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Apple Store Reopens With Many New Products
An anonymous reader writes "After being down for a couple of hours, the Apple store reopened this morning. All of the speculation has turned out to be a reality with Apple dishing out many new products and among them are; iMac 20", three iMac 24" models, two Mac Mini models, and two Mac Pro models — with one including an ATI Radeon HD 4570 graphics card. Also as rumored, there was the new Airport Extreme, and Time Capsule in 1TB. The Mac Pro is the granddaddy of them all. The lower-end Quad Core system includes a 2.66Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, 3GB of memory, 640GB hard drive, 18x double-layer Superdrive, and a NVIDIA Geforce GT 120 with 512MB of memory priced at $2,499. Finally, we have the 8-core system which includes two 2.26Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, 6GB of memory, 640GB hard drive, the 18x double-layer Superdrive, and of course the NVIDIA Geforce GT 120 with 512MB of memory priced at $3,299."
Wake me up when they make a nice, expandable, mid ranged desktop class Mac. I still think that's the big gap in their lineup.
The majority of their Macs, iPhones and displays are manufactured, assembled and shipped straight to their destination from Asia. The only parts of Apple that is really American is their R&D and sales and marketing parts, the rest was outsourced years ago.
Instead of looking at the Pound-Dollar relationship you probably want to take a closer look at the relationship between the pound and the currencies of South Korea, etc.
The lower-end Quad Core system includes a 2.66Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, 3GB of memory, 640GB hard drive, 18x double-layer Superdrive, and a NVIDIA Geforce GT 120 with 512MB of memory priced at $2,499.
Since they don't come with a monitor, the profit margin on these things must be around 50%. Wow!
The hardware is typical mid-range stuff: decent hard disc, low-end GPU (renamed 9600GSO) and mid-high end CPU (renamed i7 920). Including a high quality motherboard and PSU, that would cost around 900 dollars at retail. That leaves a healthy 1,600 for the case, OS, software and peripherals.
Honest question: Who buys these things?
Too damn right!
It's priced at 599 US dollars, and at 599 Euros (for the cheaper one)... except that 599 Euros is well over 750 dollars. I'm sure there will always be price differences, but this is just plain idiotic. That's a price increase of 25%. I think it would actually be cheaper to buy direct from the US and pay shipping and import taxes!
-- Steve
* I live in a multi-computer home environment. I've got two Windows machines, an Ubuntu machine, a MythTV, and random stuff. The Mac works great *when you do everything the OSX way*. However, in a mixed environment, it doesn't. I'm thinking of movies, pictures, address book, and things like that.
This depends a lot in my experience based upon how you interoperate. OS X is very good at using open standards and file formats provided you pick decent software to run on top of it. It is less good at interoperating with Windows proprietary formats and protocols and if your servers or Windows machines are using them and you're set on them, Linux is often better at reverse engineered solutions. Example, if you standardized on Windows Media formats, OS X will play them, but not as well as Windows or even Linux. If you picked MP3, MP4, OGG, and the like, OS X is much better than Windows at interoperating.
I bought my iMac G5 20" ALS, and it was a great machine for about 40 months. Then, it failed.
Your anecdote certainly shows reason to be annoyed, but what could Apple the vendor do to prevent this? Extend their warranties to four years and then people complain when machines fail a month after that. Would you like more reliable hardware? Of course, we all always want more reliable hardware, but Apple already is the top rated among major vendors by consumer reports and other independent reviewers. Some people will always have hardware fail regardless. You're that person. And Apple is already taking flack for using more expensive and reliable components. Just look at all the comments here about how expensive Apple is compared not to the other top rated vendors, but ones with very poor reliability numbers. People don't look at reliability when buying.
I hate backing up /home/username.
Umm, you've heard of Time machine, right? You can apply it only to selected parts of your filesystem and it does versioning more smoothly and easily than almost anything. Or, use one of many third party backup solutions that handles them intelligently.
* The hardware *is* expensive. And, in my experience, very proprietary to the point where a failure totals a machine. My x86 tower is nicely generic.
Apple has custom motherboards, but other than that, everything is pretty much off the shelf. What are you looking to replace? I don't see how it is any harder than anything else (with the exception of the motherboard which you have to buy from Apple).
* OSX isn't perfect. Neither is XP/Vista/Ubuntu.
I don't really see how this is a challenge for Apple. You want them to be perfect? Not going to happen.
Okay, I don't quite know what my rant is. I'm just in a small minority of "Mac Fanboy for ages, switching to Windows and living just fine."
Hey, use what you like and what works for you. I use OS X, Linux, and Windows daily. On my laptop Linux and Windows live in VMs and OS X gets the most love because OS X handles migrations the best and because running OS X in a VM on top of Linux or Windows gives me more headaches. People get way to hung up an emotional about these things.