That fact that you couldn't easily tell it apart from a genuine Apple-bashing post shows just how bad/. has become at over the top hate of the in-vogue "enemies" of late.
That sarcasm was so thick I was carving pieces of it off to spread on toast.
You realise *why* there were Mini Coopers in The Italian Job, right? That really wasn't product placement - they couldn't have been anything but Minis.
Well, unless you believe Michael Caine and co walked away with a big fat pay check from British Leyland all those years ago...
Before clicking on the link I suspected the parent post was total nonsense, but yes slashdot, to save your blushes I went and checked it out anyway.
I said "a fiver says this is either a rick roll or a goatse, the story comment just reeks of a teenage urban legend and he has a 7 digit UID that starts with a 2, there is no way this is legit"
So, if you like huge assholes or are a fan of prolapsed rectums, by all means click on the disguised link.
All computer manufacturers use a similar outsourced production method.
On the subject of Apple though, they pay higher wages per hour compared to everyone else (as in, the price Apple pays per hour worked by the sub contracted Chinese workers, that is passed onto them), and the rate of suicide in those plants (and I believe you're talking about the Foxconn plant, which is not an exclusively Apple construction factory - they make Dells, HPs, Xbox 360s, PS3s etc there also) is equal to or lower than the suicide rate in the general population.
Don't let any of that get in the way of a good Apple bash though.
I hear Fox News are hiring, btw. With your inability to look up facts, you're assured of the job.
Install the codecs you need in Quicktime and iTunes will play them (avi and mkv are containers, but quicktime supports them and the numerous different codecs that those containers can hold, and it also supports flac). Saying "iTunes won't support half the media I have, like mkv" is similar to saying "Yes, I have these carboard boxes" in answer to the question "what do you sell?" Unless you're actually a cardboard box maker, it doesn't really make sense.
I also use XBMC on the Mac, and it works well, especially on BBC iPlayer flash streams.
It actually *does* have a power source. The new displays all have magsafe connectors coming off them so you don't need to get the power brick for your laptop out of the bag when you're hooking up to the screen any more.
I agree the old connector was a disaster area - I have an old 15" PB that now runs Ubuntu, and if anything fails on it it will be the power connector that I have been excessively careful with, and it's still starting to "open out" a little and become loose.
That powerbook fell from my shoulder (in unpadded laptop bag) in a rental lot outside Tampa airport many years ago, landing on the rear right corner, giving it a clear visual distortion in the case but thankfully it works well to this day. I put that down to the strength of the case, since the logic board is in that corner, and it tapers to a very thin section due to the fan cut-out but does not seem to have been affected by the fall. It was in sleep mode at the time.
This is a review by PCMag - they test all manner of laptops, not just Apple ones. They're hardly the typical "Apple user", or are you just looking for some cheap flames?
Flame Apple users if you like, but don't put words in their mouths; this article was not written by one.
All of Apple's 3.5mm audio ports have optical connections via toslink (s/pdif) really. I use it all the time - all of my audio processing is done outside my iMac by the Yamaha amp, mainly because while it's not all that much better than normal analog sound out for iTunes (although it is better - the DAC in the amp is better than the one in the iMac, marginally), it does mean I can seamlessly switch to Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 sound when I watch DVDs or surround sources in XBMC/Apple DVD player. The amp detects the codec change and switches automatically.
Anyone setting up a HTPC is going to make use of connections like that.
As far as the audio in, the optical inputs take data direct from my MiniDisc deck, and even better for me they completely strip off the stupid Serial Copy Management System DRM that Sony put into their consumer MD products, allowing me to make digital copies of my MD collection for my iPod. I use SoundStudio (well worth the money for me) but things like Audacity work well too.
Making optical in and out standard on all their machines is just another one of the many things that I like about Apple's hardware.
I bought my mother that exact Fujitsu laptop - she wanted a Macbook Pro running Windows via bootcamp, but her job simply wouldn't allow it if they were putting up the funds, so I found a decent laptop that would last her as long as the MBP she really wanted to get.
Not all PC laptops are junk, I know, and she has been happy with the Amilo in the time she's had it. I dropped extra RAM into it this Christmas and it's still purring along nicely, but she looks after it.
If you trip on the MBP's power cord, it detaches from the laptop since it is held on magnetically and your laptop never falls on the floor in the first place.
