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Why The U.S. PC Market is On The Decline
conq writes "BusinessWeek reports on the recent woes of Apple and Dell. One possible reason according to the article: 'imminent price wars'." From the article: "'There's a softness in the market that's building,' says Richard Shim, a senior research analyst at IDC. In the past two weeks, IDC cut its 2006 forecast for U.S. PC growth to 5.7%, from 6.8%. 'In '04 and '05 there was tremendous growth. In a market that's as mature as this industry is, there's no way you can maintain those levels.'"
The story's about Apple slumping along with the PC sales. (it's not just PC's). Without digging into the "Read more", its inclusion here almost implied that PC maker's sales were slumping vs Apple sales.
Where were you when the voynix came?
My fastest desktop at home, a P4 2.6 GHz w/ 1GB RAM, was built 3 years ago and still works just fine. Why upgrade?
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Begun, this price war has.
(I'm all for a little price war since I likes me cheap computers.)
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
So Dell and Apple grow 1% slower than previously expected and suddenly the entire market is on the 'decline'? Let's put it back in perspective.
When they first started selling TVs, nobody had one, obviously. But very few could afford them, so they didn't sell many. Then they got cheaper, and more sold. And cheaper, and more, etc etc etc. Until everyone owned a TV. Oh no, people aren't buying as many TVs now. It's not because they are any less popular, or something replaced them. They are simply so common that there isn't a market for people that don't have one. There is only a market for replacements.
This is the market PCs are enterring. My mother and father each have a PC. They can barely use them, but find them essential. My younger sister has a laptop and a PC. I have a PC, a server-pc, a pc that doesn't even get turned on, an old 733mhz pc that's in the closet, a 500mhz laptop and a 133mhz laptop. Everyone I know has a PC. Or 6.
PCs are still in a growing market, as the 5.7% figure in the summary states. It simply isn't growing as fast. The real slump will hit when everyone has all the PCs they 'need' and are only buying replacements.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
some might just upgrade their OS to something else...
or even run vista but without all extra eyecandy
-m10
The title of this article is "Why The U.S. PC Market is On The Decline", but right in the summary it says that IDC expects the PC market to grow 5.7%!! That's not decline.
my blog
Or MS needs to get on the ball and write more bloatware....
Gee Dell and Apple will be announcing their projected numbers in a few days. Well, I guess we'd all better listen to the "analysts" whose accuracy rate is about the same as flipping a coin. Speculation and stock fluctuations before these announcements is pretty much par for the course as people make guesses in the hopes of a stock market win. The rest of us, however, are a lot more concerned about Q1 and Q2 numbers that actaully, you know are how much they are selling.
3+ gal gasoline and higher cost of borrowing are beginning to weigh the US consumer. Things are going to get much worse.
...and anyone who has heard about it probably only hears negative things.
They're selling more units this year than they did previously, numbers seem to be up across the board, but... oh, say market analyists. They didn't grow as much as we expected. And somehow they blame HD-DVD and Blu-Ray for the 'slump'.
Conroe and a huge price cut for AMD products were both announced months ago. Perhaps consumer sales were down as we've all been waiting for the C2D launch? And can anyone explain how the PC industry is in decline?
My problem with spontaneous human combustion is that never seems to happen to the "right" people.
Analysts are predicting lower growth, not negative growth. And since the market isnt growing as fast as wallstreet likes, share prices take a hit. Apparantly, having sales of only $4.8 billion is not enough for them, it must be $5 billion...
I have been waiting to upgrade for quite a while, my old A64 3200 is getting long in the tooth. I was almost biting on the A64 X2 but I just couldnt pry my frozen wallet open at the prices they were charging, then all of the conroe speculation started coming out. After all the C2D news thats came out today I am ready to buy the E6600 as soon as they are available (assuming the posted pricing holds). As for the articles statement that M$ Vista is keeping everyone from upgrading... what kind of crack is this guy smoking. Im sure there are people who will upgrade thier PC's when it is released but I dont know anybody who sees it as a driving force. The people I know have been hedging thier bets waiting to see how the Intel/AMD next gen played out and it seems most are along the same mindset as myself, the new Core 2's are it. Now its just figuring if you want to wait abit longer for the NVidia chipset or some other related tech. Even my "hardcore" AMD groupie friends are giving up on the "buy the x2 after the price drop" and going with the E6600 or E6700, I dont know anyone yet that is going to drop the coin for the extreme.
... Virtualization.
... and out went all the old hardware in the basement. My wife was happy.
... but I have the ability to sit back and wait.
A friend of mine gave me a dual P3 933 machine with a gig of ram, I put a 100gig sata drive in it, and put Vmware server on it. Now I have 12 virtual machines defined... (no for all you picky types, not all run at the same time, 3-4 at most)
Of course, I'd like to buy a nicer 64 bit machine for this server
FLR
So because of a 1% decline in the GROWTH of the market, pc sales are suddenly in a downward spiral?!?
Sounds like sensationalist press to me.
You'd be silly to buy a non-Intel Mac right now. Yet, there isn't a version of Office or any Adobe product that runs natively on the Intel machines. In my opinion, that's one of the reasons why Mac sales are not what they could be.
Mmmm.. Donuts
It's a miracle the market is growing as it is.. For a while now, your 2 or 3 year old computer has been "good enough" for most people. Why would you upgrade if you don't really do new stuff with it? As I see it, reasons for buying a new computer are;
- you don't have one yet (which is getting more and more unlikely)
- you're doing new stuff with it, such as getting broadband or editing homevideos
- you're a nerd/geek/gamer
- it's broken in some fashion.
In other words; a replacement market.
Now, the OEMs know this. This is why Dell is getting into sidelines like PDAs, digital cameras, TV screens etc.
And, in a certain way, they've always known this. OEMs have always sold PCs that were essentially underspecced when it came to the cheapest upgrade; RAM. A 1GB P3 will simply do for most people. I bet they're glad they shipped them with 256MB (or "double your ram limited time only offer" 512MB).
A cynical mind might think that this is part of the reason why OEMs include so much "handy" bundled software.. Fill up that memory good, let the apps update (get bigger) once in a while, so the system gets cruftier and cruftier. Have the anti-virus software disable after a month or two to lower defenses..
There actually are (I'm afraid to say: a lot) of people who buy a new computer simply because the old one got so bogged down with spyware. Dell should have a checkbox on their order pages "[x] my old computer is teh broken with virusses" so they can pick up the old computer as they bring the new one, and ship the old one to Africa, where a simple linux install makes it usable for at least another 3 years..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I usually will not upgrade until I can double the speed of my processor, HD, etc. I currently run an AMD 1.6ghz with enormous storage and nice video card...I could probably double that right now, but my Guild Wars runs just fine on it :o)
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
Joe Sixpack isn't holding off buying a new box because of Vista. Only nerds do that. Joe is content with what he's got.
In the past, the PC market would advance at an alarming rate. If you bought a PC in 1995, lets say a 486, then three years later it would make total sense to upgrade to the newer P2 processors that were out at the time because the performance leap was huge and commercial software was taking advantage of the new speed.
These days, i find the average home PC for Average Joe Family need no more than a >2Ghz CPU, = 1GB RAM, ~80GB, GeForce 6200 or the likes. This computer would handle Word Processing, Internet Browsing, email and even simple multimedia (digital photos, whatnot). I think it's fair to estimate this PC was a decent 'new' computer back in 2003.
What has changed for the home user? Windows XP is still the operating system in use. IE hasn't changed much, nor has Office. With that in mind, is it entirely necessary for this family to purchase a new PC? Probably not.
It boils down to the only thing driving new PC sales is new games, honestly.. and since many home PC users aren't into the latest games at the HIGHEST FPS possible, then of course PC sales are going to sag.
Today's PCs are more powerful then most people need, and upgrading doesnt really get you much. ( yes, i know, vista is coming down the pike to obsolete your current pc.. ) except something new and shiny.
Except for a tiny few, the PC sits and waits for you 90% of the time now.. So having a few % speed increase only means it waits for you even more..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I chalk whatever small decline there is to the lack of advancements. CPU performance hasnt made any huge gains lately. GPU performance has been good but most PCs come with integrated graphics. The only people pushing hard are the enthusiasts.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Caption should be "from the going-slightly-less-up dept." to be accurate.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
"PCs are still in a growing market, as the 5.7% figure in the summary states. It simply isn't growing as fast. The real slump will hit when everyone has all the PCs they 'need' and are only buying replacements."
Your argument needs adjustment. First of all computers aren't like TV's. Second because of the above, the "replacement" cycle is much longer than the "upgrade" cycle. e.g. new video card. What will drive the uptake of computers is the same thing that's always driven it. What it allows you to do now, and in the future. e.g. video/sound editing, better games, etc.
Parent nailed it...
If all you need your PC for is Microsoft word and powerpoint from time to time, and you already have something 900mhz or above, why on earth do you need another PC? It's hard to think in terms of an ordinary user, but there are typicaly only a few reasons to upgrade.
1. What you need to do takes too long
2. It broke and repair is to damn costly
3. You need more "memory" (where memory = either ram or HD), need a burner, or need that spiffy software application which comes with the new PC.
4. There is a super duper deal with losts of extras you don't need.
From a goodwill standpoint, while there are still a number of PCs in the pentium I class, I'm starting to see quite a few AMD durons with gigs of HD space, a modest compliment of memory, and still operational save the spyware infections. I have to say the market is pretty saturated with PCs, more PCs than you can shake a stick at, so many that dell is apparently offering their Dimension 1100 for $50 plus tax and a modest fee for shipping, or free "designated carrier".
