This is true if you go to an apple store, and perhaps if you call the regular support lines. Companies generally get their own sales reps who can put them in touch with higher level support people, sometimes even the developers.
A local school had some issues with afp (who doesn't?;-) and it got to the point where the local rep, regional rep, a few developers and the head of the group that deals with afp actually showed up to trouble shoot and fix it.
That's not how depreciation works for taxation purposes in any sane jurisdiction. This includes USA where depreciation is set by IRS, not some company PHB.
Secondly, spending money for the sake of not having income, you may as well just give your employees a raise or bonus instead. They'll be just as happy with a "normal" $1k computer (provided it works for their job), but much happier with $2k bonus per year.
I'm pretty sure its spending money for a much more well equipped computer that would work best for their job. And is also portable, and makes sharing of high speed storage with other systems much easier.
Yes, that software is out there. But it is for the big boys and girls who don't give a fig about the costs of a particular workstation since their overhead is mostly professional people and professional video and audio gear whose prices often start in the five figure range. The Apple tax is just chump change.
When on location its nice to have a full editing rig. A small, powerful, 11 pound cylinder that uses less then 450w of power is much more portable then the 4x larger previous gen 40lb+ system (even if it does have handles). That along with the high speed external storage that can be easily moved from machine to machine really looking forward to getting mine, sometime in january.
The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.
This is exactly what people seem to not understand. Not to mention trying to get support when your custom built system starts to have issues (blue screening due to drivers, hardware incompatibilities, etc.. ). When you have a project due for a client and some key piece of software starts crashing, or crashing the machine, the last thing you want to have to deal with are the numerous vendors playing the blame game.
Granted, not all software will be fully tweaked off the bat with the new mac pro, but its a system that no doubt the big players (The Foundry, Autodesk, Maxon, Avid, Adobe, etc) will target for testing and make sure their software works and takes advantage of as much of the hardware as is possible. As opposed to testing on randomly built DIY solutions.
For the price, how can you really beat a high end system thats custom built (down to the pcb level), using mostly off the shelf stuff (just assembled in a way thats not convenient to the DIY/tinkerer), supported by a single company, and is / will be used in testing by the actual companies that write the software you want to run on it?
what is so proprietary about Apple's chargers? Its a USB female connector coming out of the charger. The issue is UL vs non-UL certified knock-offs. You dont need to use an Apple charger, just buy any UL certified charge. No one is forcing you to buy an Apple charger.
Just because it has a UL logo on it, doesn't mean its real.
The following video was meant to be a teardown of a real vs fake charger and it turns out, they were both fake.
They could make games with all those features if they used OpenGL. But it seems most of them love being fully dependent on Microsoft so much that they just don't consider switching to open apis.
The last thing game developers want is to make it easier to create native variants of their games for OSX and Linux.. That would be silly.
The system is targetted towards professional workstation use. Having rare expensive "external" devices is already common place. External enclosures for running multiple video cards for resolve systems, firewire / esata raid arrays, etc its all being done currently. Also makes it a lot easier to swap devices between systems.
While I would like to have at least an upgradable graphics system, having everything external (for meanyway) is already a standard thing. There's only so much storage you can fit inside the system as is, and most of my graphics needs are via additional cards for cuda/opencl processing.
Being able to swap drive arrays like I was using FW800 but with speeds greater then eSATA will be nice. Being able to just plug in an external enclosure and run cuda/opencl accelerated applications more accelerated.. and not having to worry about internal power, additional psu's, etc will be welcome.
Isn't the main purpose of the iTunes Music Store to sell iOS hardware? If I recall, doesn't most of the 30% of Apple's cut go into running the store?
Apple is predominantly a hardware company, and they want people to buy their hardware. If the main purpose of their music/app stores is to sell the hardware then why would it matter where people actually get their music/apps from? Amazon is just giving people another reason to get an iOS device. They now have more options for their music purchases. Win/Win.
As another said, you could have freeform placement.
