Note that Jobs jumped on the Intel boat after Intel jumped off the "MHz is good" boat. The Core/Core 2 lines are clearly NOT meant to impress on MHz ratings. Note how the Core 2 benchmarks (if you trust them, which is a different matter altogether) has lower speed Core 2 processors smoking higher speed Athlon 64 processors.
I'm guessing that apple will make their new lineup similar to their current one. A single dual-core for the low end(conroe), a faster single dual core for the midrange (conroe) and dual dual-core or the high end (woodcrest).
It's pretty amazing that this didn't get commented on by any of the people who replied to you by now (then again, everybody got tied up on arguing how a Dell's no match for Apple's quality -- typical). But here's a pretty good hint that that theory doesn't work: Apple likes things streamlined. They're not going to have two different processors and chipsets in the same line. Consider the similarities between the MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs and Mac Minis, and you'll see what I mean. They MIGHT convert the iMac to Conroe (though I'm not sure if it dissipates little enough heat for the to make it work), and like the Ars bloke said, if they want to hold the Quad, they'll use Xeons on the Mac Pro line. If they do so, it'll be Xeons across the board. If they don't, it'll probably be Conroes across the board. But they're NOT going to break the line in half. It makes no sense either in the technical sense (because it means 2 more chipsets/processors to support), nor in a business sense (because it makes the components for the quad a lot more expensive because of scale, because it makes the lower end also suffer a bit in the volume advantages and because it makes the line itself seem less consistent).
Let's leave brand loyalism out of this. The whole purpose of capitalism is for this exact phenomenon to happen. The "underdog" company (AMD) came up with great products, people bought those products, the big bad corporation (Intel) got spooked and was forced to play harder to catch up. Result? The stunning results we're seeing from Conroe.
As long as we're moderately sure that Intel is playing fair and not leveraging their position to kick AMD out, I don't care who has the best processors. I want them to compete for that spot, just like I see nVidia and ATi doing.
The same way a police investigator might use the word of a known criminal as a lead to further investigation, rather than proof in and of itself.
And because you can actually background check any one wikipedia article quite a bit more than the afore mentioned known criminal.
I can see windows not liking that. Too much hardware mismatch, possibly? Definitely a different video card between the two "machines", possibly different loads of other things (depending on how the virtualization is done). windows might throw a "different machine, won't boot" fit.
Yes it requires an insane machine to run. Just look at these requirements:
Processor: 800 MHz, 1 GHz for premium. Unheard of, that'll burn a hole in your pocket
512MiB RAM, or 1 GiB for premium 640 KiB is more than enough for anyone, don't dare say otherwise
DirectX 9 capable card, (pixel shader 2.0 support for premium edition) Wow, so you need an ultra expensive intel GMA950 or *gasp* better (yes, the GMA is confirmed as good)
64-256 MiB VRAM depending on screen resolution for the Aero Glass desktop. Ok, here I'll concede that OS X seems to do with 32 MiB what vista requires 32 MiB for, and handles with 64 MiB what Vista demands 256 MiB for. But still, 64 MiB for a 1280x1024 or smaller display resolution isn't INCREDIBLY demanding.
15 GiB available HDD space, at least 40 GiB total (not necessarily available) for the premium edition Even the HDD starved iBook 12" I use fits this bill.
Looking at this list, I see the sort of RAM that has been standard on middle of the road computers for a couple of years, I see processor speeds that have been available since 2001, possibly earlier, I see 10% of the HDD capacity that even the cheapest desktop dells provide, and I see what any laptop bought within the last year probably provides in terms of graphics capabilities. Being backwards compatible all the way back to the earliest pentium IVs and possibly even Pentium IIIs is quite sufficient, I think. The fact that those machines can, when meeting other requirements, fulfill the "premium" version's requisites should be more than enough.
I'm not here to claim that Vista's performance is stellar, or that it's light, or whatever. In fact, when I look at what my iBook (last generation 12" model) does with the resources it has, consider what a machine that just meets the "recommended" configuration for XP (233 MHz processor and 128 MiB RAM) provides, and wonder if the performance of a "recommended specs" Vista machine will be consistent with the Mac or the XP box (with due adjustments for age). But that still doesn't make the announced requirements steep.
Finally, not all features are removed. You still have userspace drivers (which should do plenty to help stability) a departure from the admin by default model to a least privileges model (finally!), and, most importantly, a pretty desktop. If Microsoft managed to get around the WinFS problem by doing a separate database (a la Beagle or Spotlight), well, kudos to them for doing things in a simpler fashion. If the search feature is still craptastic, no cookie for the bad engineers. I'll wait and see, rather than speculate at this point whether they're going to deliver (I refuse to try the betas). If they DO deliver, they'll do so bloody late, but that's no longer the point.
No, the Aero Glass requirements aren't THAT demanding. At least, not for the sort of user who considers upgrading the OS himself (and, importantly, excluding crappy laptop integrated graphics, which will probably start fading away fast after Vista). Here's the requirements for Vista Premium, from Microsoft's site:
1 GHz x86 or x64 processor
1 GiB RAM
DirectX 9.0 compatible video card with shader model 2.0 and 128 MiB VRAM.
