Slashdot Mirror
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.
markets.
Man are the fanbois belly aching on many of the bigger sites. What shocked most is that prices for the new machines went up and in some cases a lot. An example comparing old aussie prices to new http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=7199753&postcount=164
What is missing is...
LED screens on the iMacs
Blu-Ray (of course no one really expects it)
Quad Cores
Mac Mini got its update but the price is absurd as well.
For those of us who are still upgrading (I have an older 2.13c2d white model) some selected upgrades push ship times out four to six weeks (like buying an ati 4850 chipset)
Amazing that what Apple considers affordable is getting more extreme. Consumer level goods are professional level pricing.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Well then, it's your lucky day. Those graphics cards are a generation old and mid-range at best.
I can't find out from Apple's page - do the new Mac Minis come with a bundled remote control? Because I'm thinking of putting one under the TV - especially with the low power draw at idle, the ability to do 1080p without breaking a sweat, and the firewire 800 port that will tell my external hard drives to spin down when not needed. Heck, this could probably handle my Time Machine backups for the other macs in the house while serving 1080p. Now if only Apple would rent HD Movies to this machine. Sadly, they still only rent HD to the Apple TV. ---matt
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.
You do for most Dell and Lenovo products.
- oZ
// i am here.
an increase in price, and not a minor one.
The entry level Mini now has 128 MB of video RAM, but a shared one as before and with still 1 GB RAM total.
Then again, you get even more of these USB ports than before - great, isn't it? Especially considering the price jump of 100 euros over here in Europe.
But at least one good thing: Apple did not throw out Firewire from the Minis, so we should probably praise them for this, day and night...
Weaker video all around next to the old systems and a even bigger mac pro rip off $2500 for a core i7 based system with ONLY ONE CPU and nvidia 9500 video as the GT 120 is a 9500. What a ati card pay $200 more for a 4870 512 makeing it cost $150 + $200 = $350 makeing it about $100 more then other places you can get core i7 systems with better base video and the same cpu speed FOR ABOUT $1000+ less some even with 6gb of DDR3 ram. And why mini DP on a full size video card why not full DP with a DP to mini DP cable?
The old $1,199.00 $1,499.00 level imacs used to have ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB memory and ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB with a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS with 512MB memory in the $2,199.00 one now they have slower and weaker NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics on board video in the $1,199.00 $1,499.00 ones and NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 with 512MB memory in the $2,199.00.
The mac mini is still a ripoff $599.00 for 1 GB OF RAM? $50 more for 2gb and $150 more for 4gb?
# [Add $150.00] for a 2.26 cpu
120GB is still small.
The $799.00 mini has the same 2.0 cpu but 2gb of ram and a 320gb hd. It should have at least 128 - 256 vram that does not come from system but it does not.
For about $500 you can get a X2 7750 and 790gx board with 128 side port ram with 4gb of ram apple should of put more in to the mini.
How many people who would buy one would upgrade it? At the mid range you can get a pretty good (Windows or Linux) laptop, or iMac, or Mac Mini. High-end, sure, you want to put in the latest and greatest video card, or USB 3.0 card, without buying a new box. But any other expansion? Why not use USB? Or bluetooth? Most devices will work Well Enough that way. The EyeTV HDTV tuner is USB and works fine.
A Mac Mini looks to be a decent media center if you get a wireless keyboard+mouse and download HandBrake+VLC. A better AppleTV than the AppleTV, since it comes with a DVD player. The 24" iMac is Good Enough for anyone who isn't a media producer. It's certainly a decent software development machine, although a Mac Pro is better since it can do multiple screens.
Best Slashdot Co
Reread what the grandparent said: In certain markets. The price of the Mac Mini has gone up by a fair amount in the UK. None of the current lineup looks particularly enticing, but I still have 18 months left on my MacBook Pro's warranty, so I don't have to worry about replacing it any time soon. I'm starting to think that my next machine won't be a Mac though.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apple never dropped prices for the UK when the dollar tanked against the British Pound, but this rise is due to fluctuations in the exchange rate (which sees the British Pound more or less back to where it was against the dollar before the dollar tanked)? Hell, I'm a heavy Apple user and I'm not even that much of an apologist!
The new Mini is expensive, and there's little justification for it at that spec level.
I am disappointed to see that the new iMacs don't have quad cores, although I'm a bit heartened to see they at least support up to 8 GB RAM. An imac quad core would be a great virtualization machine. I think Apple has missed the mark to not go quad core -- at least in the high imacs -- considering these models will likely be out for 9 months to 12 months. I'm also disappointed that prices didn't drop a bit considering the current market conditions. To ask folks to put down $1200 to have an all in one solution may be a non-starter nowadays. If you want a Quad core mac, you have to pay $2500 -- and for that you get 3GB RAM. Wow. Anyway, I can understand why there isn't fan fair here -- these are pretty minor speed bumps. These were much needed so I'm glad to see them arrive, but in the absence of new innovation, these speed bumps are decent today, but in 6 months they are going to be quite far behind.
