With Apple's buying power, they could have any cpu they wanted. If they've chosen this one, it's because they think it will bring them more money
I fixed that for you.
If anything, Apple has avoided playing the features game, sticking with a dual-core architecture rather than the sexy-sounding quad core.
64 bit is even less useful than quad core on a phone with 1-2GB RAM.
It's all about marketing. That's why Apple released a phone with a "quad core" GPU (whatever this means), to confuse people right after Android quad core CPU phones were out. Before that, nobody ever marketed the number of "cores" in a GPU. Just like nobody ever marketed pixel density on a phone before the iPhone 4. Android phones all had higher pixel density than iPhones before the release of the iPhone 4. They also took the crown back right after with the release of 1280x720 phones. Apple also stopped announcing RAM in their phones since they ship with half of what the competition have.
Apple pushes marketing a lot. They brag about their firsts, whether they mater or not is something else. Not that their products are bad, but you seem to trust them a little too much.
It's pretty unlikely that Apple would go to the expense of transitioning to a 64 bit architecture unless it gave them a meaningful performance benefit.
You underestimate the power of the marketing department. They needed to be first at something. They know their CPU isn't the fastest out there so at least they can say they have the only 64 bit mobile CPU.
A 64 bit processor do not magically processes information in larger chunks. You need to actually use 64 bit data for it to be usefull. Every time you use an integer smaller than 2^32 (4 billion something), you do not benefit from 64 bit. I can't think of a single application in the App Store which will benefit from 64 bit. The "dramatic" speed increase come from a better architecture, more registers, and probably a higher clock speed. A 2x increase is not uncommon from one generation of phone to another. Especially since the iPhone 5 CPU lagged behind the competition. It only means the CPU speed will now be on par with the Nexus 4.
Androids have more cores. Razors have more blades. Apple needed more bits only for marketing.
Re:The OS is good, but the hardware pushes me away
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Inside OS X Mavericks
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· Score: 1
The Mac mini is very expensive for what it contains. If you are going to add 2-3 external thunderbolt exclosure to get similar functionality to a standard PC (video card, a few hard drives, optical drive), it just get ridiculous.
I bought a 3.1 GHz Core i5 (quad core) with 16GB RAM last year. I have 3 hard drives + SSD + DVD, and a discrete video card. How much is the equivalent Mac mini?
Agreed. That's why I still run DOS on my 386 PC. Same level of performance than the fastest Core i7 out there running Windows. Having more RAM and a faster CPU would allow me to write this message in a non-text browser but who cares, as long as I get the same level of performance.
One can do a RAID 1 -alike approach by simply having a single inexpensive external drive that you make into an exact bootable copy of your internal drive. This works well for those with laptops or even some small PC's or AIW's. It doesn't really seem to make things excessively messy for most people.
This completely misses the whole point of RAID 1, which is to always have two copies of your files, even the most recent ones. Why risk a hard drive failure when you can add a second hard drive for $75? Having to manually do backups suck. Most people end up not doing it, or not very often, especially if it's on a removable/external storage because it's not always available. Of course having RAID1+backups is better. But if I had to choose between backups on external hard drives done once a month or RAID1, I'd go with the later.
But I also have a single USB3 drive that I have as a bootable mirror of my main system so I don't lose down time.
Sounds like you would be better with real RAID1. How many wires do you connect to your laptop? Of course most laptops can't hold two hard drives, so if you need a laptop this is a no-go. But it's often much cheaper to buy a powerful desktop with SSD, two hard drives, optical drive and a cheap laptop for occasionnal travelling than buying a single not so powerful laptop with a thunderbolt port and external raid array. If you are going to have a box sitting next to your monitor (or under your desk) to hold hard drives, it better hold a full PC at the same time. It will be much more expendable. The worse scenario is having an iMac and an external thunderbolt 2-4 HDD array. There you instantly sees the Mac premium.
I have even seen external 3-4 drive 2.5" arrays that didn't require external power I believe
And unless you need speed and are putting SSDs inside, they all suck. 2.5" hard drives are too expensive for their capacity and are slower. They can be usefull for a small USB hard drive without external power that you carry with you and can plug on any PC. But they suck for 3-4 drives RAID enclosures.
When I was in college they had the good idea to buy iMacs (the old ones, with a CRT monitor). They also bought an expensive external USB floppy adapter for each of them, because it was still a common way for students to carry their files. Thanks Apple. Lack of choice always carry a price premium.
A lot of people want to have a SSD, a HDD and an optical drive in their PC. A lot of people would also benefit having two drives in RAID1 to avoid data loss. In a regular PC, it's very cheap to do. Just buy two 2TB hard drives and you are set. On a Mac, you need a Mac Pro, or an expensive external RAID enclosure, which will be expensive no matter if it's thunderbolt, USB or ethernet. You probably can have a 2.5" external hard drive powered using thunderbolt. But I am pretty sure that big 2-4 3.5" drives enclosure requires external power. It just makes your desk even messier. Unless you want to take it with you all the time, without carrying your PC, it should be internal. It's cheaper, cleaner, and often faster.
