The point of these comparisons is to find an equivalent computer for the same or less money, and yet you are agreeing that the HP's screen is much worse, but that's ok because it's cheaper?
That doesn't follow. If the screen is much worse it's not an equivalent machine (to to mention the HP chassis).
There are PC laptops that match the Macbook Pro, but surprise surprise, they tend to be quite expensive. Decent laptop screens, good quality cases and good hardware. What you did was look for a laptop with a large discount coupon and close enough specs in the first couple of lines (CPU, RAM etc) and hope no one would dig too deeply, then called it comparable. And you're still trying to claim that coupon discounts are the real price. If that's the case, you should immediately take 15% off all the Macs you spec, since it's clear that everyone gets them on educational discount since it's trivially easy to tell them you're a student or find someone who is who can pass the check with their ID. That makes the Mac $1394 shipped.
Oh, and the Macbook Pro SSD is a PCIe one, although I guess for the sake of comparisons you can use a SATA III one on the PC side since most PC makers stick with that. It's swings and roundabouts - the Mac's SSD is about twice the raw performance (depending on activity), but it is a non-standard interface, whereas the PC can take any old SATA III drive, making upgrades later in the machine's life cheaper.
I am also funded out of such a grant (and the PI is my direct supervisor), but my point was that in the context of this discussion, the oft-repeated cliche that poor people are subject to different rules to rich people is somewhat affected by the fact that very few scientists are rich. Especially research scientists.
When that trope is commonly used, the difference in wealth is usually poor person vs investment banker/senator/etc. By that standard, we're nowhere on the curve.
Of course they're cost competitive, but only when you spec them approximately the same - that's my entire argument.
You're showing woeful HP laptops and claiming they are equal, then claiming that $500 coupon discounts are standard.
There are some very nice PC laptops out there, but they tend to cost a lot of money - and oddly enough, tend to cost similar to Macs of the same specs because decent quality hardware costs.
Consider the Thinkpad X1 Carbon. It costs a pretty penny - in fact, it's virtually the cost of a Macbook Pro/Macbook Air (depending on how you configure it) - but it's an extremely well built laptop with a fantastic case, really good trackpad, great screen and high quality internal specs - just like a Macbook Pro. It won't win the "Apple Challenge" though, because it's not significantly cheaper.
I looked at those photos. Again, a few compromises (mainly with the battery), and the HP chassis. The Acer is pretty good - but it's not far off the same price. The 15" Dell has no SSD, smaller battery, a massively worse screen, and of course that classic HP plastic body and it's a mere $1434 before tax (coupons don't count, unless you want to factor in the 15% off for education pricing for the MBP too?). So that makes it $1000 cheaper because of the lack of 2800x1800 screen, 256GB SSD and half the battery and a plastic body. Not seeing how these two are comparable?
The 13" Air compared to the 13" ultra is closer, but then so are the prices - the HP is $1334 and the Air is $1549. That's about $200, which the Air makes up for by including a metal chassis and thunderbolt controller and an i7 (the HP has an i5).
Sorry, is your plan just to show me things that support my argument? I'm not following.
You claimed to have won an Apple Challenge and boldly claimed so because of the "better CPU, twice the RAM, better GPU" and very conspicuously left out the much worse screen and the classically poor HP laptop chassis (check around, there are decent PC laptop cases, but HP is very definitely not it).
Now you're claiming that the $1100 price, which is listed as "price after savings" on your own graphic is the real price of the laptop and that this standard across all laptop retailers (except Apple and JC Penny). So if I go to new egg right now I can expect a $500 discount on any laptop I choose? Sweet.
You're hilarious.
But sure. If that's your standard, you "win", kid.
If the current patent mess had been in place when cars were first industrialised
It's been this way for a lot longer than that. Since the invention of the static steam engine, patents have been used like this. James Watt was a pretty egregious "patent abuser" back in the day, that ensured that his engines were the only engines that worked efficiently, brutally enforcing his patents on specific parts of the design to great effect.
I'll freely admit that Apple has its own market segment. I'll also freely admit that I simply do NOT fit into it. At all.
Right, but that's different to calling anyone who decides they are part of that segment "insane".
I don't think people who have different selection criteria for electronic hardware to me are "not sane". They simply have different needs.