If you've bought an iPod touch or an iPhone in the past 2 years, apple has a free program called "Remote." It lets you browse all your music/movies from iTunes over wifi, do coverflow from your mini to the iWhatever, etc. Then you tap on your movie/music and it plays it through the computer.
It absolutely love it; It can be found in the App Store.
This is exactly why I have not considered Mac as a viable option for me. The video card offerings are just not current enough. Why is it that everything else in the system is relatively high end and the video cards fall off the face of the planet on the low end or mid-range at best?
Until they either offer a base system with either NO VIDEO CARD (choose your own later) or something in the GTX 200 series, I can see no point in buying one. And what's up with the single HD4870, why not at least offer an X2? High end everything else and then crap for video card makes a nice workstation, but it's an insanely underpowered gaming rig. And at the price range of the Mac Pro, the only reasonable thing to compare it to is gaming class systems.
Fear is the mind killer.
It was the Radeon X1900XT. I had both the original and the updated versions cards. The machine was basically used for World of Warcraft (Which isn't hard on a GPU by any standard). http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/Graphics/X1900XT_Overheating/ATI_X1900_artifacts.html is a convenient rundown on the issues with the card. And yes, I prefer the current NVidia mess. At least I know what I'm getting. The X1900XT issues were related strictly to the Apple versions of the cards. It was stupid when I had to reseat the card at least 5 times to get the machine to boot (It would fail boot bios checks and hang). Since I put in the 8800 GT, I've had no issues. Not one. As I said, I would never trust any Mac with an ATI product in it after that mess.
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?
How much of this price change is due to the fluctuations in exchange rates?
Well, I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but here in Australia the price seems to be pegged at an advantageous rate (for Apple) and that is that. There is no room for negotiation: you either want the product or you don't. This is IMO one of the more distasteful aspects of Apple's business model.
Their model doesn't annoy me enough to stop me using my second-hand MacBook, since I find it complements my (linux) desktop machines quite comfortably, but my approval isn't required...
Looks like Apple has finally moved on from FireWire 400, as all the new products only have FireWire 800 ports. About time -- two different FireWire ports was starting to get annoying, although it does mean you'll need to get an adapter for old stuff.
You might want to try reading a little more closely. People are discussing the prices in various non-US markets. Quoting a bunch of USD prices is, at best, irrelevant.
Perhaps because this site isn't solely devoted to providing personalised news for you and nobody else? The irony is, you could customise slashdot so it doesn't show apple stories if you were so inclined.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Last I saw Apple is a tech company... they just released a ton of new products. How is this not applicable? I guess when Google released their single cellphone, or Microsoft releases a new line of Zune's, that would also not be worthy for technical people?
If you don't like stories on Apple, you can, you know, set your preferences to block it.
I walked into a Mercedes dealer today when I realized that, as a contractor, what I need is a truck and not a car.
As Mac user *I* don't need a laptop without an optical drive, which is why didn't buy the Air.
Oh, and one more thing, I'm tired of the "one button" crap. It's just old. The fact that you neanderthals are still using crappy plastic buttons rather than gestures and other multitouch goodies isn't my fault. I use an external mouse when I have the room, but when using a touch pad, sorry, Apple is by far the nicest to work with, period.
The U.S. dollar sucks right now and europeans should be paying much more for U.S. products. I was in europe last summer and it cost me a tremendous amount of money, just because of the exchange rate.
Um, no, if the US dollar is down, then while you (as noted) should be spending a lot more in Europe, they in turn should see much LOWER prices (in their terms) for US products.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
At last! I don't suppose the mini is anything high-end, but the Intel GMA is pretty much WORTHLESS for gaming.
Circumcision is child abuse.
So you're getting twice as much graphics memory that is also faster graphics memory.
Well, due note that SHARED BY MAIN MEMORY bit. It's important. Essentially, you're not really getting ANY graphics memory. You're just getting slightly faster main system memory, and the graphics chip is now willing to carve out twice as much of that main memory for it's own use.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
With the MacBook Air $2499:
And complain that the MacBook Air is more expensive because it is designed for ultralightweight applications yet has a faster bus, more memory, better graphics, etc. Apples to oranges.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I've been an Apple fan since my Apple ][+ when I was 9 years old. Throw in a 512ke, SE, 6100, iMac Rev B, and my iMac G5; along with my Dad & family's numerous machines, and I love it all.
However, I probably won't be buying another Mac any time soon for a few reasons: /home/username. I just really want to backup my documents & mail & a few other things. So, either I back up the whole gargantuan mess, or just my documents. Rooting around for all the necessary prefs files is a PITB.
