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What To Do With Your Mac Before You Sell It

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I’ve got a 2007 iMac that’s been sitting on my desk waiting to be Kijiji’d to some loving new home. I keep delaying wiping it and boxing it up 1 because I’m worried I’ll miss something – a photo, a document – and the stress of trying to make sure I’ve got a copy of everything somewhere has kept me from wanting to get rid of it.

These days pretty much anything I’m working on is either in Dropbox or iCloud somewhere so I’m really not too worried about recent documents/photos. It’s more the stuff from 4+ years ago that I’ve likely forgotten about but for some reason think I might need. (I won’t.)

But then I found this support article from Apple Support that details exactly what to do when you’re selling or giving away your Mac.

What helped me let it go 2 was Step 1: Create a backup. Of course! I have a USB hard drive that I’ve been backing up the iMac with for years and that has everything on it that I’ll likely never need again.

The rest of the steps are important to do because they’ll save you the hassle of de-authorizing your Mac from iTunes or iCloud when it’s no longer yours.

Doing Step 5, Erase and reinstall OS X, properly is very important because you want to make sure your iTunes Store / App Store account is removed from the Mac completely and that whomever buys your Mac can license it under their account. Speaking from experience, it saves a lot of time by doing it before rather than trying to do it after OS X/macOS is reinstalled.

When you’re choosing how to erase your hard drive, it’s worth considering the Security Options in Disk Utility. If you’re at all security conscious you might want to up the amount of times your data is overwritten. This option will make it more difficult for someone to try and recover your data when they’ve got your computer.

Update: If you’ve followed the steps but can’t get Option-Command-R to load OS X Recovery over the Internet like it’s supposed to – mine kept going to what you’d see if you held down Command (⌘)-R on boot, OS X Recovery – it worked for me to try Option-Command-P-R which resets the NVRAM. It’s the oldest voodoo support trick on Mac that almost never worked for me over the years but has finally paid off.

Now to sort out how much a 2007 24″ iMac will sell for.

  1. You do keep your computer boxes for resale, right?↩

  2. let it go 🎵↩

Music versus Match

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I try to be frugal when I’m handing over my hard-earned money in exchange for entertainment. It’s not that I don’t buy games, apps, software, services, movies, TV, music, etc. It’s just that I have to do it carefully and with plenty of thought given to long-term as well as short-term enjoyment – what I’m getting has to be worth my time.

So when Apple announced a 3 month trial and subsequent pricing for their new Music streaming service, I started thinking about whether it would be worth it for me and my family to use it beyond the free trial.

Here’s where I’m at currently with my iTunes music collection.

iTunes Match Math

  • We pay $27.99/year for a subscription to iTunes Match.
  • This allow us to store all music we’ve either bought from iTunes or on CD in the cloud and is accessible from any of our Mac or iOS devices, including our Apple TV.
  • Playlists, ratings, and song play counts are synced and aren’t specific to one user or device – so if my wife removes a song from a playlist, it’s removed from all devices.
  • We can play back music from multiple devices at the same time. No restrictions on how many copies of “Songs of Experience” we can stream at once from all our devices.
  • I’m the one who does most of the fiddling with playlists so it works out great for me. If my wife was more interested in managing playlists, we’d probably run into conflicting ideas of what should be in the “Best songs of 2014″playlist.
  • The only way we get more music is if we buy music from the iTunes Store or buy/get a CD and import it into iTunes and “match” it into the cloud.

One important detail, as we’ll see later with Apple Music, is what happens if you stop paying for your iTunes Match membership:

Any songs you’ve upgraded or downloaded again are completely safe. The only thing you lose is the central storage — iCloud will no longer stream or download matched or uploaded songs to your devices.

So as long as you download all your songs to iTunes on your Mac, your songs are yours for as long as you have a computer capable of playing MP3s.

Apple Music Math

Apple Music is $9.99/month but in order for both my wife and I to be able to use Apple Music on multiple devices at the same time1 we’d have to pay for the family plan which is $15/month.

