May, 9 2010 - Tethering: The iPhone takes the iPad out

The iPhone contracts by the German provider (note the singular) is some kind of gagging. You are charged 45.95€ a month in the second smallest contract. You can choose between a telephone flatrate into the German fixed line network or the T-Mobile cellular phone network. Calls to the other network and other carriers costs 29 cent per minute. The SMS service costs 19 cent per message to other carriers and is free to T-Mobile customers. Furthermore you get a data flatrate over HSDPA. However, these guys limit your speed to 64/16 kBit/s once you reach a 300 MB limit. Tethering is not allowed without an additional contract upgrade which costs another 19.95€ per month - and you get a larger threshold before they limit your speed but I'm not sure how much. Oh, and the contract duration for the tethering option is 6 months.

Currently I have a monthly traffic of around 200 MB. Surfing the internet on the small iPhone display is an emergency solution if I have to lookup something while I'm on the road. The traffic caused by Email and so on is probably insignificant. However, since I have an iPad (WiFi only) for about two weeks now I often wish I had a working internet connection while reading boring papers on this fancy device. Unfortunately Apple does not allow the iPad to tether over an iPhone. In my opinion this is a simple user-hostile marketing policy to make the 3G model of the iPad more attractive.

Some days ago Spirit, a new iPhone jailbreak, has been released. I wasn't able to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS for two months because it is an official one with firmware 3.1.3 (and a gagging-contract). So I was excited when the new jailbreak hit the public. It is by far the easiest and fastest jailbreak for iPhones I have ever seen. Simply download the application, start it, connect your iPhone via USB, click on the jailbreak-button and your iPhone reboots. About 30 seconds later the iPhone is back online and Cydia (the underground packet manager) is installed. Now you can guess my next steps: I downloaded MyWi to turn my iPhone into a WLAN access point. This useful application also enables tethering via USB and Bluetooth without asking my magenta service provider. This way I'm able to surf the internet using my iPad tethering over the iPhone wherever a suitable cellular link is available. And it works surprisingly fast: I got 528 kB/s downlink and 22 kB/s uplink which enough for the subway (:

The drawbacks of this apprach:

• MyWi only supports WEP - so I'm a walking target for hackers (;
• My service provider will limit the downlink to 8 kB/s after 300 MB per month
• It's getting a bit warm in my trouser pocket

Nevertheless it works really great, not only with my iPad but also any other WLAN enabled device.

May, 2 2010 - MacBook Pro 17" - May flame spontaneously

Well, I don't think it will flame but gets definitely too hot. Two weeks ago I got my new MacBook Pro 17" (mid 2010) with a Core i7 CPU running at 2.66GHz. Soon I noticed that it gets hotter than my old MacBook Pro 15" (late 2008). However, I didn't manage to get the CPU hotter than around 86°C. This corresponds roughly to the peak temperature of my old MacBook which used a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.4GHz. After a while a friend sent me a link where some guys pushed the CPU of the new MacBooks to 101°C using Cinebench. This is a temperature I have never seen before. I tried to reproduce it and it (almost) worked - but surprisingly not only for the new MacBook:

Since I never observed such temperatures, Cinebench really seems to push the CPUs to their limits. Although these temperatures are abnormal I did not experience any stability issues - at least so far. Both fans run at 3500rpm at these temperatures and remain comfortable quiet. However, the old MacBook reaches the same temperatures! That's a surprise since nobody was complaining about this for the past two years. The only thing to worry about is the fact that the 17" MacBook gets equally hot as a 15" model. Rumours that the new MacBook Pro has design flaws leading to excessive heat do not seem to be true.

According to the Cinbench results, the Core i7 processor offers around 80% more performance than the good old Core 2 Duo. The single thread test shows that a single processor core of the Core i7 is around 46% faster than the Core 2 Duo. I do not know for sure if the Core i7 activated its turbo boost which allows it to run at up to 3.33GHz. The remaining difference between both processors comes from Hyperthreading which allows a single core to process two threads at the same time. This increases the efficiency under certain circumstances. The OpenGL test was done using the GeForce 9600M GT (the faster one) in the old MacBook. Compared to the new GT330M there is a 65% difference. Besides double the amount of memory, the GT330M uses 48 instead of 32 shader cores which is responsible for the boost.

It's also interesting to note that the battery capacity of the new MacBookPro 17" is three times larger - 13152mAh compared to 4132mAh. Regarding its lifetime I would only say that you can deplete it in a bit more than one our (use Cinebench *g*) but it can also last for about four hours under my typical workload which includes running at least one virtual machine and keeping the display very bright. Under these conditions, the old MacBook did last for less than two hours. Apple speaks of about nine hours which might be true if you use it as jukebox.

The new MacBook is definitely more than just a small update. Together with the great 17" display at 1920x1200 pixel and the anti-glare option I'm very happy with my new (not so mobile) workstation. By the way: an employee of the Apple store in Munich told me that you don't loose your warranty for changing the hard disk or memory modules.