ha, yes paul, kinda like that but worse...he knows he isn't a pro user and has never upgraded his current pc tower (his first computer and it is now almost 7 years old and runs like crap...they even have high speed cable internet...why i don't know as that computer makes it feel like dialup to me), but now he is "planning" to really get good at computers and "become" a pro user...in the mean time he sends all the stuff he wants printed to me by email because he can no longer get his computer to work with his old lexmark printer...so he bought an HP AIO printer, scanner, fax but it won't connect to a computer that old, so this beautiful printer has been sitting on the floor for two months (plugged in and on for completely unknown reasons to me...old people are funny like that sometimes...they will make you memorize everything in their fridge so you don't keep the door open for long, open, reach, grab, close...yet they will leave the television running 24 hours a day or have a faucet dripping so the pipes won't freeze---"but ma, it's freakin june, i don't think you have to worry about pipes freezing" "you can never be too safe, sonny boy")...
edit to ask a question: what is the maximum monitor size an iBook will run nicely?? i think that could be a nice option for the old folks also...get an iBook and connect to a monitor with keyboard and mouse....use iBook as tower at home, take iBook with you on vacation (old folks take lots of freakin vacations, the bastards...it's spring break every freakin week for them, except with less sex and puking)...anyways, i know that an iBook wouldn't be useable for them for everyday use, but would it nicely drive the apple 17" monitor? the 20"??
they could get a new iBook next week, add bluetooth, a wireless keyboard and mouse and either the 17" or 20" monitor...would cost less than a tower and monitor and be more mobile...
thanks
any info on this pscates??
what route would you go with your mom?? eMac first choice, but if she won't go for that, what next? iBook and monitor, iMac FP, Tower with monitor...
hell, it's their money, should have them get the dual PM and 23 in monitor....but i would cry everytime i visited and saw that beautiful machine wasted on email, internet browsing and Word....
g
personally, i am still waiting for this:
make it 1.6 G5 single proc for 999, bundle a 17 inch screen for 500 more, so 1499 for this with monitor and minimal upgrade path (change graphics card, add ram)...boom, teh big sellar
For my situation, DEFINITELY the eMac. She wavers. Sometimes seems enthused and open to the whole "switching" idea, then sometimes gets the whole cold feet thing.
An iBook can't drive the Apple displays, can't it? Don't they have to be DVI-equipped? I don't know, I'm not sure. If they were/could, yeah...that would be a cute set-up: nice desktop hooked to a large screen, then they can throw the iBook in a bag and take it to Florida with them on their bi-monthly jaunts there.
But I'd steer my Mom to an eMac. She's not one to fool with a laptop, taking it anywhere, really. She sits as her desk (in my old bedroom that's been converted to a bitchin' home office) and makes greeting cards, surfs, e-mails, create photo albums of my niece, does the eBay thing, etc.
the ibook only has video mirroring. This means that it can only output video at the built-in screens size. This is 1024x768 @ millions of colours. If it had full video out capabilites I'd by one tommorrow and do what your suggesting. Its one of the major differences between the powerbook and the iBook.
you're just complaining to complain. USB 2.0? 25% speed update? 8x superdrive? no cost bump? seems worthwhile to me. i guess you wanted a g5? blurb.
I don't want to burst your happy bubble, but you can't be serious.
USB 2.0 is so late to the dance, there is no use announcing it. "Wow! We finally caught up with where everyone else was a year or more ago."
25% speed bump. THERE WAS NO SMALLER SPEED BUMP TO BE HAD! If there was, you would have probably gotten it and still, you would have pissed yourself with the joy of Apple's generosity.
8X SuperDrive. As I said before, this was likely the cheapest option considering that all SuperDrive models will likely carry this unit.
No price increase. All things considered, there should have been a price reduction on the low end.
Ask yourself, what would a smaller update look like? Could they have possibly done less and still produced something acceptable. This is truly the least they could do. Apple has trained some of you to have such low expectations that all they have to do now is put a new sticker on the box and you would consider it a great update. This is a $1000 desktop in 2004. They have better processors that could go in there. Would a 1.42 or even a 1.33 have killed the other product lines? If so, what does that say about the other updates to come? They get the lowest end graphics card they can buy and because it is too good, they cripple it further by removing half the memory, (or special order it that way), and removing spanning functionality because they are afraid that a low end user might discover the joys of spanning for the rest of us. They must be adding expense by lowering the specs. How long will this be acceptable to you people? Expect more, demand more, and maybe you will get more.
