In 2007 I purchased a White 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook.  I paid £650.

In 2009, Apple released the White 2.26Ghz Unibody Macbook. Apple are asking £799 for it.  It DOESN’T come with Firewire of any kind, a battery indicator or an SD slot.  Admittedly it comes with a better screen, a beefier graphics card and multitouch trackpad, nice to have but nothing mind blowing or anything that could extend the life of the machine.

I could rant about how great Firewire and how stupid Apple is for leaving it out, all I need to say is that I have 2 Firewire hard drives daisy chained attached to this machine, one of them a Time Machine Backup, 820GB’s in total running off the 1 cable.  I can’t take any of this with me if I moved to the new MacBook.

There is an argument that for only £100 more you can get the Aluminium 13″ MacBook Pro, which comes with everything I’m griping about that the plastic unibody doesn’t.  This is the up sell technique in action.  But I would argue that if there is only £100 in the difference, why even bother making the plastic version?  Why not just sell MacBook Pro’s and the MacBook Air, why even bother wasting people’s time when its so obvious in what they want to move the customer to?

Sure there will be some people who will buy it, but its such a boring machine I don’t think it does Apple any favours.  There are Netbooks with more connectivity which are more than half the price and there are other Windows machines priced at £799 that are capable of doing so much more as well. Not only isn’t it competitive with windows machines but there is also the Mac Mini.

The Mac Mini is a £499 machine with a supposed ‘Pro’ feature such as Firewire 800 (1), why even bother adding Firewire to a £499 machine but not to a £799 laptop?  The Mac Mini does have 5 USB ports as it is.  Why does a lower priced machine have it, where is the up sell technique in Apple’s desktop lineup?  Are 2 USB ports even enough for the Macbook, they are if you purchase enough wireless gear I guess.

Let’s not forget the total fail that is the SD card slot, its pretty much standard on any laptop in the consumer market, bar the actual laptop that Apple sells to consumers.

For people with the older MacBooks, the difference isn’t going to be £100 either, it will be the difference between what we paid for our current MacBooks, so the difference is actually £250.  Is it worth it now?

1. Being a Pro feature means that its use is reserved only for the Pro Machines.  An artificial distinction Apple has made with its machine to justify product differentiation.  I would argue there are better ways but hey ho.

I went to the Host Gallery last night to listen to one of my favourite photographers, Simon Roberts.  He’s completed his project ‘We English’, and he gave a talk there.  He was also on hand to sign his new book ‘We English’.  I rushed out but I wish I had bought it now!

It is slowly becoming a regular thing but I made an audio recording of his talk which can be found here.

I happened to attend the Tom Stoddart Lecture on Tuesday the 6th of October, at Conway Hall, London.

I made an audio recording of the event hosted by PhotoVoice.  It weighs in at 37MB’s and is an m4a file, sorry I recorded it on my iPhone, not bad though considering I was sitting 15-20 metres away from the stage.

Tom opens the talk after PhotoVoice run their promo video with commentary by Philip Jones Griffiths.  Covering mainly his projects in Sudan and The Siege of Sarajevo, Tom also showed a few other well known images.  The talk is itself lively and Tom is very blunt with how younger photographers should be treating photography as a career.

Related Articles:

The Guardian – Tom Stoddart’s Best Shot.

Amateur Photographer – Photojournalism is not dead.

Shame about the price, 5 grand (UK price) .  Man I would love one of these Leica M9’s.  Leica were quoted for a while saying it wasn’t possible to do this, but I always knew they could the lying buggers.  I want this to be my next camera purchase.

I think this was interesting and totally impractical but fun! (For 30 seconds)

I updated my 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook today.  It has an upgraded 500GB drive and runs with 4GB of RAM.

Installation took just over an hour but thats because there is something wrong with my optical drive, my friends laptop which is basically the same spec wise took about 45 minutes.

My machine reclaimed 25GB of space back, but no way was the original installation over 25GB’s, what happened is that SL has reread the capacity of the 500GB drive I have, and that is where I have made the gain in space!  I only installed Leopard on this machine last week anyway, and I don’t include the language packs or printers drivers.

Everything is as how left it before installation, I had a program running on Leopard as I ran the installation disk. That program was still in the taskbar once the installation had completed and rebooted into Snow Leopard.

You literally pick up where you left off. All my hot corners are still here as well. My dock enhancements via tinkertool stayed in place, and caffeine was already in the taskbar.