Note that the actual VRAM requirements are variable. For resolutions of 1280x1024 and below 64 MiB will suffice. Mostly every laptop with a dedicated graphics card will fit the 64 MB or more, under 1280x1024 total pixels bracket. 1280x800 or 1440x900 are popular resolutions nowadays, and are both beneath that amount of total pixels.
This said, the requirements are above and beyond those of OS X's Quartz Extreme. A 64 MiB card like the geforce 5200 Ultra in the powerbook 12" can and will drive a 1024x768 panel (built-in) and a 23" apple panel (the 20" ones are 1680x1050, so scale it appropriately). That's a lot more bang for buck. But it still doesn't make the hardware demands that tough. Who here has a big, beefy screen without a correspondingly beefy video card? Who can you imagine actually upgrading the OS in their boxes that doesn't have a suitable video card? I'm not going to go into the RAM and CPU requirements (note that the basic vista version only demands 512 MiB, rather than the full 1 GiB for Premium), which I don't think are over the top. Except for some odd low-voltage offerings (I'm not even aware of any, but I can conceive them existing) I can't see anyone having trouble meeting the 1 GHz requirement, and 1 GiB RAM isn't really a big deal nowadays.
Speaking for myself, and around 4-5 acquaintances who have switched to Macs within the last year to year and a half, it's not the status that matters, it's the fact that, even with the performance-lagging G4 processors, the Apple laptops offer great functionality, at reasonable prices. Before you open your mouths to say that they lack power, RAM, or whatever other hardware spec, consider this: Ideally, when you buy a computer, you pay x money expecting y funcionality. That's it, no more, no less.
Sure, my iBook 12" isn't the fastest machine I've ever worked with. However, my productivity while working on it is a great deal better than on Linux, and miles away from my windows work performance. Here by productivity I mean actual amount of useful work generated over time, and comfort while working (which yields long periods of effective work). There's very little that you could buy for the price of most 15" or smaller apple laptops that would give me a better return on investment, as measured in productivity. Since it is strictly a work machine, that's the only metric that matters.
Because apple is neither a hardware company, nor a software company. It's a computer company. They'll make and sell you the complete set, be it the iMac, iPod and iLife, be it the PowerMac (or whatever it's going to be called in a month), an Xserve RAID array and Logic/Shake/whatever it is that you need for your creative job. Now that I look at it this way, it's sort of an old school way of doing things. Personally, I rather like the result, and as a perfectionist myself I can very much relate to them not wanting to separate software and hardware any time soon. It's just not right.
I apologize for the blocky look. Here's a properly paragraphed version of that if that's too painful to read:
Actually, most RPGs that are bound to "save points" are console RPGs (which aren't usually RPGs at all, they're just action games with player character stat evolution and at least an attempt at a plot, but that's a different discussion altogether). Computer RPGs usually aren't limited by some "save point" mechanism. At least, not Neverwinter Nights, not Planescape: Torment, not Elder Scrolls: Oblivion or Morrowind, not any of the Fallouts, not "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura", nor KotOR II (probably not I either). Granted, most of these aren't VERY "short burst" friendly, but I'm finding Oblivion to be perfectly playable in half hour to one hour sessions (in between World of Warcraft sessions:o).
If you want a list of games I find perfectly playable in small increments, here goes, from my desktop: Oblivion (as mentioned, at least I like it like that), any Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game (Classic Mode is 2-minute runs, I usually fire it up and grind and jump around for a few minutes to a few hours depending on moods), World Championship Snooker (you can play it in 1 frame increments. Actual frame length varies, and can be quite long, but you can shorten that by making your computer controlled opponent play lightning fast), Diablo II (After you're a bit addicted to it, running Baal or Meph a few times only takes a few minutes, and yields some cool items), Worms 4 (my non-gamer girlfriend offered me this one, we occasionally play some hilarious, but short, bouts), any of the Need for Speed: Underground games (you just get in, lookup the closest race marker, and do one race. Takes under 10 minutes except in the very late game to do something like that). In fact, all "proper" computer games I have in my computer right now (as opposed to console ports or *cough* emulation) with the exception of WoW and Guild Wars are pretty good at fulfilling the "play for 15-30 minutes each time" niche.
Oh, and regarding "absolutely no sports games", most football ("soccer", not the american stuff) games default to either 5 or 10 minute halves. In their easier settings (which I'll assume is what the truly casual player will use) you don't really need to set up teams or stuff like that. So that argument is pretty invalid. I haven't played any of those in a while, but I'm supposing almost all EA sports games (NBA, NHL, FIFA come to mind) are set up this way as well.