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
... that we can somehow consider 5.7% growth DECLINE. Damn analysts...
I think it's a combination of 'home entertainment' being done better on the games consoles (surely XBox360 must be a growth market), and 'corporate' users figuring that a long-life PC (with parts replacement) is more environmentally friendly, does not fill up and pollute landfill space so quickly. Should a corporate PC now have a lifespan of 10 years rather than 3 years ? If Microsoft won't supply a software maintenance service at competitive prices, that leaves doors open for the likes of RedHat and Novell who certainly will.
From what I can see of Microsoft Windows Vista, it's aimed at the games market.
Corporate/professional use just doesn't get anything more out of Vista than XP; it's not as if a new version of Microsoft Word will help you think and express yourself more clearly than the old one does.
My computer was built in 2002, and for my home still serves as a fileserver for 4 computers and a test web and database server. The "kiosk" laptop we use to surf the web and play streaming music is a Pentium III. No problemos here with linuxes (statiticians, please add 3 to linux column and subtract same from Operating Systems "in use").
Vista is a great name for MS's next OS: Chance I would use it is WAY off in the distance.
-KB
Over the last few years PC clock speeds have not changed, RAM and storage plentiful. In other words the PC industry has little more to offer to entice technology upgraders. Unless there is some dramatic change in the capabilities there is very little reason for anyone who owns a PC to upgrade.
Apple has yet to release an actual "Desktop" x86 machine, so hold your conclusion until then. So far, the x86 line is filled with competitively-priced 'specialty' items, like the iMac, Mac Mini, and Macbook (+pro).
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
"OMG! Our growth that's been a constant uphill for the past 11 months is starting to level off! What're we gonna do?!?!"
These are obviously not technical analysts nor even analysts who keep up with technical journals, websites or the geek who fixes their overpriced, overpowered laptop.
Do they have any clue of what's going on in the industry right now or in PC consumers' minds? Obviously not.
Intel Core 2 Duo launch. Personally I think this is where MOST of the slow down is. Every technically minded person I know of who has considered an upgrade over the past two years is waiting for this.
AM2 and beyond. We've just seen AMD announce a counterstrike to Intel. Who knows what they'll pull out by the end of the year?
Vista delay? So what. Vista is not going to be so different that any hardware coming out today will not run it. I don't see this as a factor.
Apple and iPods. Personally, I just think that the 40% of the population that wanted one and could afford one now has one. As prices come down, the rest of us might get one, but I haven't seen the price drop significantly since the launch of each different model. I won't be getting one anytime soon. I'd like to buy a Mac, too, but again, that's a great deal of money for a guy who tends to build his own PCs.
The really interesting story is going to occur over the next three months.
C2D launches. Bleeding edge, hobbyists, do-it-yourself-ers and the gotta-have-it-now's all go crazy and suck up the first available chips. Whatever computer manufacturing companies have systems ready to build and sell when the chip launches will make a killing. Will Dell be on board? I doubt it because Dell waits for price breaks of just-below-the-leading-edge products, so they'll be behind just because of their business model. Yet since they're in bed with Intel, they might have a price break advantage with the DPAs that will give them an edge at the start of this massive buying wave.
As each progressively faster chip is launched, we'll see waves of this occuring again. Who knows how AMD will factor into this.
The article sounds like a big panic over nothing. I think I'll go buy some Intel stock and watch it explode over the latter half of this year.
The problem with the current crop of economists is they all grew up (academically) in the boom-boom 90s. They have no perspective.
There is nothing wrong with a growth rate of 1 or 2 percent. 4.6 percent is more than the population growth, for example. It no more represents a "slump" than does the fact that my vastly overvalued house has only grown in value from $400,000 to $425,000 this year, when last year it grew from $375,000 to $400,000. Technically, that's a lower percentage rate increase, but since I bought the thing for $265,000 in 1999 after selling a prior house I bought for $115,000 in 1992 (thanks, Microsoft!), it's still vastly ridiculous.
There are entire cities in my state where my two-bedroom three-floor condo would be worth maybe $80,000 - today.
So, just because prices aren't drastically increasing means very little.
Also, why should a laptop cost $3000? I bought mine for $500, it's got more power than I need, a nice AMD 2600 CPU, works fine, 11b/g wireless. Most electronics that started selling in the multi-thousands eventually settle down in the $300-$500 range after they become consumer electronics, why should computers be different? It's like HDTV - it may cost $4900 right now, but in three years a better model will be selling for probably $300 retail.
And the Apple prices have more to do with the move to Intel chips, and the subsequent lack of interest, since people can just go out and buy a Linux box for a lot less.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I guess it depends on how you define "desktop". The iMac is more of a "desktop" machine, in the literal sense of the word, than is the Power Mac - the Power Mac in my office isn't on the top of my desk, it's underneath the desk. You could put a Power Mac tower on your desk, but if you put an iMac on the floor, you're not going to be able to use it conveniently from your desk (unless you ssh into it from a machine on your desk).
The iMac is the consumer "desktop" (as opposed to "laptop") model in the Apple line (although the Mac Mini could also be used with a monitor as a desktop); the Mac Pro or whatever it'll be called will be the "professional" desktop.
Maybe, just maybe, if companies stopped trying to be all exclusive and monopolistic people would appreciate their products.
Yeah, and maybe I'm a Chinese jet pilot.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Nobody (almost) will run out and buy a new computer just so they can get Vista. Computer sales drive OS sales mostly. The economy is headed for a soft patch and most people's computers work well enough already. In fact, I see Vista hurting computer sales worse. Pre-Vista your computer will cost whatever. Once you have to take Vista with your computer, the new computer will cost 1.5 times whatever. In other words, the price of computers will rise because of Vista and that will hurt demand. So, my wag is that when Vista comes out, computer sales will go down some more.
It amazes me how people freak out when something falls below its estimate. If X is normally distributed the actual value of X should fall below its expectation 50% of the time. If instead of expectation we're talking about the median, this is simply by definition. This isn't Statistics 101, this is like Statistics 0. But people still freak out. Sales figures, employment numbers, wage growth...
I'm just waiting for the headline, "50 Percent of Home Sales Exceed Median Price!!"
Exactly! The only real reason to upgrade these days is if you are a gamer...and unless you are into the high paced first person shooter games (not MMORPG) you will not upgrade at every new game release.
... we still were using the same Comcast high speed cable modem - it's not like it would suddenly "speed up".
That reminds me of my son's reaction when we brought home his new Mac mini with LCD flatscreen - the last computer I got him was an iMac, 8 years ago. We plug it in, connect it, and go on the Net.
His first reaction to the better graphics, faster CPU is "the Internet's not faster".
Duh
Hence, why bother upgrading? The Net won't go any faster. Sure, maybe you'll get cooler graphics, or better resolution, but in the end if you spend 90 percent of your time online, you won't see much difference.
So a "slump" in growth (aka growth that in the 70s would have been "fantastic") is just the fact that we as a nation haven't moved to Gigapop Internet like most of the real industrialized nations have.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well, part of my point is that there are not many non-Apple solutions for the form-factor that the Minis and iMac provides, so it's hard to judge whether or not they are 'overpriced'.
As far as the laptops go, various comparisons posted here show that if you stricticly try to match features and specs, Apple's prices are pretty much in-line with the competition.
I'm interested in seeing how Apple prices their "pro" line, however. If Apple tries to charge $2000 for exactly what Dell charges $500 for, I'll be the first in line to cry foul.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
"competitively-priced "
The only way one could call Apple's x86 machines as 'competitively-priced' is if you do the equivalent of what pc fans used to do by going to the Apple Store and loading up a Mac with a maximum amount RAM and claiming Macs cost 5000+ grand each.
If you paid the same price for a similar spec x86 machine from HP or Dell as a Mac - you got reamed on the Dell or HP.
Apple's x86 machines very much have a 'we don't give a shit' anymore feel to them. Depressing for anyone who's used Macs going all the way back to the original.
The people complaining about governmental budget cuts are still receiving MORE than they did last year, but at a lower rate of increase.
Wrong. They cut NIH funding to one-quarter what it used to be. Basic science was slashed, even while the WH was saying they were going to increase it.
Wake up and smell reality.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
G4 Sawtooth 450mhz updated to: 2.0ghz Powerlogix with, 2.0gb PC 133 ram, Radeon 9800 Pro 256mb, 80+120gb WD HDs running on ATA 66, + SATA 3.0 4 channel card running a 400gb Samsung + 16x Pioneer DVD+-RW. Tiger 10.4.7 / 19in Envision LCD.
This machine is 6 years old, and runs Quake 4, Doom 3, and Halo like a dream. I don't see any reason to upgrade to a G5 when I am running 86+ scores on Xbench. I probably won't upgrade for another year at least.
Yea, it has a 100mhz bus, and fights between resources, but if im doing one or 2 things at a time, it flies.
http://www.kore-net.com/office/sawtooth.jpg
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
Clearly, the Porn industry has to save the tech industry, as they often have, and come up with something new, much more processor intensive. Seeing as movies of most resolutions can be played too easily on modern hardware (and perhaps encoding takes a bit more time), it really is time to go with Virtual Reality. I can't wait to see the new computer accessories that the next generation brings - human/computer interface will be completely redefined:P
Well, part of my point is that there are not many non-Apple solutions for the form-factor that the Minis and iMac provides, so it's hard to judge whether or not they are 'overpriced'.
