*if* these machines are true, i would expect them to roughly follow the current prices. maybe the top of the line custom workhorse will jump up to a higher bracket, but in general i bet they start at the same place. i don't know about all the components, but what i have read about the PPC970 chips is that they actually cost a lot less than the G4s (as well as use less power and consume less energy). If the last statement is true, it makes you wonder how loing the G4s will be around for anything but upgrades to existing machines (seems the 970 will not work with current motherbopards).
macs *usually* fall into a pricing structure and somewhat stay the same after updates. it's not like these (if they are real) will be stacked on top of the current machine's prices and start at $4,000..... the G4 some poor citizen buys today will be dropped in price by hundreds of dollars monday if these show up. sometimes they sort of shift up and down a step according to conditions of the market. For example, for a long time there has been an emac/imac right at or around $999. I guess this pricing method is what caused their price protection deal where if you buy a machine and the price officially drops in 2 or 4 weeks (depends on who you ask?) they will refund the change.
Is MacWorld or "create" or whatever still moving back to Boston? i got the impression that was up in the air when the former president of IDG (a Boston native) stepped down....... Being a Philly person, NYC can be a day trip... Boston is a hike.
also Apple WILL be at MWNYC this year, just no Steve Jobs keynote.... today IDG announced.Greg Joswiak, vice president of hardware product marketing at Apple(R), will deliver the opening feature presentation at Macworld CreativePro Conference & Expo(TM). Joswiak will address Macworld CreativePro's audience of creative professionals on Wednesday, July 16 at 9:30 a.m. ET
Not the same as Steve Jobs i guess, but it sounds like he will probably be repeating a lot of what happens next week.... but tuned down to consumer-speak. The NYC conference is being geared more towards consumers and creative people. Kind of makes sense since it's just a month after WWDC. Since theya re targetting the creative Mac users, it seems like all the more reason to keep the East Coast Expo in NYC instead of the northmost edge of the megalopolis.
but you can't watch that while in motion..... satellite takes a while to dial in when you are still.... how are you supposed to watch the tv you have propped up on your dashboard?!?!
actually it's not unusual for larger indie distros to attach a barcode to a label's releases that don't have them. they will usually charge the label some fee (like maybe 25Â/CD) to stick some sort of barcode on it..... it's possible CD Baby will attach a barcode to it. I am assuming Apple wants a unique ID for each album, and that bar code # is also how they would report their sales to Soundscan.
it seems CD Baby does the flat rate and will assign you a code that you can use for the release anywhere.... CD pressing plants will do the same thing, and for a small label that is WAY cheaper than officially registering with the UPC people and going through all that stuff.....
some people bought the Apple ][e and ][ GS monitors for their Apple ][c, they didnt pop up on that little ET looking stand, but they totally worked. They would have matched too i guess? the Apple ][gs had more of a white case than the beige ][e and ][+. My school had one hooked up to a 19" TV so the whole room could see you could use Logo in color....
For the record my Apple ][e has the 12" monochrome, which might explain why i still make my telnet windows green and black. Personally, i spent countless hours playing on my 2400 baud modem or battling my brother on Spy vs Spy or Beach Head or Castle Wolfenstein or Choplifter. Life was better with the Mach 2 or Mach 3 joystick.
i guess i show my age when i refer to a Mac's "command key" as the "open apple" key?
it's kind of odd that the 15" has not been updated to match the other G4 powerbooks, seeing how the other books have been out for months now. i wonder how true that assumption is about massive backstock of 15" powerbooks. Apple rarely has more than a few weeks worth of stock. they give these figures in their quarterly earnings reports. there is no way they had 6 months worth of 15" powerbooks sitting on the shelves. i think there are a few obvious possibilities:
either they are waiting to leapfrog the 12" and 17" models and *possibly* require features in the next OS revision.
OR they want to keep the 15" as is for the OS 9 users (graphic designers needing Quark), till everyone is ready for OS X only.