Actually, most RPGs that are bound to "save points" are console RPGs (which aren't usually RPGs at all, they're just action games with player character stat evolution and at least an attempt at a plot, but that's a different discussion altogether). Computer RPGs usually aren't limited by some "save point" mechanism. At least, not Neverwinter Nights, not Planescape: Torment, not Elder Scrolls: Oblivion or Morrowind, not any of the Fallouts, not "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura", nor KotOR II (probably not I either). Granted, most of these aren't VERY "short burst" friendly, but I'm finding Oblivion to be perfectly playable in half hour to one hour sessions (in between World of Warcraft sessions:o).
If you want a list of games I find perfectly playable in small increments, here goes, from my desktop: Oblivion (as mentioned, at least I like it like that), any Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game (Classic Mode is 2-minute runs, I usually fire it up and grind and jump around for a few minutes to a few hours depending on moods), World Championship Snooker (you can play it in 1 frame increments. Actual frame length varies, and can be quite long, but you can shorten that by making your computer controlled opponent play lightning fast), Diablo II (After you're a bit addicted to it, running Baal or Meph a few times only takes a few minutes, and yields some cool items), Worms 4 (my non-gamer girlfriend offered me this one, we occasionally play some hilarious, but short, bouts), any of the Need for Speed: Underground games (you just get in, lookup the closest race marker, and do one race. Takes under 10 minutes except in the very late game to do something like that). In fact, all "proper" computer games I have in my computer right now with the exception of WoW and Guild Wars are pretty good at fulfilling the "play for 15-30 minutes each time" niche. Oh, and regarding "absolutely no sports games", most football ("soccer", not the american stuff) games default to either 5 or 10 minute halves. In their easier settings (which I'll assume is what the truly casual player will use) you don't really need to set up teams or stuff like that. So that argument is pretty invalid. I haven't played any of those in a while, but I'm supposing almost all EA sports games (NBA, NHL, FIFA come to mind) are set up this way as well.
Nintendo has the most overpriced consoles of all, the proof? MS and Sony subsidise the early consoles, Nintendo does not and makes a profit on them, if that isn't overpricing them I don't know what is.
Allow me to disagree! You buy a product to fulfill a certain need. If a product fulfills the expectations and has a low cost, it's not overpriced, almost by definition. You make a product and sell it, the natural expectation is that you make a profit from that sale. If another company is irresponsible and/or doesn't know how to reach its market and has to sell its product below cost for it to sell -- even if at a higher price than the better product -- yet still fails to meet expectations (ie, be fun), it's their own fault. You can't POSSIBLY convince me that the it is the good cheap product that is overpriced rather than the bad expensive product. (And yes, I'm grossly simplifying in the good/bad aspect. It's on purpose to make a universal point clear, irrespectively of the actual case that is this generation of consoles).
Well, I can see it work this way: "Since it's poorly documented, you're a lot more prone to make mistakes that cost you uptime". Not even that far fetched, really. But still not too convincing, no.
From the article: Blizzard has succeeded largely by consistently identifying what it is that makes gamers want to play a game, and then amplifying that all the way to 11.
I agree. If you look closely, all the really famous Blizzard games are really the same genre concepts as previous games -- but taken to a much greater level. Picture Dune II, and the early C&C games. Great games, to be sure. Dune II really made a genre. But then look at Starcraft, and everything else that came later. SC has three completely different and quite well balanced playing styles as manifested by the races. I don't know of any game that gets that variety and balance nailed quite as well. Allied with this is a fun graphics style and a decent (not brilliant, but decent) story. Add to that a nice multiplayer system and simple controls -- you have a winner. But that game didn't come out of the blue. They had two RTS gamess coming before that, and StarCraft built atop them. The whole strategy is one of careful incremental updates -- the only thing revolutionary about SC is the amount of differentiation between factions.
Now take a look at Diablo. Hack and Slash roleplaying games have been around for ages, mostly because a real RPG is really hard to do. Neverwinter Nights, despite being hailed as a great RPG, plays as Hack and Slash, with verily little juice to it. Not many people around that make games like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura, Planescape: Torment, or the first two Fallouts, all of which are RP heavy. Blizzard looked at the half hearted RPG, saw the fun in the hack and slash, and refined it. Once again, Diablo I was simplistic, and Diablo II, while not revolutionary in any way, added a variety of classes and possible viable builds for each character that made variety tremendous. The truly phenomenal part of it was once again the online play (cheat-drenched as it was) and the collector's appeal.
Finally, look at WoW. Once again, the whole MMORPG concept has been done and redone to oblivion. Yet they managed to capture the top spot with a title that, once again, provides nothing really tremendously revolutionary. Classes and Races? Common RP notions. Battlegrounds? Besides being recent additions, they're just implementations of typical FPS concepts. Crafting and collecting? UO was there ages ago. Nothing in WoW is really new. But it's all packaged in one neat envelope, that gently introduces you into the game and that provides almost everything you could want in a MMORPG (roleplaying obviously excluded, and housing an unfortunate missing feature).