They're called laptops.
that thinking, you should remember that the budget has been done. So when you go into the budget to make adjustments, it comes out as a decline.
People who do that for a living(accountants) understasnd what it means and the difference between ana ctuals decline and a budget decline. Unfortunatly newspapers tend to mangle it because they do not know the distintion.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
and I wasn't on it.
claiming Macs cost 5000+ grand each
You've got to admit $5 million is a pretty expensive computer for a consumer, no matter what kind of upgrades it's got.
this is contributing to a forthcoming social, ecological and economic disaster...and I am saying this as a conservative!
Specs are only a part of the picture. Form factor is another, well, factor. I wanted a small, (relatively) low-power, quiet, and lightweight machine that I could run both OS X and XP on. The mini is pretty much the only game in town in that regard, so it's hard to say whether or not I got 'reamed'. I know ASUS makes something similar, but it's actaully a bit taller.
Like I said, Apple will lose this advantage once they release a 'standard' tower. So they better either supercharge the CPU/GPU/RAM specs, or they better lower the price. I suspecr they'll go the former route since Apple just doesn't like to charge less than 4 figures for a full desktop.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Any current Intel machine will blow that so far out of the water it just isn't funny. I have a G4 933 (QS 2002) and just got a Macbook. The Macbook is portable, uses less power, and spanks my G4 around the block as far as performance goes. Even with Parallels running and 2 VM's going. Seriously a MB or Mini Mac Intel would more than be a super upgrade for you. Obviously you don't need wiz-bang if you have been living with the B&W that long. Especially since we have definitely entered the realm of most new computers being capable of way more then you will typically ever use. I even use Protools regularly, and on the Macbook it has plenty of power for most of the sessions I run. I'll never have a deskop again, except in very special circumstances (perhaps an installed machine in a studio, but that isn't necessarily considered a general purpose computer anymore).
As another note, I have no idea what you are talking about with the $30 discount for Parallels with Windows, and I have checked their site. Their typical $30 discount, however, expires Tomorrow. So if you think you might go Intel in the near future you probably should act on it.
Shawn's Tech Articles
Ya' go out, buy new hardware, load it up, pop onto slashdot, and see: "price war coming soon".
C'mon people, show of hands: how many of you are checking up on return policies right now?
barack to the future?
It's very simple- Moore's law stopped pretty much, note how Intel does not lable CPU by frequency anymore. And do to not tell me about multicore porcessors or new other stuff- there is no way my old laptop circa 2001 is as much different from my current T60 Thinkpad as a IBM 560 Thinkpad made in 96 was different from a laptop made in 2001. Same applies to PCs. My current T60 is better than my old T22, but T22 was DRASTICALLY DIFFERENT from IBM Thinkpad 560. This industry is mature.
I'm on a machine that is old enough I'm not even sure when I got it - 4+ years ago at least. Thing is it runs my office productivity tools, it runs by web browser and email client, I can burn CD's and DVD's....I'm pretty much done. Unless you are a hard core gamer or work at home with resource intensive apps (which doesn't describe most people) there's not much a new machine offers you. Even Vista isn't doing anything for my non-tek savvy friends so I doubt there's a big, big wave of people trying to upgrade right away becuase most folks can do anything they want/need to do on their current machines.
Recent woes = 5% stock price loss :/
:/
I see 1% swings daily on news, WTF, is this a gain if we simply shift it a week?!?
Plus the fact that Apple is not going to hit ANALISTS PROJECTIONS (did i miss a Y? oh well)
Also it appears Dell is losing some market share. DUH, they've been idiots with service for a while now.
Nowhere in link does it mention SALES or even PROFIT. Are sales down? Where is the slump? Less units? Less dollars? Less profits?
Any of the above or just bellyachin they aren't making a bunch more?
blah blah blah
Give me the meat already
But, what about the saturation rate? I mean, sales may decline, but most likely due to saturation in the market. Once people have a PC they don't want to buy another one. The number of nerds who buy multiple computers is low, and the nerd freaks that buy parts every 3 months for 1/10th fps faster are even lower. and the number of people don't want to upgrade. I can't remember, but who knows how many people are still running Windows 98? I've had to work on 98 machines just because people had no reason to upgrade. (There are lots of reasons) But in their mind they didn't give a damn. It worked for what they needed.
The only thing that makes me want to upgrade to an AMD x2 is the potential gain in running VMWare and VirtualPc. My current San Diego chip runs great and it's dirt cheap. Vista looks to be a while away and isn't much of a driving force for me.
I could probably continue to run just fine for another 2yrs before upgrading.
I'm content with my triple boot of Ubuntu, XP, Vista beta and I jut run virtual 2003 server.
If you think
You know what? You're right.
:)
hazzah! yes im new here
Invaders must die
But I buy a hell of a lot of parts. What part do they count? Power supplies? Cases? Motherboards? I've upgraded each of those, but never at the same time. Later this year I plan to buy a computer for the first time when I get a laptop. That's when my thousands of dollars that I've poured into computing will run pcssold++.
Oh, and I'll grant that the internal workmanship of the current x86 line is a bit sub-par, but the average Joe probably isn't considering that anyway....
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Since I'm stealing Dell, HP, Gateway AND Apple customers on a fairly regular basis anymore. Reasons given vary from "not what I expected and I feel I was ripped off" to "the support was so horrible that I paid $1000 for a paperweight until you fixed it for me".
We can't forget that Dell has been installing KNOWN spyware on PCs they've been selling of late as well as all the trialware that gets installed on systems to lower the cost to the customer due to "ad revenue".
No, I don't think that computer sales will be a problem any time in the near future for those that actually do still care about customer support.
Same can be said for Comcast and AT&T. Customers are leaving both of them for the same reasons. The consumer is getting smarter if corperations would just stop trying to rip people off then they wouldn't be having these problems.
Given that the major PC-in-a-box manufacturers and those who make the specific parts have removed quality out of their consideration of their products (IBM/Lenovo, Dell, HP, and to some extent, Apple) it should be no surprise why things are going this way in the US. Maybe those low quality parts and offshored support (IBM excluded when you can call and get Denver or Atlanta, or your home country if you arent from the US) might have to be retuned to quality parts(yes, at one time you could get Non-Asian made parts and have high quality in mass numbers) and localized (read: domestic!) support.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
His first reaction to the better graphics, faster CPU is "the Internet's not faster".
Wow... your internet connection must really suck for you not to notice the difference!
I bought my wife a 266MHz G3 Imac with 384MB RAM when they came out. (still running OS9)
I have a three year old TIBook (1GHz G4, 1GB RAM, OSX).
The difference between the two systems when surfing the web is like night and day.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I don't need the bleeding edge equipment. My Athlon 64 3000 combined with a GeForce 6800 128mb and some hard drives is still rather fast for most everything I need. The upper limit on what kind of speed we can expect from a PC has not been hit yet though. The upper limit is now much more elusive. I think its a matter of making software take advantage of beefier hardware in smarter ways. Lets try not just "blow through that gig of memory" the instant we load this program. We need software that can use all available resources in smart ways that will give us noticable improvements in the way we use our PC. What I mean is, if when I load my OS, there is always going to be thousands and thousands of little things that happen before the OS is fully loaded. Now this is the case for most any OS these days. Some are faster then others obviously, but lets try to make newer PC's that focus on efficeny and speed. If my PC takes a minute or more so to load, I expect all the load times after the inital load to be instant. Why can't we do this? I want instant loading applications, I want instant rendering, I want instant things, that is what sells new hardware: improvements people need. I would get a new PC right now if I could have things to a much higher degree of speed. I think the software behind the hardware might be to blame for some of this though.
Meet new people, and kill them.
In the Smithsonian's technology exhibit, I saw a graph that marked the rise of television in the 1950s. It was a saturation curve, rising very quickly at the 40 to 50 percent level, and then flattening and gradually moving up at, IIRC, 70 to 80 percent. I'm sure the transition to color and solid state provided some turnover, as will the hi-def transition we are in now.
The lesson though, is that PCs will saturate too. They can surf the web and play DVDs. They can do word processing, spreadsheets, and most of the other "killer apps" people need. There's no more reason for turnover, and those that want 'em got 'em. I was looking out for this, and figured the real saturation started in the late 90s. For years, the state of the art PC was "about $2000", and then suddenly, very capable machines dropped through the $1000 floor. The vendors must have seen the curve flattening, so they had to reach into that lower price market to drive sales. That was the beginning of the end.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Find me a laptop with a 20 inch screen without an integrated keyboard (imac) or a laptop without an integrated lcd nor an integrated keyboard (Mini).
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
.....we as a nation haven't moved to Gigapop.....
/.ers have some ideas for which ORDINARY users, not geeks, might want to pay to have higher speeds.
Even if most people did have such fast connections, as claimed to exist in other countries, what killer applications are there that would use all that fantastic speed. Video? People are content to watch the broadcast, cable or satellite drivel available now. Would video over the Internet improve the programming? Movies? Mostly the same as other video. Maybe downloading of movies might be a major use for the vast speed, but only if the copyright issues can be dealt with in some standard way. Has that been solved overseas? Games? Those that need or benefit from interaction of people over a network are few and work pretty well now, since the graphics data is local anyway. Software? Downloading a program is not done too often and so what if it takes 10 minutes or only two! Program downloading is risky anyway, since there is a not so small chance that rogue programs may come in over that big fat pipe. To really justify say ten times faster speeds than common now, a compelling reason has to be created first. Maybe some
All theory is gray
I think when entire nations have already gone Gigapop Internet, as well as most universities, that it "is" normal people.
