iPhone wrinkle
Tony Sullivan Yesterday, Santa brought his sack to my house (a bit early, I know, but he is busy) containing a nice shiny new iPhone. Now I thought that if I waited till Xmas day to fire it up, I would be competing with the rest of the world and his dog, all of whom also got iPhones from Santa, and would probably find authorising it frustratingly slow. So I did it yesterday.
Imagine my horror as I plugged it into my venerable, trusty old (6 years or so) G4 screen-on-a-stick iMac, only to be met with an ERROR MESSAGE! So I calmly (OK- frantically) went to the Apple iPhone support site to find out why God (or was it Steve?) hates me so much.
It turns out that to Sync my new shiny toy, USB 2.0 is REQUIRED. No USB 1.1, nor Firewire. Only USB 2.0. Which, of course, my old iMac doesn't have, since it was made before 2.0 was probably invented. Fortunately, being a bit of a kit monster on the quiet, I had a Powerbook with the required port stowed away somewhere in a rucksack, so complete disaster was averted - all worked wonderfully on that.
The point of this rambling rant is that nobody saw fit to point out that USB 2 was a requirement. If I only had one computer, I would be left with a useless, albeit good looking, iBrick.
So if anyone out there is planning on making Santa's sack a little lighter, it may be worth checking your hardware first. If it is relatively new, it probably is already sufficiently equipped for the job, but if it is getting on a bit, check before forking out the outrageous amount of dough that they want for pleasure of owning an iPhone.
(I personally think that they should be available free on the NHS.)
Anyway - Merry Xmas to everyone - I'm off to play with my new toy!