It seems to matter to you that not only are you seen to be making the right choice for you, but that all those other people are so, so wrong for not making the same choices as you.
You don't fit Apple's demographic? Good for you. I'm sure there are many other choices you can make. Someone else chose Apple? Oh my god what a moron! They clearly have made an insane choice! Unlike you, of course, who have made perfectly sane and normal product purchasing decisions.
Why does it bother you so much that people choose Apple products because they actually like them? Why does it have to be that millions and millions of people are all somehow mentally impaired because they made a choice that you personally didn't? Can't you just say "that's not for me" and move on?
Millions of people choose Android phones. I don't call them morons. I struggle to comprehend your mindset.
To use a car analogy, it cost Chevy a lot of time and money to come up with the specific shape of the Corvette. That design is protected by a design patent (note: not a method patent).
How long would it take Ford to copy the design and start rolling out copies of the Corvette? Say stick a Corvette body on a Mustang chassis.
Why don't Ford do that?
I'll argue that the "classic" iPhone design that is protected by the design patent that Apple has protected - a flat, glossy slab with a large screen, minimal buttons and rounded corners - is much closer to generic that a Corvette is to being a generic car, but that's the crux of the argument here.
Just because it's trivial to copy something doesn't mean it's not without merit as an original design. Look at the original Motorola flip phone, for example. No one was doing flip phones before them, then they come out with one and it's a hit. How long does it take to innovate a hinge into a phone? Why was no one doing it before them, but then suddenly there's a whole slew of flip phones after they suddenly get popular...?
This sort of thing has been going on for as long as there have been consumer products. Hoovers before Dysons were all pretty much the same - motor, fan, cavity with one opening, bag that is permeable to air but not dust. Then Dyson comes out with a bag less design. Now go and look at all the hoovers that also have bagless designs... Why weren't there that many before? They didn't all just decide one day to "innovate" at the same time.
With a coupon, and no mention of the case. I'm assuming traditional shitty flimsy plastic HP design right? With the screws for the hinge assembly attached right into that soft, breakable plastic, yes? Oh, and a 1366x768 LCD. CPU very slightly better on the HP, RAM is better (2x as much), GPU pretty even (6750M vs 6770M).
I can see why it was cheaper.
I thought you said your Apple Challenge graphic was going to support your argument? All you've shown here is a crappy HP laptop that made several compromises to get to $1650. Then with a special offer coupon you claim that the $1100 you found it for is representative of the price. Yes, that laptop was about $400-500 cheaper than the Macbook Pro you compared it with, because it had an awful screen and a plastic body, and a free upgrade to a 750 GB HD to match the one in the Macbook pro.
Perhaps it's down to the melting of those two big ice cubes at the north and south poles of our rock (apply constant heat to a pan of water with ice floating in it and observe what happens to the temperature of the water until all the ice is gone), or maybe it's down to the error bars on the measurements over that time period (longer measurements, smaller error bars), or perhaps it's just some grand conspiracy by poorly-paid scientists who are apparently living high on the hog.
It could also be that we aren't fully in possession of the facts and that more science is needed (oh, but you would say that! keep the funding flowing! it's all a conspiracy to get grants!) about exactly what it is that causes the vastly complex and large climate to behave the way it does.
What's not in doubt is the hypothesis that if you increase the [CO2], the temperature of the gas it's mixed with will go up when exposed to IR radiation. That fact doesn't change because of a seeming aberration in the data (based on the hypothesis that the temperature will continue to rise). The system is obviously more complex than that. That's the purpose of all the research.
Mars used to have plenty of water, a comfortable atmosphere, and perhaps some living microbes.
Mars had undergone a very nasty climate change, and the peculiar thing is, Mars has no human.
Anyone care to explain what happened to Mars (without the involving the Homo Sapiens Sapiens) ?
The core solidified, shutting off the magnetic field. With no defence from the solar wind the atmosphere was stripped off over time.
Oh, sorry you were looking for an anti-climate-change position. Sorry, Mars' climate change has nothing to do with what's happening on the Earth right now.
You need to read that again. It's not a "wimpy i7", it's a Xeon. Only one of them (in quad, hex, octo or duodenal? [what's 12?] core config), but a Xeon nonetheless.
