There's the sun reflecting off the cars, there's the cars reflecting off each other, there's me reflecting off the cars. There's the whole parking lot reflecting off the building. Inside, there's this long covered walkway, and the reflections of the cars on one side and the trees on the other and the multiple internal reflections between the two banks of windows is part of what makes reality look real. AND it also tells me that there's someone running down the hall just around the corner inside the building, so I can move out of the way before I see them directly.
You can't do that without raytracing, you just can't, and if you don't do it it looks fake. You get "shiny effect" windows with scenery painted on them, and that tells you "that's a window" but it doesn't make it look like one. It's like putting stick figures in and saying that's how you model humans.
And if Professor Slusallek could do that in realtime with a hardwired raytracer... in 2005, I don't see how nVidia's going to do it with even 100,000 GPU cores in a cost-effective fashion. Raytracing is something that hardware does very well, and that's highly parallelizable, but both Intel and nVidia are attacking it in far too brute-force a fashion using the wrong kinds of tools.
I believe hand coding is the best practice but like other people have stated you can use dreamweaver in standard code view and it's exactly the same as using notepad.
I hand code HTML, but I try not to use that HTML directly... rather I take that HTML and use it to guide the templates and scripts that my text is and other objects are embedded in. This involves using a lot of explicitly classed tags and pushing the actual style off to CSS. I have avoided using HTML generation tools except as a way to experiment with different approaches to getting the results I want, because the output is never directly usable for this approach.
Is this close to the way you use Dreamweaver, and whether it is or not do you think it would be useful in this kind of workflow?
I got Dell removed from the approved vendor list at my last-but-one job 10 years ago, and they hadn't gotten re-approved when I left there in 2005, so that's a pretty weak counterexample.:)
Come to think of it, if a vendor shipped us Wintel notebooks similar to the Macbook Pro I doubt they'd make it into the list in the first place. Apple's oddball hardware really does hurt it in the corporate market. Big companies have their own support staff and policies... for example, at one point (due to an audit further upstream) I couldn't get warranty replacement hard drives because we had a retention policy for hard drives that precluded sending the old ones back.
I think there's two things you need to keep in mind:
1. Companies make mistakes in product differentiation all the time. When someone is ranting about this, ask yourself "does this mean they think Apple is being nefarious, or do they think Apple is making a mistake?"...
2. The distinction between "product differentiation" and "nefarious scheme" is kind of moot when you can't do anything about it.
I'm not sure what's going on here, but my comments aren't directed at YOU specifically, rather, as commentary to this entire thread.
I got that impression, yes. Wouldn't it have made more sense to post at the top level?
I would argue they aren't popular because the XP world isn't condusive to an all-in-one, integrated hardware/software solution like Apple can offer.
I'm not sure why you think the OS makes a big difference. It's not like Macs haven't historically had a variety of form factors, and I've had a variety of Macs with a variety of form factors, all the way back to the original 128k Mac. The thing that made the original Mac attractive for me is that it was totable. Back before laptops it was a pretty good equivalent... but since laptops came out that aspect of all-in-one hardware has really become irrelevant.
I held onto my old Beige G3 for years, upgrading it eventually to a G4/533, because it was the last conventional Desktop Apple made. And judging by the fact that people were still buying enough G4 upgrades for the G3s to keep OWC and Sonnet making new ones right up to the time the Mini came out kind of implies I wasn't the only one who thought so. In fact I bought a Radeon 9200 from OWC a couple of months before the Mini was announced, because people were making pretty convincing arguments... just like the one you're making now, that Apple wasn't going to come up with a headless Mac. No, the iMac and the all-in-one had reinvigorated Apple.
I'm pretty sure, however, that they don't purposely withhold a mid-range tower and cross their fingers in hopes people buy a Mac Pro.
Not just a Mac Pro. Apple has pretty good margins across the product line, so if people buy an iMac instead of a "Mini Pro" they're making more money, because they're netting 40% or $1200 instead of 40% of $800. That's likely the reason they crippled the intel Mini with an intel GPU, and why they do the same thing with a Macbook. It's not a "nefarious scheme", it's all part of product differentiation.
And it's still forcing a lot of people who want a Mac to buy a computer they wouldn't otherwise consider, and it's kept a number of people I know... NOT all geeks, either... from making the switch.
You sir, obviously don't own a Labrador Retriever puppy that finds anything smaller than a 2 x 4 completely invisible.