My take on the reason why Blizzard is so successful is that it works towards a complex simplicity. By this I mean that, unlike Nintendo, who goes for pure, unbridled simplicity (and Mario Kart, Super Smash Brothers et al really show how effective that is), Blizzard makes really simple games that really have a lot of potential to be taken as quite complex. I don't think I know any gaming communities that examine game mechanics quite as indepth as both the Diablo II and Wow communities, even though the games themselves have pretty simple interfaces and are easy enough to pick up (if well past the nintendo ease of pick up level). Speaking of interfaces, the whole Lua interface system for WoW is pure genious. It's the sort of thing I've dreamt of for ages. Not sure it's originally theirs or if someone else implemented something like it earlier (Civ 4 does the same with Python I think).
It's been said before, and I'll say it again: Vanilla XP doesn't bring a functional DVD player or "recent" graphics drivers out of the box. In fact, it took a bit of effort and some counter intuitive stuff to get my Athlon 64's speed throttling working on XP (CPU drivers? never heard of them before. Setting the power mode to better battery life or some such? on a desktop? Wouldn't have crossed my mind). XP isn't that easy to install to the non technically inclined either. All in all, the experience between XP and Ubuntu is pretty similar in my book, usability wise. In some aspects (namely, apt/synaptic), Ubuntu is significantly better. And please do NOT equate video/audio codecs to ease of use. Those are two distinct matters. I'll grant you that I'd prefer to have MP3 support out of the box. But you'll have to grant THEM that when you are a free software business, things like heavily proprietary licences ARE a moral objectionable. And sticking to your morals is supposed to be a Good Thing.
Bullshit. So much bullshit, in fact, I don't even know what your point is. I have a last-generation iBook 12". It has a rather friendly battery life of about 4h30 under "normal use", which means screen brightness set to a bit over half, airport on, and working with Vim, while Safari and Mail are open in the background (actually, lots more stuff open in the background, but those are the only two applications that MIGHT consume CPU resources and hence drain battery life a bit more -- namely I rarely use iTunes while using my laptop on battery power, I'd rather use my iPod). Those six hours they purportedly last is what Apple announces, and you KNOW that's under "better than optimal" conditions.
If I use the iBook as a glorified iPod (just iTunes playing while I study, the screen going out because there's no input), it'll rise to about 5h30. Yes, that battery is working fully, with a full charge holding slightly more than nominal capacity (4411 mAh rather than 4400 mAh, according to coconut battery)
No, the iBook CAN'T go months on end without being charged, unless you turn it off. Even then, that's bad practice that'll damage the battery eventually. I find the iBook consumes around 1% battery capacity per day, as they DO NOT suspend to disk. They just power down unused components, and kind of suspend to RAM. Kind of being the keyword here -- disc defrag happens while they're suspended, if you leave them connected via ethernet to a router and have an SSH connection to somewhere they reportedly keep the connection alive (reportedly -- I've never tried it myself), etc. Newer PowerBooks (and, I assume, the MacBooks), will copy the contents of their RAM to HDD to protect them from battery failures, however.
All in all, you're misrepresenting the Macs, and I have to wonder why. They're quality hardware. Quality hardware doesn't need positive misrepresenting, as its value speaks for itself. Building false expectations can only lead to disappointment.
1080p? Don't you mean 1080i? Either way: Aw, chucks. So you're telling me that to go from the 1024p (that's right, 1280x1024 could essentially be called a 5:4 1024p display mode) to 1080i (interlaced scan? urgh), you need to go from a few CDs or a half-full DVD to a giant blu-ray disc? I had no idea scalable content would have to grow five fold in size to accommodate a 5% increase in resolution.
Also, what do you mean "High quality games"? Tetris is a very high quality game, WoW is a very high quality game. There are loads of very high quality games around. Perhaps you mean high graphical detail? That's not really a measure of a game's capacity to entertain you, you know? Sure, you DO need all that space to store high resolution FMVs. But then you have yet another Final Fantasy game. On the other end of the spectrum, the very VERY detailed game that is Oblivion takes up less than a single layer DVD.
The whole storage capacity thing is probably moot. Any day now Will Wright's spore will show the light and everybody will follow. Until then, we'll steadily grow all the way to standard double layer DVDs. Or at least that's what I'd like to see:)
Actually, TFA reads quite differently from what the summary says (how surprising) and what you make of it (did you even read it?). Essentially, Bram says that the definition of Net Neutrality is a real toughie, and that the technology he's working on is basically a few caches spread around the globe to take over the part of some of the nodes in a bit torrent network. In fact, the only way I see this interfering with net neutrality is that it preemptively caches a company's content on several high bandwidth server farms of some sort, thus making the client's actual download speedier, as the farms are geographically close by, and have big connections. This all translates into a make-believe prioritization, where the content gets from point A to point B much faster than it "should" because it was cached in C, which is closer to B. Since the caching is NOT neutral, and only caches content for paying customers, it "breaks" network neutrality. Personally, I can't really see what the harm in this is. Doesn't google have data centres spread around the globe? Doesn't blizzard have WoW realms set to cater clients geographically close by? Do you expect them to hold the whole internet in their farms?
Well, your latch, like mine, is mechanical in nature, but has a magnetic system to hide the latch proper. This one is magnetic in nature: the lid stays closed through magnetic attraction.
