My laptop and server already run off SSD and with any decent bit of wear-leveling it is near impossible to wear out a SSD.
I'd be more worried about the controller chip. I've had a few USB thumbdrives go bad on me this way, rendering the data on them inaccessible unless you're really good at soldering. As a matter of fact, I've even had more USB thumbdrives go bad on me the past few years than harddrives, though admittedly I'm not carrying harddrives around in my pocket so it isn't fair comparison.
You like pain or something? I was there, and Windows running on a PC was a far superior and cheaper platform than the overpriced garbage that Apple was putting out. There is a reason why Apple almost died in the late 1990's.
So it isn't as though Apple can just waltz in to this arena and amaze people, the products already exist, and they are already easy to use. It also already works with Apple stuff. Put an iPod in your Yamaha receiver (many have iPod docks) and the receiver will control it remotely, and the Harmony will control the receiver.
The thing is, people don't know about these remotes. Sure, the people who drop $5000 on a stereo system do, but not the Joe Users out there. All that Apple would have to do is throw something together that works reasonably well, then market the hell out of it which they are really good at. I'm pretty sure the Joe Users out there would consider buying it, as maney of them already are juggling 3 remotes for even a modest set up (Cable/Satellite box, DVD player, TV). Apple could really rake in the cash, if Logitech etc. don't figure that there's a market out there for a stripped, inexpensive down version of their fancy remotes first.
I seem to remember years ago, the cabover designs were a lot more popular. I'm thinking late-1970's early 1980's. Am I remembering right? Was the reason for this the oil crisis or something else?
Is Apple really going to release a 3G iPhone with no advertising? *rolling eyes*
Have you paid any attention at all to Apple? They love to announce products completely out of the blue, with them being available for purchase immediately. Though admittedly, they probably wouldn't be able to develop a 3G iPhone without the rumor sites being all over it.
How was the airflow through the case? I think fans were recommended on anything 66Mhz or faster, but in practice you could often get away without one. Especially if you didn't have a standard AT style machine which put the CPU in the front of the computer with all the expansion cards in the way blocking the airflow.
I get a feeling that most of them are created by people using iMovie and in a typical Apple fashion, iMovie really doesn't have that many options for saving movies in different codecs/containers other than the Apple approved ones. Much the same reason you see lots of.wmv files out there from people using Windows Movie Maker.
Because the icon is only a symptom , the real problem is all the worthless processes Quicktime spawns. While that option does get rid of the icon, that's all it does.
How the hell are people spending more than $1,000 on a computer?
Well, I don't trust harddrives, so I by two of them and put them in a RAID1. That's about $450 right there for 1TB. And those Lian Li cases are so purty....
Well, just because it's Apple doesn't mean it's better. Apple generally uses the same built-in Intel-provided graphics and sound on their non-pro stuff that you find on non-Apple laptops. The harddrives are the same, nothing special drives from Seagate, etc. Apple's power adaptors suck because have no strain relief and will fray after a couple of years (though the Magsafe ones may be better). Their chiclet keyboards are awful. I hate their trackpads, but that's subjective. Their batteries bulge and catch fire like the Dell ones. Not that Dell is any better, I've found their laptops to be pretty crappy too. The best are the Thinkpads, there really isn't much comparable without moving up to something like a Panasonic Toughbook.
And on the repair thing, the latest issue of Consumer Reports placed Apple with the highest amount of repairs in their laptop ratings.
A further correction: Only Leopard on an Intel Mac is considered Unix. All those running Leopard on PPC are left out of the party. Kind of goes to show how silly the whole thing is overall.
To use your car analagy it would be like Porche bringing out some hot-hatch to compete with boy racers who want souped-up Civics and then watching their regular customers getting completely turned off.
Actually, it would be more like Porsche going out and selling a SUV to mop up the....oh wait....
Frankly, I'm tired of this unsupported "Macs are more expensive" bullcrap. Macs have fewer offerings than the rest of the companies put together. For what they sell though, they're right in line with other vendors offering similar hardware with similar reliability and support rates.
That dosen't make them any less expensive. Would you argue that a Mercedes is not an expensive car because the comparable Toyotas (well, Lexuses) are similarly priced?