And this is an other premium. External thunderbolt arrays are very expensive. So is Apple's thunderbolt cable. It's also very ugly and requires external power. The whole point of a desktop is that you can fit all your devices inside that box.
If you pick Apple's cheapest laptop, and try to build an equivalent PC, you will find that the Mac premium is close to 0.
However go get that $500 laptop, and try to configure an equivalent Mac. It will be 3x the price, only because you will have to get a Macbook Pro to get a 15" display.
For most people, an high end laptop is $750-1000. Just before the beggining of Apple's cheapest laptop. The Mac premium is mostly a lack of choices other than ultra high end machines. Don't forget their cheapest desktop that can hold two hard drives and an optical drive is the Mac Pro. It doesn't mean that Apple do not have decently-priced options. It's that they don't have options which serve most people needs without paying that premium.
. I don't know any non-geek buying Windows PCs anymore. Everyone now wants a Mac desktop or laptop based upon superior usability.
Last time I checked Macs had about 10 or 15% market share worldwide. So either the world is 85-90% geek, or you need to get out of your basement more often.
It's a little more compex than that. Instead of 2 individuals there are 6 billions. And some of them would actually benefit from global warming to happen (let say those living in the far north and not close to the sea level). Some would loose but would loose even more if we tried to avoid global warming (oil companies).
But yes, game theory applies fully here and the "rational choice" is to cooperate to avoid too much global warming.
It is well known that sea levels have been going up and down throughout the ages. The question now is whether or not we are acelerating these variations and whether life can adapt to them fast enough.
Life isn't threatened by anthropogenic global warming. Even the human specie, as a whole, isn't threatened. There is also a scientific consensus on the fact that global warming is happening and that we are responsible for it.
The real question is whether the costs of reducing greenhouse gases emissions outweigh the costs of global warming. The answer is that it's globally cheaper to reduce greenhouse gases, however every single country or individual, by being selfish, has interest to let the others pay the bill.
The surface doesn't have particularly interesting hardware. 1.3 GHz Tegra 3 CPU with relatively low res display. It should have been $350 from the start.
They decide themselves. A proof of that is that they don't all have the same prices for a given device. And we don't even know the price they pay to Samsung or LG.
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With Apple's buying power, they could have any cpu they wanted. If they've chosen this one, it's because they think it will bring them more money
I fixed that for you.
If anything, Apple has avoided playing the features game, sticking with a dual-core architecture rather than the sexy-sounding quad core.
64 bit is even less useful than quad core on a phone with 1-2GB RAM.
It's all about marketing. That's why Apple released a phone with a "quad core" GPU (whatever this means), to confuse people right after Android quad core CPU phones were out. Before that, nobody ever marketed the number of "cores" in a GPU. Just like nobody ever marketed pixel density on a phone before the iPhone 4. Android phones all had higher pixel density than iPhones before the release of the iPhone 4. They also took the crown back right after with the release of 1280x720 phones. Apple also stopped announcing RAM in their phones since they ship with half of what the competition have.
Apple pushes marketing a lot. They brag about their firsts, whether they mater or not is something else. Not that their products are bad, but you seem to trust them a little too much.
It's pretty unlikely that Apple would go to the expense of transitioning to a 64 bit architecture unless it gave them a meaningful performance benefit.
You underestimate the power of the marketing department. They needed to be first at something.
They know their CPU isn't the fastest out there so at least they can say they have the only 64 bit mobile CPU.
except that the RAM in the iPhone is not upgradable.
A 64 bit processor do not magically processes information in larger chunks. You need to actually use 64 bit data for it to be usefull. Every time you use an integer smaller than 2^32 (4 billion something), you do not benefit from 64 bit.
I can't think of a single application in the App Store which will benefit from 64 bit.
The "dramatic" speed increase come from a better architecture, more registers, and probably a higher clock speed. A 2x increase is not uncommon from one generation of phone to another. Especially since the iPhone 5 CPU lagged behind the competition. It only means the CPU speed will now be on par with the Nexus 4.
Androids have more cores. Razors have more blades. Apple needed more bits only for marketing.
The Mac mini is very expensive for what it contains. If you are going to add 2-3 external thunderbolt exclosure to get similar functionality to a standard PC (video card, a few hard drives, optical drive), it just get ridiculous.
I bought a 3.1 GHz Core i5 (quad core) with 16GB RAM last year. I have 3 hard drives + SSD + DVD, and a discrete video card. How much is the equivalent Mac mini?
Agreed. That's why I still run DOS on my 386 PC. Same level of performance than the fastest Core i7 out there running Windows. Having more RAM and a faster CPU would allow me to write this message in a non-text browser but who cares, as long as I get the same level of performance.
even a Nexus 7 would have been a much better choice
One can do a RAID 1 -alike approach by simply having a single inexpensive external drive that you make into an exact bootable copy of your internal drive.
This works well for those with laptops or even some small PC's or AIW's. It doesn't really seem to make things excessively messy for most people.
This completely misses the whole point of RAID 1, which is to always have two copies of your files, even the most recent ones. Why risk a hard drive failure when you can add a second hard drive for $75?
Having to manually do backups suck. Most people end up not doing it, or not very often, especially if it's on a removable/external storage because it's not always available.