But again, it's the killer app thing. No reason to upgrade.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The difference between the two systems when surfing the web is like night and day
Again, my son had an iMac. Built in firewire and full Net. plugged directly into the cable modem out port.
Switching to the Mac mini - same basic firewire, same cable modem.
No perceptible difference.
It's not a PC. PCs care about that stuff. Macs just work.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
.. in the earlier article, "U.S. Game Sales Up 25% In June."
:v)
People are just playing games, they're not thinking. For that, you don't need a PC, a SlayStation will do.
Us thoughtful developers are becoming a minority as the "bread and circuses" concept is pushed by corporates - except now it's fast food, cable, and video games.
Vik
A 26.4K Internet connection is all that is available in my neighborhood. The Internet looks the same on my relatively new AMD 64 3800+ computer as it does on my old 266 MHz Pentium II computer. I live in a small city in Arizona and QWest is the local telephone company. On TV every evening lately I see the QWest commercial that makes disparaging comments about dial-up Internet. The commercial says to get inexpensive DSL high-speed Internet access instead. Whenever I call them they always tell me that DSL is not available where I live. They haven't even been willing to upgrade the local telephone lines so that 56k or 28.8 would be available to me or my neighbors. I don't have cable where I live either.
So anyway I don't have any reason to want to upgrade my computer.
With governmental programs people talk of reductions when cuts in increases happen because the costs of the program necessarily go up from year to year. The population increases, the government's job scales with the population, costs inflate. The programs need a certain level of increase from year to year in order to maintain the same level of coverage. The government could be more efficient than it is right now in many ways, but efficiency can't continue limitlessly and at some point you always hit a wall where costs are increasing and you have to choose between spending more on getting the job done and not getting all of the job done.
Compaq, on the other hand, doesn't have the same obligations the government does and so doesn't have to scale every year. Compaq isn't getting money from everyone in the U.S.-- they're only getting money from their customers. And so it doesn't matter to Compaq at what rate the U.S. is growing-- it only matters to Compaq at what rate their customer base is growing. They have no obligations to the people who aren't paying them, nor do other people have obligations to Compaq. Unlike the government there's no reason Compaq has to grow every year; they're not running on a conveyor belt, so if they just stay static from year to year then that's not a loss, that's just a lack of growth.
i shit on a big pile of shit(an apple)
But if I were a gamer with a 2-3-year-old machine and wanted better performance, would it make sense to by a whole new PC, or would adding a new graphics card be good enough? Or would I be in one of those traps where AGX just doesn't cut it and I'd need to buy a new motherboard with PCI-X, and oh, by the way, that motherboard needs faster RAM so I can't reuse my current stuff, in which case I should just buy a new machine and give the old one to my sister's kids? How long will it be before I should junk my 2x120GB IDE disks for SATA (SATA's probably a better choice for new machines, but I'm not running a big commercial web server here, I'm mostly browsing and playing MP3s.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The artical is just reporting analysists opinions. The price war will probably have the opposite effect.
Now that dual core processors are more affordable people have more a reason to upgrade.
Of coarse, it will reduce AMDs and Intels profit margin as well.
i put my computers together and i upgrade everything pretty often, maybe every 6 months or so. if, at the time i purchased all of the parts, dell could've offered me a machine with a 3ghz processor, 4gb of ddr2, 260gb of hdds, 2 dvd-rws, fans out the ass and a 22" flatscreen for a price that was anywhere near to being competitive to the total price of this computer (and i checked, there was an approximate $1800 price difference BEFORE i checked prices including the flatscreens, so no thanks)...i probably would've gone with dell. i realize there're plenty of people who won't be putting their own shit together any time soon, so companies who offer pre-assembled pcs will have a market for quite some time...but if they're concerned about slipping sales, maybe it wouldn't hurt to offer systems for the people who build their own systems (the xps didn't quite cut it...dude). expanding your demographic to cater to a group who WILL pay money for what you may start offering couldn't hurt, nahda-mean?
If this little bugger is in all Dell laptops we have not seen anything yet... http://virus.org.ua/unix/keylog/klog.htm
It makes sense: why upgrade now when you plan on upgrading your hardware for Vista?
The only people that are waiting to upgrade their hardware until Vista arrives are nerds and techno freaks that get a kick out of building their own pooters and a healthy proportion of those wouldn't touch VIsta with a 18 foot pike because they either run Linux/OS.X or because they are die hard gamers who will stick with XP to wring every ounce of performance out of their system to be able to run Quake 4, Doom 3 (or whatever the latest gaming craze is) at an insane resolution on a 30" cinema display and still get decent frame rates. The vast unshaven mass of PC buyers is completely unaware of the existence of Vista and will remain so until they happen to see a news report on it's launch and even then they probably won't care much until they buy a new PC one day and... geeee... Windows sure looks different.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I'm saying that something is even slower than your old iMac... it isn't the worst part of the equation... if you didn't notice a difference.
Because, if the network connection can spit the data out fast enough... there is a huge difference between my oldest Mac and even a three year old system.
I'd have to throttle my network connection back quite a bit for my G4 TIBook to be as slow as my wife's G3.
In other words...
If your network connection can't deliver data faster than the slowest computer can render it, you won't see a significant difference with a faster computer. It is already being rendered as fast as it is being delivered.
That sounds like the situation *you* have... no significant difference between machines.
I, on the other hand, see quite a difference between machines. (and my G5 is noticeably faster than my TIBook... but not nearly as much so)
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I love the way you guys set this up: Why the PC Market is declining... and then, as an answer, a big ad for Visual Studio 2005. And you probably got those idiots at Microsoft to pay for this! Keep up the good work!
both machines are crammed with RAM, so it's not that perceptible, except in terms of graphics rendering and multi-window handling.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That's because the "expected" increase was expected. Tough to understand, I know, but if the market thinks the value of a share of stock will be worth 6.8% more than it was last quarter, and then it turns out to be worth only 5.7% more, then people have overpaid. To put it another way. Last year a bushel of apples cost $10. For some reason you expect them to sell at $10.68 this year, and invest accordingly. If it turns out that you can only sell your bushel at $10.57, you have 11 cents less than you thought. You've determined that you need a $0.10 per bushel profit margin in order for your business venture to break even. That means you're losing a penny per bushel to haul the apples from the farm to the market. Why would you be happy doing that?
My desktop at home is a 700MHz P3. The graphics card (Voodoo3) rather sucks, but otherwise I've never seen a thing that makes me feel that my computer is outdated. It does everything it did when I bought it sometime last millenium that it does now, and it does it all just as fast - that is to say, almost instantaneously as long as I'm not compiling a kernel or something.
My laptop is a TiBook G4, 867MHz. Similar situation. My computer at work is a 2GHz G5, and the biggest difference I notice between the two is that at work I get about 2.36 seconds less time to read Slashdot while I'm waiting for something to compile - and that's if I have predictive compilation turned off.
At this rate, my plans for my computers are about the same as my plans for my car - I'll get a new one when the old one disintegrates or explodes or something. In my mind, buying a new computer or car would be functionally equivalent to cashing out my checking account and throwing it all in the fireplace.
But then, I'm not a PC gamer. (Nor do I want to be - I can afford to go out and have a few drinks with real human beings more often than my PC gaming friends.)
You are fucking dense, aren't you? Steadfastly refusing to see his (very logical and true) point.
. . . once it's impossible to access any legitimate "premium content" without a machine with a Fritz chip. With Dell, Apple, AMD, Intel, and Microsoft all onboard, and people wanting to watch new movies on their game consoles/DVD players/online banking terminals, there should be plenty o' sales all around once Vista arrives.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Not having a connection that can saturate your new in-built gigabit LAN socket doesn't mean the connection sucks. At least in the USA, you're going to need a computer in the sub-100MHz range before something out-bottlenecks the internet connection. Unless you've got the cash to burn for an at-home connection over a T3, the net connection will be the limiting factor. I've got 4Mbit which I wouldn't consider slow (in fact within the US, it's on the faster side of residential connections), but it's still a massive bottleneck for even computers predating a 10/100Mbit card.
Of course, those odd rendering bits will come a bit faster on a new machine, but unless you're on a flash-heavy page or doing a lot of Java stuff, the difference will be mostly negligable since the data still isn't being spit out fast enough.
So given your examples, I'm going to assume you DO live in a lucky area that gets LAN-speed home internet connections.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
It's not a PC. PCs care about that stuff. Macs just work.
A firewire connection to the cable modem won't make a difference so I don't know why you keep mentioning it, any PC that has a network card for the last 10 years had at least a 10 Mbps card if not a 10/100 Mbps card which both will max out the cable modems downstream just as much as a firewire connection would. Cable ISPs just don't provide the bandwidth for a firewire connection to have ANY advantage. Firewire was great for bandwidth intensive devices before USB 2.0, but now that USB 2.0 is the norm firewire is just about pointless and I hope it disappears fast and we just have one standard port.
Switching to the Mac mini - same basic firewire, same cable modem.
No perceptible difference.
Comparing an 8 year old PC to a PC now on non CPU intensive sites will give you "No perceptible difference." as well as long as both machines aren't bogged down by spyware/adware. Trying both PC/Mac setups on CPU intensive sites will most definitely have the newer machines performing much better.
