A New Apple Store
(sitting in for Stephen Withers)

Last Saturday, along with 1000 or so of my closest friends (or total strangers... whatever!) I was witness to the opening of Apple newest Apple store in the Chadstone shopping mecca. As shops go, Apple's stores are nicely laid out with lots of demonstration stock for folks to play with - even the iPhones were active so you could make calls.

To be honest, if all you want is a place to buy some Apple stuff, then the extensive network of excellent resellers across Australia has everything that the Apple store has - except for one thing: The Apple Experience. From the Genius Bar (where folks with defective iPhones have, apparently, been receiving over-the-counter instant replacements)to their training programs, Apple aims to make their stores a focal point for all things Apple and not just product sales.

I chatted with a number of the new staff and it's apparent that Apple hasn't just chosen bright and cheerful staff. They've selected design experts, multimedia developers and other artists to man the store. So, rather than a sales drone who can real off the spec sheet, you can get help and advice from folks who've used the products in real situations. That's a great plus for consumers.

The risk for Apple is that people can go to the Apple store, get all the data they need and try out a few computers and then wander downstairs to the Authorised Apple Reseller and buy from them.

While the new store in Chadstone is nice, Melbournites are still eating for their own flagship store. I asked Apple's Marketing Director Rob Small when we might see a flagship store in Melbourne. No information was forthcoming.

BTW - The first purchase completed in the new Apple store was from our own Adam "Play" Turner who bought some screen protectors for his iPhone

iPhone 3G comes out of beta testing

If you've owned an iPhone 3G since release you're probably feeling a little battle weary. Let's face it, iPhone software 2.0 (and 2.0.1 and 2.0.2) have been less than stable. Claims of slow performance, instability and unsatisfactory battery life have dogged the iPhone 3G since release.

Last Friday, Apple released iPhone and iPod touch version 2.1 and it seems to have fixed some of the issues for me. Battery life is significantly better. I haven't turned off 3G since the update and have had WiFi enabled about half that time and I'm estimating that battery life is about 50% better.

Applications open faster and are more responsive although I'm still able to crash Safari just by browsing around www.theage.com.au and zooming in and out of pages a few times.

Leopard gets another update

Apple has released the fifth update to OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard). The laundry list of fixes is quite extensive although we did notice that Mobile Me gets some fixes to sync and Back to My Mac reliability. I really do get the feeling that Apple has reverted to Microsoft's early philosophy. In the old days, the folks at Redmond had a ship it "if it works at all" mantra and that advances in hardware and later bug fixes would sort out any problems.

In any case, I've loaded the update and my Macbook Air still seems to be working although iSync did tell me that Mobile Me wanted to sync over 300 calendar entries. Given that it had only recently done a sync (in the hour before the update) I didn't let it overwrite everything.

The update takes a couple of reboot cycles so don't panic if your system does that after the update.