If I go to TigerDirect, I can configure a Core 2 2.13 with 1GB of RAM, X1600 Pro, 250GB HDD, and WinXP Home for $1050 (with shipping). Basically, it's an iMac with a slightly cheaper CPU, slightly more expensive RAM, and no accessories. Throw in the 2007WFP for $350 (cheapest I can find on Froogle), and you're in for $1400. So how much have you saved here? Less than 10%!
Consider this. The iMac trades some expandability for vastly reduced desk-space requirements, and great ergonomics (heat, noise). Now considering that you can still perform the two most common upgrades (RAM expansion and HDD expansion) on the iMac, do you agree that for the majority of people, the latter advantages outweigh the former disadvantages?
Especially since more than half the machines sold today are laptops, it would seem to me that a lot more people care about factors other than internal expandability!
Your system is nowhere near the Mac towers. The Mac towers are quad core machines with server motherboards and FB-DIMM RAM. You can't even buy the parts for a Mac Pro for what Apple charges you for it.
As for as your machine: how much did your monitor cost? The 19" segment is cheap/low-quality (TN panels). The 20" panel in the iMac is the same 20" S-IPS LCD in the 2007WFP, which costs $350-$400 retail. So the price difference is probably ~$200 right there. The price difference between your CPU (the 2.4 GHz Core 2) and the iMac's is less than $100 ($222 versus $315 on NewEgg). And the price difference between an X1600 Pro and your graphics card (I'm guessing 7600GT?) is probably not more than $200. So you saved maybe $100 over the iMac? And for giving up form factor, noise, and a boatload of accessories (not just firewire, mic, and wi-fi, but bluetooth, a webcam, and a remote), maybe you got some extra hard disk space in exchange?
So in summary you traded a great deal of monitor quality, along with lots of ergonomics and accessories, for 11% more MHz, a bit faster graphics card, and maybe some extra disk space? And you call that "far cheaper"?
The price difference between 533Mhz and 667Mhz RAM is as insignificant as the performance difference. It's _certainly_ not an indicator of "substantially cheaper parts"
In my experience, machines that use bargain-basement RAM (Dell probably gets a great deal on it as its last-gen tech) also tend to use bargain-basement motherboards, power-supplies, etc. It's indicative of a machine built to save every last penny (which adds up to a lot when you sell a million of them). The iMac uses a lot of substantially more expensive parts (mobile Core 2, mobile GPU) in order to save space and power dissipation, yet still comes in at a competitive price.
Which, as I said, is fine if that's what you want. But if you _do_ want expandability, Apple has nothing for you at a reasonable price.
Sure, I'm not going to argue that. But what's it to Apple if a small minority of the market isn't served?
Nor do they need to be when they can pay a shop (or next-door's kid) to do it for them.
And how many actually do this?
The irony here is that you'll probably turn around in a few posts and say people should buy Macs because they can run Windows and, hence, do everything a Windows PC can do...
Why would I say that? If your goal is to run games, all you can get away with a really shitty machine with a great graphics card, and you won't notice the difference. Why then spend the extra money on a Mac?
Look. I'm hardly a Mac zealot, I've had a couple for about a year and a half, and before that I built my own machines and put Linux on them. The catch was that I always built them the way my PowerMac is built: fast, quiet, well-rounded, with premium parts. When I got my Mac, I noticed I didn't really miss anything. You can build exactly the machine you want if you build it yourself, but Apple happens to build exactly what I want. And I'd argue that for 90% of people, Apple has a machine with the correct level of expandability and features, at a price that's competitive with other such machines.
For a home network of _desktops_ ? Who *wouldn't* use cheaper, faster (_much_ faster), more reliable wired ethernet ?
It's barely any cheaper, the speed doesn't matter in a home environment, and the lack of convenience sucks. At my parents house, there are four computers and three people (my doing). They're all desktops, and all on wireless, because I didn't feel like running Cat5 over three floors. Almost any multi-computer household is the same way. The internet connection is a critical bottleneck, as its invariably in a different room (and usually a different floor) from PCs that might be in peoples' bedrooms or offices. That's why Wifi has taken over so fast, and why even at CompUSA the Wifi APs are right in the center of the display while you have to go hunting to find a wired hub.