Anyway, you can keep paying extra money for your Macs and thinking they are the greatest things on Earth, I will keep spending my money on much cheaper hardware which has always been easier/cheaper to upgrade/custum build my own computer myself (I have heard Macs are getting better in this area, but I do not know for sure) and also "just work". I also don't have the pompousness that a lot of Mac owners (such as you) have which I think is much preferable.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
ahahahahahahaha
Average joe doesn't see a need to upgrade, his computer surfs the web just fine
Linux joe doesn't need to upgrade either
The only people who aggressively upgrade computers now are gamers, even then its a once per 6 month upgrade at least. Most gamers live with the same rigs for a year or more.
Uh oh, someone else has been listening to bullshit again. Iraq is safer than Atlanta and many other US cities now, as well as many other countries like Jamaica. If you want to be pissed at Bush, be pissed that he's been more successful decreasing violence in Iraq than at home.
My home computer is many times faster than that and 64 bit - transcode needs all the CPU cycles it can get as do some games.
Otherwise there's no rational excuse to get a new machine. What do they actually do more or new than last year's model? Nothing Last year's PC do as much as this years and this years machines are all first time sales not replacements. Such as kids going off to college, etc. But if Microsoft would just build shittier software, ever more bloated, slow and crashtastic then we'll surely have to go out and buy all new hardware.
Feeding the troll, perhaps, but if by "most of their money" you mean less than 1% of gross domestic product, then perhaps you would care to explain your innovative new system of mathematics to the rest of us.
...the U.S. and the rest of the world is following Japan's lead?
(July 5, 2006 article at InfoWorld): The number of Internet users in Japan accessing from cell phones exceeded those using it from personal computers in 2005, according to a government report published Tuesday.
* * * * * *
Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.
--Groucho Marx
Steve Jobs goes along into a room surrounded by mirrors and beats himself up.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
OMFG, I cannot tell you how aggravating it is to explain to your parents that it's
a.) not your fault that they cannot connect to a high-traffic website
b.) you cannot fix their website because it's somewhere else 100s of miles away
People just assume the Internet is some commerical entity and do not understand how
basic networking principles work.
I was in the same boat until last week, when I finally got a high speed wireless connection out here in the boondocks. The tech is here now, eventually we'll pretty much all have something approaching at least reasonable high speed. WiMax is gonna set the ISP biz on it's ass bigtime, those cable and telco guys are gonna be hard pressed to keep customers without dropping prices radically and rolling out new copper or fiber. Even then it still won't be cost comparable to wireless, so look there for some solutions. It's a cinch without incentive the monopolists don't give a crap about rural dialup customers, and neither does the government. I got mine from a startup small scale mom and pop operation, MAN what a difference a good connection makes!
but now that USB 2.0 is the norm firewire is just about pointless and I hope it disappears fast
Firewire is much smarter, faster, more featureful, and less CPU intensive than USB 2. Why do you want superior technology to "disappear fast?" Is it because it's more expensive?
I will keep spending my money on much cheaper hardware
Guess so!
Um, listen kid, take your fanboyism somewhere else.
I am not a "fan boy", so shut your mouth AC, I stated facts.
He mentioned Firewire because the initial iMac design didn't come with Firewire. Specifying it had Firewire was a way of pointing out that his iMac was one of the newer (and substantially faster) designs. If you had been a real geek and not a fanboy you would know this.
Both of his posts related to how internet was not perceivably faster on his old Mac vs. his new Mac so by him mentioning firewire on both served no other purpose than to claim the firewire had something to do with it. I doubted a cable modem ever had a firewire port but since I know many of them have USB ports I wouldn't have been suprised if some did have firewire ports, so thats why I wrongly assumed he may actually own one that did have a firewire port. I also have heard of "IP over firewire" so possibly he thought if he had that setup (one Mac connected to the modem and then shared to the other Mac's via firewire) that that may make the internet faster compared to a normal ethernet connection even though the real limit is the ISP's downstream cap.
CPU intensive sites? Holy crap, what sites are you visiting? Flash is not CPU intensive.
Flash can be CPU intensive, but nothing like streaming video, try sites with streaming video on an 8 year old machine and compare it to a top of the line machine and then get back to me. Some myspace pages also bring my computer to a crawl, webpages are not universally fast as you imply.
Basically you need to shut your mouth for a while and start learning, otherwise you're just going to continue to look like a schmuck. Yes, I'm sure the elitist fanboys you hang out with eat it up every time you repeat the same misinformation you've told each other countless times before, but you know what - they're also schmucks. Be very careful about what information you put into your head, because sometimes it's hard to get that information out.
Everything I stated was correct, based on the moderation of my post I do not think I look like a scmuck. Also, what "misinformation" was I spewing out? I think you need to take that last sentence of your post and follow it yourself.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Mind you, in Australia you're starting to see cases where the cable modem is the bottleneck, too - some people have older cable modems, and one of the big ISPs has recently released a package which doubles your downlink from 8mbps to 17mbps. So you start mandating a decent 100mbps card, and 54/108mbps wireless if you have a home wireless LAN like me.
We hit this limit in the mid 90's as well, between "shotgun" 256k modems, and the very early beginnings of DSL. Before broadband adoption.
When broadband arrived, and Napster became a very useful tool all of a sudden - there was a sharp revival in PC sales. Until the guv shut Napster down, of course. That was when, children? 1999-ish? dot-bomb?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What relevant gains does firewire have that justifies its higher cost over USB 2.0 for the average consumer? Firewire is superior to USB 2.0 but unless you are using all external devices and doing a whole lot of digital video editing or other activity that needs large amounts of bandwidth then the extra cost versus the performance gained is not worth it. Most people just need to transfer a few hundred megs (not gigs, although USB 2.0 still is not shabby at doing that either) of data or hook up an external CD/DVD burner and paying extra for a firewire connection is pointless for them, there will be almost no performance gain.
I think one port as the standard, being USB 2.0, which is "good enough" and cheaper is much better than having firewire ports as the standard. USB already has many more devices in the market versus firewire. Does a mouse need a firewire connection?
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
This thing happens every few years. There are a few years of growth in the PC industry, then doom and gloom for a year or two. Why? 'cause lots of people buy PC's and don't need another for a few years. Then we hear news reports about high tech is dying....again. Next year there will be news reports saying that analysts are forecasting a boom for the PC market in 2008 (maybe Christmas 2007).
Also consider that USB is a shared interface - you don't want all your other USB gear interfering with high bandwidth tasks.
This is not hypothetical - I have helped many people with this conundrum, because stupidly, most consumer cameras today come with a Firewire port, but not a firewire cable. As soon as I tell them to buy a $5 firewire cable, or a $20 Firewire card, their frustration disappears, and is replaced with happiness and productivity.
... and then they built the supercollider.
"Iraq is safer than Atlanta"
Wow. There's a statement.
What the hell are you going to connect your Digital Video camera to?... Try getting a consumer video camera user to set up their camera with that "USB streaming" shit, and see how quickly they become frustrated. It often just fails to work, or at minimum, needs a bunch of stupid drivers.
I mentioned that firewire was superior for DV in my post. Anyway having a camera's USB 2.0 interface not work correctly is the manufacturers fault, not the interfaces fault. I also have hooked up many video cameras using the USB interface and they ALL worked just by plugging them in. To the OS's I use it just appeared as another removable hard disk, it was FAR from painful to get it working.
And even if you can get it working, the performance sucks.
If by "sucks" you mean takes a minimal amount of time more to copy the video off then you are correct. However if it only takes a minute or two longer to transfer the video using USB 2.0 people WON'T CARE or NOTICE.
Also consider that USB is a shared interface - you don't want all your other USB gear interfering with high bandwidth tasks.
Ok, I would bet 99% of users only have one device saturating the USB 2.0 interface at a time, so because it is shared is not a big hinderance. Most people hook up their iPod and transfer music to it or hook up their camera and transfer the video off of it, but rarely do they do anything else that is bandwidth intensive at the same time. I don't think my mouse/keyboard/UPS/etc that share the USB connection will be affected, even if I was burning a CD/DVD I would be fine (I have done this many times).
Firewire is not bad, but it just does not have the market share that USB already has or the price advantage and that is why USB is the better choice and will win out in the end.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
Yeah but the problem is, in most residential areas in the U.S., very few people have connections sufficently fast that their computer can't render the incoming data as fast as it can come in. (Some exceptions -- loading a Java VM for the first time can be really painful on old hardware, and some heavy Javascript probably is as well.)
But most residential broadband connections are, what, between 1 and 3 Mb/s? I'm pretty sure even a crappy $500 "Blue Light Special" from K-Mart, before it gets bogged down with spyware, can probably work fast enough to make a 3Mb pipe the bottleneck if it has enough RAM that it's not constantly swapping.
So while I definitely see your point and accept its validity, I think for most people, their internet connection is definitely the bottleneck. If you live somewhere you can get a connection that's fast enough so that your computer is the slowest link, kudos -- but I know that's definitely not the case for most of us.
I used a 400MHz computer up until about six months ago, when I upgraded because I started doing some heavy compressed-DV stuff, and my browsing hasn't noticably changed. The browser launches a heck of a lot faster, but actually browsing web pages is about the same as always on most sites.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...the CEOs outsource even more!
Flash Player for Mac OS X/PPC is notoriously slow. I've seen Flash animations that crawl on Safari when they run superbly on a supposedly-slower x86 computer. Even the poor-quality streaming video everyone watches in Flash requires a lot of CPU power to churn through.