OR Steve Jobs is just silly and you'll never figure him out.
that's true... i *thought* it was 30 days, but i just found this:
Should Apple reduce its price on any shipped product within 10 calendar days of shipment, you may contact Apple Sales Support at 1-800-676-2775 to request a refund or credit of the difference between the price you were charged and the current selling price. To receive the refund or credit you must contact Apple within 14 business days of shipment
i found that right here under the "Prices" section. i am 99% sure i heard 30 days too, but i don't know where i saw that.
IE/Mac and IE for windows have always been completely separate products.
I guess that's why web pages don't look the same in IE for Mac as they do in IE for windows. Makes working on web pages a nightmare (assuming you care what the M$ Windows people see).
I am pretty sure the restriction was with having the rights to international distribution worked out yet. Either on the Apple site or in the press release it states that they are working that out. Since the technology should be the same, i am guessing it's a legal issue. Odds are they will not have international rights to EVERYTHING in the catalog, so they will have to modify the store to display songs by the user's location. Maybe they will get past it, but in general stores/distros are restricted to certain territories.
There are DRM protections on the songs, but the Apple version is more laid back than anyone elses.... off the top of my head you can upload the songs to an unlimited number of iPods, 3 computers AT A TIME (you can switch that too), you can burn unlimited audio CDs "for personal use". Burning to audio CD strips off the DRM.
if you only have the songs on one machine and the machine burned up... i don't know how that works out. I guess like anything else you just have to back it up. It might not sound ideal, but if somebody breaks into your car and steals your CDs (or your house burns down) i don't think Old Man Geffen will ship you replacements for free.
well if you read the articles you will see that Apple's music store sold more songs in a week than the others have in months. Ignore the little Apple icon if you must and see it as *somebody* has possibly finally figured out a way to sell music downloads that people like. The question is how will the sales be in a few months. The Apple policy is a lot more reasonable than anyone else. None of the other services let you put the songs on a portable MP3 player, let alone burning it to an audio CD (which strips the DRM).
i have read that bluetooth is not able to handle the bandwith of a stereo audio signal with quality that would come close to your wired headphones. Let alone the issue of battery power.
Bluetooth cellphone headsets require MUCH less data than music, plus they work in other power saving tricks like intermittent broadcasting.
as attractive as wireless headphones seem, dealing with the battery recharge seems so damn annoying.
The playback systems will be married to relatively inexpensive digital projectors, because the smaller size of its screens requires less illumination to project an image of acceptable resolution.
"acceptable resolution"... ack! That article makes it sound far less sexy from the hardware side. If they are shooting for a cost effective way to distribute independent films, then good for them. Again using existing technology and relatively common digital projectors in art-house sized screens seems sensible. With so many indie film makers shooting on digital (for money and simplicity of editing reasons if nothing else) this makes a lot of sense. To shoot a film on digital, edit it digitally and then print it to 35mm is kind of silly. Yes, i am simplifying the whole thing, but when budgets are so tight, this can save the day and get more movies to the theaters instead of straight to DVD (or IFC). All that being said, this is a far cry from the next Star Wars being shown on one of these systems.
i agree... i would think DRM is a top priority to Hollywood sending out digital copies of movies.
No matter what they try I am sure somebody will still have some better way to pirate this than the old "camcorder under trenchcoat" method... but who knows. Remember at one point they were exploring streaming the movies over satellites or something? Some wayt he Theaters didnt really house the movies? I also read they wanted to use satellites for distribution so they would not have to be sent out in advance and rely on FedEx or whatever.
As long as M$ can give them an acceptable quality level, they will surely win for now...... unless somebody comes out with a tighter DRM format. I guess there is no reason there can not be a totally new format or format derivitative for theaters..... it's not like those film projectors are a huge mass selling market either.
Re:If you are not old enough (or American enough).
on
Digital Celebrities
·
· Score: 1
no shit? i had no idea.
If you are not old enough (or American enough)...
on
Digital Celebrities
·
· Score: 1
... to remember Max Headroom you can catch the 80's TV show on TechTV late at night. Set the Tivo/VCR if you are one of those sleeping persons.
