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Impossible Factory is a Beverly, MA based Apple consultancy devoted to delivering creative, innovative, and cost-effective technology solutions and support to businesses and organizations throughout New England.

Apple Consulting

$95/hr
When you need a professional partner for your Mac and mixed-environment IT needs, trust the Impossible Factory's Apple-certified, fully insured consultants to the job.

Hourly Apple Support

$95/hr
Have a Mac emergency and need help right away? No problem! We'll get a friendly, professional technician to your site ASAP. Our billing terms are simple, our prices are some of the best in the Greater Boston area, and every one of our technicians is Apple certified in desktop and server technologies.

Support Contracts & Projects

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for pricing
Whether you've got a single big project you'd like bid out, or prefer the stable costs and peace of mind that come from routine maintenance with a service level agreement, Impossible Factory can address your Apple consulting needs. Give us a call, and we can arrange for a site or project evaluation to put together a plan to address your specific business needs.

MacDefender is a Scam – Here’s How to Remove It

Apple has released a field guide for avoiding and removing the MacDefender scam anti-virus malware.

For those of you lucky enough not to have encountered it, MacDefender is a real looking pop up web advertisement that tricks unsuspecting users into believing that their Mac is infected with a number of viruses.  By clicking Remove, you’ll actually download (and if you’ve got Safari set up to automatically open downloaded files, initiate the installation of) MacDefender’s extortion malware.  MacDefender adopts that classic mafioso protection scheme of ‘pay me or else’, flooding users’ screens with graphic pornography at random intervals unless they pay for ‘protection’.

You can find Apple’s guide to avoiding and removing MacDefender here.  Look out for a patch in Software update soon to automate the removal/avoidance process.  And as always, never enter your administrator password unless you know exactly what you’re doing or installing.  If you’re not sure, call someone who is before you do.  That’s the only anti-virus you’ll likely ever need for your Mac.

Drobo Overview

Our good friends at Drobo (disclosure: Impossible Factory is a Drobo reseller) have posted some cool video product overviews that will definitely be of interest to anyone interested in adding stable, fast, expandable storage to their solutions. Here are a few of my favorites:

Drobo Overview

Drobo S

Five bay expandable storage units. Perfect for graphic designers, video editors (we use them at Rewatchable), and for home photo and media storage.

DroboFS

These are network-attached Drobos that allow small groups to enable high speed file sharing and applications – without a server.

What is a Drobo?

HowTo: Enable Right Click in OSX

HowTo: Add your Facebook Account to iChat

3 Tips for 3 Years of Mac Peace of Mind for <$350

A lot of folks buy a Mac, start using it, and don’t have a problem for years.  In fact, that’s actually kind of a big problem with Macs.  They tend to ‘just work’ until the hardware starts to come apart at the seams, and then important, expensive things start to die for real.  I’ve walked into enterprise environments with 6, 8, even 10 year old Macs in daily use.  In this post, I offer three suggestions costing less than $350 TOTAL that will provide three full years of absolute Mac peace of mind…

Time Machine

Every Mac comes with Time Machine built in.  Buy a cheap, big USB drive (like this 1TB Western Digital Passport), plug it into your Mac, and click “Use this Disk for Time Machine Backups.”  Now just leave it plugged in as often as possible, and you’ll have the ability to recover old files, or restore your system in the event of a disaster.

AppleCare

When you buy a Mac, purchase AppleCare.  It costs between $100-$250 at the time of purchase, which sounds expensive until you realize that for three full years, anytime you experience an issue with your Mac, you can bring it to the Genius Bar at any Apple retail store, and one of the highly skilled technicians will get your Mac back up and running.  Hardware dies?  They replace it.  Everything short of the battery and accidental damage is covered.  It’s unbelievably cheap insurance.

Dropbox

Time Machine is fantastic, and AppleCare ensures that you’ll always have a working Mac, but what about those extremely important files that you might not want to be without for more than a few minutes, hours, or days?  Enter Dropbox, an online service that installs a small piece of software and a folder on all of your devices (Macs, Windows PCs, iPads, iPhones, and several other mobile devices are supported).  Whenever you change a file, it’s updated EVERYWHERE.  Your Mac dies?  Everything in your Dropbox is fine.  You can get a 2GB account for free (or 2.25GB if you use this shiny referral link).  2GB is plenty for essential documents, but they also offer additional storage fairly inexpensively ($10/mo for 50GB, $20/mo for 100GB) that you can use to back up larger files like iPhoto and iTunes libraries.

So that’s it.  Add these three simple purchases/techniques to your Mac arsenal, and you’ll rest easy knowing that your data is safe and your hardware is protected for three full years, for less than $350.

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What We Do

Here's a handy list of some of the products and technologies we work with on a daily basis:

Mac OSX Support
Mac OSX Server Support
Apple Hardware Deployments
Apple Hardware Upgrades
Command Line Administration
iPhone Deployments
iPad Deployments
IT Purchasing / Budgeting
Data Backup (On-Site/Off-Site)
Online Corporate Video
Website Design
Social Media Campaigns
Search Engine Optimization / Marketing
Final Cut Studio

Don't see what you're looking for here? Call or email info@impossiblefactory.com to see if we can help.

Mozy – Online Backup That Works GREAT on Macs

2GB Totally Free Online Backup! Compliments of Mozy