You're right. My puppies have all been of the primate kind, though that opposable thumb is hell on computers, and I've pulled all kinds of interesting things out of CD and floppy drives.
Still never had a laptop pulled off a table. I'm not saying it can't happen, but based on my experience and that of the 150-400 developers and salesmen I've supported at various times over the past couple of decades... I really can't see that as a common failure mode unless you're in the habit of leaving power cables hanging in free catenaries about the place.
If I manufacture locks, and and put in a glitch so that it will unlock if you shake/tap it a certain way, then I'm not making a lock, I'm making a device 'similar to a lock'.
Have you ever unlocked a locked door from the inside?
Usually involves removing two phillips-head screws and pulling the lock mechanism out.
Booting a computer from a thumb drive is like unlocking a locked door from the inside.
A company can't appease all needs and wants of every consumer in a single product line.
That's all the more true of they don't provide a product that can be significantly customized anywhere except at the extreme high end of one of their product lines.
What tends to happen here on slashdot is that people who feel "left out" of the current offerings swarm to the threads to say how Apple has left out the majority opinion of "we want a tower".
Please refrain from putting words into my mouth. I have not said that this is a "majority opinion" nor even that a mid-range tower is the product that I'd like to see added. In fact I've pointed out twice now that this is not what I'm saying.
If you want to pick a fight with someone who is actually arguing the point that you want to argue against, go ahead.
My point is that the gap in the product line is real, and Apple would penetrate a sizable as-yet-untapped market if they filled it. Whether that gap should be filled by the device you're talking about, or whether that is a "majority" market or just a large one... I'm not going there.
People are making it sound like Apple are shooting themselves in the foot and losing huge market opportunities, but the numbers just don't support that notion.
I haven't seen any numbers that even address this point. There's not even a suggestion of anything even vaguely like a controlled study as to the relative popularity of comparable all-in-one vs headless Macs running OS X. There can't be, because Apple hasn't had comparable products since before even OS 9 was shipped. Remember, the iMac first shipped with OS 8!
There are numbers indicating that apart from laptops all-in-one designs are currently unpopular in the market as a whole. About the only line of all-in-one desktops that's got any traction at all are Macs. People buying Windows-based boxes don't generally buy all-in-ones. People buying Macs have to buy all-in-ones.
Would Apple's market share be higher if they sold a conventional desktop? I believe so, obviously, though the fact is that I can only point to indirect numbers showing that. On the other hand, you can't point to any numbers indicating I'm wrong, because there simply are no relevant numbers for Macs running OS X.
The figures suggest that for Windows users the demand for all-in-one desktops is minuscule. For OS X users, as I noted, there's no comparable all-in-one desktop to compare against, so really all they show is that OS X on Intel is very popular. That's interesting, and for some viewers (particularly the Apple fanatics: a lot of the pro-Apple camp argued that this would be a stupid idea right up to the time Jobs announced it, and many anti-Apple fanatics kept that argument up long after the market showed otherwise) even surprising, but it's almost completely independent of the hardware line up.
So while it's possible that there is some fundamental difference between OS X users and Windows users (and I would be interested to read your arguments for this point), I find it hard to believe that Apple wouldn't sell more Macs and make more profit if they sold a "Mini Pro" (the beefed up Mini) or a "Mac Semi-pro" (the mid-range tower you're discussing).
One final note: the arguments against filling this gap right now are the same ones that were arrayed against the Mini itself right up to the time Jobs announced it. Apple sold a boatload of Minis, to a lot of people who never considered a Mac before, and it's been a real success. You've got your finger on the pulse of conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom isn't always right. Think about that.
I don't know whether they dropped the books on the cable, on another cable that tugged on the power cable, or missed the cable altogether. As I said, I didn't notice at the time that it had happened, or I would have plugged it back in. When I returned to my desk my laptop had shut down to save power, and there was nobody else in the office at the time.
I have also had the magsafe connector pull away under trivial tension many times. I have never had any problem with any other power connector on any other laptop, either mine or any of the users I supported at ABB over the past 20 years. Nor have I had a power connector pull a laptop off a desk... video cables, yes, SCSI cables, yes, serial or parallel cables, yes, but those are all screwed in or clamped on. The magsafe connector may be an advance over the funky connector on the Powerbooks and iBooks, but a plain barrel connector is much simpler and more reliable.
Apple's definition of quality seems to be "it looks cool and costs more", not "it works better".