Wrong! Apple's big selling point is a whole, not half of a computer. Apple sells an integrated system the sum of which is greater than it parts. When you buy a car, you get a whole vehicle. You don't pay extra for the engine or the brakes. When you buy a toaster, the cord for it comes with it. All products EXCEPT computers, other than Apple's, come as a completed whole working device, where the user doesn't have to spend extra money, such as PC users have to do. Mac users don't have to waste money on extra security software, for example.
All products, you mean like digital cameras, that usually don't come with a memory card and a case, or that fancy TV that doesn't come with the cables you need, or the cell phone that doesn't come with the cell phone service, or the gas grill that doesn't come with the propane tank, or the car stereo that doesn't come with the mounting kit, the bazillions of toys out there with "batteries not included", and so on and so forth? One of the oldest tricks out there is to entice the customer in with a cheap "base" product, then make all your money selling them the "accessories", and if you haven't noticed that, I don't know what planet you've been living on.
Besides, most PCs that leave the door of places like Best Buy are complete systems. They come with PC, monitor, keyboard, a mouse, speakers, etc. You could even argue that they are more complete than the Mac because many bundles come with a printer, but whatever.
Not this again. Vista does eat up RAM for application cache. This means it is effectively using the RAM you spent money on. Once the RAM is needed for more important things Vista will release whatever is required. Why have RAM if your OS doesn't use it?
On the other hand, it has to load all that data into ram. This is why Vista will thrash the disk so heavily when you boot it up on a system that has a lot of ram. You're right that it doesn't cost anything to have all that ram stuffed with data, but it does cost performance to get all that data there. As far as I can tell, it really doesn't take that long for any one application to open on a modern machine even without the cache, so why waste all that time and effort loading everything on the computer into ram just in case I might need it?
Hmm... granted im speaking for myself, but I have never found any Linux distro to take signifigantly longer than any Windows or Mac to boot up... I think its mostly a perceptual thing, you probably prefer, and have gotten used to how your Windows or Mac boots up, and therefore any difference to that seems like it takes longer...
Maybe it's better with some of the latest releases, but Linux booting seems to be a very serial operation. Do this one thing, then do that one thing, then do this one thing, etc. I remember back when booting Linux with your ethernet unplugged would add a couple of minutes as the whole thing would hang while it waited for DHCP to time out, though that seems to be better now. Windows used to be that way with Windows 2000, but then they made it so several things could happen in parallel with Windows XP, which is why XP boots so much faster than 2000 ever did.
I've actually installed Vista on a P3-750 laptop. It didn't have a DVD drive, so I had to install Windows 2000, then install Vista with a USB DVD drive running at USB1 speeds. It actually ran better than I expected, and was usuable as a web browsing machine with Firefox though it took ages to boot up. Sleep/hiberate worked perfectly. It probably was most limited by it's slow harddrive more than anything else.
If your battery still works (mine does not, alas), you've even got a built-in UPS!
I did that for a while, but one day the power went out when I was not around, battery ran completely flat, and it never held a charge again. Now I have a laptop with a busted screen, busted network port, and no battery to find a use for.
Not all cars need the tank removed. In my 1988 Nissan, you had to remove the bottom seat cushion (which was simple as it held in by clips - pop it out in a few seconds) then remove a small plate that was held in place with four bolts, then you had access to the top of the tank and fuel sender unit which was held in place by (IIRC) 6 bolts. You could have the fuel pump out in 10 minutes easy by yourself if you knew what you were doing with nothing more fancy than a socket wrench (and some luck that the bolts aren't rusted in place as the case was with my car). Of course, you would need access to the interior of the car to do this, but you could use the socket wrench for that too.
I heard a few years ago that someone ran over his Powerbook G4 with a truck and it survived. I'd love to see how a Macbook Pro would compare to these "rugged" notebooks.
Probably not so good, at least in terms of being run over by a truck. I've found that the screens are not well protected nowadays seemingly due to the push to make the laptops as thin as possible.
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My laptop and server already run off SSD and with any decent bit of wear-leveling it is near impossible to wear out a SSD.
I'd be more worried about the controller chip. I've had a few USB thumbdrives go bad on me this way, rendering the data on them inaccessible unless you're really good at soldering. As a matter of fact, I've even had more USB thumbdrives go bad on me the past few years than harddrives, though admittedly I'm not carrying harddrives around in my pocket so it isn't fair comparison.