Let’s break out the calculator.

  • $15/month x 12 months = $180 per year for Apple Music

Whew. Math is hard.

That $180/year gives you access to almost any music ever made in the history of the world. You get curated playlists made by smart people at Apple Music, access to social connections to artists and friends, and the freedom from ever having to worry that you don’t have a copy of Bob Marley’s Greatest Hits album for the beach2.

The key difference between Apple Music and iTunes Match is that if you stop paying for Apple Music, all that music is gone. You no longer have access to any of the music.

Owning Music is for Old People

What if instead of streaming music, you bought it? (Gasp!)

The cost of an average album on the iTunes Music Store is $9.99. So instead of paying for Apple Music what if you just gave yourself the freedom to buy an album – or individual songs adding up to as much as $15 – a month?

After a year you’d have 12 new albums of music that you owned.

Any month that you didn’t buy an album, you’d have an extra $15 in your pocket to spend or save.

I love the idea of a streaming music service where you can play anything and everything, depending on your mood. Discovering new music without worrying about buying an album that sucks is great. I’ve had lots of fun listening to albums on Apple Music that I wouldn’t have otherwise bought.

What I don’t love is the idea of putting money into something and then having nothing to show for it when I stop paying. 3 I’m fine with paying $8/month for Netflix and with the knowledge that if I stop paying for Netflix, I can’t watch anymore. But somehow music feels more important than that to me. Digital vs “real” CDs doesn’t bother me. I don’t care if it’s on my computer or on a physical disc spinning in a record player. I want the freedom to be able to stop paying and still enjoy the music I love.

Bottom Line

We’ll see what happens in 2.5 months when the Apple Music trial runs out, but I think we’ll stick to the old fashioned way of owning our music and running it through iTunes Match. I’m guessing that as part of the negotiations with the music labels Apple had to promise to retire iTunes Match at some point in the future. At which point we’ll likely hop on the Apple Music bandwagon.

  1. On the non-family plan, if you start playing Apple Music from another device, it automatically shuts off whatever device is currently streaming music.↩

  2. Provided that there’s a decent internet connection at the beach.↩

  3. You could compare it to renting a house vs buying. However, mortgages and interest rates are not part of the Apple Music experience. Yet.↩

com.apple.photos.VideoConversionService and cloudd

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If you’ve started using the new Photos app for Yosemite and you have a slighter older Mac1, you may notice your fans spinning up and your computer getting hot even though it seems like you’re not actually doing anything.

As best as I can figure out, the culprit seems to be the syncing service running in the background to keep your Photos.app in sync with what you have in iCloud Photo Library.

activity monitor

I believe “cloudd” is responsible for all iCloud syncing, including the possible thousands of photos being flung from Mac to iPhone to iCloud. “com.apple.photos.VideoConversionService” is likely doing exactly what it describes – any videos that aren’t in a compatible format for iCloud are being converted in the background while you’re trying to get other work done.

The blessing with Apple’s iCloud syncing system is that it’s all behind the scenes and there’s nothing to configure beyond checking a box and signing in with your iCloud account. The curse is that Apple’s iCloud syncing system is all behind the scenes and there’s no way to know if it’s going to be done soon or way to pause it and restart later like you can with a service like Dropbox.

I’m sure syncing is especially rough right now as millions of people are all throwing their photo libraries at iCloud at the same time. The scale of it is impressive, scary and interesting.

With iCloud Photo Library there’s one less thing to worry about backing up if you switch to a new Mac – now you can just sign in and your photos are all there ready to keep using. As long as Apple keeps building data farms to keep up.

