto the iPod Touch turning it a color.

Finally, the case must not add to the bulk of the device. One of the things I like best about the iPod Touch is the slim and sleek design. The last thing I want is to ruin that form factor with some large or bulky case.

Over the years I have gone through a plethora of cases. They have ranged from hard plastic to silicone skins to space aged polymer skins that adhere to the device. I purchased each of these cases with high hopes that it would be the perfect case. After limited use, each of the cases would fall short and my search would begin again.

After my latest case, the iSkin Duo, began to leave dye marks on the iPod and limited the use of the docking port I was once again in the market for a new case.

I happened into the local Apple Store once again searching for a case. After looking at everything on their display several times I was about to leave empty-handed when I spotted a metallic Air Jacket case by Power Support.

The Apple store had only one, an iridescent purple. I really didn’t want a purple case but I was intrigued by the Air Jacket. It is a plastic case that claims a maximum thickness of only 1 mm.

The case itself is plastic but feels nearly weightless in your hands. It protects the entire back of the iPod Touch. The corners on the face are exposed so you do have to be careful. The front of the iPod Touch is protected with a film that attaches to the front of the iPod Touch.

The film does offer protection and doesn’t seem to impede the touch sensitivity of the screen. The case comes with two front screen protectors. One is referred to as crystal while the other is an anti-glare screen. I chose to use the crystal. I personally believe the glossy face displays richer colors.

Installation of the screen protector and the plastic Air Jacket case were relatively painless. It may take a couple of tries to get the front protector on without any air bubbles and you do have to make sure the screen is dirt and lint free but overall it’s fairly easy to install.

While I am still not a big fan of the purple, the case is very nice and I have had several people comment on how great it looks. Besides the purple, the Air Jacket also comes in pink, gold, orange, and red.

If I had my choice I would have preferred the red but when you need a case quickly, you take whatever the store has in stock.

I’ve been using the Air Jacket case now for over a month. It has done an admirable job of protecting my iPod Touch. The case adds relatively no bulk to the device keeping the form factor the same as one without a case.

The screen protector has likewise done its job. It does tend to show finger prints more than the iPod Touch without a cover. I am willing to accept that to have the peace of mind that my iPod is protected.

I would definitely recommend the Air Jacket to anyone looking for a minimal iPod Touch case. The only thing that would have made this case better would have been if I could have found a red one rather than the purple.

Based upon the introduction and subsequent reviews by those who have actually seen an iPad, the device is indeed using the iPhone operating system. This was further validated when Apple introduced a new Software Development Kit (SDK) that included calls for using the iPad’s new features.

Where my prediction fell down was that I wrongfully assumed the iPad would require a new version of the iPhone OS. Instead Apple built the iPad to live within the constraints of version 3.1.2 of the iPhone operating system.

That is not to say we will not get an iPhone OS version 4, it just means that the iPad will drive a requirement to update the operating system. My suggestions and wish list items for a new version of the operating system will have to continue to be far off dreams.

Maybe with the iPad actually ships it will include iPhone OS 4.0 or perhaps we will see a new version introduced at the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference. In the mean time I’ll stumble and struggle with the current operating system with its idiosyncrasies and long for the day when a new version will be released restoring balance to the technology universe.

Almost as quickly as the product was unveiled there were already mounds of press both positive and negative discussing the merits and drawbacks of the device. It was interesting to read these accounts especially considering the lack of hands-on experience these writers had with the iPad.

I have to admit I am more than mildly intrigued by this announcement and I can already see several applications for its unique form factor. Even with my tempered enthusiasm I recognize this is not a technology panacea that will be everything to everyone.

So far I have heard laments the device is too large while others complain it is not large enough. There are numerous complaints regarding what the device includes or does not include especially with regards to ports.

There were contingents complaining the iPad did not have a USB port, an SD card reader, a built-in keyboard, a hard drive, an HDMI connection, a camera, stereo speakers, multitasking, or Mac OS X. I even read one report blasting the iPad because it did not run Microsoft Windows Mobile.

Clearly Apple is learning once again, no matter what you introduce there are going to be detractors that will find fault with every design decision made. It is impossible to design or build the perfect device.

The diversity of the complaints of what the device includes or doesn’t include suggest Apple may be defining a new market segment. The iPad does not fit well in any current product category.

