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Mac Memory: A thrill ride you should get on now

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 | Author: OWC Larry

rollercoaster-RAM

At the moment, most – if not all memory upgrades – are still selling for substantially below the prices the same upgrades went for this time last year. What’s significant is that those prices a year ago were pretty much at lows already with the chipmakers (Micron, Hynix, Samsung, Etc) selling the parts at prices under that which it costs to produce. These companies have posted – individually – billions in losses on these memory chip sales over the past 2 years. Micron alone has lost over $2 billion during that period. When 4GB was selling for $99 last August – those prices were not sustainable. Due to the global economic meltdown at the end of 2008, costs that were already way below what was supportable dove to all new lows as the chipmakers needed to keep cash flow going. In 2009, we’ve seen productions reduced and entire producers (Qimonda/Infineon for example) completely exit production. As a result, prices had been easing up over the course of this year as the supply/demand equation has come into balance.

Today’s prices are still as much as 50% less than where the cost of various modules could easily be heading. Just over the past five days we’ve now seen cost increases of another 5-10% on DDR2 and DDR3 memory that was already up about 20-30% just over the prior 3-4 weeks. After about two years+ of supply imbalance, we are seeing things start to move swiftly back to a cost level that – if nothing else – will ensure memory continues to be available while these producers stop bleeding red ink to turn out the parts.

Currently, we have stock that doesn’t reflect the latest cost increases. More memory makes a tremendous difference for performance and will make an even bigger difference with Apple’s 10.6 Snow Leopard too. I have no crystal ball – with respect to real costs and supply – but it’s far more likely for pricing to continue ticking up a slope than go downhill again. It’s finally come to the point where the remaining chip makers no longer can continue producing parts sold below true cost vs. that long time bit about it being better to keep production lines going. They can’t afford to and the adjustment to supply is starting to show.

So, how do you turn this somewhat scary price ride into a fun, thrilling experience? Add some speed thrills to your Mac by getting in line on our site right now with these deals:

Add up to 8GB of Memory / Ram to Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro models with 4GB kits from $62.99

Add up to 8GB of Memory / Ram to Apple iMac models with 4GB kits from $62.99

Add up to 4GB of Memory / Ram to Apple Mac mini Models with 4GB from $62.99

Add up to 32GB of Memory / Ram to Apple Mac Pro Models with 8GB Kits from $25.62 per GB of upgrade

Your model not listed above? Never fear…we have upgrades for nearly every Mac produced during the last two decades!

More than just the original factory maximums, we also have tested and support configurations that were not or in some cases still not available from Apple. This includes up to 6GB or 8GB on various MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac models that were limited to 4GB; 16GB or 32GB on Mac Pro models originally limited to 8GB or 16GB. When you select memory upgrades by your model – our site shows exactly what upgrade options we have tested and support for your specific machine. Outside of Apple, OWC has the most extensively Apple Mac computer equipped testing lab which enables us to truly confirm all aspects of memory operation. This lab includes nearly every Apple Mac model that has been released over the past 15 years. We don’t just produce & sell memory for Mac – we know Mac memory inside and out.

Not all memory is created equal – OWC guarantees all our memory to meet or exceed Apple Specifications with particular attention to Apple specific requirements including (but not limited to) cooling/temperature, temperature sensor chips, SPD firmware, and gives you purchasing confidence by backing it with a Lifetime Advance Replacement Warranty. Heck, we even offer cash back rebates for your old Apple memory modules!

So go ahead, buckle on in and let us help you take your Mac on a thrill ride before the “admission fee” increases.

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics, Special OWC Deals

Two new iPod/iPhone sync cables from NewerTech!

Monday, August 17th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

3in1

Have you heard about that nifty little gadget by Apple? Apparently it’s some sort of cell phone combined with a music player that you sync using iTunes, and is apparently quite popular…

I am, of course, referring to the near-ubiquitous iPhone. To avoid hearing about it or its music-only iPod brethren, you’d have to avoid television, radio, magazines, Web sites, and pretty much not go out in public at all. In other words, its everywhere.