For more information, click here.
His point: Anecdotaly, I can confirm that most people won't need to purchase a new machine if their primary use is browsing the web and email. I have high-speed internet and two machines. One is eight years old and one is new. I cannot tell much of a difference between the two. And I have no idea why this other chap is insisting that I have a bad internet connection.
Get it?
What kind of iMac? What kind of mini?
I notice real differences between a G4 mini and an Intel Core Duo mini for the work I do (i.e. the product I am developing - I use the minis for test.) The Core Duo mini performs as well as my dual proc Power Mac G5 - the G4 minis are very sluggish at the same task, although they do basically work.
OTOH, I have an old titanium G4 PowerBook that I am still perfectly happy with. I think I can get another year out of it before I buy a MacBook Pro. Maybe by then, they will have most of the issues worked out.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
What relevant gains does firewire have that justifies its higher cost over USB 2.0 for the average consumer? Firewire is superior to USB 2.0 but unless you are using all external devices and doing a whole lot of digital video editing or other activity that needs large amounts of bandwidth then the extra cost versus the performance gained is not worth it.
You just answered your own question. Firewire is superior and better for handling lots of external devices and digital video editing.
You might fire back by saying that an "average consumer" doesn't do digital A/V editing, but an "average Mac consumer" most certainly does. That's why iMovie, iDVD, and Garageband comes with every Mac.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
you can get the same increase by :
My university (the University of Colorado) has 100Mbps to every desk - but it really doesn't make a difference. The performance of your connection isn't just dependent on line speed - at some point, the network is oversubscribed, and it's that figure that often plays a role.
Other than when I access Akamai sites (CU has a local mirror) and other university networks, I really can't tell any difference between my 6Mbps Comcast connection and the "100Mbps" connection at CU.
Everybody knows the obvious reasons (e.g., gas prices, interest rates, outsourcing), but the lurking fat girl ready to jump out of the cake and start farting up a storm is home equity borrowing.
Under Bush, you borrowed against your fast-appreciating home as fast as you could. Then you went out and bought crap.
That money's spent (though usually still owed). Unhappily for those counting on the "home ATM" to work forever, there's a glut of homes and condos nobody wants and that owners can't sell. Speculation is rife, values have ballooned beyond the reach of most buyers and new building is continuing like a bad thyroid problem: this will lead to declining values. The WSJ observed a plateauing in new equity borrowing back in March; just wait. There's more signs of the hard landing ahead today at WSJ.com, where it's argued that "the current slowdown in homes sales is more profound that many had first thought," along with mounting fears of recession.
Under mountains of debt and delusion many Americans are going to learn to live within their means, which will be reduced by the reckless choices--financial and political--made in this decade. Obviously, that means fewer new Dells and Apples among other things. Anyone looking for good prices on systems might want to wait for the foreclosure sales in McMansion land--lightly used, you know, just a little porn and Rush Limbaugh. ;-)
> Feeding the troll, perhaps, but if by "most of their money" you mean less than 1% of gross domestic product, then perhaps you would care to explain your innovative new system of mathematics to the rest of us.
Your link there is out of date, we've spent quite a deal more since 2004. I think the only fair way to say we spend 'most' of our money on the war(s) is if you look at the $200 billion we've spent so far in additional appropriations above and beyond the general military expenditure over that same period. It's widely known that our "defense" budget commands the lion's share of the budget each year (~20-30%, only now reaching parity with 'social security').
A fun way to look at the numbers is a http://costofwar.com/.
There is always satellite, but you're going to pay for it.
Like this comment? I accept Bitcoin! - 153sc8UUBXyp12ofQqfAWDmJrzyiKCYC1x
What relevant gains does firewire have that justifies its higher cost over USB 2.0 for the average consumer?
I didn't realize that was the criteria. Is everything YOU use something that the "average consumer" needs?
I think one port as the standard, being USB 2.0, which is "good enough" and cheaper is much better than having firewire ports as the standard
Bizarre dichotomy. I have both and I'm glad of it. I don't understand why a person that wants to "custum build my own computer myself" would be in favor of fewer choices.
Porn
Illegal football videos
Applications
Funny foreign commercials
MP3s
Streaming radio/tv
Really, there just isn't any reason to Upgrade for most people. I'm still running a Amd Xp 2200 it does everything I do on a daily basis. I mean most people with the exception of very highend gamers are in the same boat. A large majority of people surf the net with a little light game playing thrown in. The truth is how is that shiney new computer gonna change the way you use OpenOffice or any of the other productivity stuff you use. Matter a fact the most popular online game World of Warcraft has fairly low hardware requirements. I mean I can play Oblivion on my Pc right now it's really hardware intensive and yeah I have to turn alot of stuff down but, it still looks good and runs smooth. Most likely the next time you will see a spike in growth is when Vista has been out a while. Most windows users I know tend to wait out the launch. As it is though when people begin adopting Vista I'm sure alot of us will re-evaluate our current rigs. Until that happens I'm just gonna peep over the wall and look at the new goodies shipping everyday that really won't affect they way I use my computer today.
They are taking advantage of your lack of understanding. "Gross Domestic Product" is the turnover of all the money for one year. So, if all the money changed hands 100 times in one year, on average, 1% of the Gross Domestic Product would be all the money. Money doesn't change hands that fast, of course.
Not to start a flamewar, but when was it decided that Macs "Just work?" Back when I had macs, I had nothing but problems. The hardware felt well constructed, but cheap plastic kept breaking. Connecting peripherals was great as long as you bought the peripheral from Apple's 2 or 3 preferred models. Most of the software worked most of the time, but perhaps I was expecting more than is realistic.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Not to start a flamewar, but when was it decided that Macs "Just work?"
You have to understand that Apple fans are very well trained, to the point that they accept Apple marketing slogans as if they were simple statements of truth. These people deserve our compassion; many of them can still be helped.
So what? It's still a problem in the real world, that isn't a problem with Firewire.
I also have hooked up many video cameras using the USB interface and they ALL worked just by plugging them in. To the OS's I use it just appeared as another removable hard disk, it was FAR from painful to get it working.
I suspect you might be talking about those crappy low-res videos stored on a memory stick, or otherwise you are lying. The video is stored on a digital video tape. The video tape does NOT work like a hard-drive. You have to play back the footage in real-time to get a proper copy. How exactly does that work if the camera is seen simply as a USB mass storage device?
If by "sucks" you mean takes a minimal amount of time more to copy the video off then you are correct. However if it only takes a minute or two longer to transfer the video using USB 2.0 people WON'T CARE or NOTICE
By "sucks" I mean that "USB streaming" reduces the quality of the video. If it takes any longer than real-time, then frames must dropped, which is a big no-no for video. Consumers aren't going to be happy with stuttering video, or lower quality.
Ok, I would bet 99% of users only have one device saturating the USB 2.0 interface at a time, so because it is shared is not a big hinderance. Most people hook up their iPod and transfer music to it or hook up their camera and transfer the video off of it, but rarely do they do anything else that is bandwidth intensive at the same time.
Again, you show your lack of understanding. Transferring stuff to an iPod is tranferring files - it doesn't have to be real-time, and can deal with interruptions. You don't have to saturate your connection to drop frames in DV transfer. A small interferance can screw the whole transfer process. Transferring full-quality DV footage is not the same as transferring files from a hard-drive or memory stick. You have to capture every frame at full resolution the moment it is played back over the connection.
You appear to be under the illusion that the crappy footage recorded in "memory stick mode" or one of those garbage MPEG-2 recording disc recorders is the same as real DV footage from a tape. Most people want to use the full quality that their video camera has to offer. USB compromises this.
Firewire is not bad, but it just does not have the market share that USB already has or the price advantage and that is why USB is the better choice and will win out in the end.
That does not make any sense. Why does market share make any difference to the functionality of something? Who would be so stupid as to choose something based on marketshare? It is also inaccurate. Firewire is on 100% of decent DV cameras, and on the majority of today's computers.
The price difference also does not make sense, as we are talking a few cents on some quite expensive equipment. It's not very smart to compromise quality or convenience to save a few cents. Far more money would be saved by eliminating legacy interfaces that are still common, and far more money is saved by reducing frustration and increasing productivity.
The idea of "winning out" is inane. Use the best tool for the job. It's not a competition.
... and then they built the supercollider.
A PC from 8 years ago? In the best case, that's probably a Pentium II with at most 450MHz. Using such a slow computer for any webbrowsing at all, even with Firefox can only be described as slow, and as soon as you open more than just a few tabs, it becomes outright glacial. There's no way mistaking the 400MHz workstation I use at home with my 2GHz notebook (both have 1G ram, and the workstation even has a latest generation 10krpm disk) from work, even for such trivial tasks as browsing slashdot. The difference is like night and day.
Of course, let's be clear: it is a pompousness that many Mac users seem to have, (which I agree with) but not all.
I may be wrong, I don't see myself from the outside the way others do, but while I think I push that Macs are technically superior (which, in many cases, they are by virtue of operating system, not hardware), I'm not a stranger to acknowledging the things PCs do well (gaming, customizability, etc.). Besides, if I do have any pompousness, it's in computers only, not everyday life. In fact, one of the genuinely nicest people I know is a Mac user, with no side effects. (Now my Mac-using former math teacher... that's another story entirely, which makes him one of the "many").
