When I was about thirteen, my older brother, Craig, was really into cars and fixing them. I'd follow him around and watch him work on his Camaro in the garage. Like a doting little brother, I wanted to be like him and was awestruck at how much he knew about cars and engines. I can remember asking him how he knew so much about them and how I could learn what he knew. Craig handed me a huge stack of car magazines and told me to start reading. I was fla ergasted. Where do I start reading? Which do I read first? Is Car%26am Driver more important than SuperChevy? I can remember fli ing through a few of his magazines and quickly being overwhelmed at the amount of information I'd have to know to be like Craig. I soon went back to my Garbage Pail Kids cards and DOS manuals. I gave up on being a car mechanic but learned an important le on...the best way to start learning something is to just start learning it. It doe 't matter where you start as long as you start somewhere and keep at it long enough until the knowledge begi to gel in your mind.Being a good Mac tech starts with knowing the Macintosh and its operating system--namely, Mac OS X. Good car mechanics are often filled with arcane knowledge about the vehicles they work on. They tend to know which parts break down first and can diagnose a problem from an exte ive knowledgebase of vehicles and engines and parts. I've discovered that good Mac techs are the same way--they tend to know pretty well the i ides of many different Macintosh models and the peculiarities of each. They know, for i tance, that the Rev. A iMac G5 often suffers from logic board failures and "exploding capacitors". They can often diagnose a problem--or if one is ha ening--just by using the computer in question.
The Fundamentals
You have to know Mac OS X, and I don't mean "know how to use Mac OS X." My Mom can use Mac OS X. A good Mac tech needs to understand the fundamental structure of the operating system and how the components relate to each other. For i tance, know what Frameworks are and how they differ from Exte io . You should understand the various levels of the operating system, like why there are three "Library" folders or four/five "Fonts" folders. If you're not sure about what's lurking underneath the glo y GUI that A le gives us, then start investigating. You don't nece arily have to change anything, but it doe 't hurt to look. Start reading some of the excellent tutorials on the Web like those over at kernelthread.com or ArsTechnica You don't nece arily have to understand everything right away. Just immerse yourself in the technology and eventually it'll start making se e.
Up-to-Date Knowledge
I don't care if you know how to use Conflict Catcher. Really, I don't. What's that, you say? You know that Suitcase 8 conflicts with the ATM control panel? Good for you. I'm sure that knowledge will we useful here in mid-2006 just like that certificate you got in operating a telegraph machine. I was that guy 10 years ago and I made a good living doing it, but that was the state of tech ten years ago. You don't want to be that guy today. The one exception to this that I'll grant is that there are still a few stu orn holdouts using Macs ru ing System 8 and Mac OS 9. If you're the unlucky soul that has to su ort these machines [waves at D.C.], then sure, keep that knowledge and use it. But you should probably be preparing yourself for the inevitable switch to Mac OS X (or to Windows, shudder).
Co ider Learning Scripting
Some Mac techs are lucky enough to have come from a Unix background and have mastered shell scripting. The best Mac techs I know are scripting wizards and can whip together a script to do almost anything. That is the true power of Mac OS X, you know. Its Unix underpi ings make it versatile, stable, and secure. Buy a good begi ing book on shell or Perl scripting and start experimenting. I am certainly not a scripting whizkid, but I've gotten to the point where knowing some scripting is helping to reduce my workload, which is the ultimate goal anyway, right? What's that? You like performing the same identical configuration task on each of 400 Macs?
Use the Resources and Stay Current
The Mac community, and by exte ion, the Mac technical community, are lively collectio of interesting, fascinating, and helpful people. Learn about we ites like AFP548.com and MacEnterprise.org. Lurk on some of the better Mac technical mailing lists, even if their subject matter is over your head. I su cribe to half-a-dozen Mac tech mailing lists (such as Mac-Mgrs, MacEnterprise, Mac OS X Server, and Tidbits) and the collected knowledge in their archives is incredible. If you su cribe to a list, just lurk for awhile and follow the list rules. I've found a Gmail account and its handling of email conversatio an astonishingly good fit as a mailing list receptacle. Whenever I encounter a new problem, I immediately turn to the mailing list archives (most are online and searchable) to see if anyone else has encountered the problem and whether there's a known solution or workaround. Another sometimes-overlooked but amazing resource are A le's own discu ion forums. The signal-to-noise ratio is quite high, but there are a lot of really smart people a wering questio , many of them A le employees.
Documentation
Practice keeping documentation of the problems you've solved, or at least bookmarks to sites where you found a solution. I've lost count of the number of times I've solved a problem, didn't document it, and then had to re-solve the problem 2 months later. Documenting your troubleshooting ste and proce will also improve your articulation, writing, and communication skills. You don't have to make your documentation public, but many people do. You might even contribute to the mailing lists or we ites that I've been talking about in this post, or even to that scra y little TUAW blog.
