12 years ago Apple did have headless mid range tower Macs. It's only been since either the G5s or the Mac Pros that they started not to offer one, depending on your definition of mid range and the price that you're after.
I've been in exactly this situation: we were an custom GPS electronics company where one very talented electrical engineer built the hardware from the ground up... I signed on as his lackey... because his time was 'so valuable'...
The -very- first thing they had me do when I arrived was produce page after page of documentation on how the hardware actually worked
When I asked him why there was no documentation (or very poor documentation when there was) the answer was a combination of "You shouldn't need documentation" and "I'm not paid to document things."
Well, actually... you are.
No offense, but it sounds to me like no, he wasn't paid to write documentation. You were.
The company thought for good or ill that this super-engineer's time was better off spent doing what he did best, and a cheaper hire was found to do other cleanup work like writing docs and sharing/storing knowledge. Nothing wrong with that.
x64 is a short, sweet, unambiguous term that is much less unwieldy than x86-64. Even if Microsoft was the first to use it (and AFAIK they certainly don't market it, I've only ever seen it in the filenames of MSDN ISOs) what about that makes it verboten for the rest of us?
Any MacBook Pro ought to be able to slaughter WC3 at all full settings on the high resolution. Maybe not in the nv9400 mode (although I wouldn't be surprised if even that chip could handle the awesome power of a 4 year old game) on the latest unibody models, but still.
Are you sure that you're running a Universal Binary version? If not, then your CPU has to emulate PPC instructions. Get the latest updates from Blizzard and your experience should be a lot better.
It was strained an ugly because you didn't use a car analogy, silly!
MP3car and OGGcar both get you from A to B. OGGcar has more horsepower but a higher fuel consumption. The MP3car has better mileage AND a bigger fuel tank.
Since the actual constraint is the speed limit of the road, which both cars can easily maintain, then the MP3car wins on both economy and distance.
It was technically multitasking, but it was cooperative multitasking. Background tasks did actually run if the foreground process wasn't using all of the CPU.
Not the best nor very technically advanced, of course, but it was multitasking and it did work. One of the reasons Copland was canned though was because they were going to keep the cooperative model.
I'll agree iPods and iPhones often exceed the rated amount, even when playing videos (compared to the rated video playing amount of course.) This is probably because on such a device you're probably using it in the exact same way as the test - listening to a playlist of songs one after the other. Sure, in practical use you'll use the screen backlight a little more than the test and on a disk-based iPod you'll probably skip around a little and burn more juice, but the test results are rounded down to a neat number so you'll beat their figure.
PowerBooks, iBooks and MacBooks never have. The way to advertise a good battery life is to turn the screen brightness right down to almost-unreadable, no WiFi (usually), hard disk spun down, sometimes even boot off a RAM disk, then open TextEdit and type some characters to simulate 'use'. If you're lucky the vendor's test might be to open Safari and load a webpage every 5 minutes from a local web server.
Because this is so far removed from actual use the user has no real chance of meeting the claimed figure.
If you've truly been using OS X since beta, I don't see how you could not have run into the situation where a Finder window didn't auto-update.
From memory, that feature was only added in either 10.2 or 10.3 using fsevents. In 10.1 I distinctly remember having to install a little freeware daemon that forced windows to refresh, since OS X Finder was so infuriating for someone coming from the classic Mac OS.
I will agree that since that feature was added I've never had to refresh a folder manually to see new files, but on removable storage in 10.5 I do have to routinely open/close windows to get the "free space available" count to update. Interestingly the count that is displayed is what Finder uses to stop you copying too big a folder to the volume; dragging something seemingly too big into that window won't update the count and it will tell you there's not enough free space.
I think one of the most worrying things about this story is the claim that you can't watch your content while you have any non-HDCP device connected, even if you're not watching it on that screen!
For someone like me who has a Dell 20" screen that supports HDCP, but also an Apple 20" screen that does not, we're expected to unplug one screen every time we want to watch something protected in this manner? Get real!
I have to agree with this; one of the worst things is driver programmers creating their own BIOS screen "just because".
I put my Highpoint SATA RAID card in a Mac, and it boots in the same amount of time (except now Sleep mode doesn't work.) I put it in a Hackintosh, and there's a new BIOS screen that sits there for 20+ seconds just doing "something". Handy for if your OS is stuffed and you want to manage your RAID, but you lose hours of your life every week because of it.
I turn on AHCI mode, and the Intel chipset adds its own screen to the BIOS bootup sequence too. It enumerates all 3 of my SATA devices, and takes about 15+ seconds to do so. Other than that list, there is no additional functionality or management features. How is this acceptable?
1) "True, but look at the architecture in the macs. They elimiated the Northbridge and the Bus chips. The CPU now connects directly to the GPU."
The only reason the CPU connects to the GPU (and only in their laptops, not in any of their desktop models) is because they use a weak integrated GPU which is also the Northbridge for the CPU. While I'm sure you can shuttle data to it from the CPU slightly faster than if there was a physical PCI-E bus in the way, the speed of the device lets you down anyway. Additionally, that GPU then has to access slow, high latency system RAM rather than fast dedicated GDDR4 VRAM to store anything.
2) "on the new macs, running H264 high def has dropped processor utilization from 100% to 20%, presumbaly because of the NVIDIA chip".
