Kibbles & Bytes Blog
Apple news, tech tips, and more…
!(image)http://blog.smalldog.com/images/3036.gif!
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Well I finally got my iPhone 6 and set it up this week. I immediately configured Apple Pay and went down to Winn-Dixie to get some groceries since I knew they accepted it. What a breeze! No wallet needed! I just held my iPhone 6 near the terminal with my thumb on the Touch ID sensor and just like that I had paid for my groceries. I even got a notification of the transaction. I think that many are underestimating the impact of Apple Pay both on sales of compatible devices (i.e. iPhone 6 & 6+) and on how we pay for goods and services. From my one experience, I think Apple got this one right!
Thank you so much for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!
Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
_Don, Rachel, Dean & Mike_
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SPECIAL | Capture Your Holidays
As Don mentioned the Canon EOS 7D with a 28mm to 135mm lens is perfect for the inner artist that is looking to capture the moment on more than just an iPhone or iPad. Now ONLY $999!
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SPECIAL | Belkin Sport-Fit Armband
The Belkin Sport-Fit Plus Armband for iPhone 5/5s/5c and iPod touch 5th Generation is made from a stretchy neoprene material which is lightweight and breathable, making it ideal for exercising. There is also a pouch that can hold a key or cash. Perfect for the person on your list who is always on the go.
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Bundle Up!
We’re making it easier than ever to check everyone off your list this year. Shop our Mac The Halls Holiday Deals at “*Smalldog.com/macthehalls*”:http://www.smalldog.com/macthehalls/holiday-2014-sale or in any of “*our retail stores.*”:http://www.smalldog.com/retail/visit-us-in-store-at-any-of-our-locations
We’ve got some of this year’s hottest gifts, conveniently bundled to make shopping stress free!
!http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4149.png!:http://www.smalldog.com/macthehalls/holiday-2014-sale
p<>. *Purchase any MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or iMac with AppleCare, and receive savings of up to $200!*
!http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4150.png!:http://www.smalldog.com/macthehalls/holiday-2014-sale
p<>. *Save on an iPad case when you purchase an iPad.*
!http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4151.png!:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001658
p<>. *Hammerhead On The Go Bundle for iPad*
*Stay tuned until next week for our Annual Kibbles & Bytes Gift Guide!*
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How to Set up Apple Pay
I should have written this article earlier but I did just get my iPhone 6 so better late than never! It is really easy to set up Apple Pay but let’s go over it…
You can start using “*Apple Pay*”:http://www.apple.com/apple-pay/ as soon as you add a credit or debit card to “*Passbook*”:http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204003. Here’s the pre-requisites:
* iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus (Apple Pay in stores and within apps)
* iPad Air 2 or iPad mini 3 (Apple Pay only within apps)
* iOS 8.1 or later
* United States as your selected region
* Touch ID or passcode on your device
* iCloud account
* A supported credit or debit card from a participating bankYour credit cards are stored in Passbook so that is where you manage, add or delete them. If you want to use the card that you already have tied to you iTunes account it is really simple. Go to *Settings > Passbook > Apple Pay > Set up Apple Pay.* Once there if you do not have any credit cards already set up you can click on the + sign to add a card. You will then be given the choice of using the card on file with iTunes or add a different card.
If you are just using the card on file with iTunes it will ask you to enter the security code and then you tab “next”. It will go out on the ‘net to verify your card with the bank and you are all set.
So, if you are like me, I want to use a different card for Apple Pay than I use for iTunes so I wanted to add a new card. It was also easy. You tab the + sign and select “Use a Different Credit or Debit Card”. On the card details screen which will pop-up you can manually enter all the information or click on the camera icon next to the number field and you can capture the credit card number with the iSight camera. You will still need to add things like the expiration date and the security code manually.
You are now ready to shop at the increasing number of stores that accept Apple Pay or use Apple Pay within an app, where it says “Buy with Apple Pay” or just the Apple Pay logo: . You can always change your default card, switch cards, delete cards, etc. from within the Passbook app.
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_Dear Friends,_
It was great to be back in Vermont where we hosted the big Thanksgiving feast with lots of Mayers, Bangouras and Kellys in attendance. We got our taste of cold weather and snow and are glad to be back in the sunshine in Key West now.