Though my comment was more pointing out that Apple had a device with a "grid of icons" long before 2002. I've seen many people trying to point out phones and devices that had this a year to a few years before Apple, yet they ignore the Newton which was many years before that.
Now this isn't saying that another device didn't have a grid of icons before the Newton, just pointing out that Apple had one before the device(s) people are trying to use as prior art.
... forget that one needs to replace both the Mac and the iPod touch with the current model every few years.
Except the 5 and a half year old mac that I have runs the latest Xcode just fine.
iPod Touch I can see having to replace every few years.. but an additional $200 every few years should be insignificant if your product is making money. If its not making money, then either stop developing it, or stop complaining.
Agreed. Admittedly there are significant changes from Xcode 3 that can easily turn one off to it, but if you actually read the Xcode 4 transition guide and put in a bit of time with it, its actually far better then Xcode 3 was.
VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion are not valid solutions for all enterprise use.
Apple needs to allow OSX Server to run virtualized on non-Apple branded hardware so that it can be run under a bare-metal hypervisor like VMWare vSphere.
Yeah, I know there's Parallels Server, but that only runs on Apple branded hardware and doesn't even come close to the capabilities of vSphere.
OSX Server running on a HA-FT vSphere cluster would be, basically speaking, amazing.
Woz says he gave the De Telegraaf reporter a lengthy demonstration of voice commands on iOS and Android, pointed out that Android offered the ability to say "Navigate to Joe's Diner," and suggested that Apple would catch up through its purchases of Siri and Poly9. According to Steve, that's about it -- he says he'd "never" say that Android was better than iOS, and that "Almost every app I have is better on the iPhone." Woz did say he lightly prognosticated that Android would become more popular "based on what I've read," but that he expects Android "to be a lot like Windows... I'm not trying to put Android down, but I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS by any stretch of the imagination. But it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy."
So in the next year and a half will we expect to see WebM 1.0, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.1 and 2.2?
I can see it now, not being able to watch video on all sites because they use "2.1" and the hardware decoder in your Android phone only supports 1.6 even though it was just released yesterday.
Seriously, is Google the company that we want attempting to control a video standard? Sure they have a lot of smart developers over there, and so far I'm not convinced they can hold back and not change things too often. Is WebM as is really considered release ready by Google? After the decoder is put in a bunch of hardware will they all of a sudden come out with "Don't use that version any more, use this new one, its better. Oh, and you have to re-encode all your video."
This works pretty well under the released version of Safari for OSX 10.6. In fact, in some of the samples where the flash version is provided as well, the Flash ones use more CPU then the HTML5 ones.
There is a bit of degradation in some of the graphics, but hey its better then not seeing the graphics (ok, that really depends... if its an ad and you prefer not to see it... whatever).
Now the question is, why can't Adobe add a feature to the Flash authoring tool to just output the HTML5 and whatever is needed, that smokescreen does in the browser?
From some of the samples it would seem like you could just "drop in" the converted version with minimal loss of quality and reach a much larger audience.
I would still prefer Flash, for the most part, go away, and this won't help that too much (initially anyway). But it seems like this would be a good way for many web sites to start using HTML5 now, while support and implementations mature, as well as giving all the Flash devs time to learn to write natively in HTML5.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. So many features that are "obvious" are patented for no real reason.
Many features are "obvious" after someone else comes up with them.
This is true if you go to an apple store, and perhaps if you call the regular support lines. Companies generally get their own sales reps who can put them in touch with higher level support people, sometimes even the developers.
A local school had some issues with afp (who doesn't? ;-) and it got to the point where the local rep, regional rep, a few developers and the head of the group that deals with afp actually showed up to trouble shoot and fix it.
That's not how depreciation works for taxation purposes in any sane jurisdiction. This includes USA where depreciation is set by IRS, not some company PHB.
I'm not an account but isn't that what this says?
Secondly, spending money for the sake of not having income, you may as well just give your employees a raise or bonus instead. They'll be just as happy with a "normal" $1k computer (provided it works for their job), but much happier with $2k bonus per year.