* 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.
* I bought my iMac G5 20" ALS, and it was a great machine for about 40 months. Then, it failed. Apple told me to go pound sand since I was out of my 36 month AppleCare (that I never used previously). That stings. Higher-quality hardware my ass. I recapped the PSU, and I recapped the logic board. There was something else wrong with this machine, so I finally sold it for parts on eBay. Bummer to have a perfectly good machine die on me and have no recourse other than my wallet.
* I was really getting into iMovie HD 6 (I think that's the version), then the iMovie programs got really dumb.
* I hate backing up
The big challenge for Apple, to me, is a few fold:
* 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.
* OSX isn't perfect. Neither is XP/Vista/Ubuntu.
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."
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've been doing that with my 24" white iMac for a couple years now. I have Windows running in Parallels full-screen on one monitor, and Mac OSX full-screen on the other. It's a great cross-platform development environment, as well as a home machine.
Macs handle multi-screen pretty cleanly - no mucking about needed. Trying to get it to work well on my Dell laptop is another matter... every time you undock it it gets farked up and you have to re-set all the settings.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
High end everything else and then crap for video card makes a nice workstation, but it's an insanely underpowered gaming rig.
Everyone knows that, despite Apple's best efforts, Macs are a year behind PCs when it comes to major games anyway. I doubt anybody who's shopping for a gaming rig even gives Apple a second thought.
A comparable PC laptop (like a Lenovo X200T) would be $800 to $1000 cheaper.
For a smaller screen, a lower video chip, more weight, and on sale, yes, it is $800 to $1000 cheaper. Base price it is only $100 or so cheaper.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's important because in both cases it's removing all that memory from your main memory.
In a system with dedicated graphics RAM, if it says 1GB RAM with 256MB of graphics memory, then my system ram is 1GB, and they're providing me with an extra 256MB of graphics RAM.
In a shared memory situation, if it's 1GB RAM with 64MB of "graphics memory", then my system ram isn't really 1GB anymore - it's 1GB - 64MB. If it's 1GB of RAM with 128MB of shared "graphics memory", then my system ram is now 1GB - 128MB. In both cases, I didn't "get more graphics memory" - they just changed a setting that allows the graphics card to steal away more memory from the main system. The net memory in the system is unchanged. So you didn't get anymore then you had before. Indeed the base model USED to come with 960MB of usable system RAM before, but now since the graphics card is taking twice at much it only has 896MB of usable RAM.
Put it this way - if you change your retirement plan to now take 6% of your total paycheck rather than 3%, do you go on bragging about "how much more money you're getting now". Of course not - that money was simply reallocated. The increase in one area was at the expense of another area and there was no net change in your income. On the other hand, if your employer instead matched your 3% without taking anything more from your normal salary, THEN you can get happy.
AND PS: Any shared graphics memory will be slower that comparable dedicated. Benchmarks aren't available because generally the same chips aren't available with both, but when a graphics card has it's own dedicated memory it can access it directly. When it's shared it has to communicate with that memory over the system bus. That's slower with far more layers to go through. It's no accident that all high end graphics cards have dedicated memory whilst the low end stuff leeches system ram.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
because it isn't even remotely easy for the average user. It isn't fun for those of us who don't mind ripping them apart.
The iMac is not meant to be open, now replacing a drive in a notebook isn't that hard because even Apple has a hard time dictating what notebook layouts are like
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The fact that you neanderthals are still using crappy plastic buttons rather than gestures and other multitouch goodies isn't my fault.
Couldn't agree more. Gestures are where it's at. For example, if I want to launch Safari, I simply gesture like I'm lovingly fingering another man's anus and up it pops. One hundred percent reliable. My Mac understands.
* 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.
Hahaha.
Okay. Okay.
Touché sir.
From apple website, you can buy the OS & all you listed for 219$. Build a PC without an OS, add that 219$ and see, you get a much lower price tag.
* 2.66 GHZ Nehalem 920, overclocked to well over 3.2GHZ.
* ASUS p6t6 mobo with LOTS of features like SAS ports, RAID 0/1/5/10, at least 3 PCI-X x16 slots, eSATA connectors, etc.
* ATI 4870 with 1GB DDR5 RAM
* 12 GB RAM capable of 1600 Mhz (rather than 1066 avail on the Mac)
* 750 Watt Corsair PSU with gobs of connecting cables
* not one but FOUR WD 640 GB drive configured as RAID 0/1/5/10
* LG Bluray burner
* Acer 23" monitor
* Windows vista 64
* mouse, keyboard
Anyone know when Nehalem Xeon chips might be available for the rest of us? Then we'll compare apples to apples. Damn Mac tax!
You can get a DELL Studio XPS 435 about $1000 less with x2 ram then the mac pro.
