Apple Announces iLife ’11

iLife ’11 makes it easier than ever to create amazing things with photos, movies, and music on a Mac and share them with friends and family. It includes major upgrades to iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand, and also continues to include iWeb and iDVD. Key new features in iLife ’11 include:

iPhoto—New full-screen modes for Faces, Places, Events, and Albums; Facebook enhancements, photo mail, new slideshow themes, and a new way to build photo books and cards.
iMovie—Fun, Hollywood-style Movie Trailers, One-Step Effects, People Finder, Sports and News themes, and video publishing to more places.
GarageBand—Find the perfect rhythm and groove with Flex Time and Groove Matching, more guitar amps and stompbox effects, new Basic Lessons for guitar and piano, and “How Did I Play?”.

Learn more on Apple’s website at http://www.apple.com/ilife.

Apple Announces New MacBook Air

The all-new MacBook Air combines the power of Mac with the portability of iPad to create the next generation of MacBooks. The new MacBook Air features:

All-New Design—Apple’s thinnest and most compact notebook ever features a new unibody enclosure.
High-Resolution Displays—Available in two sizes—11-inch (1366 by 768) and 13-inch (1440 by 900).
Better Performance—All flash storage, Intel Core 2 Duo processors, and NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics combine for the perfect balance of performance and portability.
Long Battery Life—Single charge provides up to 5 to 7 hours of battery life with up to 30 days of standby time.

Learn more on Apple’s website at http://www.apple.com/macbookair.

Apple Gives Sneak Peek of Mac OS X Lion

Apple today gave a sneak peek of Mac OS X Lion, the eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system. Shipping next summer, Lion is inspired by many of iPad’s software innovations.

Today’s sneak peek highlighted just a few of Lion’s features, including the Mac App Store, a new way to discover, install, and automatically update desktop apps; Launchpad, a new home for all of your Mac apps; system-wide support for full-screen apps; and Mission Control, which unifies Exposé, Dashboard, Spaces, and full-screen apps into an innovative new view of everything running on your Mac, and allows you to instantly navigate anywhere.

To learn more, visit http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/.

Apple Brings FaceTime to the Mac

Apple today announced the public beta of FaceTime for Mac, an entirely new application that allows Mac users to video call iPhone 4 and new iPod touch users as well as other Macs. Featuring an easy-to-use interface, FaceTime for Mac automatically uses your Address Book contacts so there’s no need to create special buddy lists, and it works seamlessly with the built-in camera and mic on Mac notebooks, iMac, and Apple LED Cinema Displays.

To learn more and download the public beta, visit http://www.apple.com/mac/facetime/.

Apple has the entire keynote from the “Back to the Mac” 10-20-10 announcement event available for viewing at their website.

MacMedics is again pleased to be a sponsor of AIGA Baltimore’s 13th annual paper show, Pulp, Ink, and Hops. Please stop by our booth at the event to drop your business card for a chance to win an iPod, knock back a few cold ones and talk Macs with us.

Join AIGA Baltimore for the region’s largest paper show, Pulp, Ink, and Hops featuring paper, print samples, and designer services from tons of vendors. Enjoy light fare and “hops” from our fine local breweries while you network with your fellow creative professionals and “paper-addicts”.

Pulp, Ink, and Hops will be held this year on Thursday October 21st. A networking reception for professionals starts at 5:30 P.M., with the paper show to follow from 6:30 – 9 P.M.

This year’s venue is Baltimore Print Studios, which is Baltimore’s premier public print studio and offers letterpress and screenprinting facilities to area artists. The studios are located in Baltimore’s Station North Arts District.

Don’t miss the must-attend event of the year! A networking reception for professionals starts at 5:30 p.m., with the show to follow from 6:30 – 9 p.m. Early registration is encouraged.

Judging by the number of Mac laptops (and iPhones & iPods) that come into MacMedics with coffee spilled into them, we’ve sort of figured out that Macs and coffee often go hand-in-hand. Well, I guess they sort of go together and it usually does not work too well when the coffee goes INTO the MacBook or MacBook Pro. If you’ve got a liquid spill be sure to read this before you do anything else!

MacMedics continues our ongoing Coffee House tour, and we’ll again be enjoying the excellent java with our coffee and Mac friends at The Big Bean right down the road from our Millersville office in delightful Severna Park, Maryland.

We’ll be there Thursday October 7th from 7:00 AM to 10:00 AM to show off the latest Macintosh models and to talk about the Macintosh sales, service, and on-site consulting that MacMedics offers. We’ll also be available to talk about our repair service for iPhones (3G, 3G S, and iPhone 4) as well as all iPod repairs.

We’ll be handing out MacMedics discount cards good for $25 off any NEW Mac or $25 off any in-lab or on-site MacMedics service as well as coupons for $10 off an iPod or iPhone repair.

Anybody that stops in can get any size brewed coffee for free, compliments of your fellow coffee lovers at MacMedics.

