I was visiting the Penang Picom PC Fair during lunch today and was delighted to see an apple booth. In the past years, they did not make their presence felt, and this year they made an effort with the Switch campaign. I took the effort to do some price comparison for the Macbook range and found some price traps. I will explain what are those in detail later. In summary, my recommendation is to purchase your machine from Singapore or US, and then purchase your Apple Care in Malaysia. I have found that the Apple Care package have been priced rather competitive where it is cheaper in Malaysia by RM218 and RM156 comparing against US and Singapore.

The machines are best to buy in the US where you can have savings from RM382 to RM502. These savings can contribute significantly to your Apple Care package. Purchasing in Singapore will bring you savings from RM167 to RM241, almost half of what you can save from buying in the US. Again, these savings are rather significant.

The price trap I mention is by purchasing the machine and the apple care package on the respective countries. For example, if you purchase the basic machine and apple care from the US, you are only saving RM164 comparing to purchasing the machine in the US and then purchase the apple care package in Malaysia. Worst is purchasing both machine and apple care package in Singapore, where it gives you a mere RM11 savings.

So, if you are looking to purchase a macbook in Malaysia, I would recommend to get it from the US, if possible, and then purchase the apple care here in Malaysia. If not, you can try to get it from Singapore, and in all cases, purchase the apple care in Malaysia, its the cheapest among the 3 countries.

Note: All prices above are converted from USD and Singapore Dollar to Ringgit Malaysia based on Google Conversion rate on Apr 18, 2008.

 

Windows trash can that is. For a coffee lover, it couldn’t trill me more to have a trash can with the starbucks brand trash can, a constant reminder to get my java to fuel my day…Speaking of starbucks, I was required to travel next week to audit one of the newly setup factory in China. Considering which hotel to stay at, the first thing I did was went to google map, and search for the city’s name. Next I type in ‘Starbucks’, to search for business at the city. To my dismay, the city was not listed in Google map, to have this service, too small, so I stayed in Shangri la ShenZhen without any starbucks near by. Fear not, there are 13 starbucks stores in ShenZhen, a quick cap will do my fix.

Get your trash can here.

With a clumsy swing my colleague knocks over my starbuck tumbler and down goes a few ounces of my newly brewed cafe mocha onto my laptop. The entire laptop was still running and we got the keyboards dried. I shut it down and continue to clean it up. The keys were so tight that the under part were shining with coffee and I could not reach it. I took the laptop down to the tech support and got it opened up. There were still seepage of coffee on the DVD Rom and some of the internal parts. I was expecting a total water proof, but it seams that there are opportunity for the liquids to seep through. We tissued the entire machine up and put it back together. Works like a charm, well, for a few hours at least till the keyboards become sticky, and every keystrokes were a dreaded moment. And now, the backspace key has decided to pack up and stop functioning. I had to rely on the Del button to correct errors, something that bugs the hell out of me. Have to see the tech dude first thing tomorrow morning. Morale of the story, no matter how advance laptops have become, liquid is something that must be kept far away, and boy, I have come to realize that I have been using the backspace button so often, especially on correcting typing errors. There hardly any sentence that goes by without the use of it. Sign of rooms of improvements on the typing efficiency.

This was the light weight, low power, ultra thin processor that I worked on just before I left, and it finally has a name, Atom Processor. Cleaver name, but I was expecting a name that we have not heard before, like Pentium or Centrino, of which not a word till Intel created it. Nevertheless, this ultra light weight process will power the future of ultra mobile computing. Guess who is the first in line to have a Atom Processor powered device?…

Dock stacking as being used by OsX Leopard, has now come to Win XP through the stack docklet. Its a nifty little docklet that works on RK Launcher, ObjectDock, RocketDock and Yz Dock. There are two options of stack, one is the ‘Fan’ mode, that opens the stack up like a fan (above), and another is the Grid mode, that opens all the applications up in a grid format (below). To use it, you will have to first create a folder and create shortcuts to all the applications you want to stack up into the folder. Once you have download and enable the docklet, you just need to point the docklet to the folder of application shortcuts and whoala, its done. When I first enabled it, I was blown away by the nice animation and look of the stack. Its a cool edition to the RK Launcher that I am currently using. You can get more information of this docklet from OSX-E.