[Ti] Apple Store Service

[Kynan Shook]

Actually, in their case, FireWire is the easy way.  FireWire is faster 
than 100 BaseT Ethernet (and MUCH faster than Airport, or even Extreme, 
especially if you try to get a lot of computers to run a lot of traffic 
all at the same time).  Also, you can boot off a FireWire drive, but 
you can't boot off Ethernet, except with NetBoot, which isn't what you 
want.

So, if they were to pay for a gigabit ethernet network (fairly 
expensive still), and a fairly nice server (an XServe with all 4 drives 
striped would probably work OK-almost as fast as separate drives for 
each machine, probably), they could probably pull off the same thing 
with close to the same ease (minus a lack of bootability); but they'd 
pay a whole lot more than they needed to.

About two weeks ago, I had 10 iBooks on loan from Apple for an event at 
my university; I installed all the software I needed on one of them, 
and had it copied via Carbon Copy Cloner over FireWire to all 9 others 
in 30 or 45 minutes, which is not much longer than I spent just doing 
the install on the first one.

Related to the Apple Store service, I can say that I've had only good 
experiences in the Bloomington, MN (Mall of America) and the Wauwatosa, 
Wisconsin (Mayfair Mall) locations.  Both stores were very busy, and 
the staff was knowledgeable and friendly.  I got into some great 
conversations with a few of the employees, including one about how I 
could learn more about writing software for the Mac; they knew full 
well I had no intention of buying anything new.


XXL <xxl at mac.com> writes:
> THEY can  do that over the network without hassling with the FireWire 
> drives
> I am not encouraged about their technical expertise hearing that they 
> do it
> the hard way.


Kynan Shook
kshook at mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/kshook/index.html