I'm not sure that a "durability fight" between the MBP and the Thinkpad is really a worthy exercise - they are both excellent and rated consistently highly by people that use them.
hahahahahahahahahah. Oh wait, you were serious, let me laugh even harder HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
So a company that decides to dump *all* the legacy low speed ports on its new computers, replacing them *only* with USB ports at a time when USB was a mere curiosity and extremely poorly supported on PCs of the time (some motherboards had USB ports, but the software support was not there and everyone just used the PS/2, parallel and serial ports) - that's "fighting USB as long as it could". Right.
Sorry for any spelling errors, I'm laughing too hard, not only at the stupidity of your post but at the moderators who thought it was worth uprating.
Also, those people asking for Displayport adpaters are going to be disappointed - Apple does not use DP, only mini-DP. Everyone *I* have seen with an Apple laptop giving a presentation (and I spend the bulk of my time in a university environment) already has a mini-DP to VGA connector.
There are also many third party USB>Serial adapters. I was using one back in 1999 on a Media 100 system.
*Consumer* WiFi was an Apple thing - they took something that was only in enterprise at the time (because it was $$$$$$$) and made it a baseline feature on all their laptops and released a "cheap" WiFi hub - the igloo airport station that was around $300 - way, way less than anything in the PC arena at the time.
Man, I'm still laughing at "fought USB as long as it could". That's a good one.
Why would it? The iPhone wasn't marketed as a homebrew device - they give away all the developer tools for free (and the OS X dev side is utterly free - no fees for creating apps) and give away the iPhone SDK for free along with it on the condition that if you want to get into the store you need to pay all the associated maintenance costs ($99 per year).
The reason they don't enable the on-phone ability from the tools is to eliminate a path to apps from non-verified sources (ie, not through the store) since a developer could just release the source or and other people could install the dev tools and put it on their phone. Fine in most cases, but the first rogue app to make it onto phones that way would cause a sensation. "so much for app store security". Apple has been clear they don't want sideloading of apps and while the blocking of homebrew apps onto your own phone is a casualty of that (it's the only thing you can't do in the development chain for free), in the long run they obviously think it's only going to affect a small number of people - the genuine homebrew developers are going to be using Android handsets.
If you want to push an app onto the store though, or onto your own personal phone (with no app approval), then it is $99 per year.
This. Any company that wants to charge me for running something I've written on my phone is a company I'm wary of.
You don't write it "on your phone" though. You write it (and test it) using the totally free Dev tools, and if you're getting to the stage where you want to deploy it onto phones, then that's when the fee comes in - it's all rolled into the app store.
Perhaps they could have enabled the on-phone deployment (with no app store deployment) outside of the $99 dev fee, but it's almost immaterial, since the number of people wanting to write apps that they *only* run on their own phone vs writing apps they want to distribute is so small. For that market, a developer would be better served by Android.
Computer that I pay as little attention to as my fridge or microwave?
I know how a microwave works. I could even build you one. That doesn't mean I want to do so every time I want a new one in my kitchen. I just want to buy one that will work for me.
The benefit of OS X though, is that you can dig into the guts of it if you want (just as you can self repair the hardware), but by default it was designed without the need to do that.
You only have to pay the $99 if you want to publish your iOS app on the store - ie, all that hosting, distribution and payment processing.
The developer tools are *totally free*. You get everything you need for free to build apps for iOS and OS X. You never have to pay a single cent to develop apps on OS X (other than buying the OS and hardware to run it on, but if you're developing on that platform, why wouldn't you already have this?)
As far as the dev tools go, though, they are free. Totally free.
If you want to push an app onto the store though, or onto your own personal phone (with no app approval), then it is $99 per year.
I fail to see how this is "paying Steve to write software" when for a sizeable life of the OS X developer tools, the equivalent on the Windows side were certainly *not* free, far from it. As far as I remember, even the free developer tools that MS supplies now are not the whole deal (and why do you think they had to scramble to release a free set of tools eh?)
Of all the criticisms you can level at Apple, and there are many, the cost of the developer tools is laughably off the mark. If you mean "you have to buy an OS X machine to develop Mac OS X software then, *forehead smack*, what did you expect? I really hope you're not writing software for a platform you can't test on!
No, they weren't - the audio quality was worse, and they didn't even have as much storage space but they were easy to use, had an awesome UI and the integration with iTunes on the computer side (including ripping CDs) was easy and smooth, and *fast* since it used a firewire port. It's why they sold so many.