People who view the iPad as a computer attempt to compare it to the Apple MacBook or MacBook Air. They begin rattling off all of the features or functions found on a laptop that do not exist on the iPad.

Others look at this as a mobile communication devices ala an iPhone. They complain it lacks a camera, the form factor is too big, and the device includes too many unnecessary components.

Many of these arguments were similarly waged when the iPod came out. No one knew what it was supposed to be and therefore could not grasp the concept. It was not until the market began to evolve and users became familiar with where the iPod could fit within their lives did the device begin making strides in the market.

I predict a similar flow for the iPad. A few early adopters will take up the iPad and begin to establish where its capabilities fit in society’s information model. This coupled with applications that can take advantage of the iPad’s unique technology will hopefully help to define the market parameters and where the iPad makes sense.

I’ve been to enough Apple events to know the company and in particular Steve Jobs has these things down to a science. They maintain secrecy over all details of the event and subtly let out slight details at a rate that ensures the general public is spun up to a frenzy.

This was definitely the case for this event. It was perhaps the worst kept secret in the computer history that Apple would be releasing a tablet device. Despite that knowledge Apple customers and potential customers were glued to their computer screens waiting to learn the details of this new device.

After taking the stage Jobs wasted no time before bringing out the new product for everyone to see. It had been rumored the device would be named the “iPad” and that was accurate. At first glimpse it looks like an iPod Touch with a thyroid problem.

It has the same touch screen technology that the iPod Touch and the iPhone use. From the screen displays it runs a version of the iPhone Operating System with extensions that will utilize the larger screen real estate.

Apple is positioning the iPad to be missing link between the iPhone and the MacBook. It will run over 140,000 applications from the App Store with no modification giving the device an instant library of software on day one.

iPhone apps can run in two different modes. The first will set the application up in a window sized the same as an iPhone or iPod Touch. With a click you can expand the size of the window to four-times nearly filling the iPad’s screen.

The iPad is 9.56 inches high and 7.47 inches wide with a depth of 0.5 inches. It weighs approximately 1.5 pounds making it extremely light weight and portable for taking with you wherever you go. The 9.7 inch (diagonal) LED screen has a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels at
132 pixels per inch.

The form factor was slightly different than I expected. I thought it would have a screen ratio of 16:9 rather than 4:3. While the additional width might be good for some applications, it results in black bars on two of the sides when watching video.

The iPad comes in several configurations to allow the customer to decide which one will meet their needs without overbuying the technology. There are two standard types. One is strictly Wi-Fi enabled allowing network connectivity to any Wi-Fi Hotspot in 802.11a/b/g/n flavors.

The other includes 3G networking in addition to Wi-Fi allowing the user to connect the device to a cellular network if Wi-Fi is unavailable. Apple announced that the 3G model comes unlocked meaning it can be used on any 3G network that utilize specific frequencies. AT&T immediately announced the iPad could be used on their network.

Besides the networking type, customers can also choose the device’s capacity. The iPad will be available in 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of memory. Like the iPhone the iPad includes an accelerometer to sense when the device is rotated or tilted.

The iPad uses a graphical keyboard like the iPhone and can also utilize Bluetooth keyboards such as the Apple Wireless Keyboard. The iPad includes full support for Bluetooth 2.1 which should mean you could use wireless earphones.

The processor in the device is an Apple designed chip called the A4 which is running at 1GHz. The chip was designed to provide good performance while maintaining lower power consumption.

Power conservation was an important design criterion for the iPad allowing it to have up to 10 hours of use or 30 days of stand-by power, impressive considering the device’s minimal footprint.

The iPad is capable of playing music similar to an iPod Touch. It is also able to display High Definition video reproduction in 720p at 30 frames per second.

The device is initially being targeted to the traveler who wants to use multimedia while on the road. Its screen size would be perfect for watching a movie on an airplane or in a hotel room.

Besides audio and video, the device is also great as an electronic book reader. It was immediately clear that Apple was positioning this to compete head-to-head with Amazon and its Kindle product.

Besides the iPad, Apple also announced it would add books to iTunes allowing customers to purchase electronic books and have them downloaded directly to the iPad. Besides text and pictures, the electronic books can also include video and other media.