Black Friday did not seem to be as big as previous years and there may be many reasons for this but I think that the big box stores opening on Thanksgiving had some impact. We will never open on Thanksgiving as we believe this is a day for our employees to spend with their families, not to head to work or to the mall for shopping. In terms of sales impact, however, I also think that the deep discounting that many of the big box stores offered on Apple products was both a reflection of the amazing popularity of the most innovative products on the planet produced by Apple as well as the fact that these stores use these products as “loss leaders” to drive customers to their stores to buy TVs, refrigerators, etc. Our response to this during October was to partner with women’s shelters to make a donation from each sale. During October we were able to raise over $16,000 for these shelters thanks to customers who bought from Small Dog Electronics not based upon price but based upon community.
Competition will always be there and I do not see the deep discounting going away anytime soon. So, what is our response? We must give you many reasons to buy from Small Dog Electronics. We strive to become contributing and involved members of the communities in which we operate, provide complete solutions, patient and non-pushy sales and work very hard to make each of our customers a loyal customer. We believe in making customers for life and whenever our company intersects with your life that we both leave that intersection better from the experience. I had one friend tell me that my employees were too focused on customer service and not on sales. That we gave away our expertise and worked hard to find the right solution for the customer but that wasn’t our role, that we were sales and we should concentrate upon just that. Well, that is not going to happen, at least not on my watch. We have made our name by the friendly and caring interactions with our customers, our community involvement and honest recommendations. That is a consultative sales approach with the ultimate goal not being the small profit that we may make from a single transaction but rather the life-cycle value of a loyal customer.
Nevertheless, we have some awesome deals for the holidays both on Apple products and third-party accessories as well as tools you may need for your digital life. Check us out “*online*”:http://www.smalldog.com/macthehalls/holiday-2014-sale or in any of our “*retail stores*”:http://www.smalldog.com/retail/visit-us-in-store-at-any-of-our-locations, we will be happy to see you!
Speaking of great deals, we have made a special buy on a high-end digital camera. Now, I know that so much of modern photography is done on iPhones and iPads however, if you want to truly bring out that inner artist you may want to consider a “real” camera. The Canon EOS 7D is just such a camera. It is an 18 megapixel CMOS camera with a 28mm to 135mm lens. This camera sells for $1299 on Amazon and you can find it for about $1099 if you just want the body without the lens, but for Kibbles & Bytes readers you can get this brand new camera with lens for only $999!
“*See this great deal here!*”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001615
“!http://blog.smalldog.com/images/4152.jpg!”:http://www.smalldog.com/wag900001615
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SPECIAL | Belkin NetCam HD Wi-Fi Camera w/ Night Vision
Not only does the Belkin NetCam HD allow you to keep tabs on kids or pets from your smartphone or tablet–it also allows you to see all the action in vibrant 720p HD video. Ideal for anyone who has kids, pets, or grandparents at home, the camera captures smooth video and crisp digital audio that makes you feel like you’re right there with them.
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SPECIAL | iON Air Pro 3 WiFi – 1080p Action Waterproof Camera
Capture thrilling action moments with this iON Air Pro 3 Wi-Fi waterproof action camera. Record stunning panoramas with up to a 170° wide-angle field of view. Aimed at professional and amateur photographers, adventurers, adrenalin junkies and recreational sports enthusiasts alike, this product has a lot to offer!
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SPECIAL | Seagate Backup Plus Slim Portable Drive USB 3.0 – 2TB
The Seagate Backup Plus Slim Portable Drive is the simple, one-click way to protect and share your entire digital life. Perfect to take on the go, the sleek metal case design allows for the thinnest portable hard drive available with up to 2TB of capacity. It goes anywhere — without getting in your way. Available in Black, Blue, and Red.
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IPv6 Is On Its Way
1981 was a very eventful year. The DeLorean Motor Company began production of the now infamous DMC-12 (the time travel package didn’t become available until 1985). President Ronald Reagan signed a top secret National Security Decision Directive authorizing the CIA to recruit and support Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was born. More relevant to our tech interests though, IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) was released in 1981.
There aren’t many things from 1981 that we still use, but IPv4 is one of them. The Internet Protocol’s job is to route traffic on the Internet. One of the most critical features of this protocol is addressing. We commonly refer to this as IP addresses. IPv4 specifies 32-bit addresses. This means we have only 32 bits in which to store any possible IP address. When you see an IP address in dotted-decimal notation, such as 198.18.22.111, each of those numbers can be represented by 8 bits (198 = 11000110 for example).