With something that popular, there are going to be a lot of people using it in a lot of different ways. This opens the door for all kinds of different accessories.

Newer Technology, no stranger to the iPod arena, has released a couple of new sync cables. The first, the NewerTech 3 in 1 Audio/Sync/Charging Cable for iPod and iPhone is a standard sync cable, with something a little extra – a mini stereo jack that outputs a line-level signal. Now you can go from charging and playing music at your desk, to playing your music in your Auxiliary input equipped car stereo without changing cords.

If you don’t have a car stereo with an Auxiliary input, but would still like to charge your phone in the car, NewerTech has also released an auto charger. It does what it says: plug one end into your iPod/iPhone, the other into your car’s 12V accessory outlet  and your iPod/iPhone will charge as you drive.

NTautoPsst… a secret tip.

While each of the two cables is useful in its own right, they really shine when you’ve got both pieces. The auto adapter features a USB connection – the sync cable is a standard USB/dock connector cable.

You can plug the “3 in 1” cable into the auto/USB adapter component of the auto adapter and use it to charge AND play through. You can then use the cable from the auto adapter as a second sync cable, useful for work, travel, or replacement. This allows you to sync, charge and play music from your iPod/Phone via iTunes when at your desk, then unplug from your desktop and continue to listen and charge in the car.

And if you want to charge your iPod/iPhone via a wall adapter at home or while traveling, just use the new Auto Charger with NewerTech’s 120-12V Power Adapter.

This is definitely a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts!

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Category: New @ OWC
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What good is the MacBook Pro SD card slot anyway?

Monday, August 17th, 2009 | Author: OWC Michael

SDtotherescueWhile there has been quite a debate over Apple’s decision to provide an SD card slot rather than an ExpressCard slot on the MacBook Pro 13″ and 15″ models, the fact of the matter remains that these machines are available and that many of us will be using these laptops. So how do we make the best use of our new port?

The first few suggestions are obvious – use the card reader to read the information from your SD compatible camera, PDA, or cell phone. Also use the SD card for removable storage just as you would use a USB flash drive.

In my overall review of the MacBook Pro at its release, I had gone into detail on the storage capabilities of the SD cards to come. And I touched on the bootability aspect of the SD card slot. But what makes this important? Well the answer is twofold. A trim, clean, uncluttered startup disk boots much faster than one with all your programs and files installed on it. As a laptop typically only comes with one hard drive, we used to be limited to using the internal drive with all our saved data and programs cluttering it up, or carrying around a separate external boot drive such as a Mercury On-The-Go or Express. The SD card is physically so much smaller and an 8GB card has more than enough room to hold a trim, clean version of OS X 10.5 (a 16GB SD card has enough room to hold a full version of the OS).  Just make sure you don’t pull out the SD card while you’re still using it.

Additionally and more importantly, an SD card with the operating system installed can be used as an emergency startup disk. In the case of a corrupted drive directory structure, this can come in very handy if you find yourself unable to boot your MacBook Pro. For more detailed information on restoring a corrupted drive, read OWC Larry’s article “Resolving System Problems”

So, how do you go about making a bootable SD card? It’s actually quite simple.

To install OS X 10.5, you’ll need at least an 8GB card (There should be smaller space requirement for Snow Leopard, but we won’t know for sure until after its release).

Format the SD card using disk utility. Under the “Partition” tab, highlight the SD card you want to format. Set the card for one partition and Format: Mac OS Extended Journaled. Give the volume a name and click on “Options”. You need to choose GUID partition table in order to boot from the card. Click “Apply” and the drive will be erased and formatted correctly.

Once formatted, use your OS X 10.5 install DVD and run the installer. Select the SD card as the destination. Follow the prompts until you get to the “Install Summary” page.