Oh sorry, I let facts get in the way of an Apple bash. So sorry. I'll try to avoid that in the future.
The 780M is actually an under clocked desktop part. It's classified as a mobile chip because it pulls about 120-130 W under load, making it one of the best GPUs for performance per watt you can buy.
Crucially it gives you almost all of the performance of a "top spec" desktop GPU (but obviously not all), but the machine it sits in is virtually silent under full load.
I have the 680MX in the previous generation iMac (late 2012) and it has been fantastic. Running in bootcamp I'm getting brilliant gaming experiences without the computer making a sound, and also being 'just the screen'.
It's not for everyone of course, but those high level mobile GPUs do have a niche and they have a lot more grunt that people give them credit for - mine can drive a 1440p display at native resolution in Bioshock Infinite at 55 fps with everything set to ultra, for example. To get it over 60 I can just drop one or two settings off ultra onto high, or I can drop it down to 1080p resolution. In other words, the compromises I have made in choosing a (near) silent computer are not that bad at all.
Come on apple do you really to save the $50 (high end estimate) on an 3K+ system?
The real reason is probably because they won't fit in the box, and that most people who buy these machines will already have their own preferences (like custom FCP keyboard, for example), so the keyboard that comes with it will probably never be unwrapped.
You make a good point actually. Although Apple are probably correct that is is illegal to root your own device by the letter of the law. Not that it should be, of course.
"Apple has responded to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)'s request to the US Copyright Office to declare hacking a smartphone legal; not surprisingly, Apple believes jailbreaking is copyright violation and, therefore, illegal."
Someone needs there mod points removed:)
Just so we're clear here, you want to declare taking advantage of a root exploit "legal", but only if it's on an Apple phone.
What about a Linux server? If it's legal to to exploit a root vulnerability on iOS then surely it is on Linux, or Windows, or OS X too, right?
Actually, I do refer to this as root exploiting, but if I point that out (as I have in the past) and praised Apple for closing the security hole I get jumped on by Android fanboys calling me an enemy of freedom.
In other words, they care about exploits and security when it's convenient, but not when it's in any way in conflict with bashing Apple.
You forgot to mention the reply where he admitted to committing genocide too.
No, that would be an absurd argument.
My point is that in this clearly heavily biased article, we only have the writer's word that the guy was stopped for "going to a shooting protest", and that perhaps the "anonymous source" was stopped for other reasons - the most likely being a lack of tax or insurance, which is the overwhelmingly most frequent reason the ANPR system flags a car. Or perhaps he's a victim of cloned plates - another less common reason, but it still happens. Someone unscrupulous finds a car similar to their own (same make, same colour etc) and uses the number plate of the victim car to do things like a drive off from a petrol station or driving within the central London congestion charge zone - both things that are enforced via ANPR cameras.
I'm not saying there are not abuses of the system, but that taking a heavily biased article like this at face value is not ideal.
Right, but my point is that ANPR cameras are far too thinly spread to make any meaningful route plans of the target car, other than "we know the car went on the M1 at this time, so it's possibly in this town or this city", or "it passes this camera every day, so this motorway is probably on his commute" (the cameras are not trained on non-highway roads, except where they're in police cars and those are obviously not static).
Unless it gets pinged by another camera it's unlikely to be seen for some time. As I said, you can work out a possibly broad geographical area for a car over time, but nothing like exact routes.
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I'd be very interested to know what specific part of the parent comment qualifies it for a -1 flame bail mod.
Quotes are appreciated.
The point of these comparisons is to find an equivalent computer for the same or less money, and yet you are agreeing that the HP's screen is much worse, but that's ok because it's cheaper?
That doesn't follow. If the screen is much worse it's not an equivalent machine (to to mention the HP chassis).
There are PC laptops that match the Macbook Pro, but surprise surprise, they tend to be quite expensive. Decent laptop screens, good quality cases and good hardware. What you did was look for a laptop with a large discount coupon and close enough specs in the first couple of lines (CPU, RAM etc) and hope no one would dig too deeply, then called it comparable. And you're still trying to claim that coupon discounts are the real price. If that's the case, you should immediately take 15% off all the Macs you spec, since it's clear that everyone gets them on educational discount since it's trivially easy to tell them you're a student or find someone who is who can pass the check with their ID. That makes the Mac $1394 shipped.