I'm pretty sure its spending money for a much more well equipped computer that would work best for their job. And is also portable, and makes sharing of high speed storage with other systems much easier.
It is a luxury item, plain and simple. Most people do not buy computers that rival the price of a car.
So then you would argue that HP also makes luxury items? (and thats without graphics cards)
Then the question comes up how it can be integrated into the workflow since the macpro is built around thunderbolt connectivity and not much else.
FibreChannel Thunderbolt Adapter for SAN access?
10GbE Thunderbolt adapter?
Yes, that software is out there. But it is for the big boys and girls who don't give a fig about the costs of a particular workstation since their overhead is mostly professional people and professional video and audio gear whose prices often start in the five figure range. The Apple tax is just chump change.
One word.
Autodesk Flame.
When on location its nice to have a full editing rig. A small, powerful, 11 pound cylinder that uses less then 450w of power is much more portable then the 4x larger previous gen 40lb+ system (even if it does have handles). That along with the high speed external storage that can be easily moved from machine to machine really looking forward to getting mine, sometime in january.
The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.
This is exactly what people seem to not understand. Not to mention trying to get support when your custom built system starts to have issues (blue screening due to drivers, hardware incompatibilities, etc.. ). When you have a project due for a client and some key piece of software starts crashing, or crashing the machine, the last thing you want to have to deal with are the numerous vendors playing the blame game.
Granted, not all software will be fully tweaked off the bat with the new mac pro, but its a system that no doubt the big players (The Foundry, Autodesk, Maxon, Avid, Adobe, etc) will target for testing and make sure their software works and takes advantage of as much of the hardware as is possible. As opposed to testing on randomly built DIY solutions.
For the price, how can you really beat a high end system thats custom built (down to the pcb level), using mostly off the shelf stuff (just assembled in a way thats not convenient to the DIY/tinkerer), supported by a single company, and is / will be used in testing by the actual companies that write the software you want to run on it?
what is so proprietary about Apple's chargers? Its a USB female connector coming out of the charger. The issue is UL vs non-UL certified knock-offs. You dont need to use an Apple charger, just buy any UL certified charge. No one is forcing you to buy an Apple charger.
Just because it has a UL logo on it, doesn't mean its real.
The following video was meant to be a teardown of a real vs fake charger and it turns out, they were both fake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi-b9k-0KfE
They could make games with all those features if they used OpenGL. But it seems most of them love being fully dependent on Microsoft so much that they just don't consider switching to open apis.
The last thing game developers want is to make it easier to create native variants of their games for OSX and Linux.. That would be silly.
ace JavaScript developers who can write brilliant code
There are so many things wrong with that statement, my brain hurts trying to figure out where to begin
What laptops have dual 6 core xeons and four channel 1866mhz ram?
Ugh, I got my port speeds mixed up. Yeah, the TB2.0 ports still wont be fast enough for running external cards.
SIgh, was getting excited too.
Ok, true. At first I forgot the second slot was also x16 and that the cubix enclosure is also x16.
All of a sudden not looking as good as it could have been
The system is targetted towards professional workstation use. Having rare expensive "external" devices is already common place. External enclosures for running multiple video cards for resolve systems, firewire / esata raid arrays, etc its all being done currently. Also makes it a lot easier to swap devices between systems.
While I would like to have at least an upgradable graphics system, having everything external (for meanyway) is already a standard thing. There's only so much storage you can fit inside the system as is, and most of my graphics needs are via additional cards for cuda/opencl processing.
Being able to swap drive arrays like I was using FW800 but with speeds greater then eSATA will be nice. Being able to just plug in an external enclosure and run cuda/opencl accelerated applications more accelerated.. and not having to worry about internal power, additional psu's, etc will be welcome.
Ram is upgradable
Then, it has 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports running at 20gbps managed by 3 controllers.
Get whatever external enclosure you want and run whatever you want. Raids, Video cards, etc..
Isn't the main purpose of the iTunes Music Store to sell iOS hardware? If I recall, doesn't most of the 30% of Apple's cut go into running the store?