Apple slaps you in the face and you swoon because they touched you. Enjoy.
Hey aneurysm boy, back off the crack pipe a bit, please. Its an evolutionary update, and it is not that it is a revolution but it brings the eMac up to a very usable standard. No matter what, Macs for the next couple years will be running OS X and the Apps that go with it, now this eMac iteration can run apps and the OS at a nice pace. Better than ever before. It is a nice update, nothing to complain about.
make it 1.6 G5 single proc for 999, bundle a 17 inch screen for 500 more, so 1499 for this with monitor and minimal upgrade path (change graphics card, add ram)...boom, teh big sellar
g
I too have been waiting for this. However i want it to be more than a 1.6G5. Go look at xbench and look at the bench marks. A single processor 1.6Gs scores around 140. The new eMac will bench around the 130 mark. The G5 picks up speed in the floating point area, but not enough for me to justify an extra £500 for system that just looks nicer. Go and compare a 1.6G5 and a 1.25 iMac (rough equivilent of the new eMac but with lower L2 cache and bus speed). Quite scary when you look into it. Save your money mate, for the extra floating point scores it aint worth it. In fact its AltiVec scores are almost double. Flame me all you like for these statements but in the real world, the performance difference will be minimal.
Stick all the new eMac hardware in a nice cube design and sell it for £399 for combo and £549 for superdrive. Then we are talking about a great selling machine. The last cube failed because it was overpriced for its market, the current iMac is much the same. iMacs sell but not in the way that the CRT ones did. From everyone I know this is mainly due to the price and inflexibilty of the screen and its resolutions, I must know 10 good friends with consumer type Macs and only one has an iMac, and even he regrets buying it after the eMac arrived. He now talks about upgrading from it to the new eMac. Apple could really clean up with a £399 consumer box, I'd buy one tomorrow.
"for the power user, apple has released the G5 PowerMac
for the consumer, apple has released the Flat Panel iMac
and now, new from apple for the PC users...
the new apple PS...
...PowerSwitch...
a mini tower that will turn you on
g
where is a link to those color versions of this??
also...much better people can make the ads, i am just the idea guy
also, keep the legs like they are, but turn the handle from front to back on each side, now bend and mold the two together in the middle....forms a handle and also makes an "X"
If Apple could do a single G5 headless machine with minimal internal expansion (AGP/PCI-e, CPU daughtercard, two RAM slots) and deliver it for 999, such a machine would be "teh switchar!"
You can't change the public's mind about some things, better to sell them what they want.
Two consumer AIO's make no sense. Except for the edu-only configs (at their cheaper prices) it makes no sense to even offer a CRT machine anymore. Apple is not the only company guilty of selling CRT machines, but I won't ever buy another CRT based machine. That will become true for more and more people as the months pass.
How much life is there really in a CRT based eMac?
The consumer machines should be an iMac and a cube. Choice, it's good, people respond to it, even if it means they come in looking for what they want, and they leave having bought what you want to sell them.
the ibook only has video mirroring. This means that it can only output video at the built-in screens size. This is 1024x768 @ millions of colours. If it had full video out capabilites I'd by one tommorrow and do what your suggesting. Its one of the major differences between the powerbook and the iBook.
You do know about the firmware hack to allow spanned monitors on ibooks yeah? allowing umm err (matsu help me with this one) around like 1600x1200 ish on an external screen..
This has been brought up before, but it appears as though Apple is firmware-limiting the 8x Superdrive to be slower than the OEM version. They do this with all of their drives. The fastest CD read speed they have on any of their computers is 32x, and yet every single optical drive sold today has a faster speed.
Anyway, I compared the speeds of my Pioneer DVR-107D, purchased from NewEgg, to the speeds listed by Apple for the 8x Superdrive in the eMac.