My only problem was with Aperture but I just needed to update it via software update.  My CS4 and Lightroom installs work without any problems.  Smoothest upgrade ever.

If you’re thinking of getting Snow Leopard then you can’t go wrong, make sure you backup everything first though… just in case!

I do have to make my first Snow Leopard Time Machine backup, will do in a few hours, supposed to be faster as well for backing up.

*Update* I’ve been reading that I most likely didn’t get 25GB of free space.  Snow Leopard calculates hard drive capacity in a different way now.  This thread explains the discrepancy.

This should hopefully be the beginning of eliminating all the confusion surrounding disk space. Finally, a non-technical user will be able to buy a computer with a “320 GB hard drive” and actually see it on the desktop as basically a 320 GB hard drive. – From the link.

I have just come across these two reviews over at www.h2hreviews.com.

The first review has the Nikon D3x pitted against the Canon 1Ds mk3.  Interesting conclusion, since I own the 1Ds mk2.  But then I hope to own this camera for many years, I’m interested in a backup camera at the moment since I recently sold my 5D.

The second review has the 5D mk2 pitted against the iPhone 3GS, with side shots and everything.  I’m sure sure most of it is in jest but I had recently heard of a journalist who covered an entire news story just using his iPhone.

Remember, the best camera you have is the one that is with you.

I’ve just started shooting music photography like this week for the first time.  I got into it for a friend who asked me to photograph her charity event.  Her friend recently died of cancer at a young age and she organised a fund raiser to help those affected.  I was the photographer for the night and for my first gig I thought I did pretty well if I may say so.  I only used Canon’s 24-70mm f2.8 L and a 1Dsmk2.  All the images shot are at 3200, flash was with a EX 430mk2 for those interested.

I also shot with a polaroid camera.

The images can be found here:

To those that do follow and have a genuine interest in my work, I thank you.  Thank you for looking at my images and to find this website interesting.  I mainly get a lot of traffic for my Leica lens review but, people do stop and stick around for a little longer to look at the kind of photography I’m up to.

I’m not really busy at the moment so I hope to update this site more often (again).  I’ve recently graduated from Swansea Metropolitan University with a First Class Honours Degree in Photojournalism and I’m now waiting to start up my course at Westminster later this year.  I’m going to enroll in an MA in Photojournalism.

I’ve also started a new project about car culture, it is early days yet but I have set-up another blog to record my progress.  It can be found here at www.cgnc.wordpress.com.

On top of that, some of the finer images can be found here: http://jonathanjk.viewbook.com.  This is a new website, not another blog but a website which showcases my best work from my projects with a bit more background information about myself.  Thank you if you can take a look.  This takes my tally of websites to 4 blogs, a Flickr stream and now a viewbook portfolio.

I’ve also bought the domain for this blog so some of you will have noticed the lack of ‘wordpress’, in the URL.

If anybody is also interested following me on Twitter I can be found as the user ‘CrackedButter‘:  If you add me I won’t necessarily add you back though, I find Twitter moves too fast for me, and try to keep who I follow under 10 for the time being.  Mostly they are photo-agencies, and my favourite music group.  I can also be found on Flickr under the same username as my Twitter account.

In other news, I’ve an interview on Tuesday for the new Apple store in Cardiff, due to open sometime soon.  This is the final stage and I’m looking forward to the 90 minute interview.  I love interviews for the fact they push, and prod at the essence of who a person is, I’m a self discovery kind of guy open to new things, which is the theme of this blog post.

In 1999 I owned a desktop computer which was a Pentium 2, 350 MHz, with 128 megs of RAM, a 30GB hard drive and I think the video card had 8MB’s of inboard memory.

Jump forward to today and I’m typing this blog post on my iPhone 3GS. A PHONE with a 600 Mhz processor, 256 megs of RAM, 32 GB Flash drive and i am unaware of the video capabilities of this device. It has to be more than 8MB’s of memory though.

Some people do care about these things. Just like the guy who recently installed windows 95 on his iPhone, to do some comparison tests with the hardware we have now.

I’m new to mobile blogging but a google search will find it if you’re interested. I’m not sure how to insert links yet with this app!

But. I am left wondering, what will I have infront of me in another 10 years time? What else can we do with technology? Will it even be in my hands, it could be an implant. To me that’s very interesting.