The memory modules of the Mac Pro are *NOT* standard ECC DDR. They belong to the faster and more expensiveFB-DIMM family. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Buffered_DIMM. By the way I don't the OP said that Apple upgrades had reasonable prices, but the systems themselves, which is partly true. Especially if you account for all the things that they come with, applications, ports and design/robustness. Just check Sony Vaio prices up:P
Apple will either release a cheap macbook ($799) with discrete nvidia graphics, aluminum casing made with water-jets and lasers, netbook-sized, featuring an LED backlit screen -with good panel- OR thousands of people on the internet will start writing about how disappointed they are.
I would love to see for just once, an article that states that the mentioned technology is being produced en masse and possibly a website from where I can order it, wherever I may be at a reasonable price.
I am asking too much, eh?
That proves that it *is* viable to have much better connectivity at an affordable price. Most of us around the world get ripped off by greedy telecom giants that instead of catching up with current tech, they invest on how to spy on us, sue us, or limit our already slow connections.
Great!
On the other hand, Tokyo is densely populated and has a lot better infrastructure than the average city, but still why don't we have access to equivalent services at large urban centers?
Peter
Generally very well put, but I have an objection with:
10. Accessing Applications.
The Dock offers a great way to show running applications and the programs you launch most often.
But what about those applications you use only once in a while? The way it is now, you can either jam
the Dock so full with program icons it's ridiculous or keep the Dock clean and then open a Finder
window and drill down into the Applications folder to launch lesser-used apps. The previous
generation Mac OS let you configure program launching on the Apple menu. While there are third-party
solutions that give you back a semblance of that functionality, Apple needs to recognize this user need.
(Reader Michael Cullison contributed to this pet peeve.) The dock allows folders with aliases that act exactly like "start menus" not to mention that the best and
IMHO the intented way of launching those not-so-frequently-used-apps is spotlight... type first few letters
press down arrow and you got it!
Also, I would add a 16th thing that should change. Finder. Please make it better, make it not crash or hang so
easily, on every network drive disconnection.
All of us that are so frustrated of MS products and drive the IT industry one way or another,
lets drive it away from these free lock-in tricks we all know sooooo well.
Or we will be getting today's windows' problems, on tommorows' robots.
but measured the seriousness of the case by the harm done to the moviemakers -- not by the gain made by the offender. I would be really interested in how can one measure that "damage", in a reasonable way.
We are dealing with jailtime and people's lifes here, we can't just assume....
One more ignorant article:(
Decent FSB - doh... and please don't confuse it with memory latency, which is improved btw in the latest g5s.
Speedier etc? I am tired of hearind those uninformed statemens. "Like real gaming on PC?" Doh doh doh!!!!!!!!! I have been running wow at my dual g5 2.0ghz since its introduction and never had performance issues. Yes, I do own a gig of ram and a geForce 6800 ultra:)
All these people who state these new iMacs are soooooo much snappier etc never used a g5 one. And just happen to notice how snappy is a computer out of its case running virtually nothing but a demo. I am not impressed at all. Look closely at the pictures... 46fps? WTF? Try your pc or your 'older' (lol) g5 mac with the camera SO CLOSE to the character so as to avoid far distance drawing and see if it drops so low.... And settings set 'virtually to max'. lol again. That could mean anything - remember 'heavy' settings on wow are just two.
Yes Apple, you can fool pc guys with that 2x statements ******* (****** intel compiler on spec test - we all know what this compiler does-, multithreading on dual core, massively improved subsystems for intel, with --DONT_OPTIMISE:P flag for g5 and you get peak this difference) You will not fool your previous high end users (not fanatics - users that chose willingly). Because we can see the benefits from a superior architecture, we can see that the new MacBook pro (sic) is bulkier, lacks FW800, s-video, modem, DL 8x DVD player has half the battery life than a PB used to have... Oh, and since I don't post often, I will take this opportunity to state something I always wanted to : Macs of the current breed feel snappier that x86 pcs with windows. Not the opposite. You dont get slow window redrawings on macs having first the title bar and then the icons one by one, or panes half by half:P G4 laptops are MORE THAN decent. When you see slow game performance on macs, its 90% of the time a poor port of the 39849384938 x86 optimisations that existed in the original. G4 and of course G5 can actually outperform x86 chips in actual day-by-day operations. Yes, its true!!!!
