As the resident computer tech I have bullied a good deal of people into switching by politely informing friends and family that if their next computer is not a Mac I will not assist them with computer issues any longer. They can call Geek Squad or MS, for all I care.
Yes, I am doing the same. people used to call me and ask what Dell they should buy, I'd say buy a Mac, Dells suck. A couple weeks later I'd hear they bought a Dell. Now if they call and ask about computers, I find they are more open to Mac. I just send them to an Apple store, done.
In terms of that former PC user above, I can totally see that. I've used Macs even when Mac sucked, which they did in the late 90s. I used to look at PCs and think, damn that is faster than my mac, Macs are screwed... But after the release of OSX I could see that Apple OS development was able to rev and improve the OS very fast and more reliably than before. I was not sure if it was the UNIX foundation, efficiency of Cocoa frameworks and tools, or maybe just the benefit from dropping all the legacy stuff. But over starting in 10.3, 10.4 and increasingly in 10.5, Macs have a technical advantage over WinPC. Now when I see a PC I feel like I am visiting someone in the Soviet Union. Its just not polite to tell people how much their stuff reeks.
Its funny but I keep reading reviews of the hardcore mac guys, like arstechnica, that trash leopard in a few areas, like the design of folders. The real test that matters for the future of the platform is what to Windows people think when they see Leopard? The hardcore mac user is not going to leave for a folder design, but Windows guys may look as see a serious, detailed OS that screams. Its better to strip away the candy coatings, the cutesy stuff in the OS and just make it super slick, clean and reliable. I personally think the new dock, especially for a novice user is brilliant and not at all ugly. And the side dock is just about right for a pro user.
I bought a 1 TB MyBook (Western Digital) drive that actually contains two drives.
You can set it for RAID 1 mode, and it appears to your Mac as a 500 GB drive.
Whatever you throw at it gets mirrored to the second drive instantly. If one of the
drives goes down, you've got the other. It was $249 at Best Buy.
My initial Time Machine backup took about three hours. After that, the little backups every hour are not even noticable. (It's got three connection options: FireWire 800,
FireWire 400, and USB 2.0. I use FW800.)
Of course, I can still hook up my Maxtor 500 GB USB 2.0 drive and use SuperDuper
for a snapshot to keep off-site if needed. Although, I admit, I haven't tried that yet,
and I don't know if SuperDuper works with Leopard. That's my plan, though.
Even if SuperDuper doesn't work, you can get a second drive, and just swap them once
in a while. Time Machine is smart enough to backup what needs backing up,
I'm told, even if an official Time Machine drive has been detached and gets reattached
later.
Good luck!
Thnx for the info. Snag for me is my drive took 10 hours for initial backup (I know it is fast after that) so trying to cheat with a fast clone before risking losing TM I had while trying the trick of attaching to airport extreme base station to test Wi Fi work around. This may screw with the TM I suspect but fun to test.
I don't think it's proper to copy and paste large amounts of text when the link will do fine fine.
That guy always cracks me up with his posts, he has a 24x7 bug up his ass for MS, I can't figure it out.
I still don't understand why people feel the need to pretend there is some kind of battle going on between Windows and OSx they do not even compete in an open market, until OSx is available to install on any system it's not in competition with Windows.
Windows users for the most part don't even know anything about Leopard, so the claim that the tide is changing and we are going to see numbers beyond our wildest dream is stupid, we won't see numbers any higher than users that have Apple hardware. Its a pretty simple number to figure out.
Also Vista release was different most waited to buy new hardware that is why pc sales increased the first week 173% most Windows users decided to wait and upgrade everything based on Vista hardware requirements, that has never been the case with OSx most users just upgrade.
So if the install base is current users upgrading that isn't a big deal for Apple, they put out software to generate hardware sales because as we all know that is where most of the profit is made.