You can also do most OS X work via ssh. OS X come preinstalled. It's also pretty low maintenance. When in the PC world, and barring my gaming "needs" I'm a debian+ubuntu user. But ever since I bought my iBook, I really don't think I could live without that mixture of power and polish.
So you get the same VRAM as you did before at the same price points. It's not like they can update their lines 3 times in a couple of months and have major overhauls.
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Personally I rather like Mscromedia Fireworks. Raster AND vector graphics, bundled into one. Oooooh the potential... Not really photoshop though.
Note that Jobs jumped on the Intel boat after Intel jumped off the "MHz is good" boat. The Core/Core 2 lines are clearly NOT meant to impress on MHz ratings. Note how the Core 2 benchmarks (if you trust them, which is a different matter altogether) has lower speed Core 2 processors smoking higher speed Athlon 64 processors.
I'm guessing that apple will make their new lineup similar to their current one. A single dual-core for the low end(conroe), a faster single dual core for the midrange (conroe) and dual dual-core or the high end (woodcrest).
It's pretty amazing that this didn't get commented on by any of the people who replied to you by now (then again, everybody got tied up on arguing how a Dell's no match for Apple's quality -- typical). But here's a pretty good hint that that theory doesn't work: Apple likes things streamlined. They're not going to have two different processors and chipsets in the same line. Consider the similarities between the MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs and Mac Minis, and you'll see what I mean. They MIGHT convert the iMac to Conroe (though I'm not sure if it dissipates little enough heat for the to make it work), and like the Ars bloke said, if they want to hold the Quad, they'll use Xeons on the Mac Pro line. If they do so, it'll be Xeons across the board. If they don't, it'll probably be Conroes across the board. But they're NOT going to break the line in half. It makes no sense either in the technical sense (because it means 2 more chipsets/processors to support), nor in a business sense (because it makes the components for the quad a lot more expensive because of scale, because it makes the lower end also suffer a bit in the volume advantages and because it makes the line itself seem less consistent).
Why unfortunately?
Let's leave brand loyalism out of this. The whole purpose of capitalism is for this exact phenomenon to happen. The "underdog" company (AMD) came up with great products, people bought those products, the big bad corporation (Intel) got spooked and was forced to play harder to catch up. Result? The stunning results we're seeing from Conroe.
As long as we're moderately sure that Intel is playing fair and not leveraging their position to kick AMD out, I don't care who has the best processors. I want them to compete for that spot, just like I see nVidia and ATi doing.
The same way a police investigator might use the word of a known criminal as a lead to further investigation, rather than proof in and of itself.
And because you can actually background check any one wikipedia article quite a bit more than the afore mentioned known criminal.
I can see windows not liking that. Too much hardware mismatch, possibly? Definitely a different video card between the two "machines", possibly different loads of other things (depending on how the virtualization is done). windows might throw a "different machine, won't boot" fit.
Yes it requires an insane machine to run. Just look at these requirements:
Looking at this list, I see the sort of RAM that has been standard on middle of the road computers for a couple of years, I see processor speeds that have been available since 2001, possibly earlier, I see 10% of the HDD capacity that even the cheapest desktop dells provide, and I see what any laptop bought within the last year probably provides in terms of graphics capabilities. Being backwards compatible all the way back to the earliest pentium IVs and possibly even Pentium IIIs is quite sufficient, I think. The fact that those machines can, when meeting other requirements, fulfill the "premium" version's requisites should be more than enough.
I'm not here to claim that Vista's performance is stellar, or that it's light, or whatever. In fact, when I look at what my iBook (last generation 12" model) does with the resources it has, consider what a machine that just meets the "recommended" configuration for XP (233 MHz processor and 128 MiB RAM) provides, and wonder if the performance of a "recommended specs" Vista machine will be consistent with the Mac or the XP box (with due adjustments for age). But that still doesn't make the announced requirements steep.
Finally, not all features are removed. You still have userspace drivers (which should do plenty to help stability) a departure from the admin by default model to a least privileges model (finally!), and, most importantly, a pretty desktop. If Microsoft managed to get around the WinFS problem by doing a separate database (a la Beagle or Spotlight), well, kudos to them for doing things in a simpler fashion. If the search feature is still craptastic, no cookie for the bad engineers. I'll wait and see, rather than speculate at this point whether they're going to deliver (I refuse to try the betas). If they DO deliver, they'll do so bloody late, but that's no longer the point.
Note that the actual VRAM requirements are variable. For resolutions of 1280x1024 and below 64 MiB will suffice. Mostly every laptop with a dedicated graphics card will fit the 64 MB or more, under 1280x1024 total pixels bracket. 1280x800 or 1440x900 are popular resolutions nowadays, and are both beneath that amount of total pixels.
