Re:Yes, yes, yes, Apple's dying, blah blah blah
on
Why iPod Can't Save Apple
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· Score: 4, Informative
Expensive upgrade path?
That one died a long time ago - the RAM, HD, optical drive, graphics card, peripherals, plugs, cables, ethernet ports, and so on are all pretty standard.
The only difference between a tower Mac (G4 or G5) and a PC when it boils down to it is the motherboard and the CPU, but how is this different to buying a PC board that supports a P4 or an AMD chip - you usually have to replace the board if you want to up the speed of the CPU unless you stick with a compatible form factor.
The eMac and iMac aren't easily upgradable, but they're not designed to be.
The iBook and Powerbook are both fairly easy to upgrade in terms of new hard drive and optical drive - both parts are standard laptop components used in PC laptops.
It may cost more to get into the Mac platform (I agree, all new software is expensive) but once you're on it doesn't cost a huge amount more to keep up to date with the hardware compared to updating a PC. The long working life of Macs also helps here - from the entirely unscientific anecdotes of mine, I've dealt with a fair number of Macs and PCs and the Macs tend to have at least twice the useful life before needing a hardware upgrade.
When the PC needs upgrading, I can just sling FreeBSD on it and use it as a server, but it means a new machine is needed. The Macs I have just keep going - running OS X here on a battered old G3 which is ambling along nicely.
I wouldn't call the iPod Mini "ridiculously overpriced".
The rumours of a sub-$100 iPod started off the 'shock' of the real price of $250.
Building a device that small is difficult, and you pay for miniaturisation - the price of the components for the regular iPod and the Mini are probably similar.
The iPod Mini competes with flash based players, and stacks up very well against them.
And yes, Apple does make a profit on them. Using the "Apple is so overpriced, they/dare/ to charge more than cost price for their hardware!" is an old argument. If you want it for cost price, build one yourself.
I don't know if it;s the same "1&1" comapny, but I registered a domain with them and wanted to point it at my host, which was not 1&1 - I couldn't do it.
If you register a domain with them they will only allow it to point at their servers.
Fuck that.
I'm still sorting out the mess from that one - cancelling, getting the domain out of limbo etc.
Graphics. Media and Video on a Mac - most definitely.
Even without the raw horsepower of x86 systems, video editing and post processing on the Mac is a dream.
Apple have squeezed a lot out of each step - capturing, rendering, exporting, encoding. Apple also has made network rendering/encoding easy with Rendezvous.
I don't think I'll ever look at x86-based video editing again - it really is light years behind now.
"The company lacks a grasp of certain basics of friendly user-interfaces for gadgets."
I would say the exact opposite. You turn the iPod on by touching any of the four buttons on the front (or the scroll wheen button), and turn it off in the same way by holding play.
The iPod has six buttons on its front surface (the trackwheel and select are two buttons.
None of these buttons has any moving parts - it's all touch sensitive. No mechanical parts to break down during use. The only mechanical switch on the whole unit is the hold switch on the top by the headphone socket.
Apple's buttons are big and easy to press. I don't have big hands by any stretch of the imagination, but I hate hate hate the current trend of manufactuers to put smaller smaller fiddly buttons on their products. You need a matchstick to press the keys on some cellphones nowadays.
I fear for the day when I dial a number on my phone and I press all the keys together and the Simpsons quote will come to mind:
"I'm sorry, your fingers are too fat to dial this number. If you would like to order a complimentary dialing wand please mash the keypad angrily now"
Or something like that.
Apple's large buttons are a joy to use, and the interface (from the way the buttons work, to the way the menus on screen work) is second to none.
Lacking a grasp of friendly user interfaces? Bollocks! It's beautifully designed from a UI perspective.
Storage space is not the issue - it's bandwidth on the server end. It might only be a small increase in file size for the consumer, but Apple's bills soon add up with that extra size.
I know they use Akami, land of the infinite bandwidth, but that doesn't mean it's free.
I believe that it is the coil that surrounds the tube. If it's not secured properly to the tube itself, parts of the coil can oscillate, which causes the sound.
I guess "they don't make them like they used to" is true.
Further to the answers already here, static electricity is indeed why the paper sticks.
The reason that your screen charges up is because at the back of your set there's a bloody great electron gun (three if you have a colour TV) firing countless electrons at the back of the screen, which are deflected with a magnetic field in a neat pattern that creates the image.
Electrons are negatively charged and over time they cause a charge to build up on the screen.
As an offtopic point, the electrons hit the phosphors on the screen, or pass very close to them which causes them to glow, which is how a TV works. The electrons already present in the phosphor atoms change energy states, which releases light of a characteristic colour (either red, green or blue in the case of a TV).
My battered old warhorse Sony MZ-R30 minidisc recorder (old school for sure - it was one of the first MD recorders available in the UK) uses a lithium ion battery and I get months of playback out of it on a full charge, even today.