In short Max Headroom was a computerized head that spoke to you from a TV (played by Matt Frewer, later on Psi Factor). I guess the Max Headroom charcter started either as a spokesperson for Coke or a MTV thing. I didn't have cable TV back then so i don't remember where he started. Eventually they created a TV show around him.
big price drop on the LCDs, but the towers are upgraded. being the first or among the first machines to ship with Firewire800, 802.11g ready/equipped. it also says blutooth-enabled and bluetooth ready somewhere else, i don't know what the means exactley but.... hrmm... it seems in the stoe the top of the line BTO is Bluetooth included and the others are "ready". i dont know if it's the same little usb nub or some slick integration, but overall the upgrades and price drops are nice.
SHHH! it's not dead, it's just behind the scenes waiting for the right time to spring out again. We could debate why the cube died for days, as well as the cool things about it (powerful and small).... but that's been done to death here before.
as a side note i liked them, but would not buy one persoanlly as my sole machine.
how does this compare to those? Is it not the same compression? A friend had one, and i kind of remember the angle being that you bought a movie for, say $3, and could watch it a lot for maybe 2 weeks, then the player locked it out unless you got an access code to "buy" the movie. The player hooked to a phone line and would charge your account i guess. I remember rental stores having the media, but i guess it never did too well. I remember the concept and business model (sort of) but not the technology inside it. anyone?
Steve Jobs declared "the CRT dead" at MacWorld SF 2002. Besides the little eMac thing and them still selling the old CRT iMac , Apple stopped selling stand alone CRTs over a year ago. I am guessing Apple was not finding profit in them anymore either. Yes, they were more expensive than some other monitors, but they were very high quality and designers need that. They had a really nice high end graphic design quality 20" (or was it 21 or 22?) CRT that had a built in calibration button and was top notch all around. I still see a fair amount of them in places, they used the Sony tubes so it could not have eaten up as much money to make them as some other things.... ***COUGH*** cube ***COUGH****
In the next year or less i predict Sony will have a slick 17" laptop, then Gateway will follow and totally screw it up.
There was a time when Mac OS installs put IE and Netscape both on the machine. There is no reason they can not include Safari and something else. Honestly until Safari reaches full speed, i think they have to include something else.
Personally i do not like IE, and never did. After reading this article on slashdot about how IE cheats i see no need to ever use it. I can not wait till AOL totally dumps it and wed designers have to return to standards.
Even if i wanted to make a website totally IE happy, IE on Macs do not draw like IE does on a PC, and not having access to a PC leaves me no way to cater to the browsers quirks.
i have to agree..... who would pay $500+ to watch.mpg files on a screen as big as their watch? *maybe* if it had a video out port and you could dump your iMovie onto your ipod, and from there play back on any TV? i do not know how many people would want it, but it would be kind of cool. I would find that way more valuable than a portable MP3player/digital picture frame. If it is a tiny screen, then it is not that much better than a cell phone or color PDA with a photo album. Do you need 20 gigs of photos to display on a 2.5inch screen? That's a LOT of pr0n. A bigger color LCD just makes the whole unit that much more fragile. Knowing what i do to my minidisc player(s) is what has kept me from buying an iPod so far in its somewhat durable form.
It seems a lot fo MP3 players with radios have the radio stuff contained in the remote (like the creative MP3 player does). If Apple saw radio as a need i would think it would have been added to the current remote, or wait for the next big changeup in features/design.
i wonder if we will ever see an iPod-like thing that can record? i guess it would be a mess to make a pretty interface and would require an iApp to download and edit your recordings....
1) the "windtunnel" or "cheesegrater" machines i have molested do not seem to make a lot of noise. Either they have respec'd fans or are just happier.
2) there are not really a lot of quicksilvers around. a friend of mine just bought a dual 867MGHz G4 because they needed one. They pondered saving some cash and getting a quicksilver, but there are not really *that* many around, and the deals on them are not all that great. That was searching online. I am sure some stores here and there still have them, but i have not seen them.
i agree 100% with you. Moto does not seem to be making the chips like they should. The rumors of the pending IBM 970 chip (rollout in 2nd half of 2003) are not going to help G4 tower sales for the next 6 months. I would think there will be at least 1 G4 tower revision between today and July. It may be next week, or in the following weeks/months. I think the people buying G4 towers now are people that NEED them. people that are thinking of upgrading, like me, are waiting or pondering the upgrade kits.
i could pay $1600 for a dual 867MGhz (or students can still get a single 867MGhz for about $1300 from the edu store) or pay $450 for a 800MGHZ upgrade card from Sonnet. Since the DDR doesnt seem to be benchmarking too much better, upgrading the processor on my G4 400MGhzAGP really seems like a reasonable hold over for the next year. Even if the 970 chips only end up in Xserve or something, the G4 towers should have the motherboards tweaked by then.