This said, the requirements are above and beyond those of OS X's Quartz Extreme. A 64 MiB card like the geforce 5200 Ultra in the powerbook 12" can and will drive a 1024x768 panel (built-in) and a 23" apple panel (the 20" ones are 1680x1050, so scale it appropriately). That's a lot more bang for buck. But it still doesn't make the hardware demands that tough. Who here has a big, beefy screen without a correspondingly beefy video card? Who can you imagine actually upgrading the OS in their boxes that doesn't have a suitable video card? I'm not going to go into the RAM and CPU requirements (note that the basic vista version only demands 512 MiB, rather than the full 1 GiB for Premium), which I don't think are over the top. Except for some odd low-voltage offerings (I'm not even aware of any, but I can conceive them existing) I can't see anyone having trouble meeting the 1 GHz requirement, and 1 GiB RAM isn't really a big deal nowadays.
Speaking for myself, and around 4-5 acquaintances who have switched to Macs within the last year to year and a half, it's not the status that matters, it's the fact that, even with the performance-lagging G4 processors, the Apple laptops offer great functionality, at reasonable prices. Before you open your mouths to say that they lack power, RAM, or whatever other hardware spec, consider this: Ideally, when you buy a computer, you pay x money expecting y funcionality. That's it, no more, no less.
Sure, my iBook 12" isn't the fastest machine I've ever worked with. However, my productivity while working on it is a great deal better than on Linux, and miles away from my windows work performance. Here by productivity I mean actual amount of useful work generated over time, and comfort while working (which yields long periods of effective work). There's very little that you could buy for the price of most 15" or smaller apple laptops that would give me a better return on investment, as measured in productivity. Since it is strictly a work machine, that's the only metric that matters.
Because apple is neither a hardware company, nor a software company. It's a computer company. They'll make and sell you the complete set, be it the iMac, iPod and iLife, be it the PowerMac (or whatever it's going to be called in a month), an Xserve RAID array and Logic/Shake/whatever it is that you need for your creative job. Now that I look at it this way, it's sort of an old school way of doing things. Personally, I rather like the result, and as a perfectionist myself I can very much relate to them not wanting to separate software and hardware any time soon. It's just not right.
I apologize for the blocky look. Here's a properly paragraphed version of that if that's too painful to read:
Actually, most RPGs that are bound to "save points" are console RPGs (which aren't usually RPGs at all, they're just action games with player character stat evolution and at least an attempt at a plot, but that's a different discussion altogether). Computer RPGs usually aren't limited by some "save point" mechanism. At least, not Neverwinter Nights, not Planescape: Torment, not Elder Scrolls: Oblivion or Morrowind, not any of the Fallouts, not "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura", nor KotOR II (probably not I either). Granted, most of these aren't VERY "short burst" friendly, but I'm finding Oblivion to be perfectly playable in half hour to one hour sessions (in between World of Warcraft sessions :o).
If you want a list of games I find perfectly playable in small increments, here goes, from my desktop: Oblivion (as mentioned, at least I like it like that), any Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game (Classic Mode is 2-minute runs, I usually fire it up and grind and jump around for a few minutes to a few hours depending on moods), World Championship Snooker (you can play it in 1 frame increments. Actual frame length varies, and can be quite long, but you can shorten that by making your computer controlled opponent play lightning fast), Diablo II (After you're a bit addicted to it, running Baal or Meph a few times only takes a few minutes, and yields some cool items), Worms 4 (my non-gamer girlfriend offered me this one, we occasionally play some hilarious, but short, bouts), any of the Need for Speed: Underground games (you just get in, lookup the closest race marker, and do one race. Takes under 10 minutes except in the very late game to do something like that). In fact, all "proper" computer games I have in my computer right now (as opposed to console ports or *cough* emulation) with the exception of WoW and Guild Wars are pretty good at fulfilling the "play for 15-30 minutes each time" niche.
Oh, and regarding "absolutely no sports games", most football ("soccer", not the american stuff) games default to either 5 or 10 minute halves. In their easier settings (which I'll assume is what the truly casual player will use) you don't really need to set up teams or stuff like that. So that argument is pretty invalid. I haven't played any of those in a while, but I'm supposing almost all EA sports games (NBA, NHL, FIFA come to mind) are set up this way as well.
Actually, most RPGs that are bound to "save points" are console RPGs (which aren't usually RPGs at all, they're just action games with player character stat evolution and at least an attempt at a plot, but that's a different discussion altogether). Computer RPGs usually aren't limited by some "save point" mechanism. At least, not Neverwinter Nights, not Planescape: Torment, not Elder Scrolls: Oblivion or Morrowind, not any of the Fallouts, not "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura", nor KotOR II (probably not I either). Granted, most of these aren't VERY "short burst" friendly, but I'm finding Oblivion to be perfectly playable in half hour to one hour sessions (in between World of Warcraft sessions :o).