You like pain or something? I was there, and Windows running on a PC was a far superior and cheaper platform than the overpriced garbage that Apple was putting out. There is a reason why Apple almost died in the late 1990's.
I also heard that 2013 is the year for Linux on the desktop. It's sure shaping up to be an interesting year!
So it isn't as though Apple can just waltz in to this arena and amaze people, the products already exist, and they are already easy to use. It also already works with Apple stuff. Put an iPod in your Yamaha receiver (many have iPod docks) and the receiver will control it remotely, and the Harmony will control the receiver.
The thing is, people don't know about these remotes. Sure, the people who drop $5000 on a stereo system do, but not the Joe Users out there. All that Apple would have to do is throw something together that works reasonably well, then market the hell out of it which they are really good at. I'm pretty sure the Joe Users out there would consider buying it, as maney of them already are juggling 3 remotes for even a modest set up (Cable/Satellite box, DVD player, TV). Apple could really rake in the cash, if Logitech etc. don't figure that there's a market out there for a stripped, inexpensive down version of their fancy remotes first.
The only proucts shipping with single-mouse buttons are their laptops, which all have nice enough work-arounds to not even notice it, at all.
I like how even you call them "work-arounds". Why not simply put the two physical buttons there and be done with it?
I seem to remember years ago, the cabover designs were a lot more popular. I'm thinking late-1970's early 1980's. Am I remembering right? Was the reason for this the oil crisis or something else?
Is Apple really going to release a 3G iPhone with no advertising? *rolling eyes*
Have you paid any attention at all to Apple? They love to announce products completely out of the blue, with them being available for purchase immediately. Though admittedly, they probably wouldn't be able to develop a 3G iPhone without the rumor sites being all over it.
Don't forget the 8.375% sales tax in NYC. That makes the cheapest Macbook Pro actually $2166.42.
How was the airflow through the case? I think fans were recommended on anything 66Mhz or faster, but in practice you could often get away without one. Especially if you didn't have a standard AT style machine which put the CPU in the front of the computer with all the expansion cards in the way blocking the airflow.
I get a feeling that most of them are created by people using iMovie and in a typical Apple fashion, iMovie really doesn't have that many options for saving movies in different codecs/containers other than the Apple approved ones. Much the same reason you see lots of .wmv files out there from people using Windows Movie Maker.
Because the icon is only a symptom , the real problem is all the worthless processes Quicktime spawns. While that option does get rid of the icon, that's all it does.
How the hell are people spending more than $1,000 on a computer?
Well, I don't trust harddrives, so I by two of them and put them in a RAID1. That's about $450 right there for 1TB. And those Lian Li cases are so purty....
I don't know about you, but if I had to type for more than about 5 minutes, I would take the Dell. What was Apple thinking with that keyboard?
Besides, I can see a few nice things with the Dell. Like they were thoughtful enough to put a USB port where you would need it for a mouse.
Well, just because it's Apple doesn't mean it's better. Apple generally uses the same built-in Intel-provided graphics and sound on their non-pro stuff that you find on non-Apple laptops. The harddrives are the same, nothing special drives from Seagate, etc. Apple's power adaptors suck because have no strain relief and will fray after a couple of years (though the Magsafe ones may be better). Their chiclet keyboards are awful. I hate their trackpads, but that's subjective. Their batteries bulge and catch fire like the Dell ones. Not that Dell is any better, I've found their laptops to be pretty crappy too. The best are the Thinkpads, there really isn't much comparable without moving up to something like a Panasonic Toughbook.
And on the repair thing, the latest issue of Consumer Reports placed Apple with the highest amount of repairs in their laptop ratings.
A further correction: Only Leopard on an Intel Mac is considered Unix. All those running Leopard on PPC are left out of the party. Kind of goes to show how silly the whole thing is overall.
To use your car analagy it would be like Porche bringing out some hot-hatch to compete with boy racers who want souped-up Civics and then watching their regular customers getting completely turned off.
Actually, it would be more like Porsche going out and selling a SUV to mop up the....oh wait....
I would hardly call a mid-range laptop with a 5400 RPM drive a desktop replacement anyway.
