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Apple Announces iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, OS X Yosemite and More
Many outlets are reporting on Apple's iPad event today. Highlights include:
- Apple pay will launch Monday.
- WatchKit -- a way for developers to make apps for the Apple Watch will launch next month.
- iOS 8.1
- Messages, iTunes, and iWork updated and many more new features in OS X Yosemite.
- You can send and receive calls on your Mac if you have an iPhone with iOS 8 that's signed into the same FaceTime account.
- iPad Air 2: New camera, 10 hour battery life, 12x faster than the original iPad.
- iPad mini 3.
- iMac with Retina display.
- And a Mac mini update: Faster processors, Intel Iris graphics, and two Thunderbolt 2 ports.
I've been thinking about giving the OSX another try... I've been messing around with it at work.
The mini wouldn't be a bad way to go... it's not that expensive and I can still use my 27" monitor.
The iMac Retina... no. Besides not wanting to spend that much now, I'd hold off on a first generation rig like that.
Just because you don't understand what it's good for, doesn't mean it is important to others.
Considering that my Black MacBook (2006) lasted eight years, it was a good investment.
For those of you who are a fan of customizing the colors of message bubbles in Messages.app and don't like that Apple removed this ability as part of the iOSification of Yosemite, there's an app for that: https://github.com/kethinov/Bu...
I made this during the developer previews because I don't like the default puke green for most of my IM conversations. Hope this helps some people. Source code also available.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
As great as these advances are, perhaps the biggest news is what wasn't announced. Tim has made lots of hints this year about products in the pipeline not hinted at in the rumour mills, then teased us again today about "tripling down" on secrecy. Making Stephen Colbert their chief of secrecy is a pretty strong hint it's TV-related.
A big bunch of nothing exciting.
Oooo... an ipad 12x faster than the "original ipad" ... gee... what kind of bullshit marketing is that? Maybe Intel should do that, the recent i7 4770K wasn't impressively faster than the 3770K... maybe they should have compared it to the original Pentium D or something.
Oooo... an imac with a retina display... only reason its even theoretically interesting is that thanks to there being no way to buy a half decent desktop mac without buying that ridiculous tube is to get stuck with their lousy all-in-one form factor.
I'm not especially anti-apple, but this isn't really news. Oh, look, Dell announced an new 13" XPS laptop, and $20 off on Inspirons under $500 ... we should put that on the front page too.
I'm genuinely interested in the details of how Apple Pay is better than Chip & Pin. I've read lots of articles full of marketing FUD but haven't seen a whole lot of the technical details which make me believe it's better in areas of security or convenience.
I see a lot of people say it's better because of NFC, or that it's faster to pay with your phone, but it's just as easy for me to pull out my credit card as it is to pull out my phone. Also, I don't have to recharge my credit card each night when I go to bed.
How is Apply Pay better, in both areas of security and convenience?
You can send and receive calls on your Mac if you have an iPhone with iOS 8 that's signed into the same FaceTime account.[emphasis added]
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Yosemite Sam was the hootinst, tootinist, shootinist bobtail wildcat in the west!
The iMac has come a long way from being a cute plastic toy. A 27" 5K display and quad-core i5 for $2500. That's pretty impressive.
I have a few questions before I start digging into my couch cushions, however:
1) What is the performance and refresh rate of the display?
2) Can it act as an external display for other computers, like some older versions of the iMac?
About time desktops caught up with better screen resolutions after the whole 1080p marketing hype ruined everything.
I just hope it doesn't have the stupid ghosting problem.
This has been my experience, too. They make good quality hardware, and you will save in the long run, even if they make an insane profit from you in the short term. I'm sure someone on here can point out similar quality PC hardware, but I find other manufacturers to be very uneven. For instance, I got my mother-in-law a high-end HP in 2004 and she is still using it. But some HP machines are absolute garbage.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Considering that my Black MacBook (2006) lasted eight years, it was a good investment.
My XPS from 2006 is still with me, but the equivalent Macbook would have been far more expensive. What is your point?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Thunderbolt is useful for a niche market. Just like firewire, it won't last long. Too expensive.
I can understand why some would like it but it could definitely be improved upon.
Hey Thunderbolt, the 80's called, they want their daisy-chain back.
Says so in the name: It becomes air.
What is an XPS?
What is yoir point?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Apple is keeping its number of products (devices/models) to a minimum.
If I invest in Apple products now, I'm sure that in the future -when I am locked in, or when Apple has destroyed the competition- I have only less to choose from.
Can somebody please explain why it would be smart to buy some of these devices?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Apple proudly announced that their Excel competitor now supports table transposing.
What do you mean Excel has been doing this for over a decade and a half, at least?
I spent $1,200 on my Black MacBook and got eight years of use ($150 per year). Prior to that, I spent $1,200 on a Dell laptop that gave me three years of use ($400 per year). Do the math.
and my XPS fell apart (hinges failed and the body start cracking) while I'm still running my 2008 MacBook.
Who cares?
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Wow, so it wasn't much more than a month ago they rolled out iOS 8, and then bug fixes for it, and now iOS 8.1.
That kind of thing doesn't instill a lot of confidence.
I'm curious to know how many people have been holding off on upgrading to iOS 8 to begin with. I know I looked at it for my ipod touch and sorta decided to wait a little while and let it sort itself out. I think I'm glad I did.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Just because you don't understand what it's good for, doesn't mean it is important to others.
It's a bigger flop than firewire, which had a few niche uses.