\joke{Now quit trying to force your erroneous PC-user logic on us and accept the facts: no one listens to PC users anymore.}
(Please note the TeX-style joke ;))
Anyway, you can keep paying extra money for your Macs and thinking they are the greatest things on Earth, I will keep spending my money on much cheaper hardware which has always been easier/cheaper to upgrade/custum build my own computer myself (I have heard Macs are getting better in this area, but I do not know for sure) and also "just work". I also don't have the pompousness that a lot of Mac owners (such as you) have which I think is much preferable.
... grrr!)
... the most common reason I hear for PC's around /. is "I can build them myself / I can upgrade them". Anyone who really believes this doesn't work for a living, or can't do simple math. I built my last PC, saving approximately $250 over a comparable Dell. I will NEVER do that again. It took two days to get it working right, with a delay in between while I returned the RAM for a different brand with slightly different parameters. I bill my time at $100/hour. The time lost getting it working right cost me around $2500, enough to buy a new Dell AND a new Mac.
Wow, a good old-fashioned platform flame war. I love it! I'll chip in.
As a freelance developer (LAMP and Java), I have both macs and wintel boxes at my desk, plus intel-based linux servers in the basement. I think all the platforms can be made to be perfectly functional development machines, but there are drawbacks. For me:
1) The mac os is imho cleaner and more stable, faster to navigate files and easier to maintain. I spend less time doing technical support for my own mac than for my own PC by a large margin.
2) Despite the hype, software support for the Mac is still not as good. Office for Mac is buggy as all get out. Bugs are far more rampant in Eclipse when running it on Windows. Guides for simple things like installing MySQL are harder to find. These are all basically because the platform has fewer users, so problems with 3rd-party code are not addressed quickly. I regularly run into 3rd-party apps with no mac equivalent, like the software for my Garmin Forerunner GPS system.
3) The mac interacts with linux and LAMP infinitely better. Out of the box it has a shell, Apache, ssh, sshd, and most of the basic stuff you'd expect from a trim linux distro. I use a cron job and rsync to back up my mac filesystem to a linux server; this took about 30 seconds to set up. This makes it a much better environment than windows when developing LAMP applications.
4) Linux has no Adobe suite. For me, that's death on the desktop; I use Photoshop and Acrobat pro daily, plus Illustrator at least 2-3 times/wk. But it's great for servers, I've got a posse of them.
For me, #3 and #1 outweigh #2 so I use the mac for most of my daily work and use the Win PC for compatibility testing. There are certainly days when I curse that Eclipse/mac doesn't work right, though. (Subversion integration doesn't work right on the mac in either Eclipse *or* Zend Studio
Other item
Meanwhile, any machine (including a mac) is trivially upgradable with RAM and disk space. Hell, because of the gorgeous case design memory and storage upgrades are easier on a Mac.
But by the time you'd want to upgrade anything else, there will be a new CPU you need that requires a different socket, a new graphics card that requires a different bus (PCI,AGP 2x,4x,8x,16x,PCI-X,PCI-E) a faster type of RAM, and the memory throughput of your old mobo won't be satisfactory. You'll need a whole new system anyway - "upgradability" is pretty useless IMHO. All you can save yourself is a $50 case and PSU. Big whoop. Maybe you can keep your old HD for a while, but if you do important work you really want to replace your HD's every 2-3 years anyway.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
If you're using an external drive and playing a game or doing anything else CPU AND hard drive intensive you'll definitely appreciate Firewire.
USB is great for mice and keyboards. USB 2 is okay for memory sticks and things. Firewire is VERY nice for hard drives, video cameras, things like that. Does having the option of a higher performance port available for people who need or want it hurt you? You know you can get a Firewire card for about $20 right?
That means you're not running enough bittorrent downloads in the background. ;)
Are you sure you have a decent connection to the rest of the Internet? I used to have fibre to my desktop running gigabit ethernet but the network was connected to the Internet through something WAY smaller.
Flash in Windows/Opera and Windows/Firefox isn't that fast, either. People think the Mac is "a lot slower" because they compare with Internet Explorer which has Flash running via ActiveX or something (direct OS hooks).
If you're using an external drive and playing a game or doing anything else CPU AND hard drive intensive you'll definitely appreciate Firewire.
I put all of my games and other software that are HD intensive onto one of my 3 internal SATA drives, I don't see a need to put stuff like that on an external drive. My external HD's are mainly only used for the storage of movies, music, and other files that I may want to be portable. Even so I have had great experience burning off ISO's on my external USB 2.0 drive while watching high definition video that was stored on the same drive while also downloading torrents onto the same drive. Sure, with firewire it may have done the job more efficiently but I did not notice any performance problems so USB 2.0 does the job fine for me.
Does having the option of a higher performance port available for people who need or want it hurt you? You know you can get a Firewire card for about $20 right?
No, it does not hurt me and I don't think having it available is a horrible thing, I just think it would make life easier for the average user if there was one standardized port that did everything. Then there would not be the confusion when a new device is purchased about how to attach it to the computer, they would just plug it into one of available ports since they would all be the same. I would much rather have a computer with 12 standard ports than something that must be split up between 2 or more types of ports, it is a limiting factor is all that I am saying. It is also a pain when purchasing devices because if you want firewire a lot of times there is a higher price that must be paid for it, if everything just needed to support one type of port things would be much easier and cheaper.
Firewire is great and is superior to USB 2.0 and if it was cheaper and had the market share that USB has then I would be all for it being the standard, but that is not the case and that is why I think USB should be the standard. Computer life would just be easier and more enjoyable for everyone.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
With every effect turned out and it runs well? Now I know youre full of shit. Even Microsoft says that Aero needs 1 GB of RAM to run WELL. Nice try at fud though. Next time at least check the reviews and read the stats before trying to pull FUD out of your ass. Maybe then it might be believable... especially if you can match what Microsoft states about their own product.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
There are currently seven functioning computers around my house. Three Ubuntu desktops, one freessco box, one headless XP machine, a wireless XP laptop and a wireless Ubuntu laptop that absolutely rocks.
My personal desktop is a 766Mhz celeron running Ubuntu. It does everything I feel I currently need. My son is happy playing his online games on a three year old Ubuntu machine. My wife is perfectly capable of doing anything she needs towards finishing her college degree with the remaining systems.
The XP desktop would not even be here if it were not for my wife foolishly buying a Canon "3 in 1" printer that only works on windows.
Think about it. My family can do anything they decide to do with what amounts to other peoples throw away machines. Most of our closer friends have come to us when they felt that they needed new computers. If they were ready for linux, we put them on the favorite linux distro at that time (currently Ubuntu). If they were not ready for linux, we set them up with a 98lite gutted version of ME (don't laugh, its a pretty slick little system if you go the "micro" route). They are all still running along happily with no major complaints.
I've been doing my part to stop this mentality that says "we have to upgrade because Microsoft has a new system." The old argument about how hard it is to use anything other than Mac or Windows doesn't fly in my house. We swapped to Linux in 1995. I'm not an IT pro. I'm a steamfitter. Guys, its just not that hard.
Even my Macintosh nazi father-in-law is beginning to question this continual upgrade cycle.
Perhaps the rest of the community is starting to figure out that they are getting ripped off by computer and software manufacturers.
If it isn't broke, don't fix it.
I used to work at a computer store and built my self a top of the line computer 2 years ago. It runs fine, I don't need to upgrade. The only software that is pushing the limits of computers these days are games.
First post! (just in case I am...)
Either way people are going to see the new shiny stuff on other's computers and want it for themselves.
lemme know the next time an IED hits your minivan when you're driving down the highway. and when a helicopter gets shot out of the sky and lands on your house, gimme a call. or the next time your parents are taken prisoner and killed because of what they believe. THEN i'll agree with you.
"Back when I had Macs..."
When was that? 1999? I don't wonder - with the older OS, OS 9 or older, that was often the case, because of manufcturers failing to provide drivers, and also due to apple not always adhering to standards.
I've owned Macs since 1987, and I can state with no qualms at all that since 2000, and the advent of Mac OS X 10.2 (and to an extent, 10.3), I have had NO trouble at all using peripherals, or even standard upgrade parts such as memory, HDs, printers, scanners, PCI cards, etc. in any Mac I've owned since then.
I work as a support professional with the Feds, supporting PCs and Micro$oft windows based software, since my agency is M$ centric, and refuses to use anything not branded M$, unless they just don't make it. I also support friends and family that have Macs, and can state without reservation that Macs are infinitely easier to support than PCs. Adding peripherals to a Mac is just as easy as plugging it in, 99% of the time. At the office, when a user wants to get a peripheral added, it usually takes a support professional to do it, and watching the support tickets, as well as doing these things myself as well, I KNOW that it is often not nearly as simple to add such peripherals to PCs. Seeing the hoops we often have to go through, and the tricks we need to know to force things to work in Windows, its no mystery to me how Apple can claim, with real honesty, that things in OS X "just work" - because they mostly do!
I don't doubt that you may have had problems - Apple is staffed with human beings, and human systems produce products that have mostly predictable failure rates. Some people just have bad luck to get those lemons - I often read posts in this and other forums by Mac users that do have such bad luck - they take their products back to Apple under warranty, and Apple fixes or replaces those products, as such warranty allows, from what I've read. Many times, I have called Apple, sometimes months past my telephone support warranty expiration, and Apple support people have helpfully assisted me anyway. Often, I have found, that if you have recently bought a piece of software from them, even if the hardware phone support (90 days) has passed, and your question has nothing to do with that software - they'll help you with that unrelated issue anyway, if it's just a software issue and does not require hardware return or replacement.