Frankly, I'm tired of this unsupported "Macs are more expensive" bullcrap. Macs have fewer offerings than the rest of the companies put together. For what they sell though, they're right in line with other vendors offering similar hardware with similar reliability and support rates.
That dosen't make them any less expensive. Would you argue that a Mercedes is not an expensive car because the comparable Toyotas (well, Lexuses) are similarly priced?
Wrong! Apple's big selling point is a whole, not half of a computer. Apple sells an integrated system the sum of which is greater than it parts. When you buy a car, you get a whole vehicle. You don't pay extra for the engine or the brakes. When you buy a toaster, the cord for it comes with it. All products EXCEPT computers, other than Apple's, come as a completed whole working device, where the user doesn't have to spend extra money, such as PC users have to do. Mac users don't have to waste money on extra security software, for example.
All products, you mean like digital cameras, that usually don't come with a memory card and a case, or that fancy TV that doesn't come with the cables you need, or the cell phone that doesn't come with the cell phone service, or the gas grill that doesn't come with the propane tank, or the car stereo that doesn't come with the mounting kit, the bazillions of toys out there with "batteries not included", and so on and so forth? One of the oldest tricks out there is to entice the customer in with a cheap "base" product, then make all your money selling them the "accessories", and if you haven't noticed that, I don't know what planet you've been living on.
Besides, most PCs that leave the door of places like Best Buy are complete systems. They come with PC, monitor, keyboard, a mouse, speakers, etc. You could even argue that they are more complete than the Mac because many bundles come with a printer, but whatever.
Not this again. Vista does eat up RAM for application cache. This means it is effectively using the RAM you spent money on. Once the RAM is needed for more important things Vista will release whatever is required. Why have RAM if your OS doesn't use it?
On the other hand, it has to load all that data into ram. This is why Vista will thrash the disk so heavily when you boot it up on a system that has a lot of ram. You're right that it doesn't cost anything to have all that ram stuffed with data, but it does cost performance to get all that data there. As far as I can tell, it really doesn't take that long for any one application to open on a modern machine even without the cache, so why waste all that time and effort loading everything on the computer into ram just in case I might need it?
Hmm... granted im speaking for myself, but I have never found any Linux distro to take signifigantly longer than any Windows or Mac to boot up... I think its mostly a perceptual thing, you probably prefer, and have gotten used to how your Windows or Mac boots up, and therefore any difference to that seems like it takes longer...
Maybe it's better with some of the latest releases, but Linux booting seems to be a very serial operation. Do this one thing, then do that one thing, then do this one thing, etc. I remember back when booting Linux with your ethernet unplugged would add a couple of minutes as the whole thing would hang while it waited for DHCP to time out, though that seems to be better now. Windows used to be that way with Windows 2000, but then they made it so several things could happen in parallel with Windows XP, which is why XP boots so much faster than 2000 ever did.
I've actually installed Vista on a P3-750 laptop. It didn't have a DVD drive, so I had to install Windows 2000, then install Vista with a USB DVD drive running at USB1 speeds. It actually ran better than I expected, and was usuable as a web browsing machine with Firefox though it took ages to boot up. Sleep/hiberate worked perfectly. It probably was most limited by it's slow harddrive more than anything else.
If your battery still works (mine does not, alas), you've even got a built-in UPS!
I did that for a while, but one day the power went out when I was not around, battery ran completely flat, and it never held a charge again. Now I have a laptop with a busted screen, busted network port, and no battery to find a use for.
Not all cars need the tank removed. In my 1988 Nissan, you had to remove the bottom seat cushion (which was simple as it held in by clips - pop it out in a few seconds) then remove a small plate that was held in place with four bolts, then you had access to the top of the tank and fuel sender unit which was held in place by (IIRC) 6 bolts. You could have the fuel pump out in 10 minutes easy by yourself if you knew what you were doing with nothing more fancy than a socket wrench (and some luck that the bolts aren't rusted in place as the case was with my car). Of course, you would need access to the interior of the car to do this, but you could use the socket wrench for that too.
I heard a few years ago that someone ran over his Powerbook G4 with a truck and it survived. I'd love to see how a Macbook Pro would compare to these "rugged" notebooks.
Probably not so good, at least in terms of being run over by a truck. I've found that the screens are not well protected nowadays seemingly due to the push to make the laptops as thin as possible.