The vast majority of people purchase a PC on brand, not what CPU it has. As such, Intel will have to rationalize with it's vendors, NOT the public.
That's not all there is to it. Intel practically invented end-user microchip marketing. With the old Intel Inside campaign, ordinary people went from wanting an "IBM" or a "PC" to wanting a "Pentium". People do purchase PCs on brand, but it might well be the brand of the CPU.
I used to have a pretty similar setup. I ditched the old P200 because I found the Samba performance seriously lacking. Might be because the chipset didn't support ultra dma, just multiword dma. In any case, the P2-350 I've got now is a lot faster.
$150 from each of my next three paychecks (just started a summer job), and get a 1080i HDTV by the middle of summer. Yeah you can get a 20" non-flad SDTV for $150, but why bother now. Yeah the TV i'm getting isn't 2" thck, but who cares, its higher rez than any of the $800 LCDs walmart offers. $450 for a 30" brand name 1080i TV is not a bad deal
There's also a world outside the US. In Europe, there are no CRT HDTVs. There are no HDTV broadcasts. People who buy big LCDs now are getting "HD Ready" screens, yes, but not everyone wants to pay through the nose for something that's practically useless for a few years still. As long as the Wii supports widescreen SDTV formats it's in the clear. HDTV might be nice, but it's just not here yet.
And, given the dollar to euro exchange rate, a lot of europeans will end up buying it in/from the USA!
Almost no Europeans would buy one from the USA. First off, we have a different TV system, and the consoles sold in America are preset to NTSC. Second, there will probably be region limitations set by Nintendo. Third, even if there aren't any region codes, not all PAL games will happily work on NTSC consoles, and vice versa. And finally, when you import stuff from outside the EU you'll have to pay VAT if the value of the import is higher than something, in my case about 45 EUR. So, $200=(158+20(postage))*1.22=217.16, and that's assuming there's no import duty on gaming consoles.
I am a fan of Apple, but it's worth noting that you can configure Latitude D620 with a Quadro graphics card and 1GB of RAM for ~$1483.
It's also worth noting that you only get pricing like that in the US.
For example, in Finland, a Latitude D620 configured like the middle Macbook(with extra RAM) - with a 2 GHz Core Duo, 1 gig RAM, 60 gig 5400 rpm HDD, WLAN, Bluetooth, DVD-RW, WinXP Pro and a GMA950(no options there) costs 1952 EUR, which by today's rate would be 2465 USD. 22% VAT included, of course, but it's very very far from being cheap. No rebates available, either. Ever.
That's for Finland, but I would guess you see the same prices in the UK and only a bit lower on the continent.
Oh yeah, the middle MacBook with 1 gig RAM costs 1428.98 EUR(1804 USD). Over here, it *is* cheap. Only stuff from Acer or LG can compete.
The main difference between the iBook and PowerBook lines was not processor speed or even RAM capacity but video (the PowerBooks had dual monitor support (available via firmware hack on the iBook) and a substantially beefier video card. However, the iBook still had dedicated video RAM -- so in a sense the gap has widened.
True, but iBooks always had the cheapest video chipset that they could get away with. If it had been cost effective, Apple would have used integrated video for years. Of course, it wasn't, since they had to design the chipsets themselves. Designing in a video section would have made the north bridge a lot more complex. Now that they can just drop money into Intel's account and get a complete platform in return, things have changed.
at least a core 360 could be upgraded. the 500 Ps3 is severely crippled and with no HDMI, the games dont even look the same. Imagine spending 500 on console and realizing you cant play all the game the same and you cant just add a part anf upgrade like you can with a 360 core system.
It's not quite that bad - doesn't the cheaper PS3 still come with component output? That would allow showing all the same resolutions, just with an extra DA-AD conversion in between.
For me the perfect new Mac laptop would be the Core Duo Mini specs with a 1280x960 screen.
Won't happen. Apple have been moving towards widescreens for years now, and the 12" laptops were the last 4:3 screens. 1280x800 it will be.
BTW, am I the only one annoyed by the huge variety of different aspect ratios? Just 4:3 and 16:9 would be enough IMO, but we've got 5:4, 15:10, 16:10 and who knows what else on the market... not to mention that every LCD TV available uses a 1366x768 (or 1360x768!) panel instead of a 1280x720 one...:/
Right Clicking Problem, just left click + ctrl and voila, you get right clicking on a mac laptop. now go my child go get a macbookpro...:)
Yes, except if you want to use BootCamp and Windows XP. Control-clicking is a MacOS feature, not something done in hardware.... just try that in WinXP and you'll see why he's complaining.
I ran this test with OpenOffice 1.1.3 on my Fedora Core 3 laptop. My single letter "k", with no style attributes or anything, came to 5,181k! So, we have 5,180 "characters" (bytes) of data being stored just so that my single, solitary letter "k" can be rendered with the right font, size, paragraph, and whatever else attributes to be added.
Assuming you mean 5181 bytes, no wonder. Did you try this with two characters? The resulting file will not be twice as big. There's overhead because of all the formatting and such -- bloat, perhaps, but nothing that would be worth bitching about.