The competing mp3 players of the time were just blown out of the water by the iPod - the player that wasn't technically the best, but was far and away the easiest and best to use day to day.
Make a 7"-12" tablet priced at about $250, able to last an 8 hr workday on a single charge, able to run proprietary in-house apps (i.e. not locked to an app store), capable of real I/O (e.g. printing, able to accommodate things like a barcode scanner), and I predict sales in the tens if not hundreds of millions.
The product you are looking for is the iPad, which does absolutely every single thing in that list *except* the price. For that, you have to pay $499 for the base one with no 3G.
Other than the price, you have described the iPad perfectly, including the tens of millions of sales.
It's not just CDs - it is one of the GUI methods for unmounting any filesystem, that has hung around as a legacy option from the days of OS 9. It's not the only way to do it, and a new user is unlikely to know it does this unless they were familiar with OS 9, since the method that is suggested now is clicking the "eject" icon that appears next to each mounted disk in the Finder sidebar, or pressing the eject key on the keyboard to open the optical drive. (alternatively right click and select eject media).
The trash icon at least changes to an eject icon when you "grab" a mounted filesystem with the mouse to drag it, but it's not the main way to eject filesystems now.
If they got rid of it though, I am sure we'd be in the same boat as we are with this recycle bin decision - some people grew up that way and would be annoyed if it went away just because it's a legacy version of the "put away" command.
You really can't I think - when the iFixit guys tore one down they noted that the LCD panel has separate connections for backlight sync, backlight, DP/LVDS (whatever it was using at the time) and so on, so it couldn't just take the input from the mini-DP port - it had to go via the GPU which powers up with the logic board.
I thought it was a shame too, although maybe there's a way around it, I think it would need a custom firmware though.
Slashdot Mirror
That fact that you couldn't easily tell it apart from a genuine Apple-bashing post shows just how bad /. has become at over the top hate of the in-vogue "enemies" of late.
That sarcasm was so thick I was carving pieces of it off to spread on toast.
Have him talk about how clearly vi is superior to emacs.
You realise *why* there were Mini Coopers in The Italian Job, right? That really wasn't product placement - they couldn't have been anything but Minis.
Well, unless you believe Michael Caine and co walked away with a big fat pay check from British Leyland all those years ago...
I think you missed the sarcasm inherent in my post, aping the Apple-hate in your own in reverse .
The fact that you pointed out the "us or them" black or white distinction only makes it more amusing.
Pot, meet kettle.
Before clicking on the link I suspected the parent post was total nonsense, but yes slashdot, to save your blushes I went and checked it out anyway.
I said "a fiver says this is either a rick roll or a goatse, the story comment just reeks of a teenage urban legend and he has a 7 digit UID that starts with a 2, there is no way this is legit"
So, if you like huge assholes or are a fan of prolapsed rectums, by all means click on the disguised link.
Us higher-evolved-brain folk are reading books.
Take your idiot box away with your lesser-evolved-brain.
Oh I'm sorry, my superiority complex app must have malfunctioned. Better hope Apple releases a patch soon!
All computer manufacturers use a similar outsourced production method.
On the subject of Apple though, they pay higher wages per hour compared to everyone else (as in, the price Apple pays per hour worked by the sub contracted Chinese workers, that is passed onto them), and the rate of suicide in those plants (and I believe you're talking about the Foxconn plant, which is not an exclusively Apple construction factory - they make Dells, HPs, Xbox 360s, PS3s etc there also) is equal to or lower than the suicide rate in the general population.
Don't let any of that get in the way of a good Apple bash though.
I hear Fox News are hiring, btw. With your inability to look up facts, you're assured of the job.
Install the codecs you need in Quicktime and iTunes will play them (avi and mkv are containers, but quicktime supports them and the numerous different codecs that those containers can hold, and it also supports flac). Saying "iTunes won't support half the media I have, like mkv" is similar to saying "Yes, I have these carboard boxes" in answer to the question "what do you sell?" Unless you're actually a cardboard box maker, it doesn't really make sense.
I also use XBMC on the Mac, and it works well, especially on BBC iPlayer flash streams.
It actually *does* have a power source. The new displays all have magsafe connectors coming off them so you don't need to get the power brick for your laptop out of the bag when you're hooking up to the screen any more.
