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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.
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.
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.
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.
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The remote isn't bundled; it's a $20 option. But if you already have a remote from another Mac in your house, it'll work just fine with the new Mini.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Heck, this could probably handle my Time Machine backups for the other macs in the house while serving 1080p.
I don't think you'd want to use a computer with only a 120 or 360 GB HD for serving video & Time Machine backups...
Someone should really create a port that would allow expansion via external storage devices. That would be the bee's knees.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
* 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!
It does have that port -- it's called FireWire. I have two drives strung off mine -- one 500 GB and one 1TB.
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
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...