Hail to the new intel DRM chips. Hail to the new pro-consumer apple. Hail to my new athlon-64 pc:)
I am sorry, but I have to disagree. Better value / experience does not guarantee free market success. There are many factors playing a significant role, regardless of perceived value. Some examples :
Popularity - People will buy a product because everyone else buys the same.
Advertisment - People will buy a product because it is heavily / successfuly advertised.
Price - People will buy what they consider the best product they can buy.
Advise / rumors - Last but not least, people buy usually based on what they heard about a product, or they take the advice of someone they trust and is considered an expert on the product area.
The role of these factors can be clearly observed around apple stuff. iPod may not be the first or the most feature rich portable mp3 player, but everyone has it. Also, because it is relatively easier to use and better engineered, people say good things to other people about it. Not to mention, that iPod is also advertised.
Macs, on the other hand, tend to have this word-of-mouth spread as well. I have observed that mac users grow in groups. One guy buys one and everyone around him, even ones spreading usual fud like 'not copmartible', 'slow', 'fashion items' etc see that macs are better and may invest in getting one.
So, your assumption that IF apple computers were plain better, people would eventually buy them instead of generic PC's is over-simplified. In a perfect world, where consumers buy based on quality / experiance, where everyone is an expert in everything and everyone has acess to everything you would be absolutely right.
Well I am sorry, but people who state the opposites look to me like FUD spreaders. Guys, you know what you are talking about or you are just saying 'don't worry, everything will be ok?' in order to look wiser? Moreover, why don't you contradict the opposite false speculations like the ones stating taht more games will be availiable? The difficulty in porting is the API and OS not the CPU code! (e.g. DirectX)
I think that nothing will be ok. And I will prove my claims.
Altivec No application will ever be optimized for it again. Altivec brings huge difference in terms of performance for G4 and G5. And this kind of optimizations are difficult to code, cost money and are INCOMPARTIBLE with rosetta emulation. So, no sane company will spend money and programmers time to produce code that runs fast on your *brand new* G4/G5. Companies invest money to produce software thinking of long term benefit. In long term g4/g5 will be history. Look at rosetta emulation - no high end app will run on it (g3 emulation / no kext / no control panels). Already many corporations abandoned apple (adaptec, norton, etc) and they are going only to increase in number.
P4 Performance Check at distributed.net G4 and G5 performance. Check johnny the reaper performance. Check anandech / heck check apple claims here. No my friends P4 is not faster, I am sorry, not even on par to g5. That also means that you emulated application performance won't be OK as stated in the keynote. (Imagine what OK means when coming from the mouth of people that want to *sell* you a product - my guess would be SLOW). Moreover, P4 is not more power efficient than G5, in any way. Pentium M IS, though nobody talked about Pentium M which is beaten by g4 in many ways (especially in laptops - power consuption). Please check you facts before repeating like a parrot g5 thermal issues etc, there have been laptops in the intel world having WAY more power hunger proccessors than a g5@1,6ghz! To finish up with P4 performance : intel announced that will discontinue P4 line and will continue using the core of Pentium M derivatives. So, no it doesn't make sence in terms of performance to adopt the dying x86 techonology. Both powerPC and Cell are vastly superior. Don't buy whatever Steve sais, PLEASE.