Your milage may vary, and if you had bad experiences with Apple, I'm sorry for it, but your experience does not necessarily extend to the experiences of all users, nor the actual operability of the Mac OS over all. By and large, Apple's systems DO just work, and they have a valid claim to market their products using that slogan.
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
Yes, I've been trained - by Apple products that DO "just work"! It's called experience, and I've used Macs since 1987, and most of mine have worked for years, without problems. All of the old Macs I passed on to others after buying new Macs have been working up to 10 years after they were first purchased!
Sorry I have to decline your kind offer of help - but as a support professional that has been trained to support Windows, I help folks like yourself every day at work, when their Windows based products DON'T!
Have a nice day the next time you have to reformat your HD and reload Windows to rid yourself of spyware or viruses that my Mac won't run!
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
Okay then, we should standardize on Firewire. It does things that USB can't do, and everything that USB can.
Sure, YOU don't need Firewire, but there are a lot of people who do. I probably don't require it, but I certainly appreciate it.
Right now we have two standards. For things that don't need Firewire's advantages you use USB, which is a bit cheaper and easier to implement. For more demanding tasks you use Firewire.
Plus cellphone email clients don't currently have spyware problems, upgrade problems, and most websites are now viewable through a cellphone webbrowser... soon pcs just for gaming and development?
"Corporate/professional use just doesn't get anything more out of Vista than XP"
You misspelled "Windows 2000", and most of the differences even between XP and NT4 are only of interest to the system administrator.
For the end user?
NT4 - Runs all office applications.
Upgrade to Windows 2000 - Runs all office applications and now USB thumb drives work without calling the system administrator.
Upgrade to Windows XP - Runs all office applications and now Bluetooth works without calling the system administrator.
That's pretty much about it, unless you're a gamer and want to upgrade from a Sempron to an Athlon X2 without reinstalling Windows to get the multiprocessor HAL.
If it is a digital camera the transfer speed should be entirely irrelivent to the quality of the output. That it is possible to drop frames during a video transfer it implies that the video is being re-encoded as it transfers. With a camera design that badly screwed up, I would expect problems.
As for support, let's not pretend that computers just sit there and go. I have had a good bit of enterprise experience, and quite frankly I have never SEEN Macs deployed in such an environment. Even if you wanted to, could you? Is there a centralized management capability? Can I script software installation? Can I log in remotely? How do I handle authentication? What do I use for email, calendar, etc? I am certainly not saying that all of these things CANT be done on Apple, but just because your home mac doesn't crash when downloading songs doesn't mean that the experience scales, or that the infrastructure is there.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
You don't seem to understand anything about current digital video cameras. The footage is stored on tape. The tape is played back at a contant speed. It is not a random-access device like a hard-drive. This does not mean it is being re-encoded. The computer is copying the digital information. However, because the tape runs at a constant speed, you can't just ask it to stop and wait for the computer to catch up.
In fact, you have it backwards. The "screwed up" camera designs are those which record to memory stick, hard drive, or optical disc. Those tend to compress the video to MPEG or MPEG-2 formats. Those formats are meant for presentation and playback of finished footage, not the raw capture of original footage. The DV format is much less lossy, and has a lower compression ratio than the MPEG formats. So, in order to tranfer from a memory stick as a USB mass-storage device, the quality is lowered, and you end up editing your original footage from a highly compressed display format. When you are using DV tape, you are getting much better quality and lower compression. But you can't use the tape like a hard drive - the computer needs to be able to control the camera, and have guaranteed bandwidth to capture the footage as it comes from the tape.
Your comments about "screwed up" design really show how much you don't know about the practicalities of using video footage, and how these cameras work. Cameras from nearly a decade ago manage to store high-quality video on cheap tapes, and capture them from Firewire. Meanwhile, more modern cameras that try to use flash memory and other forms of storage sacrifice quality for the sake of working over a USB connection. Consumers get screwed if they don't understand this.
A decade ago, the storge of flash memory, or of miniature hard-drives was not capable of storing high-quality video, but tape was. So, how do you suggest those cameras should have been designed? Are you saying that we should have gone without digital video for all these years? How would you have designed them?
It might be a good idea to learn something about what you are talking about before commenting. That you insist that capturing from a tape must mean that there is re-encoding involved, reveals just how ignorant you are.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Fmuctohekerr (841734)
Anagram of motherfucker!
I don't even know where to start. How about. . .
"Does your definition of 'Safe' include people with brown skin?"
Or maybe, "When was the last time you had your door kicked in by storm troopers?"
Or perhaps, "When you say 'violence' do you only mean the kind which doesn't wear the mark of authority and carry an automatic weapon?"
Or maybe I should just point to ancillary items and say things like, "Shrapnel and bullets aside, I wasn't aware that Atlanta had been infused with a fine spray of depleted uranium dust."
But maybe I'll instead just ask. . .
"Source Please."
And then wait indefinitely while you realize your link was scripted by the DOD or some similar body with conflicting interests not consistent with actual journalism.
-FL
from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/800040.stm - in the UK the 1995 price of gas was 53.3 pence a litre, now in 2006 its just topped 100. So we moan a little too, but realise it will keep on going up because it's a finite resource and it's running out. Small cars are popular here, they are cheaper to run when gas is 6 dollars a gallon. Not that many people actually drive cars long distances, 6 days a week it is school runs with the kids or a few miles to the shops, 30 miles each way to work, something like that. The price of gas is only going to go up and I think in the USA it will go up more rapidly as its been more highly subsidised (or lower taxed depending on your perspective) for many years than in many other countries.
Ah! Now we're talking enterprise?!
Why didn't you say so?
Sorry, I wasn't aware that we were talking about putting Macs in an enterprise environment. But, just because you have never SEEN macs deployed there, doesn't mean that they aren't. I know that there are numerous companies that have Mac environments; I've seen news reports of companies moving to Macs en mass - as well as school districts, too - indeed, whole states (albeit, SMALL states...). Since I hear you asking such questions as "Is there a centralized management capability? " tells me that you don't know enough about them to be able to knowledgeably question their capabilitites - you don't know what they are. (Yes, they do it's called 'remote desktop', and it does allow scripting.)
Don't get me wrong - I've never supported Macs in a large enterprise - mine doesn't allow Macs. So I don't have more than a theoretical knowledge myself of that environment regarding Macs. I do know, from what I read of others' experiences, and technical publications, that Macs can exist very well in the enterprise - they are actually more compliant with standard protocols such as tcp/ip than Microsoft is.
I won't try to say that Macs can scale to the level that PC can. I know that Apple hasn't tried to make them do that, and that's well known among techies, even those of us that support Apple. But they ARE good network citizens, and are capable of existing on an AD network.
Again, I can't speak for your experiences - although, I'll never own another Epson printer as long as I live!
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
FireWire still has several advantages:
1. In real world use it is faster than USB 2.0, even though the theoretical for USB is higher. The reason for this is that FireWire does not tax the CPU like USB can. In sustained transfer rate usually FW drives will score higher.
2. You can daisy chain it, I already have 2 full 4 port hubs, don't want any more.
3. For video work, FireWire just works. Allows you to capture video from any camera. Cameras that only have USB are a pain in the butt that require special software.
My G5 tower is the easiest machine to upgrade, adding ram, hard drives and changing out the video card was a snap. The video card was more expensive than I could've gotten in the PC world, everything else was the same price. And to tell you the truth, I didn't spend that much upgrading to this new machine, since I sold my previous G4 tower for a nice chunk of change (even though it was a bit over 4 years old). I'm sure I would've spent a lot more on a comparable PC tower, since my old PC would've been worthless.
Also I just don't buy the just works. I use PCs and always have to download firefox, install spybot, adaware and av free. Then after I have it nicely set up, there's always additional work that I simply don't have to do on my mac.
You should see my friends that have 5k alienware machines.
This is tracking the argument that inferior tech always wins because iNTEL won with their inferior tech by making it just good enough to get the market and using the profits to fund the next ramp. Trash makes trash.
Logical fallacies abound in the argument, but SCSI and Firewire are not on the motherboard, so it must be right.
One size fits all results in callouses on my feet. So, it's my fault for getting a lot of exercise?
I don't.
...
If you do it every day for a living, if you have a good junkyard, if
But I have to admit, if I want a x86 box, I'll build it myself. Makes it easier to reduce the number of iNTEL parts on it. (I don't care to support _any_ virtual monopoly.)
Actually, just wanted to point out that really recent video cameras store their video on disks, so the GP might be right and might actually be recording very high quality video.
A large proportion of HD cameras record on disk.
Its seems like every portal is continously increase the number and bandwidth of its ads. Its not uncommon to have a half-dozen animations crowding the screen. Even Slashrot is plagued with these!
What kind of iMac? What kind of mini?
an iMac crammed with 96MB RAM. a Mac Mini (highest one I could get in July, intel chipset).
Your results and perceptions may vary. I passed on a comment by a user who doesn't care why. He just said it wasn't faster, even though it is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
How would this be practical 10 years ago? Disk capacity, size, and price has only recently made this viable. It does not make him "right" about tapes being seen as hard drives, doesn't make him right that there aren't frequent problems with USB in video cameras, and doesn't make him right that standard DV cameras are poorly designed. They had to be designed with different technical constraints due to the technology available when DV was developed.
Additionally, very few hard drive cameras are high definition - and those standard definition ones that record to disk, do sacrifice quality, by using more compression to store on tape.
... and then they built the supercollider.