Co ider Certification
A le's profe ional certification program has come a long way in the last few years. They now offer several levels of technical certification and a wide range of cla es to better your knowledge of Mac OS X and its related technologies. If your goal is to be an attractive candidate for a Mac technical position, having an ACTC or ACSA certification is certainly going to carry more weight than having only Microsoft certs or no certs at all. For awhile, i was teaching some of A le's courses and know that the team of people they have working on the manuals and course design is very knowledgeable and competent.
Following some of all of this advice will likely get you started on your way to becoming a good Mac tech. There's a lot more that I could put in this post, and I'm sure that some of our readers will have things to add as well in the comments.
Oh yeah, remember my brother Craig who taught himself to be a car mechanic? Last Christmas he bought a computer. He was pretty new to computers so he asked me for help teaching him how to set it up and use it. I tried to explain to him what this whole Internet thing was about and what I do for a living. He looked at me and shook his head, "How on Earth do you know all this!? Jeez!" I smiled and handed him a stack of computer magazines and said, "Start reading."
AMD, the #2 CPU maker in the world, has a ounced a purchase of ATI, a leading graphics card manufacturer, for $5.4 billion. IMG has more details on the buyout and the busine end of things, but we're more interested in finding out what exactly this mea for the Mac market. ATI currently su lies the graphics hardware in a good portion of A le's machines, including the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on and my wife's iMac, so here's hoping ATI makes enough money from working with A le to keep AMD - an arch rival to Intel - ha y. Stay tuned for more details as they develop.
Santa came early, bringing a little gift from Adobe. Adobe Reader < an cla ="hw">( eacute;e Acrobat Reader) Version 8.0 is out and gue what... It's Universal Binary and it's kinda fast. Not like lightening fast, but practically zi y. Thanks, Adobe!
It seems there are two slowly diverging schools of thought in terms of working on a Mac: to multi-task, or not to. While an independent (though A le-commi ioned) study has been released su orting the increased productivity theory via larger di lays and more stuff on-screen at once, not everyone sits in the same camp. Merlin Ma of 43folders is one of those campers who is thinking different, and Ru ell from our sister-blog DV Guru dro ed a note to say the latest episode of MacBreak (iTS link) features Leo and Mr. Ma waxing ecstatic on all things uncluttered and distraction-free. They cover techniques and tweaks for clearing your work ace in the Finder, as well as using 3rd party tools like our TUAW-favorite Quicksilver, irited Away (which we've covered) and MenuShade from Nullriver Software (scroll down, it's under their Open Source section).
You may not know the name, but you certainly know his work: the iPod, the iMac, and the MacBook, just to name a few. Jonathan Ive, as Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, has had a big hand in the company's succe . He i 't often in the media's eye since A le likes to keep most of their employees out of the limelight (with some notable exceptio ) but this guy is a design superstar.
Each week, we recap the Rigs of the Day that have graced our pages over the past seven days, and crown a "Rig of the Week." Here is the current entry. It's a rather short list this time around, folks.
A le's ongoing investigation into its stock option grants has delayed its SEC 10-K filing. The filing, which was due yesterday, may be delayed for as much as a month.
It's Tuesday and it's time for another i tallment of the iTunes Tuesday Freebies. Every week I scour the iTunes stores, looking for the best free offerings around the world. Here are the freebies I found for you this week. 
British born Jonathan Ive, designer of the iMac and iPod, became a Commander in The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire today. According to a Macworld article, Ive received this honor at the Queen's New Year Honours ceremony.
How's that for a headline? You could replace 'Intel' with any number of companies and it would jibe with numerous rumors and co iracy theories but this is the rumor du jour.
Today was certainly exciting day for everyone following the Macworld Expo. The a ouncement of the iPhone and the A le TV, the latter more so than the former, certainly blew this blogger away. The one category of products expected by almost everyone, but mi ing from the keynote, was A le's lineup of software, including the iLife suite and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. This begs the question about what A le's pla are for the pere ial update to the software suites, and when they plan to a ounce the release date and feature set for Leopard.
A leScript is the leprechaun of OS X. If you can catch him, you'll get a pot of gold. However, as we all know, leprechau are elusive little beasties. A leScript can seem daunting when you first try to tackle it, e ecially if you are just working with the A le provided documentation.
Are you dying for a eak peek at Leopard, the next incarnationof OS X? If so, book a ticket for San Francisco in mid-August. A le has a ounced, on its site and by email tocustomers, that it will offer a preview of OS X Leopard at WWDC2006, scheduled for August 7-11.
Hot on the heels of brining Universal status to their A lication Enhancer, U anity has released UB versio of ClearDock (free) and Menu Master ($10). ClearDock, as you might glean from the name, is a one-trick pony that can strip the dock of its tra arent background or allow you to adjust the background and the a lication triangle color to your liking. Menu Master is a slick utility for a igning, removing and rearranging shortcuts for menu items in any Mac OS X a lication. It also has a Menu Accelerator feature which allows you to "acce menu items by name without using the mouse". Both a licatio have received feature additio and improvements, as well as bug fixes along with their UB updates.
