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Just in time for the holidays, we are offering a special Bill Me Later promo—No Payments for 90 Days on orders of $999 or more until 12/25/08.
Bill Me Later is quick, easy and secure—shop without using your credit card this holiday season! Select the Bill Me Later option in our shopping cart to apply online.
To read more about Bill Me Later, click here.
Last week we picked two new winners from our Facebook “fans.” They will receive a goody bag of fun iPod and Mac accessories. We will continue to randomly choose two contest winner per month from our Facebook fans.
If you’re not already in our Facebook group, you can quickly join “by clicking here.”:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Small-Dog-Electronics/18904017006
You can also follow us on Twitter by “clicking here.”:https://twitter.com/hellosmalldog
The Logitech Pure-Fi Elite stereo system is one of our most popular iPod speaker systems. It’s also top rated–for example, it has an “A, highly recommnded” rating from iLounge.com.
The Logitech Pure-Fi Elite is a full functioning stereo for your iPod, with AM/FM radio, clock, and backlit remote that provides easy one-touch access to shuffle and repeat functions and even allows instant access to preset iPod playlists without navigating menus on your iPod.
For the rest of the holiday season, we have it on sale for $139.99 with FREE shipping!
_Dear Friends,_
The gray aliens let me go after I convinced them that the designated hitter rule is a travesty. Actually, I was away getting a medical issue taken care of and spent most of this week recovering from the surgery. Here in Vermont, we are fortunate to have an excellent medical community. All the medical providers at Fletcher Allen Hospital were great, and while I can’t say I enjoyed the experience, my problem seems to be solved and I am itching to get back to work next week!
One of the things that my experience has reinforced is that it is important to be in touch with your own mortality–to realize that life is truly short. Taking advantage of every moment and carefully considering the decisions you make each day helps to focus your life. It is my motivation for the social mission of Small Dog Electronics. How we measure our success is an important part of the DNA of our company. We feel that if we create a human-oriented workplace, with happy and healthy workers, we are a success as a business. If we treat our customers the way we would want to be treated and treat our vendors that same way, we are a success as a business. When we understand the impact our business makes upon the environment and take steps not only to lessen that impact but to improve our environment, we are a success as a business. If we can make some money while doing this, we are a success as a business. It is this triple bottom line–people, planet, profit–that defines Small Dog Electronics and drives our business.
With the holidays coming, we are launching our special Pre-Holiday Sales Event starting today through Sunday online and in our retail stores, and we’re offering some of our best deals of the year! We have over 200 total specials going on right now; be sure to check out our featured values in this issue of Kibbles & Bytes.
I noticed a version of the following tip on Apple’s website, and it reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a customer who was confused about Mac OS X’s spellchecking capabilities. They found the information helpful, so maybe some of you will too!
Mac OS X offers a fast and easy way to check the spelling of individual words in Safari, iChat, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, TextEdit, Mail, Stickies, and other OS X-based applications. Here’s how.
When you misspell a word–or type one that doesn’t appear in the standard Apple dictionary, like the city of Waitsfield, Alabama–Mac OS X highlights it with a dotted red line. To replace it with the correct spelling, right-click the word with your right-click enabled mouse, (or select it with your mouse and Control-click the word on single button mice and laptops). A pop-up menu appears, offering a list of possible replacements. Click the correct spelling of the word to instantly update your document.
If you know a highlighted term–such as Waitsfield–is spelled correctly, and you don’t want Mac OS X to highlight it in future occurrences, choose the Ignore Spelling option from the list. Mac OS X removes the highlighting below Waitsfield wherever it appears, and won’t underline this word again if you use it subsequently in your current document.
If you want all text-based Mac OS X applications to know the correct spelling of Waitsfield, you can customize the Mac OS X dictionary to include this correct spelling of the term. To do so, choose the Learn Spelling option. Mac OS X adds this spelling to its dictionary, and Waitsfield appears in the pop-up list of correctly spelled terms, whether you’re using Pages, Keynote or any other text-based Mac OS X application that uses its spelling dictionary.
Note: sometimes OS X’s built in dictionary can’t fix odd misspellings. In this case, I simply paste the word into Google, and use Google’s very good built-in spellchecker.
We will have four generations of family at my home for Thanksgiving this year. There is a lot to be thankful for this year and it will be good to have the clan gathered for the traditional celebration. I hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! All of us at Small Dog Electronics send our warmest wishes from our family to your family for a happy holiday–Give Thanks!
And thank you so much for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes! Have a great weekend!
Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
_Don, Kali & Ed_
Lately, many of our customers have been asking about the precise differences between the MacBooks with the new aluminum case design, and the $999 MacBook that has the older white, polycarbonate case design. Below I cover the most significant differences, then give a summary of what it all means.
Aluminum specs in bold on the left, vs white plastic specs on the right:
– *Unibody aluminum enclosure* vs plastic white polycarbonate enclosure
– *2.0 or 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn processors* vs 2.1 Intel Core 2 Duo Penryn processor
– Both have 3MB level of “on chip” 2 cache
– *1066 MHz frontside bus* vs 800 MHz frontside bus
– *NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics with 256MB of shared RAM,* vs Intel GMA X3100 with 144MB graphics
– *2GB of RAM (as two 1GB chips) standard* vs 1GB of RAM (as two 512MB chips) standard
– *Faster PC8500 SO DIMM RAM* vs slower (but considerably less expensive) PS5300 SO DIMM RAM
– *Max of 6GB of RAM (with one 2GB chip and one 6GB chip)* vs max of 4GB RAM
– *DisplayPort connector* vs mini-DVI connector
– *Glass trackpad with new and advanced multitouch input* vs trackpad limited to two-finger input
– *Glossy glass display* vs glossy plastic display
– *Instant-on LED backlighting* vs LCD backlighting
– *No FireWire 400 port* vs one FireWire 400 port
Both MacBook models have very similar processor speeds (indeed, the white model has a very-slightly faster processor). However, the newer MacBooks have a significantly faster bus speed (which is important, as the internal bus dictates how quickly the other components on the motherboard can communicate with the processor, and each other.) The newer MacBooks also use faster RAM.
More significantly, the aluminum MacBooks use the Nvidia 9400M chipset and boast graphics performance up to 6.2x faster over the white MacBook which uses the integrated 144MB Intel graphics chipset. Video gamers and image / video editors will see the improved graphics performance. Also, speed and responsiveness of core graphics in OS X are also improved with the Nvidia chipset, though most people will not notice the difference.
Even with these improvements, real-world testing shows that the aluminum MacBooks are only modestly faster than the white plastic MacBooks. Benchmarks show about a 9% speed difference. “MacWorld”:http://www.macworld.com/article/136236/2008/10/aluminummacbook.html magazine ran Speedmark version 5 tests on the aluminum MacBooks and the 2.1GHz white MacBook and reports that “Comparing the top of line 2.4 GHz MacBook to its less expensive, lower-powered 2 GHz sibling, we find the high-end model nearly 9 percent faster in overall Speedmark performance, with narrower performance gaps in graphics tests and wider gaps in processor tests, like Cinema 4D.”
It’s also interesting to note that Macworld magazine showed that the current white MacBook is about 4x faster that the final, top of the line PowerPC-based PowerBook – for half the price.
Ultimately, many people are going to choose the newer, aluminum MacBooks simply for their innovative design. Others will want to save a little money, don’t mind (or enjoy) the older white design, or need a compact notebook with a FireWire 400 port to support older video cameras.