  1. It may also happen on new Macs, I just don’t have any around to test my theory with.↩

Amazing Photo and Video Apps on Sale at App Store

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Apple’s running a “everything is at least 50% off” promotion for photo and video apps for both iOS and the Mac App Store. I’m not a big user of iOS apps for photography beyond the usual suspects – Apple’s Camera and Photos app, Instagram and Flickr occasionally – the better deals are on the Mac apps:

  • Pixelmator is a great Photoshop alternative at a fraction of the price.
  • Flare 2 and Analog are kind of like Instagram filters for your Mac.
  • ScreenFlow 5 is the best deal. A great app for editing video. It’s designed primarily for recording your Mac’s display to demo software but it works great as a video editor if iMovie isn’t your cup of tea.

App Store Pricing On the Move

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On episode #112 of The Talk Show, Paul Kafasis joins John Gruber to talk baseball and doorbells – but starting at the 2 hour mark of the episode 1 they have an interesting discussion about app pricing in the iOS App Store.

They come to the conclusion that for a certain genre of app on the App Store – productivity/tool apps – it’s not sustainable for developers. If developers can’t make money, they won’t be able to continue developing. Period.

There’s some interesting factors that affect developers inability to make money on the App Store:

  • No upgrade pricing. On the Mac, outside of the Mac App Store, developers can offer a new version that sells for $50 but offer it for $25 to people who had bought the previous version. On the iOS App Store it’s either sell it as a new app or give it away for free to all previous purchasers.
  • Apple’s sold 1 billion iOS devices. Which seems like a huge market. But how many of those devices are actually used by individuals? In our own house we have 2 iPhones, an iPad and an old iPod touch that all use the same App Store account. 4 devices, one sale to the developer.
  • The race to the bottom that has long been a struggle with all things online. Apple, as great as design as they’re supposed to be, hasn’t been able to figure out a way to design an App Store that surfaces great apps, not just popular apps.
  • Related to that: the occasionally insane success story of a small development team making millions off of an app masks all the great developers who give up after one or two apps because they can’t make a living. See Panic’s 2014 annual report where they spell out their amazing iOS apps don’t make them as much money as their Mac apps despite selling basically the same unit numbers on both platforms. It’s troubling if a development shop like Panic can’t make it.

Gruber and Kafasis started their discussion with the fact that Gruber’s app, Vesper, is raising it’s price instead of dropping it. And Gruber, in an interview with Jason Snell for SixColors.com, calls on to other developers to join them:

Instead, we want to embrace the users who are looking for the best app, and who are willing to pay a fair price for it if they think Vesper might be it. Going low didn’t work; we lose nothing by trying to go high. I would like to see other developers follow.

I’m all in favour of developers raising pricing for quality apps. You don’t have to be a professional software pundit to figure out that $0 for software isn’t sustainable as a business model – even with crappy ads thrown overtop.

Until Apple figures out a better way to search the App Store though, cheap apps will always rise to the top. Hopefully some of Apple’s recent hires, such as former Mac journalist Chris Breen, point to a more curated App Store.

In much the same way as I rely on blogs and the people I follow on Twitter to point me towards great apps, the average App Store user needs help sorting through the millions of apps to find the best ones in whatever category of app they’re searching for.

If you’re at all curious about the history of the iOS App Store, you should listen to Myke Hurley’s excellent series starting with episode #27 of Inquisitive: Behind the App. Even as someone who was around during the unveiling, it’s amazing how much has changed in what feels like a relatively short time.

  1. Podcasts can’t longer than 30 minutes and be successful! they say.↩

A More Powerful Dropbox Pro

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I love when services I use get better without having to pay more:

Introducing a more powerful Dropbox Pro:

Whether you’re a professor sending out your lesson plans, a musician creating and sharing your new composition, or a consultant writing and refining a proposal, Dropbox Pro provides a home for your passion and creativity. Today, we’re making that home even more powerful and roomier!

The big news for most folks is the $10/month plan now includes 1TB of space. Other new features include:

  • Passwords for shared links
  • Expirations for shared links
  • View-only permissions for shared folders
  • Remote wipe is the ability to wipe a device’s Dropbox files like a laptop or iOS device in the event it gets stolen.

Check out Dropbox if you haven’t already started using it for backing up, sharing and storing your important documents.

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