Apple benefit As for Apple itself I really don't know if this move will help in any way. I can say from previous 'switch' experience that will propably zero the percentage of macs in no time. Previous switches (OS / CPU) cut down the apple market by half. The only thing that I could see happening is selling OSX for generic pc's but that was completely denied. Even if it wasn't denied, HW variety, piracy and competition to MS cannot be ignored as well! I clearly can't see any benefit from this move and I wonder how will apple survive while having low mac sales for at least two years (nobody buying phasing out HW or first rev new tech, slow intel HW). Having also screwed their fans that way, they have turned their best advertising team into bad publicity.
BUT... WHY? I already speculated that this switch has to do with DRM, TCPA, Palladium software control etc. If anybody else has more reasonable claims to make I will be happy to listen to them. But P4 beeing faster! I call BS! WTF guys you are being said "A > B" and you say "YES MASTER" and for the same thing you are being told the opposite "B > A" and you say again "YES MASTER?"
SO I ask you guys saying everything will be OK, why do you say this? I have more things in mind but feel too sick to write them. I really have to justify to my self the fact that I have been collecting money for two years to buy my brand new Power Mac. That power mac that no Software company will write code optimized for it again. that power mac that won't have any new games written for it. That power mac which belongs to the 'fading out' line of G5 proccessors that will not be developed any more (POWER IS different). I doubt even that any more effort will be put on optimizing further gcc 4.0 for altivec / gx. this would at least leave me with linux as an option.
Bye bye apple.
the doc
Yeah, right! Anti-Semitism... Israel has done something awful, there is proof for it, and talking about it is... Anti-Semitism!
What makes you think that if it was USA, UK or China commiting the same crimes we wouldn't be posting? The only double standar I see with the Jews is exactly that - they immediatly proclaim something anti-Semitic, even if it is true! You are a live proof for my claim...
the doc
... for companies to take seriously apple and some GNU/Linux flavours...
I have to face dozens of infected pc's every day in my university, all having services like RPC Helper, or Workstation Security Manager etc. And don't start there are ways to avoid this. There are, but they are impractical to admins and users!
On the other hand there are more benefits in apple platform than drawbacks IMHO so I suspect a serious rise in market share could come. This can happen only if people act reasonably = low chances in this management driven world:(
the doc
Slashdot Mirror
The memory modules of the Mac Pro are *NOT* standard ECC DDR. They belong to the faster and more expensiveFB-DIMM family. :P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Buffered_DIMM.
By the way I don't the OP said that Apple upgrades had reasonable prices, but the systems themselves, which is partly true. Especially if you account for all the things that they come with, applications, ports and design/robustness. Just check Sony Vaio prices up
Peter
Apple will either release a cheap macbook ($799) with discrete nvidia graphics, aluminum casing made with water-jets and lasers, netbook-sized, featuring an LED backlit screen -with good panel- OR thousands of people on the internet will start writing about how disappointed they are.
I would love to see for just once, an article that states that the mentioned technology is being produced en masse and possibly a website from where I can order it, wherever I may be at a reasonable price. I am asking too much, eh?
That proves that it *is* viable to have much better connectivity at an affordable price. Most of us around the world get ripped off by greedy telecom giants that instead of catching up with current tech, they invest on how to spy on us, sue us, or limit our already slow connections. Great! On the other hand, Tokyo is densely populated and has a lot better infrastructure than the average city, but still why don't we have access to equivalent services at large urban centers? Peter
10. Accessing Applications.
The Dock offers a great way to show running applications and the programs you launch most often.
But what about those applications you use only once in a while? The way it is now, you can either jam
the Dock so full with program icons it's ridiculous or keep the Dock clean and then open a Finder
window and drill down into the Applications folder to launch lesser-used apps. The previous
generation Mac OS let you configure program launching on the Apple menu. While there are third-party
solutions that give you back a semblance of that functionality, Apple needs to recognize this user need.
(Reader Michael Cullison contributed to this pet peeve.)
The dock allows folders with aliases that act exactly like "start menus" not to mention that the best and
IMHO the intented way of launching those not-so-frequently-used-apps is spotlight... type first few letters
press down arrow and you got it!