By "quality hardware", I'm sure that we would mean something more important than that.
Indeed. My Thinkpad had my Macbook Pro beat to hell in the quality of the hardware. It was more solidly built, had a far superior keyboard, and came with a mini dock (port extender) so I could just bring it in to work in the morning and set it down and go straight to work... no fumbling around for cables or having the stupid "magsafe" connector come out without my noticing it when someone drops a pile of books on my desk...
And I didn't have to go cap-in-hand to the genius bar to replace the hard drive or void my warranty. And it didn't overheat to the point that I had to pull the battery pack out to cool it down when I was doing something CPU-intensive.
And to my eyes it even looked better, the way a stealth fighter looks better than an Airstream caravan.
Apple's hardware is pretty, but there's more to quality than expensive clothes and heavy makeup.
If a company COULD make a geek-a-liciously delicious mid-range tower with the great looks of an Apple product, it would have been done already.
I'm sorry, I really don't understand what the HELL you mean by this.
(a) I'm not asking for a "mid-range tower". My original comment was that a mid-range tower is one of several possible solutions that would satisfy my requirements.
(b) How exactly do you imagine that Apple would be somehow incapable of making a plain old desktop Mac. They've done it before. They've even done one under Jobs.. they just screwed up by making the cube a middle-of-the-road desktop in capability but charged high end workstation prices for it.
(c) There are fewer engineering tradeoffs required for this product than anything else they make. It doesn't jave the size limitations of the mini or a laptop. It doesn't have the layout and size limitations of an iMac or a laptop. It doesn't have the noise problems of the Mac Pro or the head problems of the mini and the high-end laptops and the Pro.
(d) BMW does make an economy car. It's called (with no intention of irony... they bought an economy car company that made it already) the "mini". Unlike the BMW mini, which is actually a car (seats, trunk, options) the Mac mini is more like a BMW motorbike... it costs as much as a desktop, but drives like a settop.
(e) Who said anything about "low end"? Low end is around $300 these days. I'm sure Apple would charge a minimum of $800 for a "Mini pro" or over $1000 for a "Mini Tower". It's not the low end customers who are looking for this, it's everyone up to the edge of the professional workstation market. The entry level for Macs that fit the job we're talking about start at two grand.
But most of all, the idea that they couldn't make one is just bizarre. Seriously. What the hell does "if a company COULD make" it mean?
Actually, the UNIX security model is quite finely grained when used as designed.
The problem is that it was designed with these assumptions:
1. Access to resources is controlled by access to files in the file system.
2. Access to resources is associated with user ID and group membership.
3. Privilege elevation is always managed by gateway applications running with appropriate user and group ID.
That is, if you want to limit access to a serial port to people who need to dial out, you put the serial port in the group "dialer" and the dialout software setgid "dialer", and let it limit access appropriately.
Some programs did the right thing, some didn't, but it was Berkeley Sockets that smashed it good an proper. The right thing to do would have been something like this: make "bind()" take an open file as an argument, and make the special file "/dev/sockets/25" owned by group "mail", then run the mail listener setgid "mail". It would open "/dev/sockets/25", pass that to bind, and have an open listener on the SMTP port without having to run as root.
Unfortunately, instead of that, you had to be root to open sockets in the reserved range. And the floodgates were open.
Most consumers simply don't need or want what you want.
First, I distinguished between "need" and "want". The desires you chose to ridicule were not in the "needs". You didn't ask what our "needs" were, you asked what we would do with expandability. If you asked "what do you need expandability for" you'd get a different answer.
So once you eliminate that straw man, what I need is an adequate GPU, an adequate hard drive, and no integrated display... and a consumer price. Maybe 40% over what Psystar is asking for their box? That would give Apple their usual markup.
The argument that "most consumers don't need" those features is a bit circular, since they're not available from Apple and haven't been available from Apple at a consumer price since Steve Jobs took over. On the other hand, they *are* available from Wintel box shippers, and most consumers are still buying Wintel boxes.
Don't assume you know all the reasons why they do that. I know I'm regularly surprised by people's answers to why they still use Windows after they express desire for my desktop.
And do consider that you'll never find out if you just ask Mac users, because that's a sample that's pre-selected to only include people for whom the current line of Macs is at least minimally acceptable.
Out of curiosity, what exactly would you put in those PCI slots if Apple made such a consumer machine?
What I would want to put in it would depend on what it starts with. Since I don't expect them to build my ideal machine, I just want to be able to make something that's got what I need without having to pay 3 times as much as I can afford for a bunch of stuff I don't need.