DVD-R writing: 8x OEM, 8x Apple
DVD-RW writing: 4x OEM, not listed for Apple
DVD+R writing: 8x OEM, not listed for Apple
DVD+RW writing: 4x OEM, not listed for Apple
CD-R writing: 24x OEM, 24x Apple
CD-RW writing: 24x OEM, 10x Apple
DVD-ROM reading: 12x OEM, 10x Apple
CD-ROM reading: 40x OEM, 32x Apple
I don't really understand... I mean, perhaps it is to reduce noise, and in some cases that is justified. There are some drives out there that are VERY loud... I had a Combo drive a while ago that read and wrote CDs at 48x, and it got quite loud. But my Pioneer DVD burner reads at 40x, and yet it is very quiet.
Anyway, these changes are more frustrating than actually harmful. There's not much difference, but it's silly that they would purposely reduce the speed of certain things like DVD-ROM reading. It's not like it'll be any louder at 12x than it'll be at 10x.
If Apple could do a single G5 headless machine with minimal internal expansion (AGP/PCI-e, CPU daughtercard, two RAM slots) and deliver it for 999, such a machine would be "teh switchar!"
I find that statement highly amusing.
I don't see how the ability to swap CPUs and GPUs can be deemed as 'limited,' especially when Mac users don't often switch out motherboards.
User expansion options for Apple seems to entail only the RAM, wireless cards, and in some cases, HDD.
Your idea of internal expansion seems fairly full-fledged to me.
You do know about the firmware hack to allow spanned monitors on ibooks yeah? allowing umm err (matsu help me with this one) around like 1600x1200 ish on an external screen..
Thanks for that, I didn't know that there was a hack out there. A quick search on Google confirms the fact. However it seems to be not very stable and is making machine get a little too hot. People report weeks of great use and then complete failure from the video or various other components.
When I'm thinking of buying a new mac on a budget i'm really not gonna take the risk of destroying it in the first few weeks. I'll stick to a standard mac configuration that best fits my needs rather than take a flyer and risk my cash on a third-party firmware update. Again thanks for letting me know but I think i'll stick to the eMac, it'll be cheaper and faster even after next weeks updates.
You do know about the firmware hack to allow spanned monitors on ibooks yeah? allowing umm err (matsu help me with this one) around like 1600x1200 ish on an external screen..
You do know about the complete "not gonna happen" nature of this suggestion don't you?
I'm quite certain my or thegelding's mothers are not going to be applying the "spanning hack" to a brand new iBook. Let's focus on the real world here...
If I went over to her house and she had an iBook opened up and was going at it with a solder gun, I'd collapse and go into some sort of shock.
You do know about the complete "not gonna happen" nature of this suggestion don't you?
I'm quite certain my or thegelding's mothers are not going to be applying the "spanning hack" to a brand new iBook. Let's focus on the real world here...
If I went over to her house and she had an iBook opened up and was going at it with a solder gun, I'd collapse and go into some sort of shock.
About the hack. You should all know that the iBooks are more capable of spanning than the original PBooks. The hack is not some cludge to make the system do something it was not intended to do. The graphics cards are designed for spanning. Apple just can't find a card that doesn't have that capability anymore so they turn the functionality off for the sole purpose of differentiating product lines. If you buy a PB for that sole purpose, you are giving in to Apple's scheme. The so called "hack" simply allows you to turn on what Apple turned off. I have been running it on a G3 iBook for almost a year and a half. There are no adverse issues related to spanning. I promise.
Scates, as for your comment, you should probably know that the "hack" is in the form of a simple utility now and works on all machines that Apple has so crippled. It it as easy as installing a mouse utility. So Yes, your grandma could do it. This crippling thing is borderline evil and every Mac user should fight it by enabling their stolen features. Don't just bend over and take everything they poke at you. This post is being viewed on a 19" monitor while the 12" screen attached to my iB is busy doing something else. Your eMac could be doing the same.
Hmm, interesting. I didn't know that. I thought it was some sort of hardware-based alteration. It's just software? Really?
Open Firmware, to be precise. It's programmable, so it's basically a software issue. The hack just tells the firmware "the graphics chipset can span" and since the graphics chipset can, no harm done.