This has been available in Windows for ages, using GPUs going back a few years now with the "PureVideo" and "Radeon HD" monikers. I think it's more of an indictment upon Apple that our Macs have been using the same graphics hardware but decoding everything on the CPU anyway for so long before finally pulling their act together (and again, this is on laptops only. The $4K Mac Pro with an 8800GT still decodes everything on the CPU while booted into OS X.)
Slashdot Mirror
12 years ago Apple did have headless mid range tower Macs. It's only been since either the G5s or the Mac Pros that they started not to offer one, depending on your definition of mid range and the price that you're after.
I've been in exactly this situation: we were an custom GPS electronics company where one very talented electrical engineer built the hardware from the ground up ... I signed on as his lackey ... because his time was 'so valuable' ...
The -very- first thing they had me do when I arrived was produce page after page of documentation on how the hardware actually worked
When I asked him why there was no documentation (or very poor documentation when there was) the answer was a combination of "You shouldn't need documentation" and "I'm not paid to document things."
Well, actually... you are.
No offense, but it sounds to me like no, he wasn't paid to write documentation. You were. The company thought for good or ill that this super-engineer's time was better off spent doing what he did best, and a cheaper hire was found to do other cleanup work like writing docs and sharing/storing knowledge. Nothing wrong with that.
x64 is a short, sweet, unambiguous term that is much less unwieldy than x86-64. Even if Microsoft was the first to use it (and AFAIK they certainly don't market it, I've only ever seen it in the filenames of MSDN ISOs) what about that makes it verboten for the rest of us?
Are you sure that you're running a Universal Binary version? If not, then your CPU has to emulate PPC instructions. Get the latest updates from Blizzard and your experience should be a lot better.
Wow, that was strained and ugly.
It was strained an ugly because you didn't use a car analogy, silly!
MP3car and OGGcar both get you from A to B. OGGcar has more horsepower but a higher fuel consumption. The MP3car has better mileage AND a bigger fuel tank.
Since the actual constraint is the speed limit of the road, which both cars can easily maintain, then the MP3car wins on both economy and distance.
There, wasn't that better?
Not the best nor very technically advanced, of course, but it was multitasking and it did work. One of the reasons Copland was canned though was because they were going to keep the cooperative model.
PowerBooks, iBooks and MacBooks never have. The way to advertise a good battery life is to turn the screen brightness right down to almost-unreadable, no WiFi (usually), hard disk spun down, sometimes even boot off a RAM disk, then open TextEdit and type some characters to simulate 'use'. If you're lucky the vendor's test might be to open Safari and load a webpage every 5 minutes from a local web server.
Because this is so far removed from actual use the user has no real chance of meeting the claimed figure.
From memory, that feature was only added in either 10.2 or 10.3 using fsevents. In 10.1 I distinctly remember having to install a little freeware daemon that forced windows to refresh, since OS X Finder was so infuriating for someone coming from the classic Mac OS.
I will agree that since that feature was added I've never had to refresh a folder manually to see new files, but on removable storage in 10.5 I do have to routinely open/close windows to get the "free space available" count to update. Interestingly the count that is displayed is what Finder uses to stop you copying too big a folder to the volume; dragging something seemingly too big into that window won't update the count and it will tell you there's not enough free space.
Sounds like a good idea, but remember to send 3% of your gross winnings/settlement to Apple. ;)
For someone like me who has a Dell 20" screen that supports HDCP, but also an Apple 20" screen that does not, we're expected to unplug one screen every time we want to watch something protected in this manner? Get real!
Can't be, the chances of anything like that coming from Mars are a million to one!
I put my Highpoint SATA RAID card in a Mac, and it boots in the same amount of time (except now Sleep mode doesn't work.) I put it in a Hackintosh, and there's a new BIOS screen that sits there for 20+ seconds just doing "something". Handy for if your OS is stuffed and you want to manage your RAID, but you lose hours of your life every week because of it.
I turn on AHCI mode, and the Intel chipset adds its own screen to the BIOS bootup sequence too. It enumerates all 3 of my SATA devices, and takes about 15+ seconds to do so. Other than that list, there is no additional functionality or management features. How is this acceptable?
1) "True, but look at the architecture in the macs. They elimiated the Northbridge and the Bus chips. The CPU now connects directly to the GPU."
The only reason the CPU connects to the GPU (and only in their laptops, not in any of their desktop models) is because they use a weak integrated GPU which is also the Northbridge for the CPU. While I'm sure you can shuttle data to it from the CPU slightly faster than if there was a physical PCI-E bus in the way, the speed of the device lets you down anyway. Additionally, that GPU then has to access slow, high latency system RAM rather than fast dedicated GDDR4 VRAM to store anything.
2) "on the new macs, running H264 high def has dropped processor utilization from 100% to 20%, presumbaly because of the NVIDIA chip".
This has been available in Windows for ages, using GPUs going back a few years now with the "PureVideo" and "Radeon HD" monikers. I think it's more of an indictment upon Apple that our Macs have been using the same graphics hardware but decoding everything on the CPU anyway for so long before finally pulling their act together (and again, this is on laptops only. The $4K Mac Pro with an 8800GT still decodes everything on the CPU while booted into OS X.)