If it had intel integrated video, I'd definitely need a video card.
I need at least one 3.5" drive bay.
I'd want two 3.5" drive bays, so I can run RAID-1 internal.
I want to be able to upgrade the internal CDROM.
It would be nice to be able to add eSATA... it's got less latency than Firewire. That's not a requirement but it's something I'd be likely to add if it was an option.
Adequate cooling is a must. That's a big drawback on the mini.
What I *don't* need: I don't need the Mac Pro's 8 cores. Two cores is plenty. Two cores socketed so I could upgrade to four later on would be more than ample.
What I don't even want: integrated display. I have a perfectly good display already... and a KVM.
Alternatives that would make my happy: a "Mini pro" with two 3.5" drive bays and a decent GPU, or an "iSwitch", an iMac with an internal KVM so I can toggle between it and my wintendo, or maybe a networked window system that virtualized OpenGL ove the network so I could get decent video performance over the network from the Mac. Screen scrapers like VNC and RDP need not apply.
Using SMCFanControl I have the fans set to come on at the lowest possible temperature, and rev up to speed as quickly as possible, and it's not enough. This is a known but unacknowledged problem with the first generations of Macbook Pros.
The problem is you don't seem to understand the key to good design: Don't bloat-up on features.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Apple goes too far.
The Macbook pro already has a removable battery and a separate mmory compartment, so I have no idea why you brought them up except perhaps as a stupid debating trick. A user removable hard drive, yes. Upgradable video card? In a laptop? Only if the standard GPU is inadequate, and that's not the case for the Macbook Pro.
The reason for this is because each feature added takes something else away.
Sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes adding a feature doesn't mean shortchanging anything, anywhere else. Sometimes what it's taking away is itself a problem... making the case larger to provide room for a hard drive door would give them room to put in a better keyboard, and room to improve the cooling.
Same with the Mac Mini. They cut features too far to make it so small.
In fact, the "make it ludicrously small" feature is one they need to back away from.
having to remove the battery to prevent overheating sounds like a defect to me
Overheating is a defect in all the first generation Macbook Pros, one that Apple denies exists. It's also a reason for the battery warping problems that us Macbook Pro Pioneers had to deal with: Apple's willing to replace the battery pack, but they've yet to do anything about the cooling problem.
As for the keyboards... my RSI is not "subjective".:(
The keys are flat, not bevelled. The keys are not solidly seated... they float, making it feel imprecise. The action is both too soft and too hard, with very little "padding" effect.
The external keyboard I bought appears to have been sourced from the same company as makes teh Thinkpad keyboards. It's excellent. But it does make a poor impression when I have to pull it out at a customer's site or risk aggravating my RSI.
Yeh, I got that, I wasn't aware that was a distinction that made any difference in this case. Particularly since it's the premium product that's got the worse user experience.
My point was that (a) Applecare isn't always "all that", and (b) Apple's hardware isn't "all that".
If they could send me a drive I could replace at my leisure, or if they could actually replace the drive at the Apple store without making me wait, I'd have been a lot happier.
Oh, I wasn't defending UAC at all. I think that UAC is fundamentally stupid, I'm just saying that this wasn't an example of UAC itself being stupid, just of Microsoft being lazy about how they dealt with a problem caused indirectly by UAC.
Much as I like seeing Microsoft humbled, the comments on the original article seem to exonerate Microsoft of being as stupid as the article makes them sound. Lazy, perhaps, but not that stupid.
Or is replacing-the-internal-drive just pretty much the same as plugging-in-an-external-drive ?
Pretty much, except that plugging in an external drive makes a laptop more like a desktop (even if it's firewire powered, unless you decide to get creative with electrical tape), and replacing the hard drive in a Thinkpad T23 isn't much harder than plugging in an external drive. Certainly easier and more convenient than carrying an external drive around for a week.
My Macbook Pro hard drive is not trivially user replacable and replacing it would void my warranty. Has there been a design change since the original MBP or does that only apply to Macbooks?
Google says the latter.
Replacing the hard drive to keep a Thinkpad working while waiting for the replacement doesn't void the warranty.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you don't.
What, you're one of these heretics who doesn't realize that we're in an elaborate computer simulation?
