Mac OS X Leopard -- Introducing Vista 2.0

Quit your trollin' and hit the road.

~Ulrika~

EDIT: Let me first say that none of this message is meant to flame anyone, it's just talking about how I feel about Apple, and my feelings are very strong about Apple. I think they could change the face of computers if they'd just open their eyes to bigger possibilities.

Here is the problem:

They can no longer claim that their hardware is better than the hardware of a homemade pc. They might have been able to when they were still on the Motorolla platform, when their hardware was truly proprietary. Their OS, if you find a hacked version, will run on a homemade PC, but they refuse to sell that OS for non-apple hardware. They could, and many people would drop windows in a heartbeat, but they refuse to do so.

Their software is the ONLY thing that makes their computers better than Windows based machines. Right now, their Mac Pro is currently FASTER than other PC's, but it won't be that way for long. Within just a few months, people will be able to make their own PC's that are just as fast and possibly faster, and they'll be able to do it for 3/4 to 2/3 the price, and many of those people are going to run a hacked version of the OS and Apple won't make any money from them.

I guarantee if Apple doesn't release something affordable that's upgradable over the next year (or release their OS for non-apple hardware), I as well as many other people will be building a new machine and will gladly run a hacked version of OSX--I'd rather buy it legitimately, but if they don't want to release it (or an affordable tower) I WILL get a hacked version.

Your Mercedes analogy is only a partially good one. Mercedes are definitely -way- overpriced cars, and there are vehicles that are made just as well that are other brands that cost a lot less. The thing is, Mercedes doesn't have something that all the other car companies don't have--they don't have anything about them that is like the equivalent of OSX is to the computer industry.

Computers should not be for the elite, and that's what Apple seems to believe they should be for, unless you want a Mac Mini or an Imac, which are a joke if you plan on using it for more than 2 years.

With VERY few exceptions, ALL the other computer brands have affordable computers that can be upgraded. Sony and Gateway have released computers that are like the IMac, computers that are built into the monitor that can't be upgraded, and they don't sell very well. The only reason why they're popular with Apple is because that is people's ONLY alternative to spending $2,100 or more for their computer if they want it to run OSX without getting a hacked version of the operating system.

Apple's actions are PROMOTING piracy, and if they don't make changes, they're shooting themselves in the foot. I'm not saying they're going to go down, quite the contrary, but they are shooting themselves in the foot.

I'd be happy to pay $500 for a legitimate version of OSX made for non-apple hardware. Hell, I'd pay as much as $700 for their operating system. It's THAT good. Their software kicks ass, and it would be worth every penny.

A company that is shooting themselves in the foot multiple times is Microsoft with all the problems that are going to come with Vista (the DRM, OpenGL being an emulated layer in DirectX, calling "home" constantly, getting rid of Quick Launch and replacing it with a bulky ugly sidebar, the OS takes 15gigs on the hard drive because it's a big piece of bloatware, the security problems that are going to come with all their new options you can't turn off, the system requirements for Vista are ridiculously steep--the list goes on and on).

OSX could revolutionize the computer industry, but Apple doesn't want to take that leap, they'd rather sell expensive hardware.

This really doesn't address the issue Fmeh presented regarding the inability to upgrade anything other than a machine intended for business. Aside from the less than $350 a week and the professionals, there are a whole lot of people who can comfortably pop for a video card upgrade who are put off by the inability to do so.

Vehicles are upgradeable beyond the initial off the line package which was purchased, regardless of the level of buy in. It's not about building a Mercedes from a kit, but the ability to pour money into any price level vehicle to update or enhance it's performance without having to buy a new model which certainly exists.

As previously stated, the Mac Pro is...for the "Pro" market. No home user surfing the web and playing an occasional game needs a quad core Xeon on their kitchen table. Seriously.

That being said, go and REALLY take a look at what all comes in the new Mac Pros and then tell me it's not a kick ass deal...and I've built plenty of PC's, with my latest being an Opteron box with dual channel RAM, striped 10k SATA drives, etc. The base config for the Mac Pro blows my machine out of the water except for the single 7200 RPM drive (though there are four internal drive bays available) and I paid almost exactly as much to build my Opteron box as what the new Mac Pro costs (and my Opteron box is only a single proc box compared to the Mac Pro's quad cores).