Have any of you guys checked at the discussion forums at Apple? They might have sold 2 millions copies of Leopard in the first weekend, but from the looks of the support forums there are thousands of unhappy Mac users with the blue screen of death. I bought Leopard Saturday, put the disc in my computer (PowerPC G5), but it won't even get to the install screen. It installed perfectly though on my girlfriend's laptop. I even reinstalled Tiger for a fresh start, then tried Leopard again. ...hours of a grey screen. I tried starting up from the disc but my computer just isn't recognizing it. A coworker bought a copy but after the install his computer won't even boot up! I'm sure the majority were problem free installs, but from the looks of the Leopard discussions on Apple's site, they should have maybe done some more beta testing. I'll probably have to go to the Genius Bar or wait for the dust to clear. Any of you have any similar problems?
Have any of you guys checked at the discussion forums at Apple? They might have sold 2 millions copies of Leopard in the first weekend, but from the looks of the support forums there are thousands of unhappy Mac users with the blue screen of death. I bought Leopard Saturday, put the disc in my computer (PowerPC G5), but it won't even get to the install screen. It installed perfectly though on my girlfriend's laptop. I even reinstalled Tiger for a fresh start, then tried Leopard again. ...hours of a grey screen. I tried starting up from the disc but my computer just isn't recognizing it. A coworker bought a copy but after the install his computer won't even boot up! I'm sure the majority were problem free installs, but from the looks of the Leopard discussions on Apple's site, they should have maybe done some more beta testing. I'll probably have to go to the Genius Bar or wait for the dust to clear. Any of you have any similar problems?
People don't talk about that kind of stuff here because it would mess up the illusion that Apple is perfect. You know the "it just works" bullshit. Maybe one day if Steve Jobs wasn't so paranoid he would allow his beta version to be tested the the general population instead of the 1970's theory that everything needs to be keep secret.
Clearly the Application Enhancement issue and the Divx network support issue would have been caught and fixed.
Steve Jobs doesn't allow people to compute the way they want to compute he forces you to do so the way he wants. Time Machine is another perfect example you can not change the settings to make a backup when you want it makes one once an hour and that can't be changed. Also he has decided that your desktop should remain clean hense the Grid effect which can not be modified. Apple products most of the time work fairly well but I can tell you from using them along time they aren't big on allowing the end user choice.
To even speak like this on this forum is like Harry Potter talking about Lord Voldemort.
Have any of you guys checked at the discussion forums at Apple? They might have sold 2 millions copies of Leopard in the first weekend, but from the looks of the support forums there are thousands of unhappy Mac users with the blue screen of death. I bought Leopard Saturday, put the disc in my computer (PowerPC G5), but it won't even get to the install screen. It installed perfectly though on my girlfriend's laptop. I even reinstalled Tiger for a fresh start, then tried Leopard again. ...hours of a grey screen. I tried starting up from the disc but my computer just isn't recognizing it. A coworker bought a copy but after the install his computer won't even boot up! I'm sure the majority were problem free installs, but from the looks of the Leopard discussions on Apple's site, they should have maybe done some more beta testing. I'll probably have to go to the Genius Bar or wait for the dust to clear. Any of you have any similar problems?
Been using Windows, and still am, for ... let's see... about 10 years (I'm 18).
The last couple of months, I've been following apple and I'm totally convinced that my next computer will be a mac. Just waiting for the pay to get in! (TOMORROW )
Also trying to convince my friends to switch, but they're really kinda stuck up, and think macs are weird. But I'm sure they'll switch sooner or later, after I bring my macbook with Leopard to school!
Welcome aboard Halenissen. I've been using Macs since 1986 and do a lot of tech support for them. My 21 yr old son just bought a MacBook Pro. He's a big WOW and StarCraft fan. Send me a message with your email and I'll hook you up with him if you like those games. He just got a bunch of his friends setup on iChatAV.
