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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.
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.
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.
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?
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
The iMac supports video spanning - you just need to get the right video-out adpater. The new ones even allow dual-link DVI.
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.
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.
No -- you are wrong. Lift your eyes up a bullet point, and you will see "Support for external display in extended desktop mode". In other words, the iMac supports spanning AND mirroring.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.