Oh, and the Macbook Pro SSD is a PCIe one, although I guess for the sake of comparisons you can use a SATA III one on the PC side since most PC makers stick with that. It's swings and roundabouts - the Mac's SSD is about twice the raw performance (depending on activity), but it is a non-standard interface, whereas the PC can take any old SATA III drive, making upgrades later in the machine's life cheaper.
I am also funded out of such a grant (and the PI is my direct supervisor), but my point was that in the context of this discussion, the oft-repeated cliche that poor people are subject to different rules to rich people is somewhat affected by the fact that very few scientists are rich. Especially research scientists.
When that trope is commonly used, the difference in wealth is usually poor person vs investment banker/senator/etc. By that standard, we're nowhere on the curve.
It's really cute that you think academic research-based scientists are rich.
Is this overspill from the whole "climate change is just a cover for scientists to get rich off the back of lucrative grants" stuff?
Of course they're cost competitive, but only when you spec them approximately the same - that's my entire argument.
You're showing woeful HP laptops and claiming they are equal, then claiming that $500 coupon discounts are standard.
There are some very nice PC laptops out there, but they tend to cost a lot of money - and oddly enough, tend to cost similar to Macs of the same specs because decent quality hardware costs.
Consider the Thinkpad X1 Carbon. It costs a pretty penny - in fact, it's virtually the cost of a Macbook Pro/Macbook Air (depending on how you configure it) - but it's an extremely well built laptop with a fantastic case, really good trackpad, great screen and high quality internal specs - just like a Macbook Pro. It won't win the "Apple Challenge" though, because it's not significantly cheaper.
I looked at those photos. Again, a few compromises (mainly with the battery), and the HP chassis. The Acer is pretty good - but it's not far off the same price. The 15" Dell has no SSD, smaller battery, a massively worse screen, and of course that classic HP plastic body and it's a mere $1434 before tax (coupons don't count, unless you want to factor in the 15% off for education pricing for the MBP too?). So that makes it $1000 cheaper because of the lack of 2800x1800 screen, 256GB SSD and half the battery and a plastic body. Not seeing how these two are comparable?
The 13" Air compared to the 13" ultra is closer, but then so are the prices - the HP is $1334 and the Air is $1549. That's about $200, which the Air makes up for by including a metal chassis and thunderbolt controller and an i7 (the HP has an i5).
Sorry, is your plan just to show me things that support my argument? I'm not following.
Seriously? -1 overrated on an unmoderated comment?
Guys, the moderation system is not a tool to be used when you disagree with someone. We talked about this.
What specifically about the parent comment is worthy of an overrated mod? Quotes and discussion please.
*I'm* the one moving the goalposts?!
You claimed to have won an Apple Challenge and boldly claimed so because of the "better CPU, twice the RAM, better GPU" and very conspicuously left out the much worse screen and the classically poor HP laptop chassis (check around, there are decent PC laptop cases, but HP is very definitely not it).
Now you're claiming that the $1100 price, which is listed as "price after savings" on your own graphic is the real price of the laptop and that this standard across all laptop retailers (except Apple and JC Penny). So if I go to new egg right now I can expect a $500 discount on any laptop I choose? Sweet.
You're hilarious.
But sure. If that's your standard, you "win", kid.
Microsoft tried this - they were offering money off Surface and Surface Pros if you traded in an iPad.
Didn't work out so well for them.
If the current patent mess had been in place when cars were first industrialised
It's been this way for a lot longer than that. Since the invention of the static steam engine, patents have been used like this. James Watt was a pretty egregious "patent abuser" back in the day, that ensured that his engines were the only engines that worked efficiently, brutally enforcing his patents on specific parts of the design to great effect.
Guess again.
I'll freely admit that Apple has its own market segment.
I'll also freely admit that I simply do NOT fit into it. At all.
Right, but that's different to calling anyone who decides they are part of that segment "insane".
I don't think people who have different selection criteria for electronic hardware to me are "not sane". They simply have different needs.
It seems to matter to you that not only are you seen to be making the right choice for you, but that all those other people are so, so wrong for not making the same choices as you.