The demos of the electronic book media reminded me a lot of the newspapers in the Harry Potter movies where pictures move around the page. With networking capabilities there is no reason content could not be updated in real time as news unfolds.

Besides the iPad, Apple also introduced a version of their word processor Pages, presentation software Keynote, and spreadsheet Numbers for the iPad. This brings productivity apps to the mobile space. Perhaps the best news was that each of these applications will be priced at $9.99.

The whole pricing structure for the iPad was very aggressive. A 16GB iPad with Wi-Fi will sell for $499 putting it squarely in the Kindle’s market. Prices for the 32GB and 64GB models were set at $599 and $699 respectively. If you want 3G, it is $130 more. This means the most feature laden iPad will sell for $829; $170 less than the rumored price point.

The Wi-Fi versions of the iPad will begin shipping in late March 2010 while the 3G versions will ship in late April. Overall the iPad looks like an intriguing device that has a lot of potential allowing Apple to position themselves in another mobile market.

The most popular rumor is the release of the highly anticipated Apple Tablet which has been expected for over a year. As is always the case, Apple closely manages the information that is “leaked” prior to an announcement.

Steve Jobs and the crew at Apple have perfected the art of product releases to build the hype to a frenzied level making sure all media outlets will cover their event. You would think that the public would become accustomed to these events but Apple never seems to disappoint regardless of whether the introduction lives up to the rumors or not.

The January 27 event has been billed as being “mobile” specific. This could mean anything from an update to the successful MacBook laptops to an iPhone upgrade to the new tablet. Personally I am expecting this to be the tablet which some have suggested will be named the ‘iPad”.

Rather than regurgitating the various rumors surrounding this new product, I thought perhaps it would interesting to talk through some of the challenges Apple may have in this space.

While we all love to talk about cool hardware and get excited at seeing the device in person, it is important to keep in perspective that the success of new computing devices are less tied to hardware specifications. For a device such as the Apple Tablet to gain traction in the market it will require incredible software and one killer application.

When Apple Computer introduced the Apple I and later the Apple ][, it was largely described as a “hobbyist device”. To make it work required some software engineering to create a program each time the computer was powered up. It was relegated to a market segment of people who dabbled in electronics; definitely not a mainstream product.

All of this changed with the introduction of VisiCalc. VisiCalc was an electronic spreadsheet that allowed the user to complete mathematical tasks quickly and easily. When people saw what VisiCalc could do, the sales figures for Apple ][ computers literally took off. Suddenly people who before would never have looked at a personal computer were buying these devices and inventing ways to use spreadsheets in their daily lives.

In 1984 Apple introduced the Macintosh computer. It took some of the best design ideas from the Apple Lisa and built them into a compact computer. By itself the Macintosh was a novel experiment in alternative input/output. While the Lisa had a similar interface it did not penetrate the market as Apple had envisioned.

Apple made a decision to include two applications with the Macintosh, MacWrite and MacPaint. These two applications showcased the features of the new hardware and enabled users to envision their lives being better as a result of using the product.

Customers flocked to Apple stores after the Macintosh announcement and laid out $2,995 for a computer with 128K of RAM, a 9 inch Black & White monitor, a 400K disk drive, and a dot matrix printer. The shortage of Macintosh computers resulted in waiting lists that at times reached on for several weeks or months before delivery.

For nearly a year after its introduction the Macintosh had just MacWrite and MacPaint software available yet people continued to buy the hardware just to use these two applications.

When Apple introduced the iPod, it also included iTunes as a way for user to interact with their new handheld device. With iTunes users could not only load the iPod with music but would facilitate adding content changing the paradigm of how we buy music.

Now Apple appears to be set to introduce a tablet. The question becomes, what will be the killer application that will drive people to purchase the device. It has been rumored that the tablet will be able to act as an electronic book reader, a multimedia device capable of displaying video and photos, and provide surfing capabilities. Will that be enough to garner the interest of users beyond the current loyal Apple customer base?

Each of the markets (book reader, multimedia, and browser) is adequately covered by existing products both within Apple and elsewhere. Personally I think it will take a completely different piece of software to push the tablet to cult status that previous Apple products seem to have achieved.