If you want a list of games I find perfectly playable in small increments, here goes, from my desktop: Oblivion (as mentioned, at least I like it like that), any Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game (Classic Mode is 2-minute runs, I usually fire it up and grind and jump around for a few minutes to a few hours depending on moods), World Championship Snooker (you can play it in 1 frame increments. Actual frame length varies, and can be quite long, but you can shorten that by making your computer controlled opponent play lightning fast), Diablo II (After you're a bit addicted to it, running Baal or Meph a few times only takes a few minutes, and yields some cool items), Worms 4 (my non-gamer girlfriend offered me this one, we occasionally play some hilarious, but short, bouts), any of the Need for Speed: Underground games (you just get in, lookup the closest race marker, and do one race. Takes under 10 minutes except in the very late game to do something like that). In fact, all "proper" computer games I have in my computer right now with the exception of WoW and Guild Wars are pretty good at fulfilling the "play for 15-30 minutes each time" niche. Oh, and regarding "absolutely no sports games", most football ("soccer", not the american stuff) games default to either 5 or 10 minute halves. In their easier settings (which I'll assume is what the truly casual player will use) you don't really need to set up teams or stuff like that. So that argument is pretty invalid. I haven't played any of those in a while, but I'm supposing almost all EA sports games (NBA, NHL, FIFA come to mind) are set up this way as well.
Nintendo has the most overpriced consoles of all, the proof? MS and Sony subsidise the early consoles, Nintendo does not and makes a profit on them, if that isn't overpricing them I don't know what is.
Allow me to disagree! You buy a product to fulfill a certain need. If a product fulfills the expectations and has a low cost, it's not overpriced, almost by definition. You make a product and sell it, the natural expectation is that you make a profit from that sale. If another company is irresponsible and/or doesn't know how to reach its market and has to sell its product below cost for it to sell -- even if at a higher price than the better product -- yet still fails to meet expectations (ie, be fun), it's their own fault. You can't POSSIBLY convince me that the it is the good cheap product that is overpriced rather than the bad expensive product. (And yes, I'm grossly simplifying in the good/bad aspect. It's on purpose to make a universal point clear, irrespectively of the actual case that is this generation of consoles).
Well, I can see it work this way: "Since it's poorly documented, you're a lot more prone to make mistakes that cost you uptime". Not even that far fetched, really. But still not too convincing, no.
From the article:
Blizzard has succeeded largely by consistently identifying what it is that makes gamers want to play a game, and then amplifying that all the way to 11.
I agree. If you look closely, all the really famous Blizzard games are really the same genre concepts as previous games -- but taken to a much greater level.
Picture Dune II, and the early C&C games. Great games, to be sure. Dune II really made a genre. But then look at Starcraft, and everything else that came later. SC has three completely different and quite well balanced playing styles as manifested by the races. I don't know of any game that gets that variety and balance nailed quite as well. Allied with this is a fun graphics style and a decent (not brilliant, but decent) story. Add to that a nice multiplayer system and simple controls -- you have a winner. But that game didn't come out of the blue. They had two RTS gamess coming before that, and StarCraft built atop them. The whole strategy is one of careful incremental updates -- the only thing revolutionary about SC is the amount of differentiation between factions.
Now take a look at Diablo. Hack and Slash roleplaying games have been around for ages, mostly because a real RPG is really hard to do. Neverwinter Nights, despite being hailed as a great RPG, plays as Hack and Slash, with verily little juice to it. Not many people around that make games like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura, Planescape: Torment, or the first two Fallouts, all of which are RP heavy. Blizzard looked at the half hearted RPG, saw the fun in the hack and slash, and refined it. Once again, Diablo I was simplistic, and Diablo II, while not revolutionary in any way, added a variety of classes and possible viable builds for each character that made variety tremendous. The truly phenomenal part of it was once again the online play (cheat-drenched as it was) and the collector's appeal.
Finally, look at WoW. Once again, the whole MMORPG concept has been done and redone to oblivion. Yet they managed to capture the top spot with a title that, once again, provides nothing really tremendously revolutionary. Classes and Races? Common RP notions. Battlegrounds? Besides being recent additions, they're just implementations of typical FPS concepts. Crafting and collecting? UO was there ages ago. Nothing in WoW is really new. But it's all packaged in one neat envelope, that gently introduces you into the game and that provides almost everything you could want in a MMORPG (roleplaying obviously excluded, and housing an unfortunate missing feature).
My take on the reason why Blizzard is so successful is that it works towards a complex simplicity. By this I mean that, unlike Nintendo, who goes for pure, unbridled simplicity (and Mario Kart, Super Smash Brothers et al really show how effective that is), Blizzard makes really simple games that really have a lot of potential to be taken as quite complex. I don't think I know any gaming communities that examine game mechanics quite as indepth as both the Diablo II and Wow communities, even though the games themselves have pretty simple interfaces and are easy enough to pick up (if well past the nintendo ease of pick up level). Speaking of interfaces, the whole Lua interface system for WoW is pure genious. It's the sort of thing I've dreamt of for ages. Not sure it's originally theirs or if someone else implemented something like it earlier (Civ 4 does the same with Python I think).