1) How much of Apple's target market is capable of building their own machine? 2) I highly doubt you could get that particular configuration for $1500. With Newegg pricing, just the CPU, motherboard, memory, monitor, drives, and RAM come to $1500. Did you get the case, power supply, mouse, keyboard, and graphics card for free? Did you also pull of free shipping on all of those components? That stuff will come to at least $200 if you buy reasonable-quality parts (Apple's PSUs are really high-quality).
Moreover, the ergonomics of home-built machines tends to be terrible unless you pay special attention. Dell's are pretty quiet, and my custom-built Athlon X2 machine is really quiet (courtesy of a $50 PSU, $120 case, and $50 in after-market fans and heatsinks), but the iMac is even quieter.
In the home space, where Apple's market is, wifi has decimated wired ethernet. Look at Dell's "networking options" page when configuring a machine. It's all wireless gear. They used to have "4 port ethernet hub" or the like as an option, but not anymore.
An E520 upgraded to these specs is $1229. While it _does_ lack some features the iMac has, on the flipside you have a machine with infinitely more expandability.
The E520 isn't a fair comparison, though. As evidenced by the 533 MHz RAM, it's using substantially cheaper parts than either the iMac or the XPS. And I'd argue that more people are going to find Wifi or a webcam useful than will be upgrading anything other than the hard drive or the RAM on their system (which you can do on their iMac).
This is the problem Apple has. In the tiny niche that their hardware targets, it's a fairly good deal - but if you have needs that are even slightly outside that niche, Apple has nothing for you.
It's the people who incrementally upgrade their machines that are the niche. Your average user is not capable of replacing their graphics card!
Again, you may or may not "save a lot of money". If you want a machine that's good for gaming,
Apple has no gaming machines because nobody in their right mind would game on a Mac. Gaming is all about breadth of software support, and there is no way Apple is going to compete with Microsoft on that front.
(I would also argue that there's no reason whatsoever for compulsory wifi on non-laptop computers.)
For casual users, downtime and reduced maintenance are decent reasons to switch. A Mac is like a Toyota, it requires almost no servicing, and will withstand a lot of user abuse. Since my mom got a Windows machine, the number of long-distance support sessions I've had to hold have dropped from a couple a month to once in the whole year.
That's an important point. I move pretty regularly between Linux and OS X, and I shopped around for a bit to find a PC laptop comparable to my MacBook. They're really hard to find. Sony sells a nice Vaio (C190) that has similar specs, but also costs about the same. And if you want to go into ThinkPad territory, be prepared to pay a whole lot more.
Sure you can buy a laptop for way cheaper than the $1100 Apple is charging for its low-end MacBook. But how many of those have Core 2 CPUs? And if its so over-priced, why is Dell charging $1000 for machines with almost exactly the same specs*?
I think the problem most Slashdotters have is that they can't conceive of building the type of machines Apple sells. You can get a 20" iMac with a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo and 1GB of memory for $1500. You can get a roughly comparable Dell Dimension E520 for $850. But it's not really "comparable". It comes with a 1.8 GHz processor with 2MB of cache, instead of the 2.16 GHz with 4MB. It comes with DDR2-533, instead of DDR2-667. It has no DVD burner, a GeForce 7300LE, and a 17" display.
You can't even configure that machine to be comparable to the iMac. To get in the same ballpark, you've got to jump up to an XPS 410, up the CPU to 2.13 GHz, add the 2007WFP and the Radeon 1300 Pro. Now you're at $1487, and you still have half the cache, a slower graphics card, no firewire, no wi-fi, no bluetooth, no webcam, and no remote. And it'll still take up much more space in your office!
So yes, even with the Intel Macs, you can get machines cheaper than what Apple well sell them for. However, it's no surprise you can get a cheaper machine with lesser hardware! However, if you try to match the basic specs, and a couple of the accessories (ie: no consumer machine today should ship without wifi!) you're not going to save a lot of money over the Mac.
Zelda: TP does look great (I own it too). But I remember when I got Ocarina of Time, and was blown away by how it looked. When I got TP, I was like "oh, this is pretty", but I didn't have the "totally new experience" feeling I had with OoT.
My point is simply that graphics are part of the whole package. Think back to some of the great games Nintendo put out on the N64. Would Mario 64 have been quite as immersive if it had looked like the blocky, pixelated games on the PSX? No! Mario 64 had the whole package, it played great, and it looked incredible. In a lot of games, good gameplay can make up for mediocre graphics, but in a series like Zelda, where you're expecting 99% of everything, it hurts to not even be competitive in the graphics department.