There's the sun reflecting off the cars, there's the cars reflecting off each other, there's me reflecting off the cars. There's the whole parking lot reflecting off the building. Inside, there's this long covered walkway, and the reflections of the cars on one side and the trees on the other and the multiple internal reflections between the two banks of windows is part of what makes reality look real. AND it also tells me that there's someone running down the hall just around the corner inside the building, so I can move out of the way before I see them directly.
You can't do that without raytracing, you just can't, and if you don't do it it looks fake. You get "shiny effect" windows with scenery painted on them, and that tells you "that's a window" but it doesn't make it look like one. It's like putting stick figures in and saying that's how you model humans.
And if Professor Slusallek could do that in realtime with a hardwired raytracer... in 2005, I don't see how nVidia's going to do it with even 100,000 GPU cores in a cost-effective fashion. Raytracing is something that hardware does very well, and that's highly parallelizable, but both Intel and nVidia are attacking it in far too brute-force a fashion using the wrong kinds of tools.
I believe hand coding is the best practice but like other people have stated you can use dreamweaver in standard code view and it's exactly the same as using notepad.
I hand code HTML, but I try not to use that HTML directly... rather I take that HTML and use it to guide the templates and scripts that my text is and other objects are embedded in. This involves using a lot of explicitly classed tags and pushing the actual style off to CSS. I have avoided using HTML generation tools except as a way to experiment with different approaches to getting the results I want, because the output is never directly usable for this approach.
Is this close to the way you use Dreamweaver, and whether it is or not do you think it would be useful in this kind of workflow?
I got Dell removed from the approved vendor list at my last-but-one job 10 years ago, and they hadn't gotten re-approved when I left there in 2005, so that's a pretty weak counterexample. :)
Come to think of it, if a vendor shipped us Wintel notebooks similar to the Macbook Pro I doubt they'd make it into the list in the first place. Apple's oddball hardware really does hurt it in the corporate market. Big companies have their own support staff and policies... for example, at one point (due to an audit further upstream) I couldn't get warranty replacement hard drives because we had a retention policy for hard drives that precluded sending the old ones back.
I think there's two things you need to keep in mind:
1. Companies make mistakes in product differentiation all the time. When someone is ranting about this, ask yourself "does this mean they think Apple is being nefarious, or do they think Apple is making a mistake?"...
2. The distinction between "product differentiation" and "nefarious scheme" is kind of moot when you can't do anything about it.
I'm not sure what's going on here, but my comments aren't directed at YOU specifically, rather, as commentary to this entire thread.
I got that impression, yes. Wouldn't it have made more sense to post at the top level?
I would argue they aren't popular because the XP world isn't condusive to an all-in-one, integrated hardware/software solution like Apple can offer.
I'm not sure why you think the OS makes a big difference. It's not like Macs haven't historically had a variety of form factors, and I've had a variety of Macs with a variety of form factors, all the way back to the original 128k Mac. The thing that made the original Mac attractive for me is that it was totable. Back before laptops it was a pretty good equivalent... but since laptops came out that aspect of all-in-one hardware has really become irrelevant.
I held onto my old Beige G3 for years, upgrading it eventually to a G4/533, because it was the last conventional Desktop Apple made. And judging by the fact that people were still buying enough G4 upgrades for the G3s to keep OWC and Sonnet making new ones right up to the time the Mini came out kind of implies I wasn't the only one who thought so. In fact I bought a Radeon 9200 from OWC a couple of months before the Mini was announced, because people were making pretty convincing arguments... just like the one you're making now, that Apple wasn't going to come up with a headless Mac. No, the iMac and the all-in-one had reinvigorated Apple.
I'm pretty sure, however, that they don't purposely withhold a mid-range tower and cross their fingers in hopes people buy a Mac Pro.
Not just a Mac Pro. Apple has pretty good margins across the product line, so if people buy an iMac instead of a "Mini Pro" they're making more money, because they're netting 40% or $1200 instead of 40% of $800. That's likely the reason they crippled the intel Mini with an intel GPU, and why they do the same thing with a Macbook. It's not a "nefarious scheme", it's all part of product differentiation.
And it's still forcing a lot of people who want a Mac to buy a computer they wouldn't otherwise consider, and it's kept a number of people I know... NOT all geeks, either... from making the switch.
You sir, obviously don't own a Labrador Retriever puppy that finds anything smaller than a 2 x 4 completely invisible.
You're right. My puppies have all been of the primate kind, though that opposable thumb is hell on computers, and I've pulled all kinds of interesting things out of CD and floppy drives.