Well, not months, but a long time. I'll be sad when that LiIon battery reaches the end of its life since I won't be able to replace it - it's a proprietary Sony battery for a product that was made nearly 5 years ago and has been superceded by MD players with AA batteries.
I don't use my MD player much any more - I have a 15Gb iPod. I'm in the process of converting my extensive collection of MDs to mp3 with my Sony JB-940 deck and G5, but it takes time.
The MD is handy for voice recording on location - those track marks are excellent for the job.
The versions of OS X prior to Panther (10.0 up to 10.2) shipped with tcsh as the default shell.
Apple changed the default to bash in 10.3 (although if you did an upgrade or an archive and install to go from 10.2 > 10.3 it kept tcsh as your shell for continuity's sake).
Apple is pretty good when it comes to the family licence pack.
I think they've looked at it from the point of view of the consumer.
You buy one copy of OS X for $129 but your wife and child also have a Mac each (not uncommon nowadays). Sure, you've paid for one licence, but it looks awfully tempting to install it on all three machines.
What makes it easier is that OS x has no serial codes, no activation and no network checking during install or any other time - it just installs and runs.
Apple have thus decided to charge just a little bit more to give people like that a legal alternative. They know that many people will install their one copy on multiple machines, but by making the 5 user licence affordable they'll encourage more people to buy it than making 5 licences cost 5x more than one.
Apple's pro software does have serials and checks - if you try and run two copies of Final Cut Pro (or any of its subsidiary apps) on two different machines that are on the same LAN, the second copy will refuse to start.
Yes, we did discover this by breaking the licence - we needed two edit suites for a very rush job. We bought Final Cut Express 2 to put on the other machine to make us legal again. Please don't hunt us down and kill us Apple!
and it's a giant computer trying to figure out the question to the answer to the meaning of life, and it's going to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic highway..
ok, have I posted enough for some "I get the reference too!" karma?
Well, give them a chance - VA Tech went and bought up the first 1100 of them, and promptly got themselves into the top 3 spot of fastest supercomputers in the world, all for a mere $5.2 million dollars.
The two above it (Earth simulator and something at Los Alamos) are 15% and 30% faster than the G5 supercomputer, but cost $215 milliion and $330 million respectively.
And yes, Apple was the best quote. VA tech asked for quotes from HP, Sun and others on x86 solutions and Apple was the cheapest.
I have a Dual 2Ghz G5 on my desk and it is extremely well put together and pretty damn quiet.
It weighs about 40 pounds, but it is made almost entirely of 3mm aluminium.
Even when exercising it hard (encoding with compressor, rendering in FCP) it barely puts out more than a gentle warmth at the back. When the fans do ramp up to a higher speed the air feels pretty cool. It really does dissipate heat extremely well.
According to IBM, the pair of 970's I have draw about 50W each, so 100W total - nothing to worry about at all.
IBM have reduced that 50W figure with their new generation, with the 970FX chip down to about 13W or something like that.
My 600Mhz G3 iBook does have a fan, but it has never turned on in the two years I've been using this machine, and I work it pretty hard.
According to IBM's figures, the chip I have draws 6 watts at 600Mhz, a power figure they've managed to beat in the newest version - 5.9W at 1Ghz. The 900Mhz G3 (the last G3 used in the iBook range) draws 6W at that clock speed.
It's not mounted near the CPU though - it's near the back of the iBook to the left and slightly forward of the hinge and vent. There's a thermocouple and heat sink assemby there too.
The CPU itself is passively cooled. I think the hottest thing inside the case is the HD when it's been accessed heavily for a while.
You can see a shot of the inside of my iBook here (taken when I upgraded the hard drive - it's missing from the shot, it goes in the bottom left hand corner).
I love my ultra-quiet laptop with extremely long battery life!
Indeed, the PPC platform, IMO is better suited to the embedded market than x86.
IBM's 750 range (the G3) draws a mere 6 watts at 1Ghz at present - more grunt than most embedded devices will ever need really, and at a much lower power consumption than x86.
The G3 in my laptop, while having a fan, never needs to turn it on, no matter how hard I work it.
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Expensive upgrade path?
That one died a long time ago - the RAM, HD, optical drive, graphics card, peripherals, plugs, cables, ethernet ports, and so on are all pretty standard.
The only difference between a tower Mac (G4 or G5) and a PC when it boils down to it is the motherboard and the CPU, but how is this different to buying a PC board that supports a P4 or an AMD chip - you usually have to replace the board if you want to up the speed of the CPU unless you stick with a compatible form factor.
The eMac and iMac aren't easily upgradable, but they're not designed to be.
The iBook and Powerbook are both fairly easy to upgrade in terms of new hard drive and optical drive - both parts are standard laptop components used in PC laptops.