It is hard to envision what that software may be especially since very few have been fortunate enough to see the device before its release. The announcement needs to not only provide a glimpse of the new hardware, it must also capture the imagination of software developers to inspire them to develop something that will capture the public driving not only software sales but also hardware.

Like many, I will be glued to my computer during the presentation to see what the device can do and hopefully be inspired to develop something that can push the limits of the device and enable the users to places they could not imagine before the product was announced.

As an owner of an iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS as well as several iPod Touch devices, I am eagerly awaiting the newest version of the iPhone OS. When Apple introduced iPhone OS 3.0 I was ecstatic.

When the iPhone 3G was released, the operating system had some challenges that severely impacted the usefulness of the device. The battery drain was excruciating and it was a struggle to hold and maintain a signal in some areas.

The update to the iPhone OS cleared up a lot of these issues and enabled the devices to become much more useful. We are now currently on version 3.1.2 meaning there have been some minor changes. Some of these changes have been welcomed while others introduced new issues that iPhone users have had to live with.

While Apple has never asked for my input, I would be happy to provide them with a wish list of items that I’d love to see them build into the next version of the OS.

iPhone 3GS Battery Usage. I bought an iPhone 3G on the first day it was available. For those first few weeks I really questioned my sanity. The battery would dramatically drain throughout the day requiring a charge during the day if I wanted to use the device for longer than a few hours.

iPhone OS 3.0 solved most of those issues. When I upgraded to an iPhone 3GS I was shocked to find my battery woes had returned to nearly the same level I had with the iPhone 3G at introduction. Apple engineers in conjunction with AT&T needs to figure out what is causing such a drain on the 3GS and resolve it. There must be a way to better manage energy usage to allow a user to use the phone for longer than a few short hours between charges and turning off the 3G network or not using applications cannot be the answer.

Multi-Tasking Applications. To be honest this one is really not high on my priority list. Given the aforementioned battery issues adding multi-tasking to applications may not be possible and I would rather have longer battery life than have multiple applications running.

That being said, I realize multi-tasking is necessary to be competitive in the smart phone market. Google has implemented this feature in their Android product so Apple will need to offer something similar. The key to multi-tasking is to have an appropriate algorithm that can manage potential runaway apps that could jeopardize the user experience.

Better Bluetooth Connectivity. Apple recently added the ability to connect wireless headphones to the iPhone using a Bluetooth connection. When it first was released it worked well with my motorcycle headphones. During subsequent OS updates, Apple broke that capability.

The level of regression testing needs to be better at Apple so that they don’t break functionality when they update. With more and more emphasis being placed on eliminating the wires, Apple needs to provide a more robust toolset within the OS to support Bluetooth functionality not just for headphones but also headsets.

Ability to Change Text Messaging Sounds. This is one of those things that leave you scratching your head wondering what Apple engineers were thinking. The iPhone supports custom ring tones for incoming calls but the user is limited to the six sounds that are included on the phone for text messages.

Nearly every cellular phone on the planet supports custom sounds to be used for receiving text messages; the iPhone is not one of those. This is such a simple change that you have to wonder why it was never supported in the first place.

There are documented hacks that will allow users to replace one of the six sounds with a custom sound but these hacks require the user to “jailbreak” the phone. iPhone OS 4.0 should at a minimum allow the user to set a global sound to all text messages.

If Apple really wants to impress the customer base, let the user set a sound on a per user basis to provide audio queues of who is trying to contact them.

Make Communications Contact Centered. With the iPhone I will get communications via several different ways from the same person. I might receive a phone call, a text message, a photo message, a Twitter message, or an email all from the same person.

It would be extremely beneficial if I could look at a user’s contact information and see all the communications I have had with them regardless of the medium. I understand this may not be a trivial task but it would extremely useful to consolidate all of the data in one place.

Apple took the first step when they introduced Spotlight search capabilities on the iPhone but a user should not have to go to the search function to find all the information about a recipient. Make the interface more user centralized.

These are just a few things that come to mind, I am sure I could come up with additional examples of features or functions that would be helpful in the iPhone OS 4.0. These are not complaints, they are helpful suggestions of ways to endure this device to the hearts of the users.