Slashdot Mirror
*if* these machines are true, i would expect them to roughly follow the current prices. maybe the top of the line custom workhorse will jump up to a higher bracket, but in general i bet they start at the same place. i don't know about all the components, but what i have read about the PPC970 chips is that they actually cost a lot less than the G4s (as well as use less power and consume less energy). If the last statement is true, it makes you wonder how loing the G4s will be around for anything but upgrades to existing machines (seems the 970 will not work with current motherbopards).
macs *usually* fall into a pricing structure and somewhat stay the same after updates. it's not like these (if they are real) will be stacked on top of the current machine's prices and start at $4,000..... the G4 some poor citizen buys today will be dropped in price by hundreds of dollars monday if these show up. sometimes they sort of shift up and down a step according to conditions of the market. For example, for a long time there has been an emac/imac right at or around $999. I guess this pricing method is what caused their price protection deal where if you buy a machine and the price officially drops in 2 or 4 weeks (depends on who you ask?) they will refund the change.
also Apple WILL be at MWNYC this year, just no Steve Jobs keynote.... today IDG announced
Not the same as Steve Jobs i guess, but it sounds like he will probably be repeating a lot of what happens next week.... but tuned down to consumer-speak. The NYC conference is being geared more towards consumers and creative people. Kind of makes sense since it's just a month after WWDC. Since theya re targetting the creative Mac users, it seems like all the more reason to keep the East Coast Expo in NYC instead of the northmost edge of the megalopolis.
internet = pr0n and spam
cable TV = animal planet and trading spaces.....
but you can't watch that while in motion..... satellite takes a while to dial in when you are still.... how are you supposed to watch the tv you have propped up on your dashboard?!?!
actually it's not unusual for larger indie distros to attach a barcode to a label's releases that don't have them. they will usually charge the label some fee (like maybe 25Â/CD) to stick some sort of barcode on it..... it's possible CD Baby will attach a barcode to it. I am assuming Apple wants a unique ID for each album, and that bar code # is also how they would report their sales to Soundscan.
it seems CD Baby does the flat rate and will assign you a code that you can use for the release anywhere.... CD pressing plants will do the same thing, and for a small label that is WAY cheaper than officially registering with the UPC people and going through all that stuff.....
some people bought the Apple ][e and ][ GS monitors for their Apple ][c, they didnt pop up on that little ET looking stand, but they totally worked. They would have matched too i guess? the Apple ][gs had more of a white case than the beige ][e and ][+. My school had one hooked up to a 19" TV so the whole room could see you could use Logo in color....
For the record my Apple ][e has the 12" monochrome, which might explain why i still make my telnet windows green and black. Personally, i spent countless hours playing on my 2400 baud modem or battling my brother on Spy vs Spy or Beach Head or Castle Wolfenstein or Choplifter. Life was better with the Mach 2 or Mach 3 joystick.
i guess i show my age when i refer to a Mac's "command key" as the "open apple" key?
it's kind of odd that the 15" has not been updated to match the other G4 powerbooks, seeing how the other books have been out for months now. i wonder how true that assumption is about massive backstock of 15" powerbooks. Apple rarely has more than a few weeks worth of stock. they give these figures in their quarterly earnings reports. there is no way they had 6 months worth of 15" powerbooks sitting on the shelves. i think there are a few obvious possibilities:
either they are waiting to leapfrog the 12" and 17" models and *possibly* require features in the next OS revision.
OR they want to keep the 15" as is for the OS 9 users (graphic designers needing Quark), till everyone is ready for OS X only.