With 8 bits you can only represent 256 unique combinations. This is why each piece of an IPv4 address will always be a number between 0 and 255. In a full IPv4 address, you have 4 blocks of 8 bits for a total of 32 bits. A full 32-bit IPv4 address can represent 2^32 possible addresses or 4,294,967,296. That’s almost 4.3 billion possible addresses. In 1981, this was more addresses than they thought they would ever need. After all, most people couldn’t even use the Internet then…they’d never be able to use up all those addresses!
Fast forward to 2014 (or take a DeLorean). A huge number of homes and businesses have constantly connected internet modems. Many have more than one. Each of those devices needs a unique IP address. Add in every single smartphone, as well as other random internet-connected devices and 4 billion addresses starts to seem like a pretty small number. If that situation weren’t bad enough, you can’t even use every single address. Huge chunks are reserved for certain network systems, software and documentation. All in all, roughly 600 million addresses are unavailable for use on the public Internet. The full list of reserved addresses and their uses can be found “here”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses#Reserved_IPv4_addresses.
Fortunately, if you have a home with a single modem and all computers and devices connect to a wireless router, you’re only using a single IP address of public Internet space. The modem and router act as a gateway to the outside world and the public Internet. Inside your home, your router will give you one of the special reserved addresses. You might be familiar with these, since they almost always start with 192.168. This process is called network address translation or NAT. A private organization with a large number of machines can funnel all their traffic through the modem-router and appear on the public Internet as one single IPv4 address.
Even with mitigation, we are running out of addresses, and a solution does need to be found. Fortunately, IPv6 is on its way. IPv6 addresses contain 128 bits allowing for 2^128 possible addresses or approximately 3.4×10^38. In other words, a lot. In fact, IPv6 allows for approximately 7.9×10^28 more addresses than IPv4. Unfortunately, IPv6 adoption has been slow and IPv4 still carries something like 96% of all Internet traffic. As the Internet becomes more and more saturated with devices, we’ll eventually be forced onto IPv6. Hopefully we won’t be looking back around 2050 and wondering why we didn’t choose to use 256-bit addressing instead.
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Update from Small Dog Electronics Rutland
I have been moved down to Rutland from South Burlington to cover the tech position for a short duration. The queue down here is running smoothly and the average turnaround time is actually doing pretty well considering I can only be in the store three days a week and normally after hours. One repair that I ran into that took me off guard was for a brand new “Retina 5K iMac 27 inch”:http://www.smalldog.com/category/Apple/iMac/27in that just came out. It had a defective display where it displayed both vertical and horizontal bars in different colors with varying screen flickering. I ran it through normal diagnostics and narrowed it down to the actual display itself and ruled out the graphics card. The display is on order and I’m just waiting for it to come in.
I didn’t anticipate having to repair a 5K iMac so soon, but it did give me a unique opportunity to see how the internals were arranged and changed from the previous generation of iMac. Everything appears to have been shifted to the bottom of the machine, leaving open space where it tapers towards the top of the machine. Apple went back to a 3.5” hard drive in the new iMacs, where the previous two generations all used 2.5” drives. Externally it does look very similar to all the previous iMacs but internally its completely different. For example, the speakers are larger and the boards are smaller and shaped differently. It looks beautiful on the inside, a technicians dream with how modular everything is getting. The most difficult part of having to service the new(er) style of iMacs is having to deal with the adhesive that holds the display to the back housing. Having to cut the adhesive with the provided pizza-style cutter can be frustrating if the display refuses to come off the back housing, as happened with this repair.
The second worst part is putting the display back on, which requires having to get the adhesive perfect with everything aligned, because if it’s not aligned, you have to cut the display off and try again. One aspect of the new iMac that I really like is that the display isn’t screwed down to the main logic board and only has one connection internally. This makes diagnosing easier because the inverter board, which manages the backlight level of the display, is incorporated into the display itself rather than a separate board within the machine.
All in all, I can see the new 5K iMacs being an easier to diagnose machine then its predecessor but, hopefully for your sake, I don’t see too many of them!