Welcome aboard Halenissen. I've been using Macs since 1986 and do a lot of tech support for them. My 21 yr old son just bought a MacBook Pro. He's a big WOW and StarCraft fan. Send me a message with your email and I'll hook you up with him if you like those games. He just got a bunch of his friends setup on iChatAV.
Cool. Thanks for the invite, but I just quit WoW 4 months ago. Not going back there Thanks for the welcome though
How can Amazon USA offer such a good discount? In Japan they only offer a 1% discount.
Price fixing?
Quote:
Originally Posted by shanmugam
sales volume, i guess.
Nope, not strictly sales volume and not strictly price fixing. The relevant question is how Amazon sells for less than Apple's "suggested" list price, not why the price is higher in Japan.
Apple is among a small group of companies which still practices what I think used to be called "fair trade pricing," though that's more often applied today to goods that certify that things like organic coffee beans from Nicaragua move through the distribution chain in such a way that the third world growers get a fair proportion of the ultimate selling price at your local coffee shop.
Such companies generally do not allow their resellers to cut the MSRP price on their products, which is why, unlike HP, Toshiba, etc., you never see Macs "on sale" or "close out" at your local independent Mac seller, let alone at Apple's company-owned stores, and only token discounts at Mac Mall and other catalog and online outlets. The independent vendors compensate, generally, by offering bundles of other products which are not semi-price controlled, like printers, scanners, software, etc. So they thus have a way to compete on price without "cutting" the advertised price of the Mac in the middle of the bundle, i.e., they eat their margins on the bundle to sell the Mac.
According to Wikipedia, the law that supports this has changed, but they're not very detailed about how or how Apple (and to an extent BOSE and a few others) can continue this practice.
This has been a long-standing practice at Apple, though I don't know when it began, and it has both helped and hurt them at various times. It was especially not useful to them during their period of experimenting with Mac clones when they were severely undercut by their licensees. The licensees had to compete with each other, with PC's and with Apple itself, and they had to get their product into stores and catalogs. And their main market strategy began to mirror that of PC makers: compete in a commodity market with commodity razor-thin margins pricing. In the meantime, "real Macs" stubbornly stayed at full retail, but had no real advantage except in design and then-fading cachet.
So Apple was pinned to the wall by shrinking market share, by a limited OS, by a limited CPU and then another limited CPU (680x0 and then Power PC), by competing with their own licensees, and by a pricing strategy that was diametrically opposed to their licensing strategy. And it almost sunk the company.
Now, as the hottest corp on the planet, and able to use a combination of secrecy about future product releases and high product demand to "clear out the inventory channel," so they never have left-over product TO "close out," a closed Apple with set prices is able to maintain profit margins Dell and HP would kill for, which offsets their relatively smaller sales with enough R&D capital to compete against mass marketing behemoths.
If you don't like Apple's margins, you can always buy a PC, and Apple's in little apparent danger of monopoly prosecution with less than 8% of the personal computer US market share. So while the model's working this well, don't expect any change. And don't expect any "sales" of Apple-branded products at Apple stores.
Which brings us to Amazon, the only company I know of which actually has offered significant price cuts (sometimes in the form of "rebates") across a wide spectrum of Apple products. I once bought a Mac from them at less than the "student" price, and now they're blasting Leopard out at a good discount.
One might suspect that they must account for a significant portion of Apple sales, maybe the biggest of any reseller, and therefore have leverage with Apple Inc. to the point that they can flout Steve's policies without incurring either public wrath or being cut off of their reseller status. Maybe someone else in the thread has more inside details.
But whatever, there's Apple pricing almost everywhere else (but see below) and then there's Amazon Apple pricing.
This may be changing, at least on some software, as this thread contains a link to a smaller seller offering a $40 rebate on Leopard, and I saw a reference to a price of $99 elsewhere, but to date Amazon's the only place I've ever seen a big hardware rebate on Macs.
According to Wikipedia, the law that supports this has changed, but they're not very detailed about how or how Apple (and to an extent BOSE and a few others) can continue this practice.