You don't fit Apple's demographic? Good for you. I'm sure there are many other choices you can make. Someone else chose Apple? Oh my god what a moron! They clearly have made an insane choice! Unlike you, of course, who have made perfectly sane and normal product purchasing decisions.
Why does it bother you so much that people choose Apple products because they actually like them? Why does it have to be that millions and millions of people are all somehow mentally impaired because they made a choice that you personally didn't? Can't you just say "that's not for me" and move on?
Millions of people choose Android phones. I don't call them morons. I struggle to comprehend your mindset.
To use a car analogy, it cost Chevy a lot of time and money to come up with the specific shape of the Corvette. That design is protected by a design patent (note: not a method patent).
How long would it take Ford to copy the design and start rolling out copies of the Corvette? Say stick a Corvette body on a Mustang chassis.
Why don't Ford do that?
I'll argue that the "classic" iPhone design that is protected by the design patent that Apple has protected - a flat, glossy slab with a large screen, minimal buttons and rounded corners - is much closer to generic that a Corvette is to being a generic car, but that's the crux of the argument here.
Just because it's trivial to copy something doesn't mean it's not without merit as an original design. Look at the original Motorola flip phone, for example. No one was doing flip phones before them, then they come out with one and it's a hit. How long does it take to innovate a hinge into a phone? Why was no one doing it before them, but then suddenly there's a whole slew of flip phones after they suddenly get popular...?
This sort of thing has been going on for as long as there have been consumer products. Hoovers before Dysons were all pretty much the same - motor, fan, cavity with one opening, bag that is permeable to air but not dust. Then Dyson comes out with a bag less design. Now go and look at all the hoovers that also have bagless designs... Why weren't there that many before? They didn't all just decide one day to "innovate" at the same time.
They also force you to pay them a yearly $99 fee (even for OSS), so that your apps will run on OS X, since Gatekeeper is enabled by default.
System Preferences > Security and Privacy > General > Allow apps downloaded from: anywhere (checkbox)
Sorry, how is this forcing a $99 fee? I'm genuinely curious.
"Costs $1000 less"
With a coupon, and no mention of the case. I'm assuming traditional shitty flimsy plastic HP design right? With the screws for the hinge assembly attached right into that soft, breakable plastic, yes? Oh, and a 1366x768 LCD. CPU very slightly better on the HP, RAM is better (2x as much), GPU pretty even (6750M vs 6770M).
I can see why it was cheaper.
I thought you said your Apple Challenge graphic was going to support your argument? All you've shown here is a crappy HP laptop that made several compromises to get to $1650. Then with a special offer coupon you claim that the $1100 you found it for is representative of the price. Yes, that laptop was about $400-500 cheaper than the Macbook Pro you compared it with, because it had an awful screen and a plastic body, and a free upgrade to a 750 GB HD to match the one in the Macbook pro.
Perhaps it's down to the melting of those two big ice cubes at the north and south poles of our rock (apply constant heat to a pan of water with ice floating in it and observe what happens to the temperature of the water until all the ice is gone), or maybe it's down to the error bars on the measurements over that time period (longer measurements, smaller error bars), or perhaps it's just some grand conspiracy by poorly-paid scientists who are apparently living high on the hog.
It could also be that we aren't fully in possession of the facts and that more science is needed (oh, but you would say that! keep the funding flowing! it's all a conspiracy to get grants!) about exactly what it is that causes the vastly complex and large climate to behave the way it does.
What's not in doubt is the hypothesis that if you increase the [CO2], the temperature of the gas it's mixed with will go up when exposed to IR radiation. That fact doesn't change because of a seeming aberration in the data (based on the hypothesis that the temperature will continue to rise). The system is obviously more complex than that. That's the purpose of all the research.
You missed the crucial words "statistically significant" out of your quote.
I know it seems unimportant, but I assure you it's not.
But carry on, us professional scientists will just keep on doing what we're doing.
In other news, I can boil down the whole of the IT profession to "have you tried turning it off and on again?".
"the temperature of the box will rise without limit"
wow. Total Science Fail
So, assuming a perfect insulator (as stated) and continual solar energy input to this box, what do *you* suggest will happen?
Mars used to have plenty of water, a comfortable atmosphere, and perhaps some living microbes.