The power of the system puts a major damper on the artistic style. Zelda: TP's art design looked incredible, but the Gamecube didn't do it justice. The oversaturation combined with the low resolution made things a little hard to see, and washed out details the artist's probably would've wanted to retain (and could've, with an HDR-capable GPU).
The main console Zelda has always been cutting-edge in graphical quality. The power of the N64 really allowed the N64s Zelda's to redefine what an adventure game should look (and play) like, and the Gamecube allowed the novel cel-shaded look of Wind Waker. Even "A Link to the Past", with its huge color-palette courtesy of the SNES, was a great-looking game for it's time.
So don't pretend Nintendo isn't giving up something with their low-power strategy. Zelda was always about great gameplay, but TP is the first one in a long time that also didn't push the state of the art in the technical department.
We're not talking about lacking a few instructions here. We're talking about the difference between being a fully-programmable processor and not being one.
Even an 8086 is a "full-fledged" x86 in that it supports the basic semantics of x86 code, even if its missing a few features. The Gamecube's shaders are missing BRANCHING for god's sake.
"Full-fledged" was the key-word there. The Gamecube has shaders, but they're a step above register combiners, and not the general processors that you find on modern GPUs. They have a lot more features than the register combiners found in NV20-class hardware, but they're not fully programmable the way the shaders on modern GPUs are. Modern GPUs have shaders with looping, procedure calls, and a full instruction set capable of supporting a C-like language. The Gamecube's TEV's are still oriented around rearranging fixed-function blocks of effects.
You're forgetting the flip-side to that argument. There are a large category of games that are *expected* to look great. Zelda: TP got a lot of flack for looking last-gen, because people expect Zelda to both have great gameplay *and* look pretty. Licensing something like Unreal 3 frees a lot of developer resources to working on other things besides the graphics engine, allowing for better gameplay.
1) Yes, but the latest version of Unreal is something else. 2) The Unreal Engine is designed for hardware with shaders. The Wii hardware doesn't have full-fledged shaders like the PS3 and 360 have. Even if Unreal 3 would run on the Wii, there would be no point. Without shaders, you couldn't do any of the fancy lighting and texture effects that Unreal 3 is designed to enable.
Ultimately, it's just Epic admitting that the Wii isn't designed for the kind of games that will use Unreal 3. And that's OK, Nintendo has its niche, Epic has theirs.
OS X was disruptive because it was a completely different OS from previous versions of Mac OS. When you replace the OS completely, you get a little wiggle-room in the disruption department. Microsoft doesn't get to play that card with Vista, though. XP *was* Microsoft's "OS X 10.0". It was the OS that accomplished the painful transition from the Win9x kernel to the WinNT kernel in consumer-space. Vista is just a continuation of that code-base.
Vista isn't disruptive because it had to be. It's not a rewrite, it's not a replacement, it's just a new version. The reason it's disruptive is because Microsoft took five years worth of new features and new APIs and instead of developing them incrementally over half a dozen releases, like Apple did, they stuffed them into a single mega-release. The result is that instead of updating apps gradually as new APIs come out, developers have to massively overhaul their apps for all the new APIs in Vista. And consumers, instead of dealing with a few apps breaking with each incremental release, have to deal with a huge amount of software breaking all at once.
It's a disaster on a client machine, because current OSs go to a lot of lengths to make C apps quick to execute, but leave everything else out in the cold. C/C++ applications load fast because the C runtime is already in memory and ready to go. Operating systems could have integrated support for caching, sharing, and loading JIT'ed chunks of code, but they don't. Not because of complexity reasons (linking, loading, and sharing an ELF shared library is no harder in principle than doing the same for a JIT'ed assembly for any language), but because they are built on the assumption that everything in the world can be made to look at the system level like C.
Things would likely look a lot different in a system where Java was the default language, and C was the interloper. In such a world Java apps would run substantially faster than they do now, because you could get rid of things like memory protection, position-independent-code, etc, that you don't need when you're dealing with a safe, JIT'ed language. Java apps would also load substantially faster than big C/C++ applications do on present systems. You see, when the compiler is available at runtime, program loading becomes really simple. You don't need the complex (and slow) shared library linking protocols you need to support C code. Instead, just store cached images of non-relocatable JIT'ed code. If adding or upgrading a library invalidates a cached image (a relatively rare operation), you can always just re-JIT the image with a small amount of overhead. This sure beats processing hundreds of relocations and doing tons of shared library symbol resolution *every* time you start an application!