Stop by our table to chat or just rush in to get your coffee, either way you get free coffee, our discount card, and a free entry in our drawing for an iPod shuffle (if you want to drop your business card).

Questions? Just call Dana or Jason at 410-987-8588.

See you there!

Pre-Press Tips to Improve Productivity and Your Bottom Line Presented by the Greater Baltimore InDesign User Group – Sponsored by MacMedics

MacMedics is pleased to be able to sponsor an upcoming meeting of the Greater Baltimore InDesign User Group. We have long been a sponsor of the Washington DC InDesign User Group, so naturally we were thrilled to be invited to sponsor the Baltimore chapter as well. We hope you will be able to attend this meeting, as we’re giving away an Apple iPod as a door prize.

When:
Tue, October 19, 2010, 6:00 PM

Where:
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Parsons Auditorium and Cafeteria, Building 1, Main Campus (Enter at Lobby 1)
Laurel, MD 20723

The URL for the Greater Baltimore InDesign User Group is located here, and is where you can register for the meeting.

There will be three speakers at this meeting, all production experts from local printing companies.

Our first Presenter is Martin Nibali, from KM Printing, which started out as a single Minuteman Press franchise and has grown to become “not your typical quick printer”. KM Printing is full service communications company offering marketing consulting, graphic design, print production, promotional products, and direct mail. Martin will give us many useful pre-press tips including creating InDesign preflight profiles to preflight your document as you design and choosing the correct PDF profiles, just to name a few.

Our second two presenters, Jim Hogan and Joe Wagner, are from The Whitmore Group, a commercial printing and communications company serving the mid-Atlantic region providing innovative prepress, manufacturing, and print management solutions that maximize technology and talent. Jim and Joe will demonstrate the INSITE Creative Workflow, a web-based system that enables teamwork and improves efficiency of creative development. This process allows for proof and approval of files over the internet, will track project status and support creative professionals while tracking costs and time.

Agenda:

6:00 p.m. Registration, Raffles, Networking, and Refreshments sponsored by MacMedics
6:30 p.m. Welcome, Group Business, and Adobe news
7:00 p.m. Feature Presentation I: Pre-Press Tips by Martin Nibali
7:30 p.m. Break (and final raffle sales)
7:40 p.m. Feature Presentation II: Increase Productivity with INSITE Creative Workflow, by Jim Hogan and Joe Wagner
8:10 p.m. Questions & Answers
8:25 p.m. Selecting Raffle Winners
8:35 p.m. Adjourn

Our thanks to the DC Photographers Resource for cross promoting this event on their Blog!

MacMedics End Of Summer Back To School iPhone & iPod Repair Sale

Take $20 off any iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S, or iPhone 4 Glass or LCD repair when you like MacMedics on Facebook.

Take $10 off any iPod or iPad repair when you like MacMedics on Facebook.

Hurry, this repair sale only lasts until the end of August 2010. Enjoy what’s left of the summer!

Thanks to friend of MacMedics, Mario Armstrong for inviting Dana Stibolt, Owner and Founder of MacMedics onto The Mario Armstrong on XM Radio channel 169 last week.

It was a fun talk about a really serious subject. The majority of the radio visit was focused on the MacMedics 5 Rules of Data Preservation and Protection, which can be reviewed at our web page, http://www.HardDrivesDie.com.

You can listen to the segment here. If you’d like to download the MP3 file or send it right to iTunes, just hold down “Command” and click the link above to download the file.

The interview starts at 7:45 into the recording.

We recently helped a new client from New York with a pretty tricky data recovery situation. She had visited the Apple Store to have her hard drive replaced. They were not able to do anything with her old hard drive. They ran some tests and told her her hard disk had “failed and lost all data”. She asked them if she was able to hang onto her old drive, which our Apple colleagues graciously static bagged for her. She then securely packed it and shipped it to us for data recovery.

On our first attempt, we were not able to grab any data, but we stuck with it and was able to recover all of her data.

Below is what she had to say about sending her hard drive to MacMedics:

ECSTATIC! FROM “ZERO DATA” TO FULL RECOVERY!

Sincerely,
Susan Henderson,
author of UP FROM THE BLUE
http://LitPark.com

You can read more about this including comments from her Blog readers and MacMedics at this link. You can read more about the MacMedics 5 rules of data protection and preservation at http://www.HardDrivesDie.com.

Also, don’t assume that when someone tells you your hard drive has “failed and lost all data”, that that is the gospel. Many folks don’t have the time, knowledge, or the energy to really know what’s up with your hard drive. At least 50% of the people that come into our shop with a “dead” hard drive don’t need clean room data recovery. If you send your drive away to “clean room” recovery for a free evaluation, and they can recover your data easily, you are still going to pay a pretty penny. Can you risk your data to our process, in almost all cases, yes. You can can do further damage by using the wrong process to try and recover the data, but if we suspect that your drive needs the clean room treatment, we’ll refer you to one of our partners. You data is worth a second opinion. If your data is worth $150, then it’s worth letting us have a crack at it.