Still never had a laptop pulled off a table. I'm not saying it can't happen, but based on my experience and that of the 150-400 developers and salesmen I've supported at various times over the past couple of decades... I really can't see that as a common failure mode unless you're in the habit of leaving power cables hanging in free catenaries about the place.
If I manufacture locks, and and put in a glitch so that it will unlock if you shake/tap it a certain way, then I'm not making a lock, I'm making a device 'similar to a lock'.
Have you ever unlocked a locked door from the inside?
Usually involves removing two phillips-head screws and pulling the lock mechanism out.
Booting a computer from a thumb drive is like unlocking a locked door from the inside.
A company can't appease all needs and wants of every consumer in a single product line.
That's all the more true of they don't provide a product that can be significantly customized anywhere except at the extreme high end of one of their product lines.
What tends to happen here on slashdot is that people who feel "left out" of the current offerings swarm to the threads to say how Apple has left out the majority opinion of "we want a tower".
Please refrain from putting words into my mouth. I have not said that this is a "majority opinion" nor even that a mid-range tower is the product that I'd like to see added. In fact I've pointed out twice now that this is not what I'm saying.
If you want to pick a fight with someone who is actually arguing the point that you want to argue against, go ahead.
My point is that the gap in the product line is real, and Apple would penetrate a sizable as-yet-untapped market if they filled it. Whether that gap should be filled by the device you're talking about, or whether that is a "majority" market or just a large one... I'm not going there.
People are making it sound like Apple are shooting themselves in the foot and losing huge market opportunities, but the numbers just don't support that notion.
I haven't seen any numbers that even address this point. There's not even a suggestion of anything even vaguely like a controlled study as to the relative popularity of comparable all-in-one vs headless Macs running OS X. There can't be, because Apple hasn't had comparable products since before even OS 9 was shipped. Remember, the iMac first shipped with OS 8!
There are numbers indicating that apart from laptops all-in-one designs are currently unpopular in the market as a whole. About the only line of all-in-one desktops that's got any traction at all are Macs. People buying Windows-based boxes don't generally buy all-in-ones. People buying Macs have to buy all-in-ones.
Would Apple's market share be higher if they sold a conventional desktop? I believe so, obviously, though the fact is that I can only point to indirect numbers showing that. On the other hand, you can't point to any numbers indicating I'm wrong, because there simply are no relevant numbers for Macs running OS X.
The figures suggest that for Windows users the demand for all-in-one desktops is minuscule. For OS X users, as I noted, there's no comparable all-in-one desktop to compare against, so really all they show is that OS X on Intel is very popular. That's interesting, and for some viewers (particularly the Apple fanatics: a lot of the pro-Apple camp argued that this would be a stupid idea right up to the time Jobs announced it, and many anti-Apple fanatics kept that argument up long after the market showed otherwise) even surprising, but it's almost completely independent of the hardware line up.
So while it's possible that there is some fundamental difference between OS X users and Windows users (and I would be interested to read your arguments for this point), I find it hard to believe that Apple wouldn't sell more Macs and make more profit if they sold a "Mini Pro" (the beefed up Mini) or a "Mac Semi-pro" (the mid-range tower you're discussing).
One final note: the arguments against filling this gap right now are the same ones that were arrayed against the Mini itself right up to the time Jobs announced it. Apple sold a boatload of Minis, to a lot of people who never considered a Mac before, and it's been a real success. You've got your finger on the pulse of conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom isn't always right. Think about that.
I don't know whether they dropped the books on the cable, on another cable that tugged on the power cable, or missed the cable altogether. As I said, I didn't notice at the time that it had happened, or I would have plugged it back in. When I returned to my desk my laptop had shut down to save power, and there was nobody else in the office at the time.
I have also had the magsafe connector pull away under trivial tension many times. I have never had any problem with any other power connector on any other laptop, either mine or any of the users I supported at ABB over the past 20 years. Nor have I had a power connector pull a laptop off a desk... video cables, yes, SCSI cables, yes, serial or parallel cables, yes, but those are all screwed in or clamped on. The magsafe connector may be an advance over the funky connector on the Powerbooks and iBooks, but a plain barrel connector is much simpler and more reliable.
Apple's definition of quality seems to be "it looks cool and costs more", not "it works better".
By "quality hardware", I'm sure that we would mean something more important than that.