Choose “customize” on the Install Summary page and uncheck Printer Drives, Additional Fonts, Languages, etc. so all you’re left with is the “Essential System Software” checked. Don’t worry, it should be grayed out as an option that you can’t accidentally uncheck. This will cut the installation space in about 6.2GB from 11.6GB. Click install and let it work. When its done installing it is ready to use. Along with the OS, it is also a good idea to keep a few disk utilities on your emergency startup disk. Just a few we suggest are:

TechTool Pro
DiskWarrior
ProSoft Drive Genius
ProSoft Data Rescue II
File Salvage

To boot exclusively from the SD card, set the SD card as the Startup disk in System Preferences>Startup Disk.

Otherwise, insert the card and hold the option key at startup to manually choose the SD card as your Emergency Startup Disk.

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Category: Tech Tips
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Freeware Friday

Friday, August 14th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

It’s been a while since I’ve lobbed some free software your way. Since we don’t have an installation video this week, I figured this was an optimal time to talk about a couple of pieces of Freeware I’ve recently come across that you might find interesting.

Cameras_iconSmile for the Cameras!

This is an awesome concept for a piece of software. Normally, whenever you plug in a camera, Image Capture automatically opens your image editor of choice. As with most people, this works well for me, as all I do is plug in my camera, iPhoto opens, and I can import my pictures.

Unfortunately, this setup breaks down a bit when you also have an iPhone, which is also seen as a camera. This can become inconvenient in some cases. If you have an Aperture library of several thousand pictures (this is not unreasonable – I know multiple people that have libraries this large), you don’t want it launching every time you connect your iPhone.

This is where Cameras comes in. This free preference pane recognizes each camera-enabled device you attach to your computer, and sets custom system behaviors for each one. You can set it so your DSLR can open Aperture while your point-and-shoot brings up iPhoto and your iPhone does nothing at all. It’s one of those things that should have been built into the system in the first place.

I’ll admit that I haven’t had a chance to use this software to its best ability, simply because I don’t have an iPhone and only one digital camera. However, as I said before, this is an amazingly great concept and those around the OWC offices that are using it have reported no problems, so I’m passing along the information to you.

Let’s get Geeky!

GeekTool_iconFor the most part, I’m not too keen on using the command line; I’m more of a “graphical” thinker and a terrible typist to boot. There are, however, some things, such as relocating your Home folder, that are just plain easier and/or faster to do in the Terminal.

There are also a number of different command-line tools that provide useful information. The problem with using these tools is they require me to keep one or more Terminal windows open, which is hardly convenient when I have several other programs open at once.

I came across Geek Tool a while back, and liked that it could display all sorts of Terminal results on my desktop, but found it was too difficult to get anything to work the way I wanted it to. With its latest incarnation, though, things have gotten a lot easier to use. I now use it to display a monthly calendar (using an adjustment of the cal command), my upcoming iCal events (using the free command-line tool, iCalBuddy), and a couple other bits of information, such as internal/external IP addresses, uptime,  and a log file or two.

Geek Tool is definitely not for everybody; it is best utilized by folks with a lot of experience with Linux tools. For those who can use it, though, this can be a helpful way to monitor your system.

OWC has no affiliation with this software and receives no benefit related to this support (other than a benefit we all share in the continued support of these applications). If you appreciate the function or functionality this software offers, we encourage you to support the authors.
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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics
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Lost Archive of the RAIDs

Friday, August 7th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

While we don’t have an instructional video for you this week, we’ve got something just as educational, if not as animated. Not resting after designing OWC’s new look, our crack product development and graphics departments put together a nifty resource center to help de-mystify RAID setups.

While I would be hard-pressed to find the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID, the Guardian MAXimus or the Elite-AL Pro Qx2 to be lacking in multi-drive capability, sometimes you need something larger and/or integrated.

Unfortunately, unless you have some experience building a RAID, picking out the appropriate hardware can be kind of tricky. That’s where this resource really shines. Using this page, you’ll have your RAID hardware picked out in no time!

Selecting RAID components in eight simple steps.

