I had to figure this out this morning, and didn’t find a comprehensive explanation anywhere else, so I’m offering one for posterity.
If you bought your mac with a version of OSX earlier than Leopard (10.5), and then you upgraded to Leopard with a clean install (erasing your hard drive), then you erased iLife (iPhoto, Garageband, etc.) and did not get it back.
Apple likes to say that iLife “comes with every mac,” but they don’t clarify that it does not come with every mac OS upgrade. The fact that it comes with your mac does not mean that it stays with your mac, at least not without some additional work.
iLife does come on the install discs that come with your mac. That is, the install discs that you shouldn’t generally need, since all macs come with the OS already installed. But these discs are in case you need to re-install, or to install some specific component.
If you don’t have the install discs, because you lost them, or you got your mac second hand, then you may be able to use someone else’s install discs. I have read posts indicating that for this to work smoothly, the discs you borrow have to come from the same model as the mac you’re installing to. If the models are different, you can apparently still transfer the files some other way, but I don’t have the details.
If you do have the install discs, Ben Robison has a posted a nice walk-through for installing iLife from your Tiger install discs without overwriting Leopard.
However, keep in mind that, when you do this, you will be installing the Tiger version of iLife, which is to say, iLife ’06. The fact that you paid for Leopard apparently does not entitle you to have the latest version of iLife. To get that, you will either need to buy a new mac, or upgrade for $79.
This is why Apple says that iLife comes with every mac, but you don’t hear them saying that it comes with every installation of OSX. In the mac universe, software and hardware are tightly integrated. OSX comes installed on every computer, iLife comes installed on every computer, and all three elements are made by the same company, so it’s easy to assume that iLife comes with OSX.
This idea may be reinforced by the fact that iLife is itself not any one thing, but a grouping of several pieces of software. It is advertised as its own entity, and yet the usual way to obtain it is to buy a computer that comes with it. In other words, it’s distributed just like an operating system is. And it’s always distributed with the same family of operating system. So it’s not surprising that people consider it part of that operating system. Even though (sigh) it’s not.
When before in retail history has a company released a follow-up product on the same day that they released enhancements to the original?
As I excited as I am about the increased speeds on the iPhone 3G, it feels wrong to give up my original iPhone so soon. The little guy is only a year old. Will I discard him now, at his most shining moment? Shouldn’t I give him a chance to show me what he can do with the hundreds of apps available from the SDK…with the thousands more that will surely come? And the GPS-esque self-locator on the maps feature has gotten so much better; I would have paid $100 just for that upgrade alone, but it was free.
You have to wonder what kind of use cases Apple has in mind for this business model. Is the 2.0 software supposed to make iPhone classic users think: “This is great; if only it could be faster?” Are they compromising because they don’t want to have to maintain two versions of the operating system?
When the iPhone classic came out, something we all often said (with awe): “There are only two hardware buttons. Apple could change the entire interface in an update.” It was quite something to think about, but it must be noted now that it didn’t happen, and we have to wonder whether it ever will. We’ll all be surprised if July 2009 doesn’t bring us yet another piece of hardware. How much will the interface change between now and then? Will each new version of the phone itself promise untold variations that will go unfulfilled due to additional updates? Or will all phones, no matter how old, continue to support new features insofar as they can, eventually puttering out like my housemate’s tangerine iMac?
Or will they go on living simply as phones? It’s unlikely that making a call will require more memory or hardware in the future than it does now…isn’t it?
Here’s a video of my various failed attempts to download Firefox 3, despite all indicators that it should be easy.
It’s worth mentioning that, most likely, this was a web caching issue. It wasn’t just my local cache, though, because I IMd a friend across town before I made this video, and he too saw the FF2 pages. Also, the map page was showing “downloads” rather than “pledges,” even while the other pages were still showing FF2 as the main download.
It may have been as simple as someone at Mozilla forgetting to clear their cache, or perhaps they cleared it too late in the day, and the message didn’t propogate to the edge servers near me until later than it should have. This is not a horrible thing, and a few minutes after I posted the video, I started to see the correct pages in my browser. (I’m typing this addendum in Firefox 3.)
My frustration at not getting FF3 as soon as it was promised came only out of the fact that I was so eager for it. Now that it’s here, I’m happy. (The download numbers still trouble me a bit, though.)
I’ve been a loyal customer of gandi.net for a while now…cheap, no-frills domain registration services (and other related services that I’ve never looked into).
Recently, I found out that godaddy.com was giving domain registrations away more cheaply (about $9/year, compared to gandi’s 12 Euros/year). So when it came time to register a domain for my mother’s travel agency site, I went with godaddy.
I’m not sure how many screens I had to click through, unchecking boxes that were opting me in to additional services I didn’t want, searching the screen to be sure that the button I was about to click on was the real “continue” button, and not one of many buttons upon which a click would actually indicate my agreement to purchase some other service. To tell you, I’d have to go through it all again.
The next day, a customer service from godaddy called me to welcome me to the company, and to ask if he could help me in any way. He was very polite, insofar as people with that kind of job can be polite and still get paid. Getting him to accept that the conversation was over without hanging up on him was not easy.
Anyway, the rest of the story is obvious. Today I registered another domain. I started to use godaddy again, but after a few minutes of unchecking boxes and double-checking the site navigation, I closed the window and registered the domain at gandi. It took less than two minutes.
I used to see gandi as a discount registrar, but I now see them as offering a premium service: the implicit agreement to leave me the hell alone and let me register my domains in peace.
I had to figure this out this morning, and didn’t find a comprehensive explanation anywhere else, so I’m offering one for posterity.