Indeed. My Thinkpad had my Macbook Pro beat to hell in the quality of the hardware. It was more solidly built, had a far superior keyboard, and came with a mini dock (port extender) so I could just bring it in to work in the morning and set it down and go straight to work... no fumbling around for cables or having the stupid "magsafe" connector come out without my noticing it when someone drops a pile of books on my desk...
And I didn't have to go cap-in-hand to the genius bar to replace the hard drive or void my warranty. And it didn't overheat to the point that I had to pull the battery pack out to cool it down when I was doing something CPU-intensive.
And to my eyes it even looked better, the way a stealth fighter looks better than an Airstream caravan.
Apple's hardware is pretty, but there's more to quality than expensive clothes and heavy makeup.
If a company COULD make a geek-a-liciously delicious mid-range tower with the great looks of an Apple product, it would have been done already.
I'm sorry, I really don't understand what the HELL you mean by this.
(a) I'm not asking for a "mid-range tower". My original comment was that a mid-range tower is one of several possible solutions that would satisfy my requirements.
(b) How exactly do you imagine that Apple would be somehow incapable of making a plain old desktop Mac. They've done it before. They've even done one under Jobs.. they just screwed up by making the cube a middle-of-the-road desktop in capability but charged high end workstation prices for it.
(c) There are fewer engineering tradeoffs required for this product than anything else they make. It doesn't jave the size limitations of the mini or a laptop. It doesn't have the layout and size limitations of an iMac or a laptop. It doesn't have the noise problems of the Mac Pro or the head problems of the mini and the high-end laptops and the Pro.
(d) BMW does make an economy car. It's called (with no intention of irony... they bought an economy car company that made it already) the "mini". Unlike the BMW mini, which is actually a car (seats, trunk, options) the Mac mini is more like a BMW motorbike... it costs as much as a desktop, but drives like a settop.
(e) Who said anything about "low end"? Low end is around $300 these days. I'm sure Apple would charge a minimum of $800 for a "Mini pro" or over $1000 for a "Mini Tower". It's not the low end customers who are looking for this, it's everyone up to the edge of the professional workstation market. The entry level for Macs that fit the job we're talking about start at two grand.
But most of all, the idea that they couldn't make one is just bizarre. Seriously. What the hell does "if a company COULD make" it mean?
Actually, the UNIX security model is quite finely grained when used as designed.
The problem is that it was designed with these assumptions:
1. Access to resources is controlled by access to files in the file system.
2. Access to resources is associated with user ID and group membership.
3. Privilege elevation is always managed by gateway applications running with appropriate user and group ID.
That is, if you want to limit access to a serial port to people who need to dial out, you put the serial port in the group "dialer" and the dialout software setgid "dialer", and let it limit access appropriately.
Some programs did the right thing, some didn't, but it was Berkeley Sockets that smashed it good an proper. The right thing to do would have been something like this: make "bind()" take an open file as an argument, and make the special file "/dev/sockets/25" owned by group "mail", then run the mail listener setgid "mail". It would open "/dev/sockets/25", pass that to bind, and have an open listener on the SMTP port without having to run as root.
Unfortunately, instead of that, you had to be root to open sockets in the reserved range. And the floodgates were open.
Most consumers simply don't need or want what you want.
First, I distinguished between "need" and "want". The desires you chose to ridicule were not in the "needs". You didn't ask what our "needs" were, you asked what we would do with expandability. If you asked "what do you need expandability for" you'd get a different answer.
So once you eliminate that straw man, what I need is an adequate GPU, an adequate hard drive, and no integrated display... and a consumer price. Maybe 40% over what Psystar is asking for their box? That would give Apple their usual markup.
The argument that "most consumers don't need" those features is a bit circular, since they're not available from Apple and haven't been available from Apple at a consumer price since Steve Jobs took over. On the other hand, they *are* available from Wintel box shippers, and most consumers are still buying Wintel boxes.
Don't assume you know all the reasons why they do that. I know I'm regularly surprised by people's answers to why they still use Windows after they express desire for my desktop.
And do consider that you'll never find out if you just ask Mac users, because that's a sample that's pre-selected to only include people for whom the current line of Macs is at least minimally acceptable.
Out of curiosity, what exactly would you put in those PCI slots if Apple made such a consumer machine?
What I would want to put in it would depend on what it starts with. Since I don't expect them to build my ideal machine, I just want to be able to make something that's got what I need without having to pay 3 times as much as I can afford for a bunch of stuff I don't need.
If it had intel integrated video, I'd definitely need a video card.
