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    DOWNLOAD: On this week's all-star episode, we welcome Kyle Wiens and Miro Djuric, from iFixit, who will present the results of teardowns of the latest iPhones, iPads, and Macs. You'll also hear some of the results of tearing apart gear running Android, and whether it's possible to fix a broken printer or a broken TV set.

    Backup strategies are on the agenda as we present Mike Bombich, creator of Carbon Copy Cloner, a Mac app that makes a clone or duplicate of your hard drive. You'll hear about the differences and the app's advantages over Apple's Time Machine.

    You will also hear from Bryan Chaffin, co-founder and co-publisher of The Mac Observer, whose bill of fare includes his perfectly awful experiences with Comcast support and why Apple makes it so difficult to upgrade most Macs. You'll also hear about WireLurker, malware that can impact both Macs and iOS (now blocked by Apple), and Bryan's reactions to iTunes 12.

    Click to hear our latest episode: The Tech Night Owl Live — November 8, 2014

    For more episodes, click here to visit the show’s home page.


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    A Simple Viewpoint About Net Neutrality

    November 12th, 2014

    The original concept of the Internet was to be free and open. Well, not in the sense of charging you for the service, but letting you access the content you want without a gatekeeper. Sure there are sites that require usernames and passwords, and cater strictly to people who are customers who sometimes pay for access, but if the site is legal, your ISP shouldn't get involved.

    Now in the early days of the online world, only a few had open Internet access. Such mass-market online services as AOL and CompuServe (later acquired by AOL) chose to dole out the Internet in tiny digestible bits, while keeping you mostly inside their walled gardens.

    That was a long time ago, and when you order up Internet service today, you expect that any site or service you access will present content to you at near the speed for which you contracted. Sure sites might run slower because their servers are overloaded, or for reasons beyond the control of your ISP, but you should otherwise expect things to just work. Well, unless your ISP has an outage.

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    They Still Believe Rumors Based on Rumors

    November 11th, 2014

    Before the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus arrived, there were photos of components and finished cases that appeared quite close to the mark. So despite Apple's efforts to clamp down on security leaks, the word still got out. As a practical matter, with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people assembling Apple gear, it is virtually impossible to shut it all down. The stories will get out from time to time, and Apple has to cope with it.

    Sure, secrets are kept, but very often they manage to avoid the Asian supply chain. The Mac Pro, for example, is assembled in the U.S.A., and production is fairly limited, hence there were fewer people to suffer from bouts of loose lips before the original launch. Since the Apple Watch hasn't yet gone into mass production, again Apple has fuller control over the leaks. Indeed, very little of the final configuration was known in advance of the September media event where the curtain was lifted, though there was plenty of guesswork, some of which might have hinted at the reality by sheer logic or luck.

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    Newsletter Issue #780: iOS 8 and Apple’s Big Mistake

    November 10th, 2014

    Taking advantage of lower prices for flash storage, buying iPhones and iPads with more space to put your stuff has become cheaper. So it costs $100 extra to increase capacity from 16GB to 64GB, and another $100 to go to 128GB. In passing, I eagerly await the time when Apple offers larger solid state drives on new Macs for prices that come closer to that of a mechanical hard drive.

    So clearly Apple is delighted if you have plenty of extra space. Unlike Microsoft and Samsung, Apple actually doesn't reserve a huge portion of storage space for its own needs on an iPhone or an iPad. But it still may not be enough for iOS 8.

    Now there have been loads of questions as to why the iOS 8 upgrade pace continues to lag behind iOS 7, and even iOS 6. Give it time some suggest, while others talk about rampant bugs. The 8.0.1 update, which killed cellular service and Touch ID on an iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, is cited as a key example. But Apple withdraw the update within a little over an hour, not enough time for many people to be impacted. In all, some 40,000 devices were affected, and Apple provided easy instructions to restore those devices. The next day, iOS 8.0.2 arrived, which fixed the problem that was allegedly due to a problem with the update's "wrapper," according to Apple.

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    The Apple Pay Conundrum

    November 7th, 2014

    Shortly before starting this article, I went to the nearest Walgreens store to buy some batteries for my Apple Magic Mouse. When you get the low battery warning, you only have a short time to replace them.

    Now understand that Walgreens is seldom the cheapest place to buy anything unless it's on sale, or you have one of their rewards cards, which occasionally works with one item or another. But I needed those batteries yesterday and didn't have time to get to a store with a better price.

    I might even have been tempted to give Apple Pay a try, since Walgreens supports NFC-based mobile payment systems, and that includes the seldom-used Google Wallet. But my bank hasn't yet opted to support Apple's payment schedule, and the same is true for my one-and-only credit card. Well, at least not yet.

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