Way to miss the point of the ad. It's not saying that upgrading is easier on the Mac, it's saying that upgrading to a new OS doesn't require a huge amount of upgrades. It's a dig at the resource requirements of Vista, not the upgradability of PCs.
On a tangential note, upgrading PCs has become a crock. Back in the day, when I could stick a Pentium overdrive chip into my 486SX motherboard, upgrading made some sense. These days, unless I upgrade every year it seems like I have to buy the majority of a new system because the standards for memory, graphics, and CPU sockets keep changing. Given that you can always EBay your old Mac (for a pretty good price mind you), upgrading a PC is probably not much cheaper, if at all. For example, I have an October 2005 PowerMac G5 (2500 new). If I EBay the old machine, I could probably get a new Mac Pro for less than $1000 total cost. However, to upgrade a similar-era PC to the Mac Pro's specs would cost me well over $1800, since I'd have to replace the CPUs, the motherboard, the RAM, and maybe the PSU as well.
I don't think the argument is that PC hardware upgrades are easier than hardware upgrades on the Mac, but rather that Vista requires very substantial hardware upgrades while Leopard won't. Each release of OS X tends to be faster than the previous one, on the same hardware (though they usually use more memory). Tiger runs perfectly fine on a circa-2001 PowerMac G4 (composited windows and all), and so will Leopard. Meanwhile, Vista is going to crawl on a circa-2001 Athlon XP with a Geforce 2, and won't do Aero Glass on that machine at all.
To put a sharper point on it, Apple's upgrade cycle is very gradual, and very incremental. They release a new major version every year or two. Each new version obsoletes a couple of the oldest supported models, and breaks a minor number of applications. An upgrade is generally not very traumatic. Meanwhile, Vista is being released half a decade after its predecessor. It's instantly obsoleting a huge amount of hardware, and breaking a lot of applications in the process.
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Apple also gives discounts. Amazon had $100-$200 off Macs awhile ago, and of course all students automatically get 10% off.
If I go to TigerDirect, I can configure a Core 2 2.13 with 1GB of RAM, X1600 Pro, 250GB HDD, and WinXP Home for $1050 (with shipping). Basically, it's an iMac with a slightly cheaper CPU, slightly more expensive RAM, and no accessories. Throw in the 2007WFP for $350 (cheapest I can find on Froogle), and you're in for $1400. So how much have you saved here? Less than 10%!
Consider this. The iMac trades some expandability for vastly reduced desk-space requirements, and great ergonomics (heat, noise). Now considering that you can still perform the two most common upgrades (RAM expansion and HDD expansion) on the iMac, do you agree that for the majority of people, the latter advantages outweigh the former disadvantages?
Especially since more than half the machines sold today are laptops, it would seem to me that a lot more people care about factors other than internal expandability!
Your system is nowhere near the Mac towers. The Mac towers are quad core machines with server motherboards and FB-DIMM RAM. You can't even buy the parts for a Mac Pro for what Apple charges you for it.
As for as your machine: how much did your monitor cost? The 19" segment is cheap/low-quality (TN panels). The 20" panel in the iMac is the same 20" S-IPS LCD in the 2007WFP, which costs $350-$400 retail. So the price difference is probably ~$200 right there. The price difference between your CPU (the 2.4 GHz Core 2) and the iMac's is less than $100 ($222 versus $315 on NewEgg). And the price difference between an X1600 Pro and your graphics card (I'm guessing 7600GT?) is probably not more than $200. So you saved maybe $100 over the iMac? And for giving up form factor, noise, and a boatload of accessories (not just firewire, mic, and wi-fi, but bluetooth, a webcam, and a remote), maybe you got some extra hard disk space in exchange?
So in summary you traded a great deal of monitor quality, along with lots of ergonomics and accessories, for 11% more MHz, a bit faster graphics card, and maybe some extra disk space? And you call that "far cheaper"?
The price difference between 533Mhz and 667Mhz RAM is as insignificant as the performance difference. It's _certainly_ not an indicator of "substantially cheaper parts"
In my experience, machines that use bargain-basement RAM (Dell probably gets a great deal on it as its last-gen tech) also tend to use bargain-basement motherboards, power-supplies, etc. It's indicative of a machine built to save every last penny (which adds up to a lot when you sell a million of them). The iMac uses a lot of substantially more expensive parts (mobile Core 2, mobile GPU) in order to save space and power dissipation, yet still comes in at a competitive price.