  1. Select the computer you want to attach your RAID array to and how big you want it to be.
  2. Click the “Show RAID Options” button. You will be presented with a selection of the kinds of RAID levels supported by controllers compatible with your computer.
  3. Select the Type of RAID you want. If you’re not sure what kind of RAID to choose, there’s a series of QuickGuides to the right that will give you a decent grounding in what kind of setup will work for your needs. Once you select the RAID kind you want, the list of compatible cards will adjust to show only the cards that support that RAID type.
  4. Select the card you want from the next list. There’s not much science to this; choose one that has the manufacturer/features/price you want. The enclosures list will adjust to enclosures compatible with this controller card.
  5. Select the enclosure you want. Again, this is a matter of personal preference. Once you do, a list of compatible cables will be listed beneath them.
  6. Select compatible cables to connect the drives to the controller card.
  7. Click the “Add selected items to cart”.
  8. Select the SATA drives you wish to add to your RAID – keep in mind that, in most cases, they should all be the same size. Other than that, though, your choice of drive is really up to you.

It’s that easy!

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Category: New @ OWC, Tech Tips
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Crib notes for Safari 4.

Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Sometimes, when I feel the urge to tinker, I poke around the various “resource bundles” of applications on my Mac. Its not always a smart thing to do (which is why I always work on a copy) and very often, there’s not much interesting in there besides some icons and a couple of code fragments that aren’t very interesting.

Sometimes, though, you find something incredibly useful. While poking about in the latest version of Safari, I came across a document that lists out the various keyboard and mouse shortcuts.

If you have Safari 4 installed, you can view it by entering this URL into your address bar (or just right-click the link and open it in a new window…) -  file:///Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/Shortcuts.html

While most of these shortcuts are old hat for many Safari users, it was nice to have all the combinations listed out as a reference. I later found out that you can also access this page if you have enabled Safari’s Debug menu. This can be done by using any of a number of Free/Shareware Safari add-ons or by entering the following command in Terminal

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1

(thanks to Mac OS X Hints for this tip.)

While the Debug menu may be useful for programmers and the like, there really isn’t too much that’s useful for the rest of us, outside a couple of amusing “party tricks” (ooh… transparent windows…) and the aforementioned shortcuts list.

What I find much more useful is the “Develop” menu. This is another menu that’s disabled by default. It’s easy enough to turn on, though.

  1. Go to the Preferences in Safari.
  2. Click on the Advanced tab.
  3. Check the box next to “Show Develop menu in menu bar.’

In this menu, you’ll find a bevy of tools that will prove useful from time to time.

If you have a page that’s refusing to load via Safari, you can choose to open it directly in another browser you have installed by using the “Open Page With” selection. Similarly, if there’s a site that “requires” a particular browser even though there’s nothing “browser-specific” about it (banking sites are notorious for this), you can change Safari’s “User Agent” string by selecting the “required” browser from the list.

One of the features I use frequently is the Web Inspector. This multi-tabbed interface allows you to check out the source code, images, scripts, Cascading Style Sheets, and other elements of a site. I’ve used it to troubleshoot pages I’ve put together, grab images I’d otherwise be unable to get, and see what causes a particular page to take so darn long to load.

There are a bunch of other selections, as well, including options to turn off  images, CSS, JavaScript and a number of other items. My advice on those is to leave them alone unless you’re sure they’re what you need to turn off. You can find more information about this menu by looking up “Develop menu” in Safari Help.

Though it is doubtful that I will ever say that it is the only Web browser you will need, Safari 4 is a very capable one. Now, with just a couple of tweaks, it becomes even more flexible. While it may not have all the extensibility of Firefox, these options make it my primary browser both at work and at home.

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Category: Tech Tips
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Get Wrapped Up In Another World

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 | Author: OWC Grant

With the recent unveiling of our new site look, you may have noticed the site “wrapper” space theme. If you have been an OWC customer or follower for any amount of time, you likely will have heard or read about our affinity for Star Trek and all things space related as well as the impetus for our company name.

As such, it was only logical to create a background with that theme. Sorry, I couldn’t resist that and in no means am I as quick with the Trekkie nods as OWC Chris S. was in our movie recap.

So, if you would like to boldly give your Mac’s desktop a look that is from an Other World and join us in stargazing, you can use the very same OWC Blue Star Field background.

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Category: OWC Unplugged, Random Thoughts & Topics
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