As the Apple Turns: Scene 4397: Eek, Updates Everywhere! (12/17/03)

Eek, Updates Everywhere! (12/17/03)

Wow, apparently today was Update Day and no one told us; if we had known, we could have thrown a little impromptu party or something. Nothing major, mind you-- just a few friends over for nachos so we could all download and apply our updates while watching the Angel rerun together. But that's okay, it's not like we need contact with other humans or anything... we can probably go another, what, four or five hours cooped up in this compound before we start going all squirrelly and saving precious bodily fluids in meticulously-labeled jars down in the basement. So yeah, we're good.

We were, um, talking about updates, right?

Okay, well, here we go: first MacMinute announced that Apple had released something called Battery Update 1.1, which allegedly "enhances the performance of a battery to ensure that full capacity is available for a PowerBook or iBook." Unfortunately, it's not for every PowerBook or iBook; our Pismo is sadly missing from the list of supported portables (supportables?), which is a bummer because its battery capacity seems to drop by at least ten minutes with every new Mac OS X version to issue forth from down Cupertino way. But if you've got a post-clamshell iBook or a PowerBook G4, it's worth scoping out the list of affected systems to see if maybe you can score some extra juice just by firing up Software Update.

Then, of course, there's the biggie: faithful viewer Bernd Schnitker (we swear that sounds like an exotic sausage dish, but he's just this guy, you know?) was the first to let us know that Mac OS X 10.3.2 is now making the rounds via Software Update. People on dialup connections, prepare to sigh raggedly; whereas the 10.3.1 updater was teeny-tiny, this sucker weighs in at roughly 38 MB, and with good reason. According to Apple, 10.3.2 includes a ton of changes, including new versions of Mail and Address Book, improved networking code, fixes for printing and faxing issues, and a slew of other "enhancements" too esoteric to list. (Well, okay, we'll list one, just for a taste: "The Repair Permissions utility no longer reports a permissions issue with the printer.conf file." There you go. Reason to run the updater right there.)

Apparently we've reverted to our old incautious selves, because we went ahead and installed this puppy on our original 12-inch PowerBook (the one that's been panicking its kernel every other day ever since we upgraded to Panther) without waiting to hear about potential 10.3.2 "issues." Our logic basically went like this: "any update that's almost 40 MB in size has got to fix this problem." Pretty clever, huh? Well, so far we have no weirdness to report, but it's only been a couple of hours yet. And if something bad does start to happen, well, at least we'll have a ready-made plot point for tomorrow's episode...

SceneLink (4397)

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The above scene was taken from the 12/17/03 episode:

December 17, 2003: Apple spits out a battery update and Mac OS X 10.3.2. Meanwhile, word has it that Steve Jobs is committed to give next month's Expo keynote, despite what IDG says or doesn't say, and rumors claim that Apple is negotiating to rent "one of the most expensive basements in the universe" to house a second Manhattan retail store...

Other scenes from that episode:

4398: It'll Be Steve... Probably (12/17/03) Heads up, Nervous Nellies: it's time to get antsy! There are now only twentyish days left until next month's Macworld Expo keynote address, the one event with the greatest potential to be the most Mac-significant speech of the year-- and IDG still hasn't actually told us who's giving it yet. Oh, sure, Steve has handled the honors every year since his Amelio-booting return...
4399: SoHo: The Warm-Up Act? (12/17/03) Gee, and here we thought that the only interesting Apple Retail openings from here on out would be the ones overseas-- you know, like the recent Ginza grand opening which had a line-up of about 80 quadrillion people before the doors opened...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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