Also, I would add a 16th thing that should change. Finder. Please make it better, make it not crash or hang so
easily, on every network drive disconnection.
the doc
All of us that are so frustrated of MS products and drive the IT industry one way or another,
lets drive it away from these free lock-in tricks we all know sooooo well.
Or we will be getting today's windows' problems, on tommorows' robots.
No, thanx Microsoft.
the doc
We are dealing with jailtime and people's lifes here, we can't just assume....
the doc
One more ignorant article :( :) :P flag for g5 and you get peak this difference) :P G4 laptops are MORE THAN decent. When you see slow game performance on macs, its 90% of the time a poor port of the 39849384938 x86 optimisations that existed in the original. G4 and of course G5 can actually outperform x86 chips in actual day-by-day operations. Yes, its true!!!! :)
Decent FSB - doh... and please don't confuse it with memory latency, which is improved btw in the latest g5s.
Speedier etc? I am tired of hearind those uninformed statemens. "Like real gaming on PC?" Doh doh doh!!!!!!!!!
I have been running wow at my dual g5 2.0ghz since its introduction and never had performance issues. Yes, I do own a gig of ram and a geForce 6800 ultra
All these people who state these new iMacs are soooooo much snappier etc never used a g5 one. And just happen to notice how snappy is a computer out of its case running virtually nothing but a demo. I am not impressed at all. Look closely at the pictures... 46fps? WTF? Try your pc or your 'older' (lol) g5 mac with the camera SO CLOSE to the character so as to avoid far distance drawing and see if it drops so low.... And settings set 'virtually to max'. lol again. That could mean anything - remember 'heavy' settings on wow are just two.
Yes Apple, you can fool pc guys with that 2x statements ******* (****** intel compiler on spec test - we all know what this compiler does-, multithreading on dual core, massively improved subsystems for intel, with --DONT_OPTIMISE
You will not fool your previous high end users (not fanatics - users that chose willingly).
Because we can see the benefits from a superior architecture, we can see that the new MacBook pro (sic) is bulkier, lacks FW800, s-video, modem, DL 8x DVD player has half the battery life than a PB used to have...
Oh, and since I don't post often, I will take this opportunity to state something I always wanted to :
Macs of the current breed feel snappier that x86 pcs with windows. Not the opposite. You dont get slow window redrawings on macs having first the title bar and then the icons one by one, or panes half by half
Hail to the new intel DRM chips. Hail to the new pro-consumer apple. Hail to my new athlon-64 pc
the doc
P.S. Sorry for my English. I tried
Last time I checked IX != 11. Looks to me more like 9... :)
The role of these factors can be clearly observed around apple stuff. iPod may not be the first or the most feature rich portable mp3 player, but everyone has it. Also, because it is relatively easier to use and better engineered, people say good things to other people about it. Not to mention, that iPod is also advertised.
Macs, on the other hand, tend to have this word-of-mouth spread as well. I have observed that mac users grow in groups. One guy buys one and everyone around him, even ones spreading usual fud like 'not copmartible', 'slow', 'fashion items' etc see that macs are better and may invest in getting one.
So, your assumption that IF apple computers were plain better, people would eventually buy them instead of generic PC's is over-simplified. In a perfect world, where consumers buy based on quality / experiance, where everyone is an expert in everything and everyone has acess to everything you would be absolutely right.