Apple is predominantly a hardware company, and they want people to buy their hardware. If the main purpose of their music/app stores is to sell the hardware then why would it matter where people actually get their music/apps from? Amazon is just giving people another reason to get an iOS device. They now have more options for their music purchases. Win/Win.
As another said, you could have freeform placement.
Though my comment was more pointing out that Apple had a device with a "grid of icons" long before 2002. I've seen many people trying to point out phones and devices that had this a year to a few years before Apple, yet they ignore the Newton which was many years before that.
Now this isn't saying that another device didn't have a grid of icons before the Newton, just pointing out that Apple had one before the device(s) people are trying to use as prior art.
I just found this post today:
AT&T (yeah, them) is the one that invented a grid of colorful icons, half a decade before Apple.
http://www.statusq.org/archives/2012/08/30/4453/
Add this to the prior art file.
And Apple had the Newton MessagePad a decade before that.
http://www.thocp.net/hardware/pictures/pda/apple_newton_sml.jpg
... forget that one needs to replace both the Mac and the iPod touch with the current model every few years.
Except the 5 and a half year old mac that I have runs the latest Xcode just fine.
iPod Touch I can see having to replace every few years.. but an additional $200 every few years should be insignificant if your product is making money. If its not making money, then either stop developing it, or stop complaining.
Agreed. Admittedly there are significant changes from Xcode 3 that can easily turn one off to it, but if you actually read the Xcode 4 transition guide and put in a bit of time with it, its actually far better then Xcode 3 was.
VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion are not valid solutions for all enterprise use.
Apple needs to allow OSX Server to run virtualized on non-Apple branded hardware so that it can be run under a bare-metal hypervisor like VMWare vSphere.
Yeah, I know there's Parallels Server, but that only runs on Apple branded hardware and doesn't even come close to the capabilities of vSphere.
OSX Server running on a HA-FT vSphere cluster would be, basically speaking, amazing.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/18/exclusive-woz-misquoted-almost-every-app-that-i-have-is-bette/
Woz says he gave the De Telegraaf reporter a lengthy demonstration of voice commands on iOS and Android, pointed out that Android offered the ability to say "Navigate to Joe's Diner," and suggested that Apple would catch up through its purchases of Siri and Poly9. According to Steve, that's about it -- he says he'd "never" say that Android was better than iOS, and that "Almost every app I have is better on the iPhone." Woz did say he lightly prognosticated that Android would become more popular "based on what I've read," but that he expects Android "to be a lot like Windows... I'm not trying to put Android down, but I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS by any stretch of the imagination. But it can get greater marketshare and still be crappy."
So in the next year and a half will we expect to see WebM 1.0, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.1 and 2.2?
I can see it now, not being able to watch video on all sites because they use "2.1" and the hardware decoder in your Android phone only supports 1.6 even though it was just released yesterday.
Seriously, is Google the company that we want attempting to control a video standard? Sure they have a lot of smart developers over there, and so far I'm not convinced they can hold back and not change things too often. Is WebM as is really considered release ready by Google? After the decoder is put in a bunch of hardware will they all of a sudden come out with "Don't use that version any more, use this new one, its better. Oh, and you have to re-encode all your video."
Just my thoughts.
This works pretty well under the released version of Safari for OSX 10.6. In fact, in some of the samples where the flash version is provided as well, the Flash ones use more CPU then the HTML5 ones.
There is a bit of degradation in some of the graphics, but hey its better then not seeing the graphics (ok, that really depends ... if its an ad and you prefer not to see it ... whatever).
Now the question is, why can't Adobe add a feature to the Flash authoring tool to just output the HTML5 and whatever is needed, that smokescreen does in the browser?
From some of the samples it would seem like you could just "drop in" the converted version with minimal loss of quality and reach a much larger audience.
I would still prefer Flash, for the most part, go away, and this won't help that too much (initially anyway). But it seems like this would be a good way for many web sites to start using HTML5 now, while support and implementations mature, as well as giving all the Flash devs time to learn to write natively in HTML5.