Thunderbolt is nothing more than external PCIe with a yet another "one protocol to rule them all" wrapper.
We've had eternal PCIe for over a decade. We don't use it outside of pro workstations with external FirePro / Quadro shit.
They key selling point of Thunderbolt is "OMG it's so fast!". Yet the only practical uses for that speed for 99.99% of people are already served by other shit (DisplayPort, Ethernet, etc.). For regular use, USB 3.x will dominate the market, even if they're being completed retarded and still changing the connectors. For uses where you really do need speed, you connect to PCIe directly anyway.
As bad as USB 1-2 / 3 / 3.1 / otg / mini / micro / a / b / c is, Thunderbolt is worse because of the cost of the cables and controllers compounds with the fact that any port can be a thunderbolt port, so you'll need an adapter to go from that USB port that's actually a thunderbolt port on your Sony laptop to your thunderbolt cable to your thunderbolt device.
Passing ethernet, video and USB over a single cable may look nice, but it's not worth the cost and it serves very little purpose. Daisy chaining can be done via DisplayPort, if you really want. HDMI can carry Ethernet for some reason, and DisplayPort can carry USB (data and the higher-power charging shit).
Nothing about Thunderbolt is novel or particularly useful. Being connected straight to PCIe the way Thunderbolt is is wildly insecure, to boot.
I don't know if I'm the only one and to be honest the way I use OS X doesn't make this such a big deal, but at 5K unless they do automatic font scaling. I'm going to need to be able to divide my monitor up in to virtual monitors. That way I can resize zones where if I click the magnify/maximize button it doesn't waste the entire real estate of my monitor. I really enjoy the snap feature in windows 7 enough I use a program called sizeup on OSX to emulate it, but once I start buying 27 and 30" monitors I really would like my desktop tp let me arbitrary subdivide it in to multiple monitors for behavioral reasons.
Anyone have an app for that?
Momento Mori
Really? You don't have any clue to what an XPS is? Not even using context?
Well, I can only hope you give your children up for adoption so at least the NURTURE side gives a fighting chance. >_>
"iMac with Retina display"
What does this mean? Is Retina is a technical term that should convey some specific meaning now?
-Lod
The way I understand it is that this isn't "really" a x.1 version, it's "8.1" because it's the version that adds Apple Pay and support for the new iPads.
Basically iOS 8.0 was released missing features that the couldn't finish in time for launch, and 8.1 will be the originally intended 8.0 with all the features iOS 8 was supposed to have from the get-go.
Which, uh, really doesn't instill much confidence either, now that I think about it.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Yeah, like firewire isn't used in most video cameras still.
Thunderbolt is just 25x faster.
Your two data points have me convinced.
niche uses like most all video cameras.
Just because you don't understand the actual use, doesn't mean it's not useful to transfer data at 20Gbps.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
That kind of thing doesn't instill a lot of confidence.
Never mind that iOS 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 were in testing after iOS 8 got released. So many new products, so many updates.
XPS is/was a high end Dell laptop specification and branding touted as being the ultimate in desktop replacements (also marketed with the Alienware badge). The series started in the Dimension line of desktop machines when the Pentium first hit the market (source: have owned a Dimension XPS P60 desktop (since scrapped) and an Inspiron XPS 8200 laptop (which I still use because it's got 2GB RAM and a 1600x1200 screen)). The trademark for the laptop line is a lit "XPS" logo running down the left and right sides of the lid in red or blue, on rare occasions in green (mine has the standard lid because I managed to break the XPS badge). On the show Stargate Atlantis, XPS laptops were rebadged with the fictional logo depicting them as "SGI" laptops (SGI have NEVER made a laptop) but for anyone who's ever owned an XPS, Inspiron or Latitude the chassis were pretty recognisable. The biggest selling point for me with the Latitude/Inspiron PPx chassis wasn't the XPS badge on the high end machines but the fact that they're pretty much completely modular. You can switch batteries, optical drives, hard drive caddies, internal cards, graphics processors etc, among almost the entire line from the lowliest PII/233 up to the P4/2.0 - knowing this because I've been doing it since 2002.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Considering that my Black MacBook (2006) lasted eight years, it was a good investment.
Why? What's it worth now?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'm glad it worked for you. But depending on where you're going with that statement, you might be committing the Texas sharpshooter's fallacy.
Still no new macbook pro...
Thats it, I'm out. I'll just get a Nexus 9 and a keyboard and move to the cloud.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Thunderbolt networking requires a $30 cable to achieve 10Gb ethernet connectivity without spending several hundred/thousand dollars on switches, HBAs and cabling.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. If you're releasing a major version a month or so before you launch new products, you'd hope you have the OS for those products squared away.
This sounds like they pushed out iOS 8, ran into problems and released iOS 8.0.1, and apparently 8.0.2, and then 8.0.3.
And now they're rolling out 8.1.
That is a lot of churn in a relatively short period of time. Which tells me I'm still going to wait a while, because I expect 8.1.1 or 8.2 to appear within a month or so.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Maybe they are thinking X-ray photoelectron spectroscope?
There are only a few choices, and one seems more obvious than the others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X...
Someday a Slashdot ID of 177180 will mean something.
Kinda like MickeySoft with Win8 + Win8.1?
well the release of ios 8.0.1 was a joke with the bugs, but 8.1 makes sense since the main reason for the release is to include apple pay (if it was just bug fixes would be 8.0.3)
The Texa WTF Fallacy?! Never heard of it. ;)
In Yosemite many things gets reported to mother-ship, try this open: "About this Mac" yep, network packet send to the boss...and many more...