It might just be that they give smaller discounts to retailers so there's less room to cut the price. Apple is rumored to have among the smallest retailer discounts in the computer industry.
Has anyone tried making a clone of there Time Machine back up yet? So far it has failed with Finder, Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper.
You may think I am crazy to want to copy a back up; but the first back up is very slow (once done it is fast) and I wanted to experiment with Airport Extreme Wi Fi backup. In case i screwed up the first backup done directly (a way to get APE to work we think) in testing this theory I tried to clone it but no dice.
If anyone knows how to let me know
The first back up is always going to be slow. The subsequent backups are equivalent to database snapshots where only the changes are recorded. Enterprise Object Frameworks (EOF) had this back in 96.
Comments
As the resident computer tech I have bullied a good deal of people into switching by politely informing friends and family that if their next computer is not a Mac I will not assist them with computer issues any longer. They can call Geek Squad or MS, for all I care.
Yes, I am doing the same. people used to call me and ask what Dell they should buy, I'd say buy a Mac, Dells suck. A couple weeks later I'd hear they bought a Dell. Now if they call and ask about computers, I find they are more open to Mac. I just send them to an Apple store, done.
In terms of that former PC user above, I can totally see that. I've used Macs even when Mac sucked, which they did in the late 90s. I used to look at PCs and think, damn that is faster than my mac, Macs are screwed... But after the release of OSX I could see that Apple OS development was able to rev and improve the OS very fast and more reliably than before. I was not sure if it was the UNIX foundation, efficiency of Cocoa frameworks and tools, or maybe just the benefit from dropping all the legacy stuff. But over starting in 10.3, 10.4 and increasingly in 10.5, Macs have a technical advantage over WinPC. Now when I see a PC I feel like I am visiting someone in the Soviet Union. Its just not polite to tell people how much their stuff reeks.
Its funny but I keep reading reviews of the hardcore mac guys, like arstechnica, that trash leopard in a few areas, like the design of folders. The real test that matters for the future of the platform is what to Windows people think when they see Leopard? The hardcore mac user is not going to leave for a folder design, but Windows guys may look as see a serious, detailed OS that screams. Its better to strip away the candy coatings, the cutesy stuff in the OS and just make it super slick, clean and reliable. I personally think the new dock, especially for a novice user is brilliant and not at all ugly. And the side dock is just about right for a pro user.
I bought a 1 TB MyBook (Western Digital) drive that actually contains two drives.
You can set it for RAID 1 mode, and it appears to your Mac as a 500 GB drive.
Whatever you throw at it gets mirrored to the second drive instantly. If one of the
drives goes down, you've got the other. It was $249 at Best Buy.
My initial Time Machine backup took about three hours. After that, the little backups every hour are not even noticable. (It's got three connection options: FireWire 800,
FireWire 400, and USB 2.0. I use FW800.)
Of course, I can still hook up my Maxtor 500 GB USB 2.0 drive and use SuperDuper
for a snapshot to keep off-site if needed. Although, I admit, I haven't tried that yet,
and I don't know if SuperDuper works with Leopard. That's my plan, though.
Even if SuperDuper doesn't work, you can get a second drive, and just swap them once
in a while. Time Machine is smart enough to backup what needs backing up,
I'm told, even if an official Time Machine drive has been detached and gets reattached
later.
Good luck!
Thnx for the info. Snag for me is my drive took 10 hours for initial backup (I know it is fast after that) so trying to cheat with a fast clone before risking losing TM I had while trying the trick of attaching to airport extreme base station to test Wi Fi work around. This may screw with the TM I suspect but fun to test.
I don't think it's proper to copy and paste large amounts of text when the link will do fine fine.
That guy always cracks me up with his posts, he has a 24x7 bug up his ass for MS, I can't figure it out.
I still don't understand why people feel the need to pretend there is some kind of battle going on between Windows and OSx they do not even compete in an open market, until OSx is available to install on any system it's not in competition with Windows.