If only the Doctor could do clamshell mode reliably with the full 32MB of VRAM like in the PowerBook... \
I'm curious to see what the iBook/PowerBook playing field will look like on Monday. Who knows?
Escher
I don't know whether to love or hate you guys!!! I had really made my mind up and began to plan for my new eMac. Now I'm kinda hoping for 1.25G4 iBooks with superdrives!!. A nice 19" screen for home and the ability to use Garageband on the move....oh i could be tempted. It was all so simple until you guys.....arh cheers anyway no really i mean it. Maybe they'll drop the ibook prices like the eMacs as well, got to really. Cheapest £699 inc VAT Highest £999 inc VAT
Comments
anyways, gotta love tangents...
g
Actually, this whole thing is all too familiar (kinda going through it right now with MY Mom).
Originally posted by thegelding
edit to ask a question: what is the maximum monitor size an iBook will run nicely?? i think that could be a nice option for the old folks also...get an iBook and connect to a monitor with keyboard and mouse....use iBook as tower at home, take iBook with you on vacation (old folks take lots of freakin vacations, the bastards...it's spring break every freakin week for them, except with less sex and puking)...anyways, i know that an iBook wouldn't be useable for them for everyday use, but would it nicely drive the apple 17" monitor? the 20"??
they could get a new iBook next week, add bluetooth, a wireless keyboard and mouse and either the 17" or 20" monitor...would cost less than a tower and monitor and be more mobile...
thanks
any info on this pscates??
what route would you go with your mom?? eMac first choice, but if she won't go for that, what next? iBook and monitor, iMac FP, Tower with monitor...
hell, it's their money, should have them get the dual PM and 23 in monitor....but i would cry everytime i visited and saw that beautiful machine wasted on email, internet browsing and Word....
g
personally, i am still waiting for this:
make it 1.6 G5 single proc for 999, bundle a 17 inch screen for 500 more, so 1499 for this with monitor and minimal upgrade path (change graphics card, add ram)...boom, teh big sellar
g
An iBook can't drive the Apple displays, can't it? Don't they have to be DVI-equipped? I don't know, I'm not sure. If they were/could, yeah...that would be a cute set-up: nice desktop hooked to a large screen, then they can throw the iBook in a bag and take it to Florida with them on their bi-monthly jaunts there.
But I'd steer my Mom to an eMac. She's not one to fool with a laptop, taking it anywhere, really. She sits as her desk (in my old bedroom that's been converted to a bitchin' home office) and makes greeting cards, surfs, e-mails, create photo albums of my niece, does the eBay thing, etc.
Originally posted by progmac
you're just complaining to complain. USB 2.0? 25% speed update? 8x superdrive? no cost bump? seems worthwhile to me. i guess you wanted a g5? blurb.
I don't want to burst your happy bubble, but you can't be serious.
USB 2.0 is so late to the dance, there is no use announcing it. "Wow! We finally caught up with where everyone else was a year or more ago."
25% speed bump. THERE WAS NO SMALLER SPEED BUMP TO BE HAD! If there was, you would have probably gotten it and still, you would have pissed yourself with the joy of Apple's generosity.
8X SuperDrive. As I said before, this was likely the cheapest option considering that all SuperDrive models will likely carry this unit.
No price increase. All things considered, there should have been a price reduction on the low end.
Ask yourself, what would a smaller update look like? Could they have possibly done less and still produced something acceptable. This is truly the least they could do. Apple has trained some of you to have such low expectations that all they have to do now is put a new sticker on the box and you would consider it a great update. This is a $1000 desktop in 2004. They have better processors that could go in there. Would a 1.42 or even a 1.33 have killed the other product lines? If so, what does that say about the other updates to come? They get the lowest end graphics card they can buy and because it is too good, they cripple it further by removing half the memory, (or special order it that way), and removing spanning functionality because they are afraid that a low end user might discover the joys of spanning for the rest of us. They must be adding expense by lowering the specs. How long will this be acceptable to you people? Expect more, demand more, and maybe you will get more.
Apple slaps you in the face and you swoon because they touched you. Enjoy.