On two different occasions I sold 5 year old MacBook on Craigslist for $500. I don't know what the expectation would be for an hp or whatever, but I was satisfied with this.
I spent $1,200 on my Black MacBook and got eight years of use ($150 per year). Prior to that, I spent $1,200 on a Dell laptop that gave me three years of use ($400 per year). Do the math. This is known as a Return of Investment (ROI).
The current value of my Black MacBook with a busted CPU fan, a 32-bit CPU and unable to run current software is a paperweight in my dead tree inbox.
Not when Apple has been at the top of hardware reliability surveys for years.
Yosemite Sam was an angry Hessian.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=xps+compu...
My XPS had the keys on the keyboard fall off, suspiciously close to the time the warranty ran out.
As always, YMMV.
When the netbook craze began (2008), I bought a 9" Acer Aspire One, for roughly US$400. That was my main laptop (and, during vacations, my main computer. Yes, I work at a university, so six weeks of vacations every year).
One year ago, I decided it was time to renew. I bought its sucessor, the 10" Acer Aspire One. For US$350. And it's my main computer outside of my office. I am really happy with it.
I have just bumped up its memory (2GB6GB). Besides that, I'm more than satisfied with what I got. I have recommended it to my family — Nowadays, my wife has one, and I have taken three more to her family (mother and two brothers). We are all quite happy with them (except for the sister that insisted on keeping Windows 8).
So, yes, US$400 for a good five year use... Is about US$80 per year. Quite acceptable!
i have one too and it still kind of works. not any useful but works
to bad today's mac's are cheaper than comparable windows laptops
The new low-end model of Mac mini has a dual-core 1.4GHz i5 CPU. How would that compare to a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo?
I'm not entirely convinced that Touch ID is worth the extra $100. Hopefully the IHS teardown will indicate if there is anything else of value between the two.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Great, my old DOS(Box) games will now be the size of an icon. :D
The previous generation had the option of a 2.6 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-3720QM.
Is their new 3.0GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 really faster?
I can understand why some would like it but it could definitely be improved upon.
Hey Thunderbolt, the 80's called, they want their daisy-chain back.
Hey PC user, the 90's called, they want their boring large beige boxes back.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Is Apple so embarrassed by their lack of meaningful CPU performance improvements that they feel the need to compare the latest iPad to a 5 year old obsolete brick to impress me? I think that they think I'm stupid.
You'll be waiting for a long time...
No, no, NO! Confucius say "learn to masturbate; come in handy".
They've been selling Retina displays for a couple years, slapping it on the iMac isn't rocket science. I do think it's an unnecessary feature that will jack the price, but the iMac went from being the cheap mac to the not insanely expensive Mac some time ago, so meh.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
A $30 cable, expensive Thunderbolt chipset, expensive peripherals, and you won't be getting actual 10 Gbps full duplex Ethernet through Thunderbolt, nor will it work a damn without an actual 10 Gbps Ethernet controller somewhere in the system.
Keep on keepin' on, though.
I spent $1,200 on my Black MacBook and got eight years of use ($150 per year). Prior to that, I spent $1,200 on a Dell laptop that gave me three years of use ($400 per year). Do the math.
Yeah and I have had a Toshiba laptop last 5 years at 400. Thats 80 bucks a year. Both of our accounts a merely anecdotal though.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
My Black MacBook is still working and I still use it.
(Ditto for my ancient Travelmate)
They weigh a ton though....
Bit envious of son's new MacBook :-(
The Cutter
niche uses like most all video cameras.
Just because you don't understand the actual use, doesn't mean it's not useful to transfer data at 20Gbps.
I understand the use. "Most all video cameras" don't fucking have Thunderbolt. "Most all video cameras" can't fucking sustain that bandwidth out.
For any professional gear, DisplayPort 1.2/1.2a/1.3 is the better choice. 17.28 Gbps of bandwidth as of the end of 2009, 25.92 Gbps as of now. Yes, it supports daisy chaining.
So fuck right on off with telling me what I don't fucking understand.
Spending lots of money on PC hardware is pretty silly, as far as I'm concerned. There's more refurbished/used hardware that one could shake a stick at and it's absurdly cheap. Buying expensive PC hardware is like buying really expensive disposable pens: It's a waste of money, usually.
I don't respond to AC's.
You bought a Dell laptop. Might as well have just taken that money out in ones and lit them on fire in your back yard. Would have been entertaining in a horrific way and at least you wouldn't have had any expectations crushed afterward. Dell makes OK servers and workstations, but their laptops are hit or miss to the point that we haven't bought them in years.
Buy a decent Lenovo or Asus laptop and you'll be far more satisfied.
Do the math.
But you already did it!
Anyways, Apple products can be pricey, but if you want excellent quality and usability, nothing on the market offers the same value.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Exactly. A $400 dell is OK for a year, then slow after that.
Spend $1000 for a business class machine, it's good 3-5 years minimum.
Every time I think "Fuck this, I'm dropping Apple for Linux", I start pricing up a box the way I want it with a huge bus, good motherboard, high-end processor, and all the goodies, I'm at $1600+
Hardware matters the most. Cheap hardware is cheap.
If you can't afford brand new Apple prices, check out the used Apple products at OWC.
One, the phrase is "return ON investment".