I agree the old connector was a disaster area - I have an old 15" PB that now runs Ubuntu, and if anything fails on it it will be the power connector that I have been excessively careful with, and it's still starting to "open out" a little and become loose.
That powerbook fell from my shoulder (in unpadded laptop bag) in a rental lot outside Tampa airport many years ago, landing on the rear right corner, giving it a clear visual distortion in the case but thankfully it works well to this day. I put that down to the strength of the case, since the logic board is in that corner, and it tapers to a very thin section due to the fan cut-out but does not seem to have been affected by the fall. It was in sleep mode at the time.
Why "Apple users" here?
This is a review by PCMag - they test all manner of laptops, not just Apple ones. They're hardly the typical "Apple user", or are you just looking for some cheap flames?
Flame Apple users if you like, but don't put words in their mouths; this article was not written by one.
Noise, power and heat.
The 5400 is cooler, quieter and less thirsty and not *that* much slower than a 7200rpm.
If you want the performance gains, that's what the SSDs are for.
So does the MBP if you want it.
All of Apple's 3.5mm audio ports have optical connections via toslink (s/pdif) really. I use it all the time - all of my audio processing is done outside my iMac by the Yamaha amp, mainly because while it's not all that much better than normal analog sound out for iTunes (although it is better - the DAC in the amp is better than the one in the iMac, marginally), it does mean I can seamlessly switch to Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 sound when I watch DVDs or surround sources in XBMC/Apple DVD player. The amp detects the codec change and switches automatically.
Anyone setting up a HTPC is going to make use of connections like that.
As far as the audio in, the optical inputs take data direct from my MiniDisc deck, and even better for me they completely strip off the stupid Serial Copy Management System DRM that Sony put into their consumer MD products, allowing me to make digital copies of my MD collection for my iPod. I use SoundStudio (well worth the money for me) but things like Audacity work well too.
Making optical in and out standard on all their machines is just another one of the many things that I like about Apple's hardware.
I bought my mother that exact Fujitsu laptop - she wanted a Macbook Pro running Windows via bootcamp, but her job simply wouldn't allow it if they were putting up the funds, so I found a decent laptop that would last her as long as the MBP she really wanted to get.
Not all PC laptops are junk, I know, and she has been happy with the Amilo in the time she's had it. I dropped extra RAM into it this Christmas and it's still purring along nicely, but she looks after it.
If you trip on the MBP's power cord, it detaches from the laptop since it is held on magnetically and your laptop never falls on the floor in the first place.
I'm not sure that a "durability fight" between the MBP and the Thinkpad is really a worthy exercise - they are both excellent and rated consistently highly by people that use them.
"Fought USB as long as it could" (+4 insightful)
hahahahahahahahahah.
Oh wait, you were serious, let me laugh even harder HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
So a company that decides to dump *all* the legacy low speed ports on its new computers, replacing them *only* with USB ports at a time when USB was a mere curiosity and extremely poorly supported on PCs of the time (some motherboards had USB ports, but the software support was not there and everyone just used the PS/2, parallel and serial ports) - that's "fighting USB as long as it could". Right.
Sorry for any spelling errors, I'm laughing too hard, not only at the stupidity of your post but at the moderators who thought it was worth uprating.
Also, those people asking for Displayport adpaters are going to be disappointed - Apple does not use DP, only mini-DP. Everyone *I* have seen with an Apple laptop giving a presentation (and I spend the bulk of my time in a university environment) already has a mini-DP to VGA connector.
There are also many third party USB>Serial adapters. I was using one back in 1999 on a Media 100 system.
*Consumer* WiFi was an Apple thing - they took something that was only in enterprise at the time (because it was $$$$$$$) and made it a baseline feature on all their laptops and released a "cheap" WiFi hub - the igloo airport station that was around $300 - way, way less than anything in the PC arena at the time.
Man, I'm still laughing at "fought USB as long as it could". That's a good one.
Why would it? The iPhone wasn't marketed as a homebrew device - they give away all the developer tools for free (and the OS X dev side is utterly free - no fees for creating apps) and give away the iPhone SDK for free along with it on the condition that if you want to get into the store you need to pay all the associated maintenance costs ($99 per year).