Depending on what theory you adhere too, there were either outside forces at work that destroyed the environment of the dinosaur or the species simply did not react to changes going on around them and over time nature went a different direction leaving the dinosaur to die out.

During my lifetime I have seen a metamorphosis occur in the music industry. What I am about to describe will no doubt date me and give my children more than enough ammunition to accurately compare me to actually being a dinosaur.

When I was a young boy I remember listening to music on vinyl records. There were the 45’s, which contained one song per side, and then there were the 12-inch albums that would fit several songs per side. The album not only included music but also came in a very cool cardboard jacket that featured artwork on the front and informational tidbits on the back.

The problem with these vinyl albums were that they scratched easily, were susceptible to temperature changes, and were pretty much impossible to take with you to listen to away from home. The music industry adapted and the age of tape arrived. I remember my parents purchasing an 8-Track tape player for the car.

By today’s standards the 8-Track was huge. It had its own issues such as stretching when hot and who could forget the garbled sound you heard as the tape player began eating your favorite tape? I spent many a night helping my father trying to rethread an 8-Track tape hoping it wasn’t damaged too bad.

The great thing about the 8-Track was that it could contain about the same amount as an album so you could carry along the works of a specific artist. The album art was shrunk and now was the label on the 8-Track tape but it still felt like an album.

When I became a teenager the 8-Track was nearly dying. It was being replaced by an even smaller format, the cassette tape. Most of the music from my high school years was on cassette. Rather than having to deal with tracks, we dealt with sides. One side of a cassette was similar to a side on an album. The artwork was shrunk yet again and now adorned the front of a cassette case.

The cassette was the ultimate in portability especially with the invention of the Sony Walkman. You could carry along several albums worth of music and listen to it while you went about your life. The tape players were more durable than the 8-Track but still managed to eat your favorite tape at the most inappropriate time.

The digital age came to music with the invention of the CD. Now we had these little silver platters that looked like a space age version of the vinyl album but in a more compact format. The CD was amazing. It seemed relatively bullet proof (until you left it in the hot car all day). A CD could contain an entire album at very high quality. The artwork of an album again morphed and now was displayed on the front of the CD case.

I remember when the CD came out and I thought it was the ultimate delivery mechanism for music. I enjoy the album experience as you listen to a group and attempt to understand the theme the musicians were attempting to share through the body of work.

At some point though we as a society decided that albums weren’t that useful. Instead we only wanted the hit songs and viewed the others as “filler”. We began creating “Mix CDs” with just a single song from an artist. Everything became a countdown of sorts with music being scattered around.

This concept was further solidified with the invention of the MP3 player and subsequently with the on-line music store. Here you are able to buy just a single song that might be hot this week. Many of the on-line music stores still offer the album but the majority of purchases are for a single song.

The once admired cover art is now an afterthought and the notes and liner data has gone away replaced by an obscure fan site if the listener is interested.

I somehow cannot force myself to embrace this new paradigm. I still like looking at the artwork while I listen and I want to hear the whole album regardless of whether all of the songs will become hits. I want to read about the band and what they were thinking when they built the album.

Now though as recording acts become younger, the concept of the album is beginning to die out. Instead an artist bio is linked to a song or the artwork depicts the artist rather than the album. Songs are single entities designed to stand-alone.

Perhaps I’ll finally come around to this type of marketing or maybe I’ll be like the dinosaur and ignore the environmental changes and slowly fade away as a forgotten market segment.

Since we have Cox Communications engineers living in our neighborhood the lines running to the junction box were very clean and the speed was very good. The problem with cable modem service has always been that the more people that use the service in an area the slower it got. In our case, I have not noticed a significant slow down as new users have come on.

For several years I have been using a Motorola SB-5101 Cable Modem. This Surfboard modem has been a workhorse and has run steadily without much more than an occasional reboot usually after a power outage or service disruption.

Recently we received notification that Cox Communications is beginning to offer a new ultra high-speed package capable of up to 28Mbps downloads with 2.5Mbps upload speed. Given the amount of data I transfer between client and server during my development cycles, I am always looking for an upgrade in service.

The new internet service came with one caveat. It requires a DOCSIS 3.0 compliant modem. Unfortunately for me the SB-5101 is DOCSIS 2.0 meaning it will not work with the faster connection. So while the Motorola SP-5101 is still working fine I needed to replace it with a faster modem.