Two, the calculation normally involves some element of revenue.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Moreso, the frequent and free OS upgrades that keep it modern and well integrated with other devices add considerable value. As does the fact that you don't need to buy virus protection, or to have said protection drain your system resources, particularly important as the system ages. And when you finally sell it, you get some real money. Macs in their base configs are good value. Although memory and storage upgrades are not.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
The summary is a list of bullet points?
Awesome.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm surprised they're calling it "Apple Pay". I thought it would be "iPay".
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Why does article have an opinion tag?
I read the entire summary, and all it did was list facts. Not a single word of opinion is in there.
Now I can fully understand the reason for the iGarbage tag, as this is Slashdot, and no love of Apple products is permitted in any way, shape or form.
But opinion? huh?
If the MTBA on a high-end PC is six years (though you can pick any number), and I buy a 3-year-old machine (again, pick any number), I've just doubled the time that I spend setting up a new machine. Honestly, I just don't enjoy that process anymore.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Try running the latest Lightroom, Photoshop CC, and After Effect CC on that machine, editing raw DLSR files and 1080p video, and you will suffer. Most of my hardware update is at foremost due to more demanding software, rather than hardware failure per-se.
Exactly. A $400 dell is OK for a year, then slow after that.
My father used to get a new $400 Dell box every other year because the old Dell box would slow down from all the naughty bits he downloaded off the Internet. He refused to properly maintain his PC by defragging the hard drive and updating the AV scanner. Meanwhile, his old Dell box became my newest FreeNAS file server.
So is mine, except now with 4 times the RAM, a brand new battery, and a brand new SSD, all bought within the last 4 months.
How easy is it to replace a Mac battery 8 years on? Actually how easy is it to replace it 8 months on?
Did the math, my Dell laptop has outlived any Apple device I own. Plus I can still get replacement batteries and upgrade it with RAM and SSD at will without paying extortionate prices for the privilege of doing so.
Laptops, like most other hardware has it's quality rise and fall. One year Dell is good, the next year it's Asus, and so on and so on. I used to be a big fan of the Dell Latitude D630C laptop with a business class extended warranty, oops it fell out of the back of the truck and put a big crack in the LCD while i was unloading luggage at the airport, no problem sir, we'll get that fixed right away are there any other items on the laptop that are cracked / broken / missing screws, etc. Things change over time, a company that gives great support today, might be absolute shit in a years time due to budget cuts, etc.
Defragging the hard drive and updating the AV scanner? I thought that wasn't even necessary on Windows anymore.
Considering that my Black MacBook (2006) lasted eight years, it was a good investment.
My XPS from 2006 is still with me, but the equivalent Macbook would have been far more expensive. What is your point?
Today that price difference is not nearly as much. Looking at (as best I could find, not exactly) comparable systems, a Dell 15" XPS laptop is $0.99 MORE than a MacBook Pro 15". The Dell has a touch-screen but the MacBook Pro has an SSD and other differences. Perhaps if you took more time than I just did to build as close a system as possible the Dell would be cheaper, but I didn't find that.
The MacBook is still useful
Plus I can still get replacement batteries and upgrade it with RAM and SSD at will without paying extortionate prices for the privilege of doing so.
For my 2006 Black MacBook, I maxed out the RAM to 2GB by using cheaper memory modules from Other World Computing (OWC). I popped in a OWC 120GB SSD for less than a $100 last year. Although Apple still charges $129 for replacement batteries, I can get them for $75 through OWC or $35 on eBay from China.
When will the goyim have their own OS X?
On two different occasions I sold 5 year old MacBook on Craigslist for $500. I don't know what the expectation would be for an hp or whatever, but I was satisfied with this.
While I congratulate you on that sale, I really don't get it. You can get a refurbished MacBook Air, 13", latest model, better in any way imaginable and as new, with a year warranty, for $849. Why does anyone pay $500 for a five year old Mac?
Dell's equipment service life is 3 years. The difference between your XPS is the Black Macbook is that the guy was still using the macbook for daily tasks. Your XPS is probably on a shelf somewhere.
My late 2009 i7 iMac is unfortunately still going strong, with 16gb of ram and a 4TB fusion drive. It'll last for another few years. I have a mac mini 2009 that's been cranking away in a colo 24x7 for the last 4-5 years with no issues.
You can see the difference between Apple products on eBay every day. I've been trying to pick up a old Mac Pro, and Mac Pros from 2009 are going for $1k+. It's unreal and sort of ridiculous.
Even the prices for iDevices are crazy. Look on glyde.com: the 3GS is still $48, $100+ for a 4s. These phones are ancient. You can't give old cellphones away that aren't iPhones.
How easy is it to replace a Mac battery 8 years on? Actually how easy is it to replace it 8 months on?
Eight years on: You buy a battery, either from Apple or on eBay. You need a coin to unlock the battery and swap it out.
Eight months on: Doesn't matter how hard, because it will be under warranty.
A bit older: Very easy. You take your MacBook to the Apple Store, hand over your cash, and they put in a new battery.
For my 2006 Black MacBook, I maxed out the RAM to 2GB by using cheaper memory modules from Other World Computing (OWC). I popped in a OWC 120GB SSD for less than a $100 last year. Although Apple still charges $129 for replacement batteries, I can get them for $75 through OWC or $35 on eBay from China.
Yeah that was back then, you can't do that anymore. The MacBook was replaced by the MacBook Air in which the battery and RAM are soldered-in components. Not sure if these new just-announced models have the SSD soldered in now.