The reason they don't enable the on-phone ability from the tools is to eliminate a path to apps from non-verified sources (ie, not through the store) since a developer could just release the source or and other people could install the dev tools and put it on their phone. Fine in most cases, but the first rogue app to make it onto phones that way would cause a sensation. "so much for app store security". Apple has been clear they don't want sideloading of apps and while the blocking of homebrew apps onto your own phone is a casualty of that (it's the only thing you can't do in the development chain for free), in the long run they obviously think it's only going to affect a small number of people - the genuine homebrew developers are going to be using Android handsets.
If you want to push an app onto the store though, or onto your own personal phone (with no app approval), then it is $99 per year.
This. Any company that wants to charge me for running something I've written on my phone is a company I'm wary of.
You don't write it "on your phone" though. You write it (and test it) using the totally free Dev tools, and if you're getting to the stage where you want to deploy it onto phones, then that's when the fee comes in - it's all rolled into the app store.
Perhaps they could have enabled the on-phone deployment (with no app store deployment) outside of the $99 dev fee, but it's almost immaterial, since the number of people wanting to write apps that they *only* run on their own phone vs writing apps they want to distribute is so small. For that market, a developer would be better served by Android.
Computer that I pay as little attention to as my fridge or microwave?
I know how a microwave works. I could even build you one. That doesn't mean I want to do so every time I want a new one in my kitchen. I just want to buy one that will work for me.
The benefit of OS X though, is that you can dig into the guts of it if you want (just as you can self repair the hardware), but by default it was designed without the need to do that.
You only have to pay the $99 if you want to publish your iOS app on the store - ie, all that hosting, distribution and payment processing.
The developer tools are *totally free*. You get everything you need for free to build apps for iOS and OS X. You never have to pay a single cent to develop apps on OS X (other than buying the OS and hardware to run it on, but if you're developing on that platform, why wouldn't you already have this?)
As far as the dev tools go, though, they are free. Totally free.
If you want to push an app onto the store though, or onto your own personal phone (with no app approval), then it is $99 per year.
I fail to see how this is "paying Steve to write software" when for a sizeable life of the OS X developer tools, the equivalent on the Windows side were certainly *not* free, far from it. As far as I remember, even the free developer tools that MS supplies now are not the whole deal (and why do you think they had to scramble to release a free set of tools eh?)
Of all the criticisms you can level at Apple, and there are many, the cost of the developer tools is laughably off the mark. If you mean "you have to buy an OS X machine to develop Mac OS X software then, *forehead smack*, what did you expect? I really hope you're not writing software for a platform you can't test on!
No, they weren't - the audio quality was worse, and they didn't even have as much storage space but they were easy to use, had an awesome UI and the integration with iTunes on the computer side (including ripping CDs) was easy and smooth, and *fast* since it used a firewire port. It's why they sold so many.
The competing mp3 players of the time were just blown out of the water by the iPod - the player that wasn't technically the best, but was far and away the easiest and best to use day to day.
Make a 7"-12" tablet priced at about $250, able to last an 8 hr workday on a single charge, able to run proprietary in-house apps (i.e. not locked to an app store), capable of real I/O (e.g. printing, able to accommodate things like a barcode scanner), and I predict sales in the tens if not hundreds of millions.
The product you are looking for is the iPad, which does absolutely every single thing in that list *except* the price. For that, you have to pay $499 for the base one with no 3G.
Other than the price, you have described the iPad perfectly, including the tens of millions of sales.
It's not just CDs - it is one of the GUI methods for unmounting any filesystem, that has hung around as a legacy option from the days of OS 9. It's not the only way to do it, and a new user is unlikely to know it does this unless they were familiar with OS 9, since the method that is suggested now is clicking the "eject" icon that appears next to each mounted disk in the Finder sidebar, or pressing the eject key on the keyboard to open the optical drive. (alternatively right click and select eject media).
The trash icon at least changes to an eject icon when you "grab" a mounted filesystem with the mouse to drag it, but it's not the main way to eject filesystems now.
If they got rid of it though, I am sure we'd be in the same boat as we are with this recycle bin decision - some people grew up that way and would be annoyed if it went away just because it's a legacy version of the "put away" command.
You really can't I think - when the iFixit guys tore one down they noted that the LCD panel has separate connections for backlight sync, backlight, DP/LVDS (whatever it was using at the time) and so on, so it couldn't just take the input from the mini-DP port - it had to go via the GPU which powers up with the logic board.
I thought it was a shame too, although maybe there's a way around it, I think it would need a custom firmware though.