Originally posted by thegelding
personally, i am still waiting for this:
make it 1.6 G5 single proc for 999, bundle a 17 inch screen for 500 more, so 1499 for this with monitor and minimal upgrade path (change graphics card, add ram)...boom, teh big sellar
g
I too have been waiting for this. However i want it to be more than a 1.6G5. Go look at xbench and look at the bench marks. A single processor 1.6Gs scores around 140. The new eMac will bench around the 130 mark. The G5 picks up speed in the floating point area, but not enough for me to justify an extra £500 for system that just looks nicer. Go and compare a 1.6G5 and a 1.25 iMac (rough equivilent of the new eMac but with lower L2 cache and bus speed). Quite scary when you look into it. Save your money mate, for the extra floating point scores it aint worth it. In fact its AltiVec scores are almost double. Flame me all you like for these statements but in the real world, the performance difference will be minimal.
Stick all the new eMac hardware in a nice cube design and sell it for £399 for combo and £549 for superdrive. Then we are talking about a great selling machine. The last cube failed because it was overpriced for its market, the current iMac is much the same. iMacs sell but not in the way that the CRT ones did. From everyone I know this is mainly due to the price and inflexibilty of the screen and its resolutions, I must know 10 good friends with consumer type Macs and only one has an iMac, and even he regrets buying it after the eMac arrived. He now talks about upgrading from it to the new eMac. Apple could really clean up with a £399 consumer box, I'd buy one tomorrow.
"for the power user, apple has released the G5 PowerMac
for the consumer, apple has released the Flat Panel iMac
and now, new from apple for the PC users...
the new apple PS...
...PowerSwitch...
a mini tower that will turn you on
g
where is a link to those color versions of this??
also...much better people can make the ads, i am just the idea guy
also, keep the legs like they are, but turn the handle from front to back on each side, now bend and mold the two together in the middle....forms a handle and also makes an "X"
You can't change the public's mind about some things, better to sell them what they want.
Two consumer AIO's make no sense. Except for the edu-only configs (at their cheaper prices) it makes no sense to even offer a CRT machine anymore. Apple is not the only company guilty of selling CRT machines, but I won't ever buy another CRT based machine. That will become true for more and more people as the months pass.
How much life is there really in a CRT based eMac?
The consumer machines should be an iMac and a cube. Choice, it's good, people respond to it, even if it means they come in looking for what they want, and they leave having bought what you want to sell them.
Originally posted by MacGraham
the ibook only has video mirroring. This means that it can only output video at the built-in screens size. This is 1024x768 @ millions of colours. If it had full video out capabilites I'd by one tommorrow and do what your suggesting. Its one of the major differences between the powerbook and the iBook.
You do know about the firmware hack to allow spanned monitors on ibooks yeah? allowing umm err (matsu help me with this one) around like 1600x1200 ish on an external screen..
Anyway, I compared the speeds of my Pioneer DVR-107D, purchased from NewEgg, to the speeds listed by Apple for the 8x Superdrive in the eMac.
DVD-R writing: 8x OEM, 8x Apple
DVD-RW writing: 4x OEM, not listed for Apple
DVD+R writing: 8x OEM, not listed for Apple
DVD+RW writing: 4x OEM, not listed for Apple
CD-R writing: 24x OEM, 24x Apple
CD-RW writing: 24x OEM, 10x Apple
DVD-ROM reading: 12x OEM, 10x Apple
CD-ROM reading: 40x OEM, 32x Apple
I don't really understand... I mean, perhaps it is to reduce noise, and in some cases that is justified. There are some drives out there that are VERY loud... I had a Combo drive a while ago that read and wrote CDs at 48x, and it got quite loud. But my Pioneer DVD burner reads at 40x, and yet it is very quiet.
Anyway, these changes are more frustrating than actually harmful. There's not much difference, but it's silly that they would purposely reduce the speed of certain things like DVD-ROM reading. It's not like it'll be any louder at 12x than it'll be at 10x.
Originally posted by Matsu
If Apple could do a single G5 headless machine with minimal internal expansion (AGP/PCI-e, CPU daughtercard, two RAM slots) and deliver it for 999, such a machine would be "teh switchar!"
I find that statement highly amusing.