I also think that we will eventually see AMD chips in some of Apple's machines. I can't imagine they'll lock themselves down to only Intel like Dell did for so long and the truly Quad Core chips AMD has coming will do some serious damage compared to Intel's pseudo quad core chips (really only two dual cores).

As for officially releasing a version of OS X to run on any generic PC, you have to consider from Apple's side how much of a royal pain it would be to suddenly have to support every PC component known to man, including all the off-brand stuff that may or may not be total crap. Their support stuff would have to drastically increase in number to be able to support all the new generic box users, for which they would only b e receiving money for the OS. Microsoft can afford to do that because they sell a crapload of other products in mass quantitities and/or for a lot of money (SQL Server, Windows 2003 Server licenses in all the various flavors, etc.). For Apple to officially say "We will now support every PC component known to man" would be a very risky business decision because of the drastically increased support costs in exchange for minimal revenue, IMHO. Remember, Apple is still a business, and a publicly traded business at that, so their ultimate responsibility is to the shareholders.

I wasn't talking about PC components, I mean upgrading within the platform; video cards, as an example. If Apple shareholders are only focused upon the professional user, I apologize for intruding.

Despite the similarity to my name, this Maxtor drive talk concerns me. I'll investigate today and ask if they are using any other drives from other manufacturers. I also want to make sure that if I order a single drive machine that it will come with the drive trays for the extra three slots. I'd probably just go for the cheapest standard drive and swap out my own and use the included drive for a nice big scratch disk.

I wasn't replying to you.

Apple's shareholders aren't concerned only about Pro users silly. iPod anyone?

As for only being able to upgrade the graphics card in the Pro machines, I kinda understand the thinking behind it. Again it's related to support. Apple doesn't make that much off the lower end machines. Like BMW's 3 series cars, they are intended to "get you into the family" so that, for those who decide that the Mini and iMac are sufficient for their needs at the time of purchase, that when it comes time to replace that Mini/iMac/BMW 3 series, that if you have the means and want the addiitonal performance, maybe you'll consider the Mac Pro/BMW M3. If they make it easy for customers of their lower end machines to go swapping out video cards, they'd be getting a lot more support calls since you'd end up with a lot of first time Mac owners who assume that if the card fits the slot, it should work. Then the people who actually bothered to research the cards that are officially supported for Macs would see that the cards that are better than what's already in the Intel -based iMacs would be silly expensive to the point of pushing you near Mac Pro prices anyhow...at which point you'd be much wiser to just pony up and buy a Mac Pro in the first place and get a lot more performance (and...hmmm...expandability) for only a few dollars more.

BTW, there's some kick butt stuff coming in Leopard that has the potential to make SL scream. They showed a demo yesterday afternoon of "another MMORPG" with some new optimization hooks available that nearly doubled the framerate when enabled, and that was at max graphics settings.

Really?????

How many people do you know who've "upgraded" the engine in their car? I've never met anyone who has put in a new engine in order to "upgrade". For most cars you can make small tweaks, like a different battery or maybe some shiny new chrome, a new stereo too, but almost nobody makes major upgrades. In fact your car analogy is better suited the other way around. Apple computers are like cars. You can modify the peripherals easily, but any other changes would take money and a large amount of expertise. And would void your warranty. With Apple you have the choice of having a stable, amazing operating system, and top of the line hardware, but you can't really upgrade. That's the product Apple sells. Their software is a feature they use to sell their hardware. That's their business model, and it seems to work well. Look at the iPod. The iTunes Music store sells music at a cut rate price. Apple makes almost no money at all off its music sales. The point is to sell iPods. Music and Software are the features that sell Apple hardware. I hope Apple never releases its operating system to run on non-Apple computers. Adopting a Microsoft model would suck.

Nope, sorry, Intels Core 2 Duo is considerably cheaper and faster than the AMD64. It's AMD's turn to play catch up this time and despite using one in my current pc I'd choose Intel for my next build. It's also the incentive I need to upgrade my Mac Powerbook.