OR Steve Jobs is just silly and you'll never figure him out.
i found that right here under the "Prices" section. i am 99% sure i heard 30 days too, but i don't know where i saw that.
I guess that's why web pages don't look the same in IE for Mac as they do in IE for windows. Makes working on web pages a nightmare (assuming you care what the M$ Windows people see).
I am pretty sure the restriction was with having the rights to international distribution worked out yet. Either on the Apple site or in the press release it states that they are working that out. Since the technology should be the same, i am guessing it's a legal issue. Odds are they will not have international rights to EVERYTHING in the catalog, so they will have to modify the store to display songs by the user's location. Maybe they will get past it, but in general stores/distros are restricted to certain territories.
There are DRM protections on the songs, but the Apple version is more laid back than anyone elses.... off the top of my head you can upload the songs to an unlimited number of iPods, 3 computers AT A TIME (you can switch that too), you can burn unlimited audio CDs "for personal use". Burning to audio CD strips off the DRM.
if you only have the songs on one machine and the machine burned up... i don't know how that works out. I guess like anything else you just have to back it up. It might not sound ideal, but if somebody breaks into your car and steals your CDs (or your house burns down) i don't think Old Man Geffen will ship you replacements for free.
well if you read the articles you will see that Apple's music store sold more songs in a week than the others have in months. Ignore the little Apple icon if you must and see it as *somebody* has possibly finally figured out a way to sell music downloads that people like. The question is how will the sales be in a few months. The Apple policy is a lot more reasonable than anyone else. None of the other services let you put the songs on a portable MP3 player, let alone burning it to an audio CD (which strips the DRM).
i have read that bluetooth is not able to handle the bandwith of a stereo audio signal with quality that would come close to your wired headphones. Let alone the issue of battery power.
Bluetooth cellphone headsets require MUCH less data than music, plus they work in other power saving tricks like intermittent broadcasting.
as attractive as wireless headphones seem, dealing with the battery recharge seems so damn annoying.
"acceptable resolution"
That article makes it sound far less sexy from the hardware side. If they are shooting for a cost effective way to distribute independent films, then good for them. Again using existing technology and relatively common digital projectors in art-house sized screens seems sensible. With so many indie film makers shooting on digital (for money and simplicity of editing reasons if nothing else) this makes a lot of sense. To shoot a film on digital, edit it digitally and then print it to 35mm is kind of silly. Yes, i am simplifying the whole thing, but when budgets are so tight, this can save the day and get more movies to the theaters instead of straight to DVD (or IFC). All that being said, this is a far cry from the next Star Wars being shown on one of these systems.
i agree... i would think DRM is a top priority to Hollywood sending out digital copies of movies.
No matter what they try I am sure somebody will still have some better way to pirate this than the old "camcorder under trenchcoat" method... but who knows. Remember at one point they were exploring streaming the movies over satellites or something? Some wayt he Theaters didnt really house the movies? I also read they wanted to use satellites for distribution so they would not have to be sent out in advance and rely on FedEx or whatever.
As long as M$ can give them an acceptable quality level, they will surely win for now...... unless somebody comes out with a tighter DRM format. I guess there is no reason there can not be a totally new format or format derivitative for theaters..... it's not like those film projectors are a huge mass selling market either.
no shit? i had no idea.
... to remember Max Headroom you can catch the 80's TV show on TechTV late at night. Set the Tivo/VCR if you are one of those sleeping persons.
In short Max Headroom was a computerized head that spoke to you from a TV (played by Matt Frewer, later on Psi Factor). I guess the Max Headroom charcter started either as a spokesperson for Coke or a MTV thing. I didn't have cable TV back then so i don't remember where he started. Eventually they created a TV show around him.
big price drop on the LCDs, but the towers are upgraded. being the first or among the first machines to ship with Firewire800, 802.11g ready/equipped. it also says blutooth-enabled and bluetooth ready somewhere else, i don't know what the means exactley but .... hrmm... it seems in the stoe the top of the line BTO is Bluetooth included and the others are "ready". i dont know if it's the same little usb nub or some slick integration, but overall the upgrades and price drops are nice.