Windows users for the most part don't even know anything about Leopard, so the claim that the tide is changing and we are going to see numbers beyond our wildest dream is stupid, we won't see numbers any higher than users that have Apple hardware. Its a pretty simple number to figure out.
Also Vista release was different most waited to buy new hardware that is why pc sales increased the first week 173% most Windows users decided to wait and upgrade everything based on Vista hardware requirements, that has never been the case with OSx most users just upgrade.
So if the install base is current users upgrading that isn't a big deal for Apple, they put out software to generate hardware sales because as we all know that is where most of the profit is made.
Oh yeah, that is right! Thanks for reminding me, could've made a little mistake there
Anyways thanks for the warm welcome
Have any of you guys checked at the discussion forums at Apple? They might have sold 2 millions copies of Leopard in the first weekend, but from the looks of the support forums there are thousands of unhappy Mac users with the blue screen of death. I bought Leopard Saturday, put the disc in my computer (PowerPC G5), but it won't even get to the install screen. It installed perfectly though on my girlfriend's laptop. I even reinstalled Tiger for a fresh start, then tried Leopard again. ...hours of a grey screen. I tried starting up from the disc but my computer just isn't recognizing it. A coworker bought a copy but after the install his computer won't even boot up! I'm sure the majority were problem free installs, but from the looks of the Leopard discussions on Apple's site, they should have maybe done some more beta testing. I'll probably have to go to the Genius Bar or wait for the dust to clear. Any of you have any similar problems?
People don't talk about that kind of stuff here because it would mess up the illusion that Apple is perfect. You know the "it just works" bullshit. Maybe one day if Steve Jobs wasn't so paranoid he would allow his beta version to be tested the the general population instead of the 1970's theory that everything needs to be keep secret.
Clearly the Application Enhancement issue and the Divx network support issue would have been caught and fixed.
Steve Jobs doesn't allow people to compute the way they want to compute he forces you to do so the way he wants. Time Machine is another perfect example you can not change the settings to make a backup when you want it makes one once an hour and that can't be changed. Also he has decided that your desktop should remain clean hense the Grid effect which can not be modified. Apple products most of the time work fairly well but I can tell you from using them along time they aren't big on allowing the end user choice.
To even speak like this on this forum is like Harry Potter talking about Lord Voldemort.
Have any of you guys checked at the discussion forums at Apple? They might have sold 2 millions copies of Leopard in the first weekend, but from the looks of the support forums there are thousands of unhappy Mac users with the blue screen of death. I bought Leopard Saturday, put the disc in my computer (PowerPC G5), but it won't even get to the install screen. It installed perfectly though on my girlfriend's laptop. I even reinstalled Tiger for a fresh start, then tried Leopard again. ...hours of a grey screen. I tried starting up from the disc but my computer just isn't recognizing it. A coworker bought a copy but after the install his computer won't even boot up! I'm sure the majority were problem free installs, but from the looks of the Leopard discussions on Apple's site, they should have maybe done some more beta testing. I'll probably have to go to the Genius Bar or wait for the dust to clear. Any of you have any similar problems?
First post I see, congratulations.
At backtomac, digitalclips and solipism
Oh yeah, that is right! Thanks for reminding me, could've made a little mistake there
Anyways thanks for the warm welcome
yvw
Been using Windows, and still am, for ... let's see... about 10 years (I'm 18).
The last couple of months, I've been following apple and I'm totally convinced that my next computer will be a mac. Just waiting for the pay to get in! (TOMORROW
Also trying to convince my friends to switch, but they're really kinda stuck up, and think macs are weird. But I'm sure they'll switch sooner or later, after I bring my macbook with Leopard to school!
Welcome aboard Halenissen. I've been using Macs since 1986 and do a lot of tech support for them. My 21 yr old son just bought a MacBook Pro. He's a big WOW and StarCraft fan. Send me a message with your email and I'll hook you up with him if you like those games. He just got a bunch of his friends setup on iChatAV.