Which, as I said, is fine if that's what you want. But if you _do_ want expandability, Apple has nothing for you at a reasonable price.
Sure, I'm not going to argue that. But what's it to Apple if a small minority of the market isn't served?
Nor do they need to be when they can pay a shop (or next-door's kid) to do it for them.
And how many actually do this?
The irony here is that you'll probably turn around in a few posts and say people should buy Macs because they can run Windows and, hence, do everything a Windows PC can do...
Why would I say that? If your goal is to run games, all you can get away with a really shitty machine with a great graphics card, and you won't notice the difference. Why then spend the extra money on a Mac?
Look. I'm hardly a Mac zealot, I've had a couple for about a year and a half, and before that I built my own machines and put Linux on them. The catch was that I always built them the way my PowerMac is built: fast, quiet, well-rounded, with premium parts. When I got my Mac, I noticed I didn't really miss anything. You can build exactly the machine you want if you build it yourself, but Apple happens to build exactly what I want. And I'd argue that for 90% of people, Apple has a machine with the correct level of expandability and features, at a price that's competitive with other such machines.
For a home network of _desktops_ ? Who *wouldn't* use cheaper, faster (_much_ faster), more reliable wired ethernet ?
It's barely any cheaper, the speed doesn't matter in a home environment, and the lack of convenience sucks. At my parents house, there are four computers and three people (my doing). They're all desktops, and all on wireless, because I didn't feel like running Cat5 over three floors. Almost any multi-computer household is the same way. The internet connection is a critical bottleneck, as its invariably in a different room (and usually a different floor) from PCs that might be in peoples' bedrooms or offices. That's why Wifi has taken over so fast, and why even at CompUSA the Wifi APs are right in the center of the display while you have to go hunting to find a wired hub.
What's the point of comparing a custom-built machine to something sold, shipped, and supported as a unit by Apple?
Yes, you can get a "cheaper" machine moving the cost of part selection, assembly, installation, and support to yourself. No duh.
1) How much of Apple's target market is capable of building their own machine?
2) I highly doubt you could get that particular configuration for $1500. With Newegg pricing, just the CPU, motherboard, memory, monitor, drives, and RAM come to $1500. Did you get the case, power supply, mouse, keyboard, and graphics card for free? Did you also pull of free shipping on all of those components? That stuff will come to at least $200 if you buy reasonable-quality parts (Apple's PSUs are really high-quality).
Moreover, the ergonomics of home-built machines tends to be terrible unless you pay special attention. Dell's are pretty quiet, and my custom-built Athlon X2 machine is really quiet (courtesy of a $50 PSU, $120 case, and $50 in after-market fans and heatsinks), but the iMac is even quieter.
In the home space, where Apple's market is, wifi has decimated wired ethernet. Look at Dell's "networking options" page when configuring a machine. It's all wireless gear. They used to have "4 port ethernet hub" or the like as an option, but not anymore.
An E520 upgraded to these specs is $1229. While it _does_ lack some features the iMac has, on the flipside you have a machine with infinitely more expandability.
The E520 isn't a fair comparison, though. As evidenced by the 533 MHz RAM, it's using substantially cheaper parts than either the iMac or the XPS. And I'd argue that more people are going to find Wifi or a webcam useful than will be upgrading anything other than the hard drive or the RAM on their system (which you can do on their iMac).
This is the problem Apple has. In the tiny niche that their hardware targets, it's a fairly good deal - but if you have needs that are even slightly outside that niche, Apple has nothing for you.
It's the people who incrementally upgrade their machines that are the niche. Your average user is not capable of replacing their graphics card!
Again, you may or may not "save a lot of money". If you want a machine that's good for gaming,
Apple has no gaming machines because nobody in their right mind would game on a Mac. Gaming is all about breadth of software support, and there is no way Apple is going to compete with Microsoft on that front.
(I would also argue that there's no reason whatsoever for compulsory wifi on non-laptop computers.)
Who still uses wired ethernet in their house?
For casual users, downtime and reduced maintenance are decent reasons to switch. A Mac is like a Toyota, it requires almost no servicing, and will withstand a lot of user abuse. Since my mom got a Windows machine, the number of long-distance support sessions I've had to hold have dropped from a couple a month to once in the whole year.
That's an important point. I move pretty regularly between Linux and OS X, and I shopped around for a bit to find a PC laptop comparable to my MacBook. They're really hard to find. Sony sells a nice Vaio (C190) that has similar specs, but also costs about the same. And if you want to go into ThinkPad territory, be prepared to pay a whole lot more.