I'm still scratching my head over the so-called "update" that is the iPad Mini 3. The 32 GB wi-fi Mini 3 is $150 more than the still-available wi-fi Mini 2 and the only difference is the addition of a fingerprint sensor on the Mini 3. Otherwise, they are identical. Same CPU, same GPU, same retina display, same size, thickness and weight. It's the lamest update of a product in Apple's history.
the low price trend started only recently. My 2009 15" MBP cost $1700 new.
Whoosh...
What is an XPS?
and what is a MacBook?
Also in one case the guy really needed a 32 bit computer so he could run whatever critical PPC programs.
> For my 2006 Black MacBook, I maxed out...
The newest Mac OS X 2006 MacBook can run now is Lion (to be honest - you CAN run Mountain Lion but it involves hacking the install media, some voodoo with kexts etc. - I would not be sure about stability of such system). Which is now 3 releases old. Not a big deal if you really want to run it (simply put - you have no money for newer hardware) but it will certainly give you compability issues like recent versions of software not working at all. With PC laptops usually you can pop in recent-decent version of Windows even on much older hardware. It will run slowly (such as Lion on 2006 MacBook with 2Gs RAM) but it will run your software. With Mac you can't do that.
That is similar to what is going on with PC laptops. Basically MacBook Air is an ultrabook in PC nomenclature. PC ultrabooks also tend to be less upgradeable and serviceable than bigger laptops. For example compare Lenovo ThinkPad 430 and 430u (u - as in ultrabook). The slim design just forces use of smalled perhaps nonremovable parts. IMO all PC laptops that match MacBook Air size are also as unupgradeble and unserviceable as MacBook Air - it is not a marketing choice by Apple but the size imples it. Also what is new that you can't upgrade or service your phone or tablet - any brand. Get over it.
"Doubled" doesn't mean much, when it's one afternoon every three years.
That is similar to what is going on with PC laptops.
So? We're talking about MacBooks, it was great that you could do it back then but now that those MacBooks have been replaced by the MacBook Air you can't do those things anymore which is a shame because it was so useful and you could keep an older system going for much longer before needing to upgrade.
I have a very nice Mac Mini latest 2012 with a 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 Quad-Core processor with Eight logical threads. It has a 1TB disk and I put 16 GB memory to this machine, costing me around $900.
... No i7 quad, only dual core, and many i5. No more than 16GB two years later. The disk options are neither better. What they did was to add a less than 2 GHz CPU for the $499 version (yes, the i5 and i7 have more MHz in the "options" but applications are becoming more parallel, so the extra cores are important).
... etc.
Now I see the options
From my perspective as a developer, these machines are not state of the art. They are really becoming "mini" in the current menu of computing options, so what I think is that Apple is reserving "something else", maybe a Server or something that it is not yet published.
And I made a little exploration in Amazon, just for comparison:
Lite-On 24X SATA Internal DVD+/-RW Drive Optical Drive IHAS124-14 $20.16
Intel Core i7-3770 Quad-Core Processor 3.4 GHz 4 Core LGA 1155 - BX80637I73770 $299.99
2 WD Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD20EZRX $82.99
Corsair CX Series 430 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 PLUS Bronze ATX12V/EPS12V 384 Power Supply CX430M $49.99
Gigabyte LGA 1150 Intel H87 Dual LAN DVI HDMI UEFI DualBIOS Mini ITX DDR3 1600 Motherboard (GA-H87N) $111.22
Cooler Master Elite 130 No Power Supply Mini-ITX Tower Case- Midnight Black (RC-130-KKN1) $39.99
Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3L 1600MT/s (PC3-12800) DR x8 ECC UDIMM 240-Pin Server Memory CT2KIT102472BD160B $178.97
TOTAL $866.30
This is comparable by price, but as a machine this is two times the capacity of the mini. A real i7 Quad, 2 2TB disks and a much better, although not so beautiful box. And the motherboard has 10 USB ports, 2 Net
Mac users BUY more software... So developers make done money. That's why we have a Mac App Store and Windows don't.
I spent $1,200 on my Black MacBook and got eight years of use ($150 per year). Prior to that, I spent $1,200 on a Dell laptop that gave me three years of use ($400 per year). Do the math.
If you dont need a computer, a Dell lasts as long as any Mac.
However if you've got real requirements for a computer (I.E. work or gaming) then a Macbook goes out of date faster than a Dell because the dell is both higher speced and upgradeable.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
My '92 Sun IPX is still running. And I think I paid about $20 for it.
What does that even mean?
Between going to hourly contracting and having kids, I value my time more than ever. That afternoon is worth several hundred dollars IMHO. I was very different as a young man.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
*Snore snore*
2004 toshiba is in great shape. All plastic.
Lightroom 1.0 and Photoshop CS3 run great on my 2006 Black MacBook, which was current hardware when those software packages came out. If I run anything demanding, I set up a script and let it run overnight.
You seem to miss the point. I want the latest software to speed up sorting/filtering/tagging/editing of a 250-to-multi-1000 shoot. And yes, I'm not a casual photographer.
An expensive paperweight, prone to GPU failure.
This tablet is still 4:3 aspect ratio, like your parents TV.
If you intend on watching videos, perhaps you should get one of the following:
iphone 6+ tablet/phone
Nexus 6 tablet/phone
Nexus 7 tablet
Nesus 9
buy Asus/Acer or even HP for Pete's sake. But Dell has been selling $1200 laptops with laughable specs for 10+ years now.