Also, the data recovery firms pay a commission to the folks that refer business to them (including us). Many people would rather just have that commission, rather then trying to take the trouble of trying to recover your data. If your data is super critical, then you may want to go right to a clean room firm. If you’re not sure, please call us and ask us how we think your case should be handled. We do this every single day, so we do have a good deal of Macintosh Data Recovery experience we can share with you.

This iBook hard drive came into the MacMedics Lab for data recovery. The hard drive came out of an iBook G4. Sadly the client did not have their data backed up. This hard drive has a serious problem and it now sounds like a chicken!

Please ensure you have an automated, functional, and fully tested back up system in place. Hard drives can die at any time. See our website www.HardDrivesDie.com for more information.

As Apple Authorized Service Providers, we perform quite a number of Macintosh warranty repairs on behalf of Apple’s customers. We also do so for many of our own customers whom have purchased their Apple gear from MacMedics.

Over the last six months or so, our Apple service business has basically doubled. The Apple Stores in the area are so overwhelmed; many Apple owners are finding out that there is an alternative to making an appointment or waiting around in the mall for a face-to-face with a Genius at the Genius Bar. See our recently updated Blog post on why it makes sense to come visit MacMedics in either Lanham (1 mile from I-495 at RT 50) or Millersville (5 minutes from BWI Airport or 10 minutes form the Annapolis Mall)

When we perform an Apple Warranty or AppleCare repair for someone, Apple sends them a survey to ask how well we performed the service on Apple’s behalf.

Apple then forwards these remarks and the accompanying scores to us with the idea that they will help improve our service.

In the latest round feedback from Apple, these anonymous comments praise MacMedics in such a level of detail it almost looks like we wrote them ourselves.

These are direct from Apple, and we’d like to thank our loyal customers for supporting us. THANKS!

-Very customer focused.

-MacMedics said it was a video card issue. Seems like they were right. So far I’ve had no black screen issues since the repair was performed.

MacMedics would like to thank Dwight Silverman’s Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog for the kind plug for MacMedics’ $150 Liquid Spill Rescue Program.

If you have just arrived from Dwight Silverman’s Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog regarding this topic. This is a delicate subject, and my comments were deemed too long (and maybe too self serving) to be posted on their Blog site. Seriously, please call us to at least chat about your issue, and $150 is a small price to pay to have ALL of the facts regarding your liquid spill case. If you don’t fully read this Blog post, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re out of the woods if your MacBook or MacBook Pro (or any other laptop) is working after you wiped it off, and dried it out. We see lots of cases where the computer will FRY it’s self after what’s left of the liquid inside starts to corrode and grows what we call creeping crud.

MacMedics does offer a $150 “liquid spill” assessment. For $150, we will have our Apple Certified techs take the unit completely apart and perform one round of electronic cleaning. The $150 will also get you a written estimate of what exactly the unit needs in terms of parts for repair, which you can in turn submit to your insurance or credit card to start a claim. Our $150 evaluation and first go-around of cleaning is a good deal, as sometime we can save the unit for $150.

See this review from DJ PHAZE We were able to save his DJ MacBook for $150.

Also, here’s our full post from the MacMedics Blog on liquid spills.

In regards to sending your unit out for repair we accept repairs from all over the world, and we are known for our quick turn around times. We will also start looking at your MacBook or MacBook Pro the day it arrives, so we do not wait around on liquid spills. Also, as this article mentioned, getting inside the UniBody MacBook and MacBook Pros are a pain. It is definitely not a repair for a beginner.

Another advantage MacMedics can offer is that we fix only what has a problem. When you compare our quote to $1200 one from Apple that uses a “tiered” repair system that favors the worst case scenario and no cleaning, our repair can be half as much, or even less depending on the problem. We only clean what needs cleaning, and we only replace what needs to be replaced. By totally talking the unit fully apart (most others do not perform this service) we have a fairly accurate view of what needs to happen. When you compare that to someone just giving a verbal estimate of $1200 without taking the unit apart, our repair is usually less. One other factor that is commonly overlooked is if Apple sends your unit away for depot service, there is a disconnect in ownership of the problem from the Genius who checked it in to the Repair Tech who handles your case in another state.

I’ll just mention one other thing here. Often someone will have a liquid spill, then clean it up, dry it out, and then use the computer. You really, really need to get inside that unit to ensure ALL of the liquid and corrosion is totally gone. We commonly see units suffer from a spill, for a few days, then totally fry, because the corrosion (creeping curb) will short out a circuit somewhere, killing the logic board or other complex electronic system.

When you are dealing with a crisis like this, it is helpful to talk to someone who has been through this process before. Feel free to call and talk to me, or any of our expert techs to get all of your repair options. 1-866-MAC-MEDICS

Also, MacMedics is an Apple Authorized Value Added Reseller, so even if you do have a MacBook Pro catastrophe on your hands, we can sell you a new unit, transfer your data, and give you a trade-in allowance for your damaged unit.

Sorry to ramble on, but this is a complex topic. Please check out our Blog for more details.

Dana Stibolt