I don't see how the ability to swap CPUs and GPUs can be deemed as 'limited,' especially when Mac users don't often switch out motherboards.
User expansion options for Apple seems to entail only the RAM, wireless cards, and in some cases, HDD.
Your idea of internal expansion seems fairly full-fledged to me.
*Rebuttal welcomed*
Originally posted by gsxrboy
You do know about the firmware hack to allow spanned monitors on ibooks yeah? allowing umm err (matsu help me with this one) around like 1600x1200 ish on an external screen..
Thanks for that, I didn't know that there was a hack out there. A quick search on Google confirms the fact. However it seems to be not very stable and is making machine get a little too hot. People report weeks of great use and then complete failure from the video or various other components.
When I'm thinking of buying a new mac on a budget i'm really not gonna take the risk of destroying it in the first few weeks. I'll stick to a standard mac configuration that best fits my needs rather than take a flyer and risk my cash on a third-party firmware update. Again thanks for letting me know but I think i'll stick to the eMac, it'll be cheaper and faster even after next weeks updates.
Originally posted by gsxrboy
You do know about the firmware hack to allow spanned monitors on ibooks yeah? allowing umm err (matsu help me with this one) around like 1600x1200 ish on an external screen..
You do know about the complete "not gonna happen" nature of this suggestion don't you?
I'm quite certain my or thegelding's mothers are not going to be applying the "spanning hack" to a brand new iBook. Let's focus on the real world here...
If I went over to her house and she had an iBook opened up and was going at it with a solder gun, I'd collapse and go into some sort of shock.
Originally posted by pscates
You do know about the complete "not gonna happen" nature of this suggestion don't you?
I'm quite certain my or thegelding's mothers are not going to be applying the "spanning hack" to a brand new iBook. Let's focus on the real world here...
If I went over to her house and she had an iBook opened up and was going at it with a solder gun, I'd collapse and go into some sort of shock.
About the hack. You should all know that the iBooks are more capable of spanning than the original PBooks. The hack is not some cludge to make the system do something it was not intended to do. The graphics cards are designed for spanning. Apple just can't find a card that doesn't have that capability anymore so they turn the functionality off for the sole purpose of differentiating product lines. If you buy a PB for that sole purpose, you are giving in to Apple's scheme. The so called "hack" simply allows you to turn on what Apple turned off. I have been running it on a G3 iBook for almost a year and a half. There are no adverse issues related to spanning. I promise.
Scates, as for your comment, you should probably know that the "hack" is in the form of a simple utility now and works on all machines that Apple has so crippled. It it as easy as installing a mouse utility. So Yes, your grandma could do it. This crippling thing is borderline evil and every Mac user should fight it by enabling their stolen features. Don't just bend over and take everything they poke at you. This post is being viewed on a 19" monitor while the 12" screen attached to my iB is busy doing something else. Your eMac could be doing the same.
Originally posted by pscates
Hmm, interesting. I didn't know that. I thought it was some sort of hardware-based alteration. It's just software? Really?
Open Firmware, to be precise. It's programmable, so it's basically a software issue. The hack just tells the firmware "the graphics chipset can span" and since the graphics chipset can, no harm done.
Originally posted by pscates
Hmm, interesting. I didn't know that. I thought it was some sort of hardware-based alteration. It's just software? Really?
pscates: Have a look at the official Screen Spanning Doctor website.
If only the Doctor could do clamshell mode reliably with the full 32MB of VRAM like in the PowerBook...
I'm curious to see what the iBook/PowerBook playing field will look like on Monday. Who knows?
Escher
Originally posted by Escher
pscates: Have a look at the official Screen Spanning Doctor website.
If only the Doctor could do clamshell mode reliably with the full 32MB of VRAM like in the PowerBook...
I'm curious to see what the iBook/PowerBook playing field will look like on Monday. Who knows?
Escher
I don't know whether to love or hate you guys!!! I had really made my mind up and began to plan for my new eMac. Now I'm kinda hoping for 1.25G4 iBooks with superdrives!!. A nice 19" screen for home and the ability to use Garageband on the move....oh i could be tempted. It was all so simple until you guys.....arh cheers anyway