"Not enough memory to eject disk!"

But I'm a fan of funny things like that. Sorta like my old Amiga 1200 and it's infamous "Guru Meditation" errors and the equally infamous Sad Mac.

True. And next year AMD plans to either release news of, or the actual processor, a QUAD-core CPU. *fingers crossed*

NOW- the catch with all this fun "technology"-- Does any software (not professional versions) take advantage of this? Does Mom & Dad need dual/quad core xeons & Athlon's & Core2Duo to view photo's of the grandkids or the video?? It'd be nice if the software kept up with the hardware. I've already posted before that the game industry was having trouble coding games to use dual-core processors.

I read no post longer than my hand.

~Ulrika~

You can upgrade all components of a Mac Pro, including the processor, the video card, hard drives, and optical drives. Hardware on the motherboard can be supplemented or replaced using PCI slots.

The new Mac Pro is identical in capability and lower in price than a comparable Dell machine. The myth of comparatively higher expense and inability to upgrade are busted.

~Ulrika~

Excluding my professional applications which desperately need more processing power, I think that compression and decompression tools would benefit most from the new processors. For instance, on a G5 it takes about 2 hours to encode 1 hour of H.264 video at DVD quality, on a Duo Core 2 it takes 1 hour, I can't wait to see what a quad-core Xeon can do.

Additionally, these faster processors will enable higher-level compression beyond H.264 in time, which is something we'll all benefit from.

I'm sure there's more but I have to run ...

~Ulrika~

Graphics card.

Actually, I do know lots of people who can and do change out an engine but that's unique to my environ and certainly not the norm. Not the point, either, unless you liken a graphics card to the engine of a vehicle. I can upgrade items on my vehicle which have been developed for newer models of the same line without invalidating the warranty. (Sometimes they even have recalls just to make sure the consumer feels up to date, heh. )

Apple does devote its resources to incorporating graphic cards with updated technology but it's not available to earlier buyers of the same model. I do find it an odd restriction for a consumer market in the Imac price range. Again, it's all good for the Pro line, but the upper end, casual user spending between $1-2k is quickly stalled and unable to spend more money to enhance the product. When the time comes to make another purchase, the decision becomes whether to jump up a spending level up to Pro, to stay at the same spending level and repeat the cycle, or to jump ship to a system which better accomodates upgrades for users in their share of the market.

Or I guess, they can just listen to their Ipod instead.

Ok, Ulrika. I will definitely buy a Mac Pro rather than a Dell system.

Of course, you know that there are people who aren't in the market for either, don't you?

HMMMM.. lets see what 2400 bucks gets you on a desk top. Four dual cores, good deal, even 2.66 gig. Wow. So you have a huge processor....and if you ever want to predict the flight model of a shed in a tornado, and have baout five days to do it in..this is your machine. If however you want to run the bejezzus out of SL, or any other game out there, Four dual core processors is a bit overboard.

But for Arguments sake a four xenon processor at 2.6 gigs from Alienware, by no means cheap, is gonna run you about 2700 bucks with twice the memory. Of course a 20" apple monitor is about 700 bucks, and you can get a serviceable 19" for half that, but we will leave the monitor out.

Now lets say we want to run the bejeezus out of SL well wht is the key issue in any computer game? CPU power, or video power? Well chances are, freinds and neighboors its video power. So your four xenon processors are ripping out the calcs and shoving them all into a 256meg pipeline to put on the screen. So your frame rate will still be limted.

Now lets just start with an alienware Intel system. We get a core 2 duo 6700. Not quite four xenons, but it will certainl run the bejezzus out of SL and every graphics program on the market so you can freely ripp of textures from your fellow SLer's. And it will also run any otehr game on the market very well.
Well everythinhg else about the machine, performance wise, is the same..a gig of memory, two hundred megs of hd space..except..and here is the kicker: the Alienware has dual SLI PCI -Express 256meg video cards. Likely putting out about 2.5 times the frame rate of the apple's single g-force 7800. this sytems will set you back about $2473.
and is much more suiatble for the intended purpose. Chances are the avery person could get dual SLI-64s and still get better performance than a single 256. Certainly dual 128 SLI's would outperform the single 256.