After some research I concluded that the Motorola SB-6120 would comply with the minimum requirements by Cox Communications. At the time the SB-6120 was in relatively short supply requiring me to order it and wait and wait.

I received notification that the modem had shipped about the same time as our local electronics vendor received their shipment meaning that I had to wait for shipping time. The last four days have been murder as I waited for the new modem to arrive.

The package arrived today and I eagerly opened the box and unpacked the modem. It has an industrial look to it with mesh sides which should help with air flow and heat dispensation. Cable modems don’t usually run hot but considering I live in Arizona everything runs hot regardless of what heat the electronics generate.

There really isn’t a lot to this modem. On the back are three ports. The top port is an RJ-45 Ethernet port for connecting to my Apple AirPort Express. The center port is a cable connector for attaching an RJ-6 or RJ-59 coax cable. The bottom port is the power port for plugging the cable modem into the wall.

The front of the cable modem is likewise fairly simple with five status lights. The top light for power, the second for data received followed by send data. The bottom two lights are an online indicator and a link light.

After unplugging the old SB-5101 I removed the unit and replaced it with the SB-6120. After connecting the power cable, coax cable, and Ethernet cable the modem was powered up. After self-diagnostics it appeared to be working correctly.

I think called Cox Communications and sat on the phone for what seemed like an eternity. I was finally connected to a technician who activated the new modem and deactivated the old modem in their system. Soon the receive and send lights began blinking and I was up and running.

I completed the order for upgraded service and it should be active shortly. I’ll soon be cruising the “information superhighway” with a brand new V-8 blazing past the other packets as I travel around the Internet.

As soon as these were released I invested in a set for travelling. I used the term invest because these headphones had a suggested retail price of nearly $200. At the time I was a struggling software developer and these were definitely more than I really could afford if I was honest with myself.

I happened to be flying quite a lot between assignments and needed something to try and eliminate the background noise that is prevalent in air travel. I was skeptical that noise cancelling technology was capable of making a difference but after the first use of these Sony headphones I was convinced.

The noise cancelling circuitry uses a single triple-A battery which is located in a compartment over the right ear. There is a switch on the ear cup that will turn the noise cancelling circuitry on and off.

I found that the noise cancelling circuits were not only good for removing the background noise away from the music but were helpful for distinguishing the voices of flight attendants away from the engine noise when I wasn’t listening to music.

Although I have now moved to the Bose QC-3 headphones there are still features of the Sony that I prefer. For one the Sony headphones will still work if the battery happens to go dead. That is not the case with the Bose which do not work at all without a battery.

There will be some who do not like the over ear style but I found the ear cups of the Sony to be quite comfortable even for extended periods. The headphones fold up slightly to store easily in a carry-on bag. Even in their folded state they do take up some room so they are not the most compact item in your bag but for what they do, I would not leave home without them.

If you find a used pair or find someone closing these out to make room for the newer Sony models I would not hesitate to recommend the Sony MDR-NC20 headphones. They definitely saved my sanity for a long time until I had children but that’s another story.

Multi-boot systems are really nothing new and usually it does not require a piece of hardware to accomplish this. I probably would have glossed over this article and moved on but something caught my eye. Not only did this device support Windows and various distributions of Linux but it promised Macintosh compatibility.

I had recently purchased a Macbook Pro laptop and had become increasingly impressed with OS X. Apple has always had an elegant operating system but I struggled with the idea of having to buy their hardware. Don’t get me wrong, I like Apple hardware, I just have special needs and do not necessarily agree with some of the design decisions Apple has made in their hardware space.

The EFi-X device suddenly opened up a whole new world for me. I could now create the hardware configuration I needed for the type of computing I did and I would still be able to run the Macintosh operating system as well as Linux and Windows. This seemed almost too good to be true.

I did some research on the device and attempted to get several points of view before placing an order for this device. The last thing I wanted was to get taken by some scam. The EFi-X story was an interesting one. They had recently changed distributors in the United States. This was done as a result of the former partner creating Macintosh clones using the EFi-X device.

Cloning an Apple computer is the equivalent to pouring fish and blood in shark infested waters. You are bound to attract a school of lawyers or sharks or both. Still I couldn’t help but remained interested in the EFi-X device.