I heard for years that 24-bit color was "better than the human eye could discern" yet 32-bit color video cards are commonplace nowadays. What about 48 bit? 64 bit? 128 bit?
32-bit colour does not allow for any more colours than 24-bit. It's still just 8 bits per channel, the extra 8 bits is either just padding or used as an alpha channel for transparency. 48-bit colour is on the horizon, however.
Now, I wear one at my hip (the cell phone) and wish it gave me unmetered Internet Access.
Please, *please* don't do that unless you're intent on looking like a supergeek from 1997. Brrr. You've got pockets, use them.
Generally, yes, in Sweden, no. According to a recent law (last July), downloading without a license is also illegal. This law is supposed to be an implementation of a EU directive, so it will be "interesting" to see what the other countries make of it..
Same thing in Finland, since 1st January 2006. The new law also includes the DMCA-style ban on breaking an "efficient copy protection" even for fair use purposes... is that included in Sweden as well?
I am used to and highly enjoy playing games in 720p/1080i on my Xbox 360. Its going to be quite a depressing change if I have to play the new Revolution in a 4:3 aspect ratio.
Why do you suppose that? NOBODY has said that the Revolution wouldn't support 16:9 modes, just that it won't use HD resolutions. It can and will use 16:9 modes, just like the GC, PS2 and Xbox do now. In the previous generation, only the Xbox had a non-volatile setting for aspect ratio that games would follow, on the PS2 and GC you had to set it per-game. I bet this nag will be fixed in the Revolution...
Non-time-limited, but still DRM'd downloads aren't something you own. Especially if you can't sell them on. This is still renting -- at least with DVDs I can carry them to a second hand shop when I get bored. This is just another scheme to get you to buy their stuff several times.
Let's see here... if we could get downloadable movies that you could a) make copies of, and transcode into whatever format you wish, and b) resell the license when you're done watching, THAT would be download-to-own, instead of download-to-pwn.
I saw X-Type a few days ago the rear end reminded me of a Ford Contour.
The X-Type *is* basically a Mondeo (Contour/Mystique in NA) with some make-up. Traversal engine, front wheel drive and a Ford Diesel engine. Not very aristocratic..
If you do music on your computer, wait. Garageband is Universal, but I doubt anyone actually uses it. I tried running Propellerhead Reason 3.0 on the 20" Intel iMac, and I had to back down to 25 ms latencies on the internal sound source before the sound actually held together. 25 ms is not nearly enough for real-time input, so we'll just have to wait for universal binaries.
Sure enough, we plugged the iPod into my laptop, and I started browsing the directory structure, and everything was COMPLETELY mangled. I mean, worse than how compilers mangle some function calls. Filenames appeared to be random strings of alphanumeric characters, and songs from the same album were separated across MULTIPLE subfolders!
That has little to do with iTunes. The iPod just works that way... try putting music on an iPod with any other manager software, it will turn out just the same way. Some 3rd party managers can also pull music off an iPod and rename the tracks based on tags.
iTunes only "mangles" track names if you have the "keep my music organised" checkbox checked, and even then it just sorts them into directories by artist and then by album.
That said, I don't think iTunes is a great music management application. With large collections it gets slow, really slow. And there's no way you can organise things by anything other than genre, album name and artist tags. I prefer foobar2000.
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That's not all there is to it. Intel practically invented end-user microchip marketing. With the old Intel Inside campaign, ordinary people went from wanting an "IBM" or a "PC" to wanting a "Pentium". People do purchase PCs on brand, but it might well be the brand of the CPU.
I used to have a pretty similar setup. I ditched the old P200 because I found the Samba performance seriously lacking. Might be because the chipset didn't support ultra dma, just multiword dma. In any case, the P2-350 I've got now is a lot faster.
There's also a world outside the US. In Europe, there are no CRT HDTVs. There are no HDTV broadcasts. People who buy big LCDs now are getting "HD Ready" screens, yes, but not everyone wants to pay through the nose for something that's practically useless for a few years still. As long as the Wii supports widescreen SDTV formats it's in the clear. HDTV might be nice, but it's just not here yet.
Almost no Europeans would buy one from the USA. First off, we have a different TV system, and the consoles sold in America are preset to NTSC. Second, there will probably be region limitations set by Nintendo. Third, even if there aren't any region codes, not all PAL games will happily work on NTSC consoles, and vice versa. And finally, when you import stuff from outside the EU you'll have to pay VAT if the value of the import is higher than something, in my case about 45 EUR. So, $200=(158+20(postage))*1.22=217.16, and that's assuming there's no import duty on gaming consoles.
It's also worth noting that you only get pricing like that in the US.
For example, in Finland, a Latitude D620 configured like the middle Macbook(with extra RAM) - with a 2 GHz Core Duo, 1 gig RAM, 60 gig 5400 rpm HDD, WLAN, Bluetooth, DVD-RW, WinXP Pro and a GMA950(no options there) costs 1952 EUR, which by today's rate would be 2465 USD. 22% VAT included, of course, but it's very very far from being cheap. No rebates available, either. Ever.