SHHH! it's not dead, it's just behind the scenes waiting for the right time to spring out again. We could debate why the cube died for days, as well as the cool things about it (powerful and small).... but that's been done to death here before.
as a side note i liked them, but would not buy one persoanlly as my sole machine.
how does this compare to those? Is it not the same compression? A friend had one, and i kind of remember the angle being that you bought a movie for, say $3, and could watch it a lot for maybe 2 weeks, then the player locked it out unless you got an access code to "buy" the movie. The player hooked to a phone line and would charge your account i guess. I remember rental stores having the media, but i guess it never did too well. I remember the concept and business model (sort of) but not the technology inside it. anyone?
Steve Jobs declared "the CRT dead" at MacWorld SF 2002. Besides the little eMac thing and them still selling the old CRT iMac , Apple stopped selling stand alone CRTs over a year ago. I am guessing Apple was not finding profit in them anymore either. Yes, they were more expensive than some other monitors, but they were very high quality and designers need that. They had a really nice high end graphic design quality 20" (or was it 21 or 22?) CRT that had a built in calibration button and was top notch all around. I still see a fair amount of them in places, they used the Sony tubes so it could not have eaten up as much money to make them as some other things.... ***COUGH*** cube ***COUGH****
In the next year or less i predict Sony will have a slick 17" laptop, then Gateway will follow and totally screw it up.
There was a time when Mac OS installs put IE and Netscape both on the machine. There is no reason they can not include Safari and something else. Honestly until Safari reaches full speed, i think they have to include something else.
Personally i do not like IE, and never did. After reading this article on slashdot about how IE cheats i see no need to ever use it. I can not wait till AOL totally dumps it and wed designers have to return to standards.
Even if i wanted to make a website totally IE happy, IE on Macs do not draw like IE does on a PC, and not having access to a PC leaves me no way to cater to the browsers quirks.
i have to agree..... who would pay $500+ to watch .mpg files on a screen as big as their watch? *maybe* if it had a video out port and you could dump your iMovie onto your ipod, and from there play back on any TV? i do not know how many people would want it, but it would be kind of cool. I would find that way more valuable than a portable MP3player/digital picture frame. If it is a tiny screen, then it is not that much better than a cell phone or color PDA with a photo album. Do you need 20 gigs of photos to display on a 2.5inch screen? That's a LOT of pr0n. A bigger color LCD just makes the whole unit that much more fragile. Knowing what i do to my minidisc player(s) is what has kept me from buying an iPod so far in its somewhat durable form.
It seems a lot fo MP3 players with radios have the radio stuff contained in the remote (like the creative MP3 player does). If Apple saw radio as a need i would think it would have been added to the current remote, or wait for the next big changeup in features/design.
i wonder if we will ever see an iPod-like thing that can record? i guess it would be a mess to make a pretty interface and would require an iApp to download and edit your recordings....
yes, i respond to my own posts.....
2 things about current G4s.....
1) the "windtunnel" or "cheesegrater" machines i have molested do not seem to make a lot of noise. Either they have respec'd fans or are just happier.
2) there are not really a lot of quicksilvers around. a friend of mine just bought a dual 867MGHz G4 because they needed one. They pondered saving some cash and getting a quicksilver, but there are not really *that* many around, and the deals on them are not all that great. That was searching online. I am sure some stores here and there still have them, but i have not seen them.
i agree 100% with you. Moto does not seem to be making the chips like they should. The rumors of the pending IBM 970 chip (rollout in 2nd half of 2003) are not going to help G4 tower sales for the next 6 months. I would think there will be at least 1 G4 tower revision between today and July. It may be next week, or in the following weeks/months. I think the people buying G4 towers now are people that NEED them. people that are thinking of upgrading, like me, are waiting or pondering the upgrade kits.
i could pay $1600 for a dual 867MGhz (or students can still get a single 867MGhz for about $1300 from the edu store) or pay $450 for a 800MGHZ upgrade card from Sonnet. Since the DDR doesnt seem to be benchmarking too much better, upgrading the processor on my G4 400MGhzAGP really seems like a reasonable hold over for the next year. Even if the 970 chips only end up in Xserve or something, the G4 towers should have the motherboards tweaked by then.