EFi-X USA to sell pre-made PCs as do-it-yourself Mac clones - Page 6

R5400 is rack mount system not a desktop tower.


The base ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB is poor at the price of $130.00 as that is what they want to add 1 more also add $150 for a 8800gt? makeing it a $280 video card BIG RIP off.

I don't understand the Glossy/Matt screen issues either, so I'm not going to defend them.

For storage, the general dilemma here is that ~70% of buyers are laptop-oriented, not desktop, so there's pragmatically no real provision for a 2nd HD other than to go to Network storage (Time Capsule) and other aspects of "Cloud".

Similarly, I see that the users who are generally "running out" of space aren't particularly in the 'casual' power class, so we need to see to what degree we're looking at the 20% of the 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle).

FWIW, what I would personally like very much to see to help us out (yes, I'm a power user of sorts; still photography) is an easy & clean OS X Utility (Control Panel) that helps the Admin to painlessly relocate a "big" user account off of the boot drive onto secondary drive(s). This can be done at the Terminal prompt, but its not particularly painless - - plus you'll never know when a random OS update could break it.


I understand what you're asking for, but that's a Catch-22 requirement in some ways, plus you're asking for the return of the 1990s "Performa Line" problems of excessive proliferation, which drives manufacturing costs up in order to try to save you a dime or two. Until Apple is bigger than Dell, it simply doesn't make good business sense.


Ignore the gaming requirement and the middle of the iMac line does just fine ... although at $1500 and $1800, its just not at the price points you want.
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The lack of a mate display is putting people off of the imac.




But most people don't need that much power then need some better then the mini and the imac AIO with NO mate display does not work for them.

You DO realize that OS X is hardly the only operating system to be able to bootstrap via EFI, right? And that this dongle would totally help people with older BIOS-based machines bootstrap and use those operating systems?

This company is providing hardware that you can do what you want with. There is nothing illegal in any of that. Their dongle doesn't facilitate infringement as you can use it to install a number of other OS's.

No it doesn't make them legal; the items are ALREADY legal. Using them to do something against the law makes your ACTIONS illegal. Not really sure why this is so difficult for you to understand...

Because most of us aren't lawyers? Anyway, the lesson I take from all of this is that just the existence of these companies, indicates some one is willing to place their money on the line in the belief there is a substantial market for a computer design that Apple doesn't offer, legal or not. Rather than address the issue, Apple prefers to take action in court to shut down Psystar, which is well within their rights.

If, big if, Apple sues Efi-X and loses, that only leaves two options I see. Begin suing the consumers who bought the Efi-X dongle to break Apple's EULA and that would be bad PR and risk having their EULA found to be illegal. Or Apple could dedicate programmers to continually break compatibility with the Efi-X dongel (re: I guess this is possible), also a less than satisfactory solution by adding more expense and complexity to the OS.

Which OSs are they? OS X is the only one I know of that requires it. Do the x86-64 OSs require EFI to install? That sounds about right, I don't know, OS X is the only OS that I have that needs the extra memory.



I think it's pretty clear that Psystar is infringing. But EFI-X might not be, if there are legitimate technical uses. As far as I understand, a tool generally isn't illegal if it has legitimate & non-infringing uses, and is not advertised by the maker in such a way to suggest its illegal use. For example, lock picking tools can be used legally or illegally. Usually lock pick manufacturers aren't held liable for the misuse of their products.

I'm just speaking for the sake of argument but, they could simply institute a check when OS X boot to check for some very specific hardware requirements. Like the serial number, check to see if there are any 32bit PCI slots (none of Apple's recent Leopard supporting machines use them), etc.

They do use pci for on board chips.

But not actual slots. You can see the device tree and Apple has a short list of PCI devices attached to the motherboard PCI bus. It would be trivial to detect all the PCI 32bit devices and make sure they only conform to a list set in an encrypted file or in the firmware.

But power g4 / g5 uses have 32bit cards in there mac's.


and this will just be more hardware lock out that will get by passed.