Sure you can buy a laptop for way cheaper than the $1100 Apple is charging for its low-end MacBook. But how many of those have Core 2 CPUs? And if its so over-priced, why is Dell charging $1000 for machines with almost exactly the same specs*?
*) Not to mention an inferior LCD panel!
I think the problem most Slashdotters have is that they can't conceive of building the type of machines Apple sells. You can get a 20" iMac with a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo and 1GB of memory for $1500. You can get a roughly comparable Dell Dimension E520 for $850. But it's not really "comparable". It comes with a 1.8 GHz processor with 2MB of cache, instead of the 2.16 GHz with 4MB. It comes with DDR2-533, instead of DDR2-667. It has no DVD burner, a GeForce 7300LE, and a 17" display.
You can't even configure that machine to be comparable to the iMac. To get in the same ballpark, you've got to jump up to an XPS 410, up the CPU to 2.13 GHz, add the 2007WFP and the Radeon 1300 Pro. Now you're at $1487, and you still have half the cache, a slower graphics card, no firewire, no wi-fi, no bluetooth, no webcam, and no remote. And it'll still take up much more space in your office!
So yes, even with the Intel Macs, you can get machines cheaper than what Apple well sell them for. However, it's no surprise you can get a cheaper machine with lesser hardware! However, if you try to match the basic specs, and a couple of the accessories (ie: no consumer machine today should ship without wifi!) you're not going to save a lot of money over the Mac.
Zelda: TP does look great (I own it too). But I remember when I got Ocarina of Time, and was blown away by how it looked. When I got TP, I was like "oh, this is pretty", but I didn't have the "totally new experience" feeling I had with OoT.
My point is simply that graphics are part of the whole package. Think back to some of the great games Nintendo put out on the N64. Would Mario 64 have been quite as immersive if it had looked like the blocky, pixelated games on the PSX? No! Mario 64 had the whole package, it played great, and it looked incredible. In a lot of games, good gameplay can make up for mediocre graphics, but in a series like Zelda, where you're expecting 99% of everything, it hurts to not even be competitive in the graphics department.
Oh, LTP was also one of the first games to use an 8-megabit SNES cart, allowing it to have a huge game-world compared to other games of the time.
The power of the system puts a major damper on the artistic style. Zelda: TP's art design looked incredible, but the Gamecube didn't do it justice. The oversaturation combined with the low resolution made things a little hard to see, and washed out details the artist's probably would've wanted to retain (and could've, with an HDR-capable GPU).
The main console Zelda has always been cutting-edge in graphical quality. The power of the N64 really allowed the N64s Zelda's to redefine what an adventure game should look (and play) like, and the Gamecube allowed the novel cel-shaded look of Wind Waker. Even "A Link to the Past", with its huge color-palette courtesy of the SNES, was a great-looking game for it's time.
So don't pretend Nintendo isn't giving up something with their low-power strategy. Zelda was always about great gameplay, but TP is the first one in a long time that also didn't push the state of the art in the technical department.
We're not talking about lacking a few instructions here. We're talking about the difference between being a fully-programmable processor and not being one.
Even an 8086 is a "full-fledged" x86 in that it supports the basic semantics of x86 code, even if its missing a few features. The Gamecube's shaders are missing BRANCHING for god's sake.
"Full-fledged" was the key-word there. The Gamecube has shaders, but they're a step above register combiners, and not the general processors that you find on modern GPUs. They have a lot more features than the register combiners found in NV20-class hardware, but they're not fully programmable the way the shaders on modern GPUs are. Modern GPUs have shaders with looping, procedure calls, and a full instruction set capable of supporting a C-like language. The Gamecube's TEV's are still oriented around rearranging fixed-function blocks of effects.
You're forgetting the flip-side to that argument. There are a large category of games that are *expected* to look great. Zelda: TP got a lot of flack for looking last-gen, because people expect Zelda to both have great gameplay *and* look pretty. Licensing something like Unreal 3 frees a lot of developer resources to working on other things besides the graphics engine, allowing for better gameplay.
1) Yes, but the latest version of Unreal is something else.
2) The Unreal Engine is designed for hardware with shaders. The Wii hardware doesn't have full-fledged shaders like the PS3 and 360 have. Even if Unreal 3 would run on the Wii, there would be no point. Without shaders, you couldn't do any of the fancy lighting and texture effects that Unreal 3 is designed to enable.