Does it float? It would be very useful companion while swimming ;)
the doc
Well I am sorry, but people who state the opposites look to me like FUD spreaders. Guys, you know what you are talking about or you are just saying 'don't worry, everything will be ok?' in order to look wiser? Moreover, why don't you contradict the opposite false speculations like the ones stating taht more games will be availiable? The difficulty in porting is the API and OS not the CPU code! (e.g. DirectX) I think that nothing will be ok. And I will prove my claims. Altivec No application will ever be optimized for it again. Altivec brings huge difference in terms of performance for G4 and G5. And this kind of optimizations are difficult to code, cost money and are INCOMPARTIBLE with rosetta emulation. So, no sane company will spend money and programmers time to produce code that runs fast on your *brand new* G4/G5. Companies invest money to produce software thinking of long term benefit. In long term g4/g5 will be history. Look at rosetta emulation - no high end app will run on it (g3 emulation / no kext / no control panels). Already many corporations abandoned apple (adaptec, norton, etc) and they are going only to increase in number. P4 Performance Check at distributed.net G4 and G5 performance. Check johnny the reaper performance. Check anandech / heck check apple claims here. No my friends P4 is not faster, I am sorry, not even on par to g5. That also means that you emulated application performance won't be OK as stated in the keynote. (Imagine what OK means when coming from the mouth of people that want to *sell* you a product - my guess would be SLOW). Moreover, P4 is not more power efficient than G5, in any way. Pentium M IS, though nobody talked about Pentium M which is beaten by g4 in many ways (especially in laptops - power consuption). Please check you facts before repeating like a parrot g5 thermal issues etc, there have been laptops in the intel world having WAY more power hunger proccessors than a g5@1,6ghz! To finish up with P4 performance : intel announced that will discontinue P4 line and will continue using the core of Pentium M derivatives. So, no it doesn't make sence in terms of performance to adopt the dying x86 techonology. Both powerPC and Cell are vastly superior. Don't buy whatever Steve sais, PLEASE. Apple benefit As for Apple itself I really don't know if this move will help in any way. I can say from previous 'switch' experience that will propably zero the percentage of macs in no time. Previous switches (OS / CPU) cut down the apple market by half. The only thing that I could see happening is selling OSX for generic pc's but that was completely denied. Even if it wasn't denied, HW variety, piracy and competition to MS cannot be ignored as well! I clearly can't see any benefit from this move and I wonder how will apple survive while having low mac sales for at least two years (nobody buying phasing out HW or first rev new tech, slow intel HW). Having also screwed their fans that way, they have turned their best advertising team into bad publicity. BUT... WHY? I already speculated that this switch has to do with DRM, TCPA, Palladium software control etc. If anybody else has more reasonable claims to make I will be happy to listen to them. But P4 beeing faster! I call BS! WTF guys you are being said "A > B" and you say "YES MASTER" and for the same thing you are being told the opposite "B > A" and you say again "YES MASTER?" SO I ask you guys saying everything will be OK, why do you say this? I have more things in mind but feel too sick to write them. I really have to justify to my self the fact that I have been collecting money for two years to buy my brand new Power Mac. That power mac that no Software company will write code optimized for it again. that power mac that won't have any new games written for it. That power mac which belongs to the 'fading out' line of G5 proccessors that will not be developed any more (POWER IS different). I doubt even that any more effort will be put on optimizing further gcc 4.0 for altivec / gx. this would at least leave me with linux as an option. Bye bye apple. the doc
Yeah, right! Anti-Semitism... Israel has done something awful, there is proof for it, and talking about it is... Anti-Semitism!
What makes you think that if it was USA, UK or China commiting the same crimes we wouldn't be posting? The only double standar I see with the Jews is exactly that - they immediatly proclaim something anti-Semitic, even if it is true! You are a live proof for my claim...
the doc
... for companies to take seriously apple and some GNU/Linux flavours ...
I have to face dozens of infected pc's every day in my university, all having services like RPC Helper, or Workstation Security Manager etc. And don't start there are ways to avoid this. There are, but they are impractical to admins and users!
On the other hand there are more benefits in apple platform than drawbacks IMHO so I suspect a serious rise in market share could come. This can happen only if people act reasonably = low chances in this management driven world :(
the doc
European! :)
the doc
...not to mention that in Europe (esp. Greece where I live) lag is just unbearable. the doc