Now if you want to simply run the bejeezus out of SL and don't fell some insane need to have the craziest fram rates ever on Halflife 2 or Quake x and Doom X, then you can get into the area fifty one for about 1700 bucks, and well you can get into a lesser system for about 1200 bucks. Bothe of which will run SL at a similar performance level in terms of lag, frame rate, ect. as the Apple. Oh and where is apple's 1200-desktop? The I Mac for 1300 bucks? not even close. The I mac for 1600 bucks? Not even close.

Now lets look at the old AMD-which is the route I go. Now I upgraded my desk top last year for about 1200 bucks and so I am not really ready-but were I doing it today and wanting to spend 2400 bucks It would look something like this:

AMD Athlon™64 FX 62 Dual-Core CPU
1 gig of ram
I'd go with dual Geforec 7900 256 processors in SLI mode
An Asus Physics processor
and a 300 meg hard drive.

The options really are endless...
and you can get a perfectly servicebale system that will run the bejeezus out of Second Life for 1100 bucks. Where is apples 1100 dollar desk top? Oh thats right they don't make one.

thus, when one looks at a computer and says, what do I want to do with it? Well Apple is just very expensive sor so limited return.

The graphics ard on the make pro is only a ge force 7400. No SLI. If you were going to have 1 512 graphics card, you are better off with a readeaon x-1900-xt.

Of course a professional doing video work should have a much higher power machine than the base model workstation. About 12,000 bucks will get ya a top of the line amd from alienware, with auto desk installed.

Well, I'm sorry you can't read one page of text. Let's try again:

Apple's business model assures that the Macintosh will never have more than 10% of the computer market.

The Imac and the mini are almost worthless--having to buy a whole new computer every 2 years every time you want to upgrade is like slapping their consumers in the face, and it differs completely from the rest of the computer market. Sony and Gateway have released computers that are like the Imac--where the computer is part of the monitor, and they've never sold very well, with good reason. The only reason they sell well for Apple in contrast to their pro lines is because it's the only option they give to people who don't have thousands to spend on a computer if they want to run osx.

Their software is the ONLY thing that makes their computers better than Windows based machines.

The biggest problem with Apple is that they have a stick up their ass.

Go to the apple webpage and go to the customize option for the mac pro and it will prove wrong what you just said. Also, in an earlier post, you mentioned a 300 meg drive. I think you meant a 300 gig drive. Besides that error, there are many other errors that make your posts look a little bit silly--you're clicking "submit reply" too quickly before you've had a chance to proofread.

Sorry for putting a small break in the debate here, but:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc06/
WWDC '06 keynote video stream.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/index.html
Video previews of Mac OS 10.5 and some of its features.

Some great stuff, IMO, especially Time Machine.

Makes me wish I had a Mac. :\

Gotta agree with Fmeh and Jake. As fond as I am of OSX, grand new announcements coming out of Apple only serve to leave me feeling less satisfied.

Sorry, Apple. I'm just not ready for that kind of commitment. I admit that you were exciting; so damn good looking. Twenty inches, omfg. But you're not aging well, having a hard time keeping up, and stuck in the past. If you wanted to be more than my bootie call, you should have gone with UsMac instead of Imac.

God dammit, I eventually decide to go PC instead of buying another mac, and then:

1. Intel release a faster processor than my X2, and AMD reduce their prices, just days after I receive the order;

2. Apple release an expandable Intel tower system.

Basically, if you want a guide to what not to buy, simply do not buy whatever I do.

The 2.6 core 2 duo is cheaper by a couple hundred bucks than the tope of the line amd, but the faster core 2..the 3.2 is a hundred dollars more expensive

The 2.93 core 2 extreme-which is maybe more comperable to the AMD is a bit over a grand, or as high as $1200, with the AMD around 800. And this is the bleeding edge of processors..

when you take it down to earth, where not everyone has quad top of the line xenons, the amd chips are better deals. Though my laptop is powerded by intel.