After waffling back and forth for a while I finally decided to buy one of the devices. At the time the United States distributor showed a version 1.0 and version 1.1. After asking several questions I was told that the two versions were relatively equivalent. The reason for version 1.1 was to address some requirements for a device that would work in difficult environments such as a factory floor or some other high stress area. Since my computer remains in the safety of my house and given the fact that the distributor would not have the version 1.1 for another several weeks I bought the EFi-X version 1.0.

The key to making the EFi-X work was adhering to a fairly strict hardware selection. The company produces a Hardware Compatibility List and only supports hardware configurations that are listed there. It just so happened that my motherboard and processor were among the list. I did have to change video cards but that seemed like a small price to pay to be able to run Macintosh OS X.

The installation was relatively painless. The EFi-X plugs into one of the internal USB ports on the motherboard. Once installed it simply required a change to the boot device order in the BIOS settings to boot from the EFi-X before the hard drive and it came to life.

The EFi-X requires there only be one operating system per hard drive. This is somewhat of an annoyance since I would rather have just dedicated a partition to an OS rather than a whole drive but given how cheap hard drives have become this was not really an issue.

After installing the hardware I booted the computer and was shown a new boot screen that showed icons for each hard disk installed in my system. Those drives formatted in NTFS showed as Windows drives while those formatted as FAT or Macintosh Journaled showed as Apple drives. Linux formatted disks showed a penguin icon.

There is no mouse interface at this point, you must use the arrow keys to select the appropriate disk to boot from. The boot manager does not show the names of the disk volumes so if you have more than one disk formatted in a particular operating system you are left to guess which one is really the boot drive. While that is mildly annoying it is only a problem the first couple of times you boot after that you know which icon/disk is bootable and which are just data drives (at least it should only take you a couple of times to remember that).

In order to load the Macintosh OS X you must have an actual retail version of the operating system. You cannot use a backup disk that came with another Apple computer but instead need to have a version of the OS. Since you really should have a license for this OS anyway that should not be a problem. I am guessing that requirement helps EFi-X keep the Apple lawyers at bay as well.

The installation of OS X went flawlessly, After running through the installation routine I was left staring at a full Macintosh OS X desktop just as if I were running on Apple hardware. I attempted to update OS X through Software Update and it too worked as you would expect. I was able to install all of my Macintosh software on the machine and at no time did I ever encounter a problem where the software or hardware did not think it was a Macintosh.

It has been a relatively painless proposition or at least it was until recently. When Apple introduced their latest version of OS X, Snow Leopard, I was curious whether the EFi-X device would handle the new operating system version.

Before attempting an upgrade I decided to wait and research how successful other users had been. What I found was users reporting that Snow Leopard would not run at all with EFi-X. I went to the EFi-X web site to see if I could find any official announcement of Snow Leopard support. Instead I found the web site was down and had been for days.

When service was finally restored to the EFi-X web site I found the company has determined that Snow Leopard will only be supported on version 1.1 of their device. Apparently the earlier statement where they said version 1.0 and 1.1 were essentially the same has now changed.

The customer base for EFi-X is currently up in arms. The company is remaining suspiciously quiet ignoring the customers’ pleas for clarification as to why the change in stance. Further the distributors are still selling version 1.0 of the device with misleading OS X compatibility claims.

While the EFi-X device continues to work under Leopard (OS X version 10.5) the latest version of the flashable ROM has broken dual monitor support. An update is promised but no timetable has been identified for this fix.

The business practices seem somewhat shady and given the amount of negative press I am now seeing on the Internet surrounding this product I would hesitate to recommend anyone follow my lead and purchase this product.

I will continue to monitor the direction this is taking and will use the EFi-X at least for the time being but I am already beginning research on another alternative to the EFi-X dongle. An open source group using the Chameleon project is creating a similar device using a standard USB thumb drive. If you want to follow along with this saga, I recommend the EFi-X Users forums, they are a great source of information.

Over the next few weeks I hope to play with that configuration to determine how well that works and what is involved in maintaining the software to load OS X on non-Apple hardware. For those who are looking for an easy and painless way to run OS X, your best bet is probably to buy a Mac Mini or an iMac.