It's been said before, and I'll say it again: Vanilla XP doesn't bring a functional DVD player or "recent" graphics drivers out of the box. In fact, it took a bit of effort and some counter intuitive stuff to get my Athlon 64's speed throttling working on XP (CPU drivers? never heard of them before. Setting the power mode to better battery life or some such? on a desktop? Wouldn't have crossed my mind). XP isn't that easy to install to the non technically inclined either. All in all, the experience between XP and Ubuntu is pretty similar in my book, usability wise. In some aspects (namely, apt/synaptic), Ubuntu is significantly better. And please do NOT equate video/audio codecs to ease of use. Those are two distinct matters. I'll grant you that I'd prefer to have MP3 support out of the box. But you'll have to grant THEM that when you are a free software business, things like heavily proprietary licences ARE a moral objectionable. And sticking to your morals is supposed to be a Good Thing.
Bullshit. So much bullshit, in fact, I don't even know what your point is. I have a last-generation iBook 12". It has a rather friendly battery life of about 4h30 under "normal use", which means screen brightness set to a bit over half, airport on, and working with Vim, while Safari and Mail are open in the background (actually, lots more stuff open in the background, but those are the only two applications that MIGHT consume CPU resources and hence drain battery life a bit more -- namely I rarely use iTunes while using my laptop on battery power, I'd rather use my iPod). Those six hours they purportedly last is what Apple announces, and you KNOW that's under "better than optimal" conditions.
If I use the iBook as a glorified iPod (just iTunes playing while I study, the screen going out because there's no input), it'll rise to about 5h30. Yes, that battery is working fully, with a full charge holding slightly more than nominal capacity (4411 mAh rather than 4400 mAh, according to coconut battery)
No, the iBook CAN'T go months on end without being charged, unless you turn it off. Even then, that's bad practice that'll damage the battery eventually. I find the iBook consumes around 1% battery capacity per day, as they DO NOT suspend to disk. They just power down unused components, and kind of suspend to RAM. Kind of being the keyword here -- disc defrag happens while they're suspended, if you leave them connected via ethernet to a router and have an SSH connection to somewhere they reportedly keep the connection alive (reportedly -- I've never tried it myself), etc. Newer PowerBooks (and, I assume, the MacBooks), will copy the contents of their RAM to HDD to protect them from battery failures, however.
All in all, you're misrepresenting the Macs, and I have to wonder why. They're quality hardware. Quality hardware doesn't need positive misrepresenting, as its value speaks for itself. Building false expectations can only lead to disappointment.
1080p? Don't you mean 1080i? Either way: Aw, chucks. So you're telling me that to go from the 1024p (that's right, 1280x1024 could essentially be called a 5:4 1024p display mode) to 1080i (interlaced scan? urgh), you need to go from a few CDs or a half-full DVD to a giant blu-ray disc? I had no idea scalable content would have to grow five fold in size to accommodate a 5% increase in resolution.
Also, what do you mean "High quality games"? Tetris is a very high quality game, WoW is a very high quality game. There are loads of very high quality games around. Perhaps you mean high graphical detail? That's not really a measure of a game's capacity to entertain you, you know? Sure, you DO need all that space to store high resolution FMVs. But then you have yet another Final Fantasy game. On the other end of the spectrum, the very VERY detailed game that is Oblivion takes up less than a single layer DVD.
The whole storage capacity thing is probably moot. Any day now Will Wright's spore will show the light and everybody will follow. Until then, we'll steadily grow all the way to standard double layer DVDs. Or at least that's what I'd like to see :)
"commuter death" in google yields aprox 2M results. Don't do it man! long commutes can be DEADLY, no way you'll surive
Actually, TFA reads quite differently from what the summary says (how surprising) and what you make of it (did you even read it?). Essentially, Bram says that the definition of Net Neutrality is a real toughie, and that the technology he's working on is basically a few caches spread around the globe to take over the part of some of the nodes in a bit torrent network. In fact, the only way I see this interfering with net neutrality is that it preemptively caches a company's content on several high bandwidth server farms of some sort, thus making the client's actual download speedier, as the farms are geographically close by, and have big connections. This all translates into a make-believe prioritization, where the content gets from point A to point B much faster than it "should" because it was cached in C, which is closer to B. Since the caching is NOT neutral, and only caches content for paying customers, it "breaks" network neutrality. Personally, I can't really see what the harm in this is. Doesn't google have data centres spread around the globe? Doesn't blizzard have WoW realms set to cater clients geographically close by? Do you expect them to hold the whole internet in their farms?
Well, your latch, like mine, is mechanical in nature, but has a magnetic system to hide the latch proper. This one is magnetic in nature: the lid stays closed through magnetic attraction.
You can also do most OS X work via ssh. OS X come preinstalled. It's also pretty low maintenance. When in the PC world, and barring my gaming "needs" I'm a debian+ubuntu user. But ever since I bought my iBook, I really don't think I could live without that mixture of power and polish.
It's called dual channel. It's not a characteristic of the RAM, but, rather, of the chipset.
So you get the same VRAM as you did before at the same price points. It's not like they can update their lines 3 times in a couple of months and have major overhauls.
Under tech specs:
Audio
>br> * Built-in stereo speakers
* Built-in omnidirectional microphone
Yeah, I think it does have one