It may cost more to get into the Mac platform (I agree, all new software is expensive) but once you're on it doesn't cost a huge amount more to keep up to date with the hardware compared to updating a PC. The long working life of Macs also helps here - from the entirely unscientific anecdotes of mine, I've dealt with a fair number of Macs and PCs and the Macs tend to have at least twice the useful life before needing a hardware upgrade.
When the PC needs upgrading, I can just sling FreeBSD on it and use it as a server, but it means a new machine is needed. The Macs I have just keep going - running OS X here on a battered old G3 which is ambling along nicely.
I wouldn't call the iPod Mini "ridiculously overpriced".
/dare/ to charge more than cost price for their hardware!" is an old argument. If you want it for cost price, build one yourself.
The rumours of a sub-$100 iPod started off the 'shock' of the real price of $250.
Building a device that small is difficult, and you pay for miniaturisation - the price of the components for the regular iPod and the Mini are probably similar.
The iPod Mini competes with flash based players, and stacks up very well against them.
And yes, Apple does make a profit on them. Using the "Apple is so overpriced, they
Works great?
It doesn't display my site correctly, which uses nothing but 100% standards compliant HTML 4.01 and CSS1.
Not even very complex HTML or CSS, just basic to average.
IE fucks it up.
I don't know if it;s the same "1&1" comapny, but I registered a domain with them and wanted to point it at my host, which was not 1&1 - I couldn't do it.
If you register a domain with them they will only allow it to point at their servers.
Fuck that.
I'm still sorting out the mess from that one - cancelling, getting the domain out of limbo etc.
Graphics. Media and Video on a Mac - most definitely.
Even without the raw horsepower of x86 systems, video editing and post processing on the Mac is a dream.
Apple have squeezed a lot out of each step - capturing, rendering, exporting, encoding. Apple also has made network rendering/encoding easy with Rendezvous.
I don't think I'll ever look at x86-based video editing again - it really is light years behind now.
It had popups?!
Wow, I guess Safari's popup blocker really does work.
Come to think of it, I've haven't seen a web popup since I switched to Safari and Mozilla....
"The company lacks a grasp of certain basics of friendly user-interfaces for gadgets."
I would say the exact opposite. You turn the iPod on by touching any of the four buttons on the front (or the scroll wheen button), and turn it off in the same way by holding play.
The iPod has six buttons on its front surface (the trackwheel and select are two buttons.
None of these buttons has any moving parts - it's all touch sensitive. No mechanical parts to break down during use. The only mechanical switch on the whole unit is the hold switch on the top by the headphone socket.
Apple's buttons are big and easy to press. I don't have big hands by any stretch of the imagination, but I hate hate hate the current trend of manufactuers to put smaller smaller fiddly buttons on their products. You need a matchstick to press the keys on some cellphones nowadays.
I fear for the day when I dial a number on my phone and I press all the keys together and the Simpsons quote will come to mind:
"I'm sorry, your fingers are too fat to dial this number. If you would like to order a complimentary dialing wand please mash the keypad angrily now"
Or something like that.
Apple's large buttons are a joy to use, and the interface (from the way the buttons work, to the way the menus on screen work) is second to none.
Lacking a grasp of friendly user interfaces? Bollocks! It's beautifully designed from a UI perspective.
And it would be much harder for them to cheat and give twice as many votes to republican candidates.
Storage space is not the issue - it's bandwidth on the server end. It might only be a small increase in file size for the consumer, but Apple's bills soon add up with that extra size.
I know they use Akami, land of the infinite bandwidth, but that doesn't mean it's free.
I believe that it is the coil that surrounds the tube. If it's not secured properly to the tube itself, parts of the coil can oscillate, which causes the sound.
I guess "they don't make them like they used to" is true.
Further to the answers already here, static electricity is indeed why the paper sticks.
The reason that your screen charges up is because at the back of your set there's a bloody great electron gun (three if you have a colour TV) firing countless electrons at the back of the screen, which are deflected with a magnetic field in a neat pattern that creates the image.
Electrons are negatively charged and over time they cause a charge to build up on the screen.
As an offtopic point, the electrons hit the phosphors on the screen, or pass very close to them which causes them to glow, which is how a TV works. The electrons already present in the phosphor atoms change energy states, which releases light of a characteristic colour (either red, green or blue in the case of a TV).
LANC!
Fuck me running, I haven't used LANC since you had to stoke the camera's boiler and build up steam before you could use it.
The two ports are both standard - the 4 pin was designed for small devices that didn't need bus power such as video cameras and so on.
You'll find the 4 pin port on pretty much all modern camcorders and DV decks.
As far as I know, Sony are the only ones to use it on a 'host' machine, thus removing the bus power option that is so useful with the 6 pin port.
There is no framework for video over USB in OS X as far as I know, unlike firewire.