Ultimately, it's just Epic admitting that the Wii isn't designed for the kind of games that will use Unreal 3. And that's OK, Nintendo has its niche, Epic has theirs.
The funny thing is that, like most materials which are very stiff, diamond isn't very tough at all.
I ran GNOME (pre-Cairo slowdown even) on a PII-300. It crawled. I doubt it's much better with an extra 100 MHz.
OS X was disruptive because it was a completely different OS from previous versions of Mac OS. When you replace the OS completely, you get a little wiggle-room in the disruption department. Microsoft doesn't get to play that card with Vista, though. XP *was* Microsoft's "OS X 10.0". It was the OS that accomplished the painful transition from the Win9x kernel to the WinNT kernel in consumer-space. Vista is just a continuation of that code-base.
Vista isn't disruptive because it had to be. It's not a rewrite, it's not a replacement, it's just a new version. The reason it's disruptive is because Microsoft took five years worth of new features and new APIs and instead of developing them incrementally over half a dozen releases, like Apple did, they stuffed them into a single mega-release. The result is that instead of updating apps gradually as new APIs come out, developers have to massively overhaul their apps for all the new APIs in Vista. And consumers, instead of dealing with a few apps breaking with each incremental release, have to deal with a huge amount of software breaking all at once.
It's a disaster on a client machine, because current OSs go to a lot of lengths to make C apps quick to execute, but leave everything else out in the cold. C/C++ applications load fast because the C runtime is already in memory and ready to go. Operating systems could have integrated support for caching, sharing, and loading JIT'ed chunks of code, but they don't. Not because of complexity reasons (linking, loading, and sharing an ELF shared library is no harder in principle than doing the same for a JIT'ed assembly for any language), but because they are built on the assumption that everything in the world can be made to look at the system level like C.
Things would likely look a lot different in a system where Java was the default language, and C was the interloper. In such a world Java apps would run substantially faster than they do now, because you could get rid of things like memory protection, position-independent-code, etc, that you don't need when you're dealing with a safe, JIT'ed language. Java apps would also load substantially faster than big C/C++ applications do on present systems. You see, when the compiler is available at runtime, program loading becomes really simple. You don't need the complex (and slow) shared library linking protocols you need to support C code. Instead, just store cached images of non-relocatable JIT'ed code. If adding or upgrading a library invalidates a cached image (a relatively rare operation), you can always just re-JIT the image with a small amount of overhead. This sure beats processing hundreds of relocations and doing tons of shared library symbol resolution *every* time you start an application!
Way to miss the point of the ad. It's not saying that upgrading is easier on the Mac, it's saying that upgrading to a new OS doesn't require a huge amount of upgrades. It's a dig at the resource requirements of Vista, not the upgradability of PCs.
On a tangential note, upgrading PCs has become a crock. Back in the day, when I could stick a Pentium overdrive chip into my 486SX motherboard, upgrading made some sense. These days, unless I upgrade every year it seems like I have to buy the majority of a new system because the standards for memory, graphics, and CPU sockets keep changing. Given that you can always EBay your old Mac (for a pretty good price mind you), upgrading a PC is probably not much cheaper, if at all. For example, I have an October 2005 PowerMac G5 (2500 new). If I EBay the old machine, I could probably get a new Mac Pro for less than $1000 total cost. However, to upgrade a similar-era PC to the Mac Pro's specs would cost me well over $1800, since I'd have to replace the CPUs, the motherboard, the RAM, and maybe the PSU as well.
I don't think the argument is that PC hardware upgrades are easier than hardware upgrades on the Mac, but rather that Vista requires very substantial hardware upgrades while Leopard won't. Each release of OS X tends to be faster than the previous one, on the same hardware (though they usually use more memory). Tiger runs perfectly fine on a circa-2001 PowerMac G4 (composited windows and all), and so will Leopard. Meanwhile, Vista is going to crawl on a circa-2001 Athlon XP with a Geforce 2, and won't do Aero Glass on that machine at all.
To put a sharper point on it, Apple's upgrade cycle is very gradual, and very incremental. They release a new major version every year or two. Each new version obsoletes a couple of the oldest supported models, and breaks a minor number of applications. An upgrade is generally not very traumatic. Meanwhile, Vista is being released half a decade after its predecessor. It's instantly obsoleting a huge amount of hardware, and breaking a lot of applications in the process.