With the same cpu power.
750GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive vs 640GB
a 640gb is $50 less on the dell
Dell 24 inch S2409W Widescreen Flat Panel vs none
ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB vs # NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB
can add ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB for $100 or ATI Radeon HD 4870 GDDR5 1024MB for $200 vs ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB for $200 more
can also get a Studio XPS 435 with No Monitor for $1,299
with x2 the ram or - $150 for the same ram
ATI Radeon HD 3650 256MB
ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB [add $50]
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB [add $150]
ATI Radeon HD 4870 GDDR5 1024MB [add $250]
you can also find other dell core i7 deals as well.
That's funny because I had the exact opposite experience with a dell laptop and a macbook air. The Air wouldn't detect the majority of displays plugged into it so you have to force it to use multiple monitors
I've used laptops from Dell, IBM, and Apple and so far only the Apple one has smoothly worked for me. Generally I use the laptop when I'm out and about, plug into a monitor at the office and plug into a different monitor when working from home. With Mac laptops I can close the lid and take it to the coffee shop and open it and it works. I can close the lid unplug my work monitor, take it home and plug in my home monitor open the lid and it works. With all the others I had to unplug the monitor before suspending then un-suspend, then plug in a new monitor, and even then I often had to mess with the preferences.
It's one of the reasons I haven't bought a Lenovo laptop for a long time.
I'm pricing a Xeon Dell Precision workstation class machine on dell.ca, which is a better comparison to the Xeon based Workstation that is a Mac Pro, and I'm up to $2800 right now and guess what ? It has 2 GB DDR2 ECC ram vs the Mac's 3 GB DDR3 ECC (triple channel). It has an older, non-Nehalem Xeon processor, same ghz as the Mac but no 2 threads per core like the Mac. 1 SATA hard drive, 80 GB (WTF is this ?), same superdrive optical drive, etc...
I think Apple nailed their market just right. This isn't a cobbled together gaming PC, it's a Professional Workstation with a certain grade of hardware you're not getting in your cobbled together PC.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
The new Mini is expensive, and there's little justification for it at that spec level.
It's a pretty pricey little box but show me a cheaper PC in that SAME small form factor w/ the same Core 2 Duo CPU w/ 1066mhz FSB, DDR3 RAM, Firewire 400 and 800, gigabit ethernet, SPDIF Audio In AND Out (24-bit 96khz at that), displayport, an IR reciever for the remote, and a DVD burner.
Even if you found a mini-itx board with all of those goodies (you may but you most likely won't), by the time you got everything built, it would cost just as much if not more than the $600 mac mini. The new mini is not a wussified EEE desktop.
Now try to find an HP or Lenovo SFF desktop that has all of the same gear at a reasonable price.
BTW, it may be integrated video but the GF9400M is no slouch, I have no problem playing Call of Duty 4 @ 1280x800 on my low-end Macbook white.
Don't believe me? Prove me wrong.
I call. My new Macbook White 2009, $999
-2Ghz Core 2 Duo "Penryn"
-1066MHz front-side bus
-2GB DDR2 RAM
-120GB SATA HDD
-256MB (Shared) GeForce 9400M
-SPDIF Audio In/Out
-Firewire
-13.3" 1280x800 LCD
-802.11a/b/g/draft-n wireless, bluetooth 2.1
-8x DVD+-RW
-4.5hr battery
-5.0 lbs
A real computer geek also knows that USBserial adapters are dirt cheap and work with just about any remotely modern operating system including OSX and even support funky baud rates or port settings.
A PC-card slot would be nice but I can live without it. I wouldn't mind being able to put my old PCMCIA SCSI card to use and use CF->PCMCIA adapters instead of a USB card reader.
The shared-memory video isn't really an issue as the 9400M is actually quite capable and has 16 real stream processors. CoD4 runs well and Quake 4 runs REALLY well. It'll be supported by OpenCL in Snow Leopard as well.
....I think what people are really wanting this year is an Apple netbook. Come on Apple, take some risks, surprise us a little.
Nice! That's a good deal you got there.
USB/serial adapters have *terrible* reliability when it comes to the actual serial data implementation. There are myriad problems that can result when trying to talk to devices such as embedded computers, GPS units, or data acquisition systems. This is even true with the manufacturer's Windows drivers running on Windows. They don't always work how you might expect.
...for the front page Slashdot stories when Dell, Lenovo and Sony modestly update their current lineup of computers!
Oh wait...
Read Pynchon.
You forget in Europe we include the sales tax (VAT) in the headline price, in the states they don't do that. I think (but have no accurate figures so am probably wrong, but by less than 5% either way I'd venture) that sales taxes in the states are about 10%, so you are looking at 660 - 750, which is still more but then you expect that from apple, at lest we do in the uk...