It's not as simple as hooking up a USB-based video camera and having it work straight away with OS X.
My battered old warhorse Sony MZ-R30 minidisc recorder (old school for sure - it was one of the first MD recorders available in the UK) uses a lithium ion battery and I get months of playback out of it on a full charge, even today.
Well, not months, but a long time. I'll be sad when that LiIon battery reaches the end of its life since I won't be able to replace it - it's a proprietary Sony battery for a product that was made nearly 5 years ago and has been superceded by MD players with AA batteries.
I don't use my MD player much any more - I have a 15Gb iPod. I'm in the process of converting my extensive collection of MDs to mp3 with my Sony JB-940 deck and G5, but it takes time.
The MD is handy for voice recording on location - those track marks are excellent for the job.
The versions of OS X prior to Panther (10.0 up to 10.2) shipped with tcsh as the default shell.
Apple changed the default to bash in 10.3 (although if you did an upgrade or an archive and install to go from 10.2 > 10.3 it kept tcsh as your shell for continuity's sake).
Apple is pretty good when it comes to the family licence pack.
I think they've looked at it from the point of view of the consumer.
You buy one copy of OS X for $129 but your wife and child also have a Mac each (not uncommon nowadays). Sure, you've paid for one licence, but it looks awfully tempting to install it on all three machines.
What makes it easier is that OS x has no serial codes, no activation and no network checking during install or any other time - it just installs and runs.
Apple have thus decided to charge just a little bit more to give people like that a legal alternative. They know that many people will install their one copy on multiple machines, but by making the 5 user licence affordable they'll encourage more people to buy it than making 5 licences cost 5x more than one.
Apple's pro software does have serials and checks - if you try and run two copies of Final Cut Pro (or any of its subsidiary apps) on two different machines that are on the same LAN, the second copy will refuse to start.
Yes, we did discover this by breaking the licence - we needed two edit suites for a very rush job. We bought Final Cut Express 2 to put on the other machine to make us legal again. Please don't hunt us down and kill us Apple!
Apple is still releasing security fixes for 10.2 when they arise, but I see your point. They have EOL'ed 10.1 and earlier.
and it's a giant computer trying to figure out the question to the answer to the meaning of life, and it's going to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic highway..
ok, have I posted enough for some "I get the reference too!" karma?
Well, give them a chance - VA Tech went and bought up the first 1100 of them, and promptly got themselves into the top 3 spot of fastest supercomputers in the world, all for a mere $5.2 million dollars.
The two above it (Earth simulator and something at Los Alamos) are 15% and 30% faster than the G5 supercomputer, but cost $215 milliion and $330 million respectively.
And yes, Apple was the best quote. VA tech asked for quotes from HP, Sun and others on x86 solutions and Apple was the cheapest.
Give it time.
^ mod this guy up.
My iBook attracts more girls than a Justin Timberlake vs Brad Pitt naked jelly wrestling contest.
I have to fend them off with pointy sticks.
Word.
I have a Dual 2Ghz G5 on my desk and it is extremely well put together and pretty damn quiet.
It weighs about 40 pounds, but it is made almost entirely of 3mm aluminium.
Even when exercising it hard (encoding with compressor, rendering in FCP) it barely puts out more than a gentle warmth at the back. When the fans do ramp up to a higher speed the air feels pretty cool. It really does dissipate heat extremely well.
According to IBM, the pair of 970's I have draw about 50W each, so 100W total - nothing to worry about at all.
IBM have reduced that 50W figure with their new generation, with the 970FX chip down to about 13W or something like that.
My 600Mhz G3 iBook does have a fan, but it has never turned on in the two years I've been using this machine, and I work it pretty hard.
According to IBM's figures, the chip I have draws 6 watts at 600Mhz, a power figure they've managed to beat in the newest version - 5.9W at 1Ghz. The 900Mhz G3 (the last G3 used in the iBook range) draws 6W at that clock speed.
It's not mounted near the CPU though - it's near the back of the iBook to the left and slightly forward of the hinge and vent. There's a thermocouple and heat sink assemby there too.
The CPU itself is passively cooled. I think the hottest thing inside the case is the HD when it's been accessed heavily for a while.
You can see a shot of the inside of my iBook here (taken when I upgraded the hard drive - it's missing from the shot, it goes in the bottom left hand corner).
I love my ultra-quiet laptop with extremely long battery life!
Plus, they have a restricted ground zone the size of Switzerland around the base - these things only have a 20 mile range.
Indeed, the PPC platform, IMO is better suited to the embedded market than x86.
IBM's 750 range (the G3) draws a mere 6 watts at 1Ghz at present - more grunt than most embedded devices will ever need really, and at a much lower power consumption than x86.
The G3 in my laptop, while having a fan, never needs to turn it on, no matter how hard I work it.