OS X doesn't give blue screens.
Get a Mac.
!
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13...s/article.html
I don't think it's proper to copy and paste large amounts of text when the link will do fine fine.
So sorry Jeff, I didn't get the link till later and added it in edit, only had the text to start with.
http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0275835
First post I see, congratulations.
i've been a mac user since the quadra 660av,
and i've been reading posts here for a long time.
figure i'd finally post something after frustrations with leopard.
Welcome aboard Halenissen. I've been using Macs since 1986 and do a lot of tech support for them. My 21 yr old son just bought a MacBook Pro. He's a big WOW and StarCraft fan. Send me a message with your email and I'll hook you up with him if you like those games. He just got a bunch of his friends setup on iChatAV.
Cool. Thanks for the invite, but I just quit WoW 4 months ago. Not going back there
How can Amazon USA offer such a good discount? In Japan they only offer a 1% discount.
Price fixing?
sales volume, i guess.
Nope, not strictly sales volume and not strictly price fixing. The relevant question is how Amazon sells for less than Apple's "suggested" list price, not why the price is higher in Japan.
Apple is among a small group of companies which still practices what I think used to be called "fair trade pricing," though that's more often applied today to goods that certify that things like organic coffee beans from Nicaragua move through the distribution chain in such a way that the third world growers get a fair proportion of the ultimate selling price at your local coffee shop.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggested_retail_price
Such companies generally do not allow their resellers to cut the MSRP price on their products, which is why, unlike HP, Toshiba, etc., you never see Macs "on sale" or "close out" at your local independent Mac seller, let alone at Apple's company-owned stores, and only token discounts at Mac Mall and other catalog and online outlets. The independent vendors compensate, generally, by offering bundles of other products which are not semi-price controlled, like printers, scanners, software, etc. So they thus have a way to compete on price without "cutting" the advertised price of the Mac in the middle of the bundle, i.e., they eat their margins on the bundle to sell the Mac.
According to Wikipedia, the law that supports this has changed, but they're not very detailed about how or how Apple (and to an extent BOSE and a few others) can continue this practice.
This has been a long-standing practice at Apple, though I don't know when it began, and it has both helped and hurt them at various times. It was especially not useful to them during their period of experimenting with Mac clones when they were severely undercut by their licensees. The licensees had to compete with each other, with PC's and with Apple itself, and they had to get their product into stores and catalogs. And their main market strategy began to mirror that of PC makers: compete in a commodity market with commodity razor-thin margins pricing. In the meantime, "real Macs" stubbornly stayed at full retail, but had no real advantage except in design and then-fading cachet.
So Apple was pinned to the wall by shrinking market share, by a limited OS, by a limited CPU and then another limited CPU (680x0 and then Power PC), by competing with their own licensees, and by a pricing strategy that was diametrically opposed to their licensing strategy. And it almost sunk the company.
Now, as the hottest corp on the planet, and able to use a combination of secrecy about future product releases and high product demand to "clear out the inventory channel," so they never have left-over product TO "close out," a closed Apple with set prices is able to maintain profit margins Dell and HP would kill for, which offsets their relatively smaller sales with enough R&D capital to compete against mass marketing behemoths.
If you don't like Apple's margins, you can always buy a PC, and Apple's in little apparent danger of monopoly prosecution with less than 8% of the personal computer US market share. So while the model's working this well, don't expect any change. And don't expect any "sales" of Apple-branded products at Apple stores.
Which brings us to Amazon, the only company I know of which actually has offered significant price cuts (sometimes in the form of "rebates") across a wide spectrum of Apple products. I once bought a Mac from them at less than the "student" price, and now they're blasting Leopard out at a good discount.
One might suspect that they must account for a significant portion of Apple sales, maybe the biggest of any reseller, and therefore have leverage