That's for Finland, but I would guess you see the same prices in the UK and only a bit lower on the continent.
Oh yeah, the middle MacBook with 1 gig RAM costs 1428.98 EUR(1804 USD). Over here, it *is* cheap. Only stuff from Acer or LG can compete.
True, but iBooks always had the cheapest video chipset that they could get away with. If it had been cost effective, Apple would have used integrated video for years. Of course, it wasn't, since they had to design the chipsets themselves. Designing in a video section would have made the north bridge a lot more complex. Now that they can just drop money into Intel's account and get a complete platform in return, things have changed.
Yes, except that the black MacBook is matte, not glossy. It's not at all like the black iPods, which is good since they scratch so easily.
It's not quite that bad - doesn't the cheaper PS3 still come with component output? That would allow showing all the same resolutions, just with an extra DA-AD conversion in between.
Won't happen. Apple have been moving towards widescreens for years now, and the 12" laptops were the last 4:3 screens. 1280x800 it will be.
BTW, am I the only one annoyed by the huge variety of different aspect ratios? Just 4:3 and 16:9 would be enough IMO, but we've got 5:4, 15:10, 16:10 and who knows what else on the market... not to mention that every LCD TV available uses a 1366x768 (or 1360x768!) panel instead of a 1280x720 one... :/
Cool, good to know there is a solution, even a third-party one.
Yes, except if you want to use BootCamp and Windows XP. Control-clicking is a MacOS feature, not something done in hardware.... just try that in WinXP and you'll see why he's complaining.
Isn't that more like, "The terrorists HATE our FREEDOM, so limiting said freedom will make everybody SAFER!"
All the time. My minimum for credit card purchases is $20, and I never write checks unless I have to.
A better question would be - you write cheques? You *have* cheques? What the hell for?
I remember my dad used to use cheques in the 80's, and he was considered old-fashioned.
Assuming you mean 5181 bytes, no wonder. Did you try this with two characters? The resulting file will not be twice as big. There's overhead because of all the formatting and such -- bloat, perhaps, but nothing that would be worth bitching about.
I heard for years that 24-bit color was "better than the human eye could discern" yet 32-bit color video cards are commonplace nowadays. What about 48 bit? 64 bit? 128 bit?
32-bit colour does not allow for any more colours than 24-bit. It's still just 8 bits per channel, the extra 8 bits is either just padding or used as an alpha channel for transparency. 48-bit colour is on the horizon, however.
Now, I wear one at my hip (the cell phone) and wish it gave me unmetered Internet Access.
Please, *please* don't do that unless you're intent on looking like a supergeek from 1997. Brrr. You've got pockets, use them.
It would be, but Matrox's box only works at 60 Hz (75 Hz at triple 1024x768) so you had better stick with LCD's.
Same thing in Finland, since 1st January 2006. The new law also includes the DMCA-style ban on breaking an "efficient copy protection" even for fair use purposes... is that included in Sweden as well?
Why do you suppose that? NOBODY has said that the Revolution wouldn't support 16:9 modes, just that it won't use HD resolutions. It can and will use 16:9 modes, just like the GC, PS2 and Xbox do now. In the previous generation, only the Xbox had a non-volatile setting for aspect ratio that games would follow, on the PS2 and GC you had to set it per-game. I bet this nag will be fixed in the Revolution...
Non-time-limited, but still DRM'd downloads aren't something you own. Especially if you can't sell them on. This is still renting -- at least with DVDs I can carry them to a second hand shop when I get bored. This is just another scheme to get you to buy their stuff several times.
Let's see here... if we could get downloadable movies that you could a) make copies of, and transcode into whatever format you wish, and b) resell the license when you're done watching, THAT would be download-to-own, instead of download-to-pwn.
They don't, not any more. The Honda NSX was discontinued late last year.
The X-Type *is* basically a Mondeo (Contour/Mystique in NA) with some make-up. Traversal engine, front wheel drive and a Ford Diesel engine. Not very aristocratic..
Yeah, I would. Except that now we have to trust BMW to make our Rollses.
Don't forget NMT, which was on the market before AMPS.
If you do music on your computer, wait. Garageband is Universal, but I doubt anyone actually uses it. I tried running Propellerhead Reason 3.0 on the 20" Intel iMac, and I had to back down to 25 ms latencies on the internal sound source before the sound actually held together. 25 ms is not nearly enough for real-time input, so we'll just have to wait for universal binaries.
That has little to do with iTunes. The iPod just works that way... try putting music on an iPod with any other manager software, it will turn out just the same way. Some 3rd party managers can also pull music off an iPod and rename the tracks based on tags.
iTunes only "mangles" track names if you have the "keep my music organised" checkbox checked, and even then it just sorts them into directories by artist and then by album.
That said, I don't think iTunes is a great music management application. With large collections it gets slow, really slow. And there's no way you can organise things by anything other than genre, album name and artist tags. I prefer foobar2000.