Mars had undergone a very nasty climate change, and the peculiar thing is, Mars has no human.
Anyone care to explain what happened to Mars (without the involving the Homo Sapiens Sapiens) ?
The core solidified, shutting off the magnetic field. With no defence from the solar wind the atmosphere was stripped off over time.
Oh, sorry you were looking for an anti-climate-change position. Sorry, Mars' climate change has nothing to do with what's happening on the Earth right now.
You need to read that again. It's not a "wimpy i7", it's a Xeon. Only one of them (in quad, hex, octo or duodenal? [what's 12?] core config), but a Xeon nonetheless.
Oh sorry, I let facts get in the way of an Apple bash. So sorry. I'll try to avoid that in the future.
The 780M is actually an under clocked desktop part. It's classified as a mobile chip because it pulls about 120-130 W under load, making it one of the best GPUs for performance per watt you can buy.
Crucially it gives you almost all of the performance of a "top spec" desktop GPU (but obviously not all), but the machine it sits in is virtually silent under full load.
I have the 680MX in the previous generation iMac (late 2012) and it has been fantastic. Running in bootcamp I'm getting brilliant gaming experiences without the computer making a sound, and also being 'just the screen'.
It's not for everyone of course, but those high level mobile GPUs do have a niche and they have a lot more grunt that people give them credit for - mine can drive a 1440p display at native resolution in Bioshock Infinite at 55 fps with everything set to ultra, for example. To get it over 60 I can just drop one or two settings off ultra onto high, or I can drop it down to 1080p resolution. In other words, the compromises I have made in choosing a (near) silent computer are not that bad at all.
Come on apple do you really to save the $50 (high end estimate) on an 3K+ system?
The real reason is probably because they won't fit in the box, and that most people who buy these machines will already have their own preferences (like custom FCP keyboard, for example), so the keyboard that comes with it will probably never be unwrapped.
The box is really small.
You make a good point actually. Although Apple are probably correct that is is illegal to root your own device by the letter of the law. Not that it should be, of course.
Apple treats you as a criminal? I'm sorry but you are simply trolling.
http://www.legalzoom.com/intellectual-property-rights/copyrights/apple-responds-eff-jailbreaking FRom the article because I am lazy.
"Apple has responded to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)'s request to the US Copyright Office to declare hacking a smartphone legal; not surprisingly, Apple believes jailbreaking is copyright violation and, therefore, illegal."
Someone needs there mod points removed :)
Just so we're clear here, you want to declare taking advantage of a root exploit "legal", but only if it's on an Apple phone.
What about a Linux server? If it's legal to to exploit a root vulnerability on iOS then surely it is on Linux, or Windows, or OS X too, right?
Actually, I do refer to this as root exploiting, but if I point that out (as I have in the past) and praised Apple for closing the security hole I get jumped on by Android fanboys calling me an enemy of freedom.
In other words, they care about exploits and security when it's convenient, but not when it's in any way in conflict with bashing Apple.
You forgot to mention the reply where he admitted to committing genocide too.
No, that would be an absurd argument.
My point is that in this clearly heavily biased article, we only have the writer's word that the guy was stopped for "going to a shooting protest", and that perhaps the "anonymous source" was stopped for other reasons - the most likely being a lack of tax or insurance, which is the overwhelmingly most frequent reason the ANPR system flags a car. Or perhaps he's a victim of cloned plates - another less common reason, but it still happens. Someone unscrupulous finds a car similar to their own (same make, same colour etc) and uses the number plate of the victim car to do things like a drive off from a petrol station or driving within the central London congestion charge zone - both things that are enforced via ANPR cameras.
I'm not saying there are not abuses of the system, but that taking a heavily biased article like this at face value is not ideal.
Right, but my point is that ANPR cameras are far too thinly spread to make any meaningful route plans of the target car, other than "we know the car went on the M1 at this time, so it's possibly in this town or this city", or "it passes this camera every day, so this motorway is probably on his commute" (the cameras are not trained on non-highway roads, except where they're in police cars and those are obviously not static).
Unless it gets pinged by another camera it's unlikely to be seen for some time. As I said, you can work out a possibly broad geographical area for a car over time, but nothing like exact routes.