With a Mac you pay through the nose, but you always get the same thing. With a PC there's so many choices it's easy to drop that kinda money and walk away with something that on paper should rock and in practice it blows. I've got an i7 laptop for work that's like that, and it's the bane of my existence.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Maybe those version numbers actually mean something other than your simplistic assumption.
A $30 cable, expensive Thunderbolt chipset, expensive peripherals, and you won't be getting actual 10 Gbps full duplex Ethernet through Thunderbolt, nor will it work a damn without an actual 10 Gbps Ethernet controller somewhere in the system. Keep on keepin' on, though.
Does being stupid come with being an Apple-Hater, or did you pay extra? http://www.macworld.com/articl...
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Thank you for that explanation, which got me thinking: Apple Pay could remake the web, in some very good ways. Just expand Apple Pay into the micropayment system I've wanted for over 15 years.
If Apple can "scale this down" (even by losing some money on overhead and transaction costs) and make it painless and worthwhile for a website to charge as little as one cent for something, then many good things happen. I think a vast number of web users would happily click a "1 Cent Apple Pay" button to read the second half of an article or column, or hear a song or a podcast, or watch a funny cat video. If it's good, it's worth one cent. If it wasn't, it was only a penny.
Or think of it as $10 for every 1000 articles read/artworks viewed/songs heard: a trivial expense for weeks or months of web usage for most people, in exchange for the content without registrations, or subscriptions, or pay walls, and without advertising. You know, that annoying stuff you try to block. That stuff that Google sells. (Oh-oh...!)
But this would be much more than a way to drop a pipeline into Google's core revenue source. Creatives and publishers and entrepreneurs of all sorts could just add Apple Pay to a page like a social media button, and then sell or rent their work directly and affordably. One cent transactions may only add up to just a few dollars for some, but what are they making now? Web ads bring them little. Maybe they're happy selling songs for $1, but they might be thrilled by the number of people willing to pay one cent to listen to one song, once.
And it could scale up really well. Charities and activists could raise real money in tiny, painless increments. Even one cent per page view adds up to a big chunk of change for newspapers and magazines that now struggle to survive on advertising and/or subscriptions. I think the New York Times website would be thrilled if their 17 million page views a day made them one cent each: that's over $62 million a year. Or maybe some big players get "greedy," and decide to charge a whole five cents for that big story, or virtual art show, or for your first listen to that new song from your favorite band: a million nickels is $50,000.
Now think of ebook sellers who don't need Amazon any more. Think about PayPal, and streaming music services. And why not Bitcoin via Apple Pay....
I'm sure some of you will see this as a dystopian vision, but I think Apple could do a lot of good and (eventually) make a lot of money with my distributed digital free market daydream.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I was just supposed to upgrade some older macs to mavericks and thanks to some application incompatibilities yosemite is as no go for now. Am i totally out of options as I can't find mavericks on app store and it seems to have vanished from the download sections?!
serious question.
So does his Dad.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Considering that my Black MacBook (2006) lasted eight years, it was a good investment.
You say that as if a regular laptop cant last that long. And I bet you paid more for that than you would of an equivalent specs windows based machine.
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What stopped you from using your Dell after 3 years? Did it break? Did Dell refuse to fix it?
I bought my white Macbook in 2007, paid $1200. One of my family members made the remark that they only ever buy the Walmart special, (whatever is on sale for around $300) and told me that $1200 for a computer was a crime and I was stupid to ever pay that much. In that time, the longest they have ever had a computer was 2 years meanwhile my Macbook is not only still kicking, it still works pretty damn well, though I did max out the RAM a few years ago, install Lion, and am on my third battery.
After all these years, it still works great as my portable computer, Software Radio terminal, and music server though my desktop PC is my primary computer.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Do the math.
But you already did it!
Anyways, Apple products can be pricey, but if you want excellent quality and usability, nothing on the market offers the same value.
Quality, fair enough. Usability is entirely subjective. For me using the mac at work is an exercise in frustration. Does look nice though.
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Considering that my Black MacBook (2006) lasted eight years, it was a good investment.
My XPS from 2006 is still with me, but the equivalent Macbook would have been far more expensive. What is your point?
Today that price difference is not nearly as much. Looking at (as best I could find, not exactly) comparable systems, a Dell 15" XPS laptop is $0.99 MORE than a MacBook Pro 15". The Dell has a touch-screen but the MacBook Pro has an SSD and other differences. Perhaps if you took more time than I just did to build as close a system as possible the Dell would be cheaper, but I didn't find that.
You can bet dell but an extra chunk of cost on just because apple showed them people will pay that much and apple overcharge because they know most people who buy one want the badge more than any actual feature of the machine.
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Yeah, like firewire isn't used in most video cameras still.
Thunderbolt is just 25x faster.
What else is it used in? Exactly, niche.
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What does that even mean?
That to mac users form>function.
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niche uses like most all video cameras.
Just because you don't understand the actual use, doesn't mean it's not useful to transfer data at 20Gbps.
Niche uses like 1 product type. I say that's pretty niche. Practically every keyboard (musical) has a MIDI port, but I doubt you'd argue that's not niche.