I need at least one 3.5" drive bay.
I'd want two 3.5" drive bays, so I can run RAID-1 internal.
I want to be able to upgrade the internal CDROM.
It would be nice to be able to add eSATA... it's got less latency than Firewire. That's not a requirement but it's something I'd be likely to add if it was an option.
Adequate cooling is a must. That's a big drawback on the mini.
What I *don't* need: I don't need the Mac Pro's 8 cores. Two cores is plenty. Two cores socketed so I could upgrade to four later on would be more than ample.
What I don't even want: integrated display. I have a perfectly good display already... and a KVM.
Alternatives that would make my happy: a "Mini pro" with two 3.5" drive bays and a decent GPU, or an "iSwitch", an iMac with an internal KVM so I can toggle between it and my wintendo, or maybe a networked window system that virtualized OpenGL ove the network so I could get decent video performance over the network from the Mac. Screen scrapers like VNC and RDP need not apply.
If Apple charged twice the price for it I'd buy one from Apple.
Using SMCFanControl I have the fans set to come on at the lowest possible temperature, and rev up to speed as quickly as possible, and it's not enough. This is a known but unacknowledged problem with the first generations of Macbook Pros.
The problem is you don't seem to understand the key to good design: Don't bloat-up on features.
:(
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Apple goes too far.
The Macbook pro already has a removable battery and a separate mmory compartment, so I have no idea why you brought them up except perhaps as a stupid debating trick. A user removable hard drive, yes. Upgradable video card? In a laptop? Only if the standard GPU is inadequate, and that's not the case for the Macbook Pro.
The reason for this is because each feature added takes something else away.
Sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes adding a feature doesn't mean shortchanging anything, anywhere else. Sometimes what it's taking away is itself a problem... making the case larger to provide room for a hard drive door would give them room to put in a better keyboard, and room to improve the cooling.
Same with the Mac Mini. They cut features too far to make it so small.
In fact, the "make it ludicrously small" feature is one they need to back away from.
having to remove the battery to prevent overheating sounds like a defect to me
Overheating is a defect in all the first generation Macbook Pros, one that Apple denies exists. It's also a reason for the battery warping problems that us Macbook Pro Pioneers had to deal with: Apple's willing to replace the battery pack, but they've yet to do anything about the cooling problem.
As for the keyboards... my RSI is not "subjective".
The keys are flat, not bevelled. The keys are not solidly seated... they float, making it feel imprecise. The action is both too soft and too hard, with very little "padding" effect.
The external keyboard I bought appears to have been sourced from the same company as makes teh Thinkpad keyboards. It's excellent. But it does make a poor impression when I have to pull it out at a customer's site or risk aggravating my RSI.
Yeh, I got that, I wasn't aware that was a distinction that made any difference in this case. Particularly since it's the premium product that's got the worse user experience.
My point was that (a) Applecare isn't always "all that", and (b) Apple's hardware isn't "all that".
If they could send me a drive I could replace at my leisure, or if they could actually replace the drive at the Apple store without making me wait, I'd have been a lot happier.
Oh, I wasn't defending UAC at all. I think that UAC is fundamentally stupid, I'm just saying that this wasn't an example of UAC itself being stupid, just of Microsoft being lazy about how they dealt with a problem caused indirectly by UAC.
Much as I like seeing Microsoft humbled, the comments on the original article seem to exonerate Microsoft of being as stupid as the article makes them sound. Lazy, perhaps, but not that stupid.
Or is replacing-the-internal-drive just pretty much the same as plugging-in-an-external-drive ?
Pretty much, except that plugging in an external drive makes a laptop more like a desktop (even if it's firewire powered, unless you decide to get creative with electrical tape), and replacing the hard drive in a Thinkpad T23 isn't much harder than plugging in an external drive. Certainly easier and more convenient than carrying an external drive around for a week.
My Macbook Pro hard drive is not trivially user replacable and replacing it would void my warranty. Has there been a design change since the original MBP or does that only apply to Macbooks?
Google says the latter.
Replacing the hard drive to keep a Thinkpad working while waiting for the replacement doesn't void the warranty.
I have to think that either you were under Apple Care and didn't want to pay for the drive
Well, doh.
Getting a new laptop without a long term warranty or support contract is daft.
If you were down for a week
Where did I say I was down for a week? I used an external drive while I was waiting, rather than risk screwing up my warranty.
With a thinkpad that wouldn't be an issue.