Of course having RAID1+backups is better. But if I had to choose between backups on external hard drives done once a month or RAID1, I'd go with the later.
But I also have a single USB3 drive that I have as a bootable mirror of my main system so I don't lose down time.
Sounds like you would be better with real RAID1. How many wires do you connect to your laptop?
Of course most laptops can't hold two hard drives, so if you need a laptop this is a no-go.
But it's often much cheaper to buy a powerful desktop with SSD, two hard drives, optical drive and a cheap laptop for occasionnal travelling than buying a single not so powerful laptop with a thunderbolt port and external raid array.
If you are going to have a box sitting next to your monitor (or under your desk) to hold hard drives, it better hold a full PC at the same time. It will be much more expendable.
The worse scenario is having an iMac and an external thunderbolt 2-4 HDD array. There you instantly sees the Mac premium.
I have even seen external 3-4 drive 2.5" arrays that didn't require external power I believe
And unless you need speed and are putting SSDs inside, they all suck. 2.5" hard drives are too expensive for their capacity and are slower. They can be usefull for a small USB hard drive without external power that you carry with you and can plug on any PC. But they suck for 3-4 drives RAID enclosures.
All 3 MBA users with this expensive adapter would agree with you.
When I was in college they had the good idea to buy iMacs (the old ones, with a CRT monitor). They also bought an expensive external USB floppy adapter for each of them, because it was still a common way for students to carry their files.
Thanks Apple. Lack of choice always carry a price premium.
A lot of people want to have a SSD, a HDD and an optical drive in their PC.
A lot of people would also benefit having two drives in RAID1 to avoid data loss. In a regular PC, it's very cheap to do. Just buy two 2TB hard drives and you are set.
On a Mac, you need a Mac Pro, or an expensive external RAID enclosure, which will be expensive no matter if it's thunderbolt, USB or ethernet.
You probably can have a 2.5" external hard drive powered using thunderbolt. But I am pretty sure that big 2-4 3.5" drives enclosure requires external power. It just makes your desk even messier.
Unless you want to take it with you all the time, without carrying your PC, it should be internal. It's cheaper, cleaner, and often faster.
And this is an other premium. External thunderbolt arrays are very expensive. So is Apple's thunderbolt cable.
It's also very ugly and requires external power. The whole point of a desktop is that you can fit all your devices inside that box.
My mailbox is something like 400m away.
If you pick Apple's cheapest laptop, and try to build an equivalent PC, you will find that the Mac premium is close to 0.
However go get that $500 laptop, and try to configure an equivalent Mac. It will be 3x the price, only because you will have to get a Macbook Pro to get a 15" display.
For most people, an high end laptop is $750-1000. Just before the beggining of Apple's cheapest laptop.
The Mac premium is mostly a lack of choices other than ultra high end machines. Don't forget their cheapest desktop that can hold two hard drives and an optical drive is the Mac Pro. It doesn't mean that Apple do not have decently-priced options. It's that they don't have options which serve most people needs without paying that premium.
About half of them, actually.
Still, many non-geeks work in these organizations and are behind the decision to purchase PCs over Macs.
. I don't know any non-geek buying Windows PCs anymore. Everyone now wants a Mac desktop or laptop based upon superior usability.
Last time I checked Macs had about 10 or 15% market share worldwide. So either the world is 85-90% geek, or you need to get out of your basement more often.
It's a little more compex than that. Instead of 2 individuals there are 6 billions. And some of them would actually benefit from global warming to happen (let say those living in the far north and not close to the sea level). Some would loose but would loose even more if we tried to avoid global warming (oil companies).
But yes, game theory applies fully here and the "rational choice" is to cooperate to avoid too much global warming.
It is well known that sea levels have been going up and down throughout the ages. The question now is whether or not we are acelerating these variations and whether life can adapt to them fast enough.
Life isn't threatened by anthropogenic global warming. Even the human specie, as a whole, isn't threatened. There is also a scientific consensus on the fact that global warming is happening and that we are responsible for it.
The real question is whether the costs of reducing greenhouse gases emissions outweigh the costs of global warming. The answer is that it's globally cheaper to reduce greenhouse gases, however every single country or individual, by being selfish, has interest to let the others pay the bill.
The surface doesn't have particularly interesting hardware. 1.3 GHz Tegra 3 CPU with relatively low res display. It should have been $350 from the start.
Wasn't fully sovereign until 1982. So there is more than political sovereignty in this map.
But what if a majority of the population supports Hitler?
The goal of Kyoto was not 5%, it was 7% below 1990 for the USA.
http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/3145.php
And the US is nowhere near that goal.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/images/ghgemissions/USCO2EmissionsTimeSeries.png
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the United States increased by about 10% between 1990 and 2011.
I hope one day we will get rid of all these closed, proprietary messaging protocols.
Too bad it's not for the good reason in this case.
They decide themselves. A proof of that is that they don't all have the same prices for a given device.
And we don't even know the price they pay to Samsung or LG.
AFAIK Samsung doesn't list MSRP for their canadian phones. So the carrier can effectively decide the "value".