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I have a customer with a MacPro (PowerPC). He can't upgrade the OS anymore since the Intel switch but its working still and is as fast as ever. The machine is 12 years old and still humming along. Sure he spent a lot of money on it but he's gotten his money's worth! In the past he would buy cheapo systems such as those retail discount PC's that are practically obsolete and cut a lot of corners to keep the price down. They would slow down to a crawl in a year, get infected with gobs of malware and then the hardware would fail and he'd buy a new one. The money he spent on all his previous computers exceeds what he spent on one Mac Pro and the life of the Mac Pro exceeded all the old systems. So in the long run he's saved a lot of money. This guy is very cheap, he's complaining about having to upgrade even after 12 years. I tried to explain that the system is way too old and its time to consider an upgrade. But he'll run this thing till it goes snap crackle pop and the magic blue smoke pours out. He's also had two hard disk failures but Time Machine saved his bacon. Within 2-3 hours he was up and running like nothing happened each time. That includes the drive time to Best Buy to pickup a new hard disk! When the MacPro finally bites the dust, he'll likely get an iMac as they have come a long long way from what they were 12 years ago. Also he saved countless hours of tech support and many dollars on AV upgrades and subscriptions. Sure he's got a few questions now and then but it's not really a problem. I just spoke with him last night and his problem was that Comcast was bouncing up and down including his TV service. No problems with the Mac.
Yosemite breaks a lot of apps. I had to jump through some hoops to get Mavericks to run on my Macpro 2,1 8 core with 32gb of ram.
I had to rewrite boot.efi. My bootloader does not care what model of mac you have, as long as it's 64bit capable.
I took it a step further too. I have an old EFI32 GT120 graphics card just in case I run into an issue... this card is my secondary. My primary is a Nvidia GTX 560. The card works fine. The only issue I had was with vmware fusion. vmware fusion sometime on occasion locks up the ui. it's a bug because I can get out of it with ctl-option-f.
I created a usb install image for efi32 macs. just opy your favorite distro to the usb and name it boot.iso.
I installed Mint 17 and successfully installed on my macpro internal hard drive. I am in the process of creating a mac boot installer tool.
this weekend i will be testing my disaster recovery tools for it. basically I created another usb key that boots the latest clonezilla. I am basically doing the same as carbon copy cloner... disk to disk. After I install my ESATA connector on my old mac pro I should be good to go.
I'm not running the generic kernel.. I optimized the kernel, removed what I didn't need. all memory is detected. My test system has 20gb.
I'm moving on. my 2 mac pros have a lot of life left in them. Hopefully this weekend I will test the video editing capabilities.
i don't know if I am going to release my own optimized distribution for old x86 macs, or just release the efi32 booter/installer.
I do know there are a lot of old mac pros out there that are perfectly fine. And the linux community can pick purchase them pretty cheap.
Thunderbolt lets you do things that were never possible with firewire, even if we ignore the speed disparity. You can, for example, attach a card cage with PCIe (and PCI) slots for whatever specialized hardware you need. Then you hook this up to your laptop. Before thunderbolt, you had to have a laptop with expressCard slots, and use expensive (think $1k for one card bay for good brand name products), bulky, finicky and rather short range PCIe extender solutions. This wasn't possible at all with FireWire.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
First of all, Firewire was never able to transfer arbitrary PCI traffic, thus you couldn't use it to attach external PCI/PCIe devices to your portable device. When PCIe "extender" solutions became available, they were expensive and bulky. The connectors were huge, and the cable thick, and sometimes it would just refuse to work in a particular setup. Thunderbolt provides this kind of functionality on a manageable, off-the-shelf interconnect that you can buy in nearby Walmart. A brand name thunderbolt single x16 PCIe card cage runs about $500, and you can buy off-brand ones for half that. This lets you pull off stunts like adding two graphics cards to your laptop. I'd say calling it a "bigger flop than firewire" is borderline trolling.
Connecting "directly" to PCIe for expansion/extension purposes is setting the clock 10 years back - if you have any PCIe to attach to begin with. Fewer and fewer laptops have expressCard slots, and some high end laptops rightfully (IMHO) got rid of them. I don't really miss expressCard on MacBooks. Thunderbolt is much easier to deal with.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
A buddy of mine is evaluating a design of a small 32 node HPC cluster with nothing but thunderbolt as point-to-point interconnect. So far the results are very positive, and it's a huge bang for the buck. I don't think you quite know what you're talking about, because the presence of an ethernet controller "somewhere in the system" would be immaterial.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Why would I care? :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Apple hardware is uneven too. The first generation products are kind of notorious, but even more mature ones regularly have issues. Overheating CPUs, ghosting on LCDs, failing logic boards, failing charger boards, failing optical drives, failing nVidia chipsets, failing batteries etc. Not that Apple is particularly bad or anything, other high end manufacturers have the same issues.
I'd say proper Thinkpads (not the Lenovo consumer stuff) and Panasonic Let's Note (Toughbook in some markets) are just as reliable, and definitely more repairable. I have found NEC business laptops to be extremely robust too.
HP are awful, not least because they were one of nVidia's biggest customers so were hit the hardest by chipset failures that happened around the 18 month mark. Fortunately in the EU that's still in warranty.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Uh, you just did the math - why should I duplicate your effort?
Except that in practice nobody does that, and if someone does, it will never get mainstream. It could be useful to attach a high end graphic card to a laptop, but: 1. such a case would be very expensive and bulky (power supply) 2. bandwidth is still too slow for high end graphic cards There was nothing wrong with express card. You could get a cellular modem, wifi, ethernet, usb2, sound card, eSATA card in that format. It was cheap and covered pretty much every use case except, again, graphic cards, for the same bandwidth reason. What killed it is that laptops had pretty much all these functions built-in so there was no need for external cards. Plus laptops keep getting smaller so that slot unused by 99% of us had to go. In practice the main selling advantage of Thunderbolt is that you save one cable (against using DVI/HDMI/DP + USB3) to connect a monitor.