No, G4 and G5s used 64bit PCI slots. Later G5's used PCI-X and PCIe slots. Anyway if it detected Open firmware (PPC), it might as well skip any other checks.

elilo and the freebsd loaders can use EFI, and if you're working with / testing those boot loaders to bootstrap linux or bsd with an older BIOS based machine, you'll need to do some workaorunds or use a hardware device like this. Since elilo loads more than just linux (and bsd), there's all sorts of OS's that could use it, including Solaris/OpenSolaris, the rest of the bsds, and Plan 9. These are mostly not so mainstream, but that's exactly why you'd need an EFI emulator.

64-bit versions of Windows also support EFI, though obviously they do not require it.

Dell's website is horrible; I couldn't find the basic tower configuration earlier; try a build based on the Dell Precision T5400, even though its FSB is only 1333MHz instead of 1600MHz.

Versus the standard $2,800 Mac Pro, it looks like the Dell comes in at $3,638 (for today), assuming that the base Mac 256MB Radeon 2600 XT is comparable to a 256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX570, and before you figure out how much the included 19" E1909W LCD in the Dell bundle is worth (it can't be deleted).


Mac Mall sells the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB for $120, so explain to me how "horrible" is Apple's $130 price? In any event, since it is included in the Mac Pro's base price and when you credit that card and add the $150 that Apple wants to bump it up to the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, I'd say that you're at ($120+$150=$270), which is pragmatically close enough to the $275 street price of the 8800 GT (again, from Mac Mall) that I see nothing here to complain about.



There's more than one way to service a market: these niche customers can buy used. Its the same as what I did when I wanted a Porsche 911 but didn't want to spend more than $30K.


-hh

Newer 3650 cards are about $50 - $60 3850 4650 cards are $89.99 4670 are $100 and the 2600 XT 512 cards are $80 - $110 so the mac rom is costing you about $40 more.


GeForce 9800 GT same thing as a 8800gt is $100 - $150 so $275 is a big rip off. GTX 260 cards are about $250


There's more than one way to service a market: these niche customers can buy used. Its the same as what I did when I wanted a Porsche 911 but didn't want to spend more than $30K.

Given how small the market is for Mac video cards, I really don't see the problem there. With the Windows market, you have such a broader base to amortize the firmware development cost.

My sentiments exactly, although there's a lot more fixed costs than just the NRE for the firmware that have to be budgeted in, as a niche item has costs incurred at every step, if for no other reason than to keep it identified as distinct from the standard configuration.

The basic formula is:

Final Unit cost: (Fixed Costs/Production Volume) + (Variable Costs)

One product that I'm involved with at work is a niche variant of a standard item. The two products' respective variable costs are within roughly 10%, but because of our relatively miniscule production volume on the variant, we get utterly slaughtered by our relative inability to amortize out its fixed manufacturing costs and as such, our final cost on the niche variant is roughly 5x higher than the standard.

When we keep in mind that IIRC roughly 70%(?) of Mac sold are laptops and for the remaining portion of desktops, they're split between the mini, iMac 20", iMac 24" and then the variants on the Mac Pro ... currently, there's 3 different video card options ... the simple reality is that there aren't tens of millions of units being sold per month with which to amortize down the fixed costs of development and production of these permutations.

...and if Apple did offer more product permutations - - shades of the Dark Performa Days - - then the costs of all of the permutations would invariably be higher. The unfortunate reality is that most US consumers don't work close enough to manufacturing anymore, so they don't really understand what the implications are of what they're asking for.


-hh

Can we Sticky -hh post above? (216)

it would go some way to ending the silly debate over some of Apples pricing.

True, but the objection was that the only thing you're buying was a ROM, so I kept it simple.


I don't think even the typical manufacturing worker understands this. That's more something that entrepreneurs, management and some of engineering has to deal with.


I doubt it would do much. There are still going to be silly arguments, some of them may even seem plausible arguments, but in the end, they're either false or just don't matter. In the case of expensive Mac graphic cards, there's very little market for third party Mac graphics cards, if the market wants them, they'll have to pay extra. It doesn't help that the small market is shrunk even further by people just reflashing a card for Windows.