Those iPod-o e ed kids over at iLounge have updated their Free iPod Book to version 2.2 (yes, books can have version point updates too). Four all-new sectio are included in this updated version:
MacZot is offering Inventive's iClip as a free download today. It's version 3.7 and i 't a universal binary but version 4.0 is about to ship and the company has long offered free upgrades, so grab it now and watch for version 4.0 to ship. I'm not personally a user of multiple cli oards, but I su ose it couldn't hurt to give this a whirl. Who doe 't like free stuff.
This i 't quite a mind-blowing feature, but it might come in handy to those who frequently need to track down a ecific menu item or command. In the menus of any a (including even menubar utilities), you can simply type the first letter of an item you're trying to find in the currently selected menu. This unfortunately doe 't seem to work acro all menus, i.e. - you can't type a command to find it in any menu in the current a , but it should at least help with those "oh I *know* it's in this menu somewhere" moments. This also a ears to work acro all a , Carbon (Finder, Firefox) included.
Yes,everyone's going crazy over the Ultra-Mobile PC(UMPC), the new cla of handheld devices that run Windows XP and are su osed to be the best thing since sliced bread(sliced bread with two and ahalf hours of battery life, but that's a different story). I don't know what all the hype is about, really. MyA le Newton 2100, which was discontinued about a decade ago, does just about everything else a UMPC does, and has asimilar form factor. Let's do a modest feature comparison. According to Microsoft, a UMPC boasts:
RealNetwork's CEO Rob Glaser, always one to fire off a comment when he tricks himself into thinking the industry is listening, might be one of the first major partners of Microsoft to publicly expre , erm, 'disa ointment' with the Redmond company's all-in-one a roach with their Zune music player and service, slated to be delivered... oh I du o, some day: "We think this a case where our technology competitors, in this case ecifically Microsoft, have literally thrown the baby out with the bath water." This might also be the first time Microsoft has been accused of literally throwing out a baby, along with other features and products, such as 
With all the hu ub surrounding the a ouncement of the A le/Nike partnership, no one mentioned the day's most striking revelation. No one except Arik He eldahl, that is. In an article at Busine Week Online, Arik points out that Steve was wearing a pair of Nike Moires i tead of his usual New Balance 991s at the pre conference. Of course, Steve couldn't wear New Balance while talking about Nike (the Moires he was wearing are part of the Nike+ line and still unavailable to the general public). 
A le has just released version 7.0.1 on their dominant jukebox software, iTunes. This update, 'addre es stability and performance i ues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more.' That covers a lot of iTunes' functionality, so here's hoping it fixes all the bugs people are ru ing into.
The first thing I do whenever I get new A le gear is think to myself, 'How can I void the warranty?' Usually I just dunk the machine in a vat of butter milk, but edahc is a little more creative than I am (and handier with a dremmel it would seem). He i talled a fingerprint sca er in his new MacBook Pro, and documented the whole proce in case you're as paranoid and handy as he is.
Co idering the great reaction that C.K. garnered from our first podcast we thought it was high time that we put aside our petty differences and worked together to create the second ever TUAW podcast.
A le has i ued an EFI Firmware Update 1.0 which "fixes several Boot Camp and start up i ues on Mac Pro computers." We've been hearing about these problems for a little while now, so here's hoping this 1.8MB update can let Mac Pro + XP owners sleep a little better at night. 
Besides being arky and asking why Microsoft bothered in the first place, I've been thinking about the more significant a ects of the Zune, such as what it mea (and could mean) to the market and the culture of the industry. There is a lot to be said about the fact that Microsoft is paying a record label tax on every device sold and the terrifying precedent that sets, as well as the IP-trampling and DRM-wra ing Wi-Fi sharing feature. Through all this I realized that Microsoft *could* have a great product on their hands - if they got to working on some true i ovation (i tead of - at best - an u olished gimmick), and cleaned out the criticism todo list. It wouldn't be easy, e ecially in light of the uphill battle that seems to be getting steeper by the week, but it could theoretically be done, and we all would be better off if it ha ened (remember: competition is good for you and me). After the break, I've listed a a few fundamental elements and features that could propel the Zune not simply into the position of a justifiable contender to the DAP throne, but that of a truly i ovative and culturally significant product like the iPod has become.
Thirty years ago was just the begi ing, you say? So now what? What's the next act? Where does A le Inc, eacute;e A le Computer, go from here?
No, you haven't mi ed a joint a ouncement from A le and Griffin. However, you might have mi ed this poston Make which links to ZapWizard's Flickr set detailing how he put a Mac mini,with accompanying LCD screen and mouse/keyboard, into his car.
Yahoo! is asking celebrities to compile their holiday tech wish lists. Why? Hello, how would we know what to buy if celebrities didn't tell us? The latest celeb to list their tech wants is Tyra Banks. The top two slots on her list are given over to gear from our favorite fruit company.