I actually agree on the "old style" Thinkpads, but recent models look more and more like Lenovo's other stuff so I don't know how confidant I am. We all have Thinkpads at work and even the last generation was uneven, with the cheaper models acting... well, cheap. The old-school stuff was very high-quality.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Why would I run Lion when Snow Leopard was the most rock stable version of OS X ever released?
Cracked screen. Out of warranty. I didn't know much about laptops as I do now. Getting a replacement screen on eBay may have been a possibility.
I spent $1,200 on my Black MacBook and got eight years of use ($150 per year). Prior to that, I spent $1,200 on a Dell laptop that gave me three years of use ($400 per year). Do the math.
What is this, an Atari commercial?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
A $30 cable, expensive Thunderbolt chipset, expensive peripherals, and you won't be getting actual 10 Gbps full duplex Ethernet through Thunderbolt, nor will it work a damn without an actual 10 Gbps Ethernet controller somewhere in the system.
Keep on keepin' on, though.
Does being stupid come with being an Apple-Hater, or did you pay extra? http://www.macworld.com/articl...
Having a fucking brain necessitates being a Mac hater. If you think you're getting anything near the capabilities for full duplex 10 Gbps Ethernet over Thunderbolt without a true 10 Gbps Ethernet controller in the system, you're a damned fool. If you do have a 10 Gbps Ethernet controller in the system, just use it directly.
First of all, Firewire was never able to transfer arbitrary PCI traffic, thus you couldn't use it to attach external PCI/PCIe devices to your portable device. When PCIe "extender" solutions became available, they were expensive and bulky. The connectors were huge, and the cable thick, and sometimes it would just refuse to work in a particular setup. Thunderbolt provides this kind of functionality on a manageable, off-the-shelf interconnect that you can buy in nearby Walmart. A brand name thunderbolt single x16 PCIe card cage runs about $500, and you can buy off-brand ones for half that. This lets you pull off stunts like adding two graphics cards to your laptop. I'd say calling it a "bigger flop than firewire" is borderline trolling.
Connecting "directly" to PCIe for expansion/extension purposes is setting the clock 10 years back - if you have any PCIe to attach to begin with. Fewer and fewer laptops have expressCard slots, and some high end laptops rightfully (IMHO) got rid of them. I don't really miss expressCard on MacBooks. Thunderbolt is much easier to deal with.
Compare the adoption rate of firewire vs the adoption rate of Thunderbolt across peripherals.
Firewire was much more successful, and had an actual use at the time - it was much faster than USB when USB was a bottleneck for common uses.
Thunderbolt is faster than USB, but USB 3 and USB 3.1 are not bottlenecks for common uses. For high-demand uses, you should be using something like DisplayPort or PCIe, both of which are faster and cheaper (from controller to cable to licensing) than Thunderbolt.
I don't think you understand how Thunderbolt works - it's a controller that attaches directly to PCIe and then wraps some protocol shit around it so it can shunt USB, Ethernet, etc. over a single pipe. I would prefer to go over PCIe without Thunderbolt every single time.
Anecdotal : Japanese cap issue with $1000 motherboard replacement cost.
Ipod nano easily broken screen. Ipod nano battery defect causing free swap out.
The class action lawsuits are endless.
But same for any large company selling millions of widgets. But don't make it out like they always have amazing design and build quality, they fuck up often and have the best PR.
Yes but now his bargain laptop special will be more powerful and a current OS than your 7 year old one with usb3 and longer battery life and no additional maintenance hassles and costs. You're not really coming out ahead.
Sounds similar to buy vs lease arguments. Some people want something current and new, others want investment. Sometimes economics swing both ways.
Doesn't have to be money gained, but material gain over that time. Ie, entertainment and productivity. Can still be measured as a return on investment. No?
A $30 cable, expensive Thunderbolt chipset, expensive peripherals, and you won't be getting actual 10 Gbps full duplex Ethernet through Thunderbolt, nor will it work a damn without an actual 10 Gbps Ethernet controller somewhere in the system. Keep on keepin' on, though.
Does being stupid come with being an Apple-Hater, or did you pay extra? http://www.macworld.com/articl...
Having a NO fucking brain necessitates being a Mac hater. If you think you're getting anything near the capabilities for full duplex 10 Gbps Ethernet over Thunderbolt without a true 10 Gbps Ethernet controller in the system, you're a damned fool. If you do have a 10 Gbps Ethernet controller in the system, just use it directly.
FTFY, and you just proved it. And you will never be able to tell, because you are so fucking stupid.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Thankfully, it acts as a PCIe bridge, too :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Graphics cards really need bandwidth only for texture uploads, and if you're shuttling images between the CPU and the GPU. For many high-performance games, the bandwidth requirement for the CPU-GPU links is rather models.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. If you're releasing a major version a month or so before you launch new products, you'd hope you have the OS for those products squared away.
This sounds like they pushed out iOS 8, ran into problems and released iOS 8.0.1, and apparently 8.0.2, and then 8.0.3.
And now they're rolling out 8.1.
That is a lot of churn in a relatively short period of time. Which tells me I'm still going to wait a while, because I expect 8.1.1 or 8.2 to appear within a month or so.
Well, that's nothing on Google. Supposedly Android 5.0 Lollipop will launch 11/3 - but 5.0.1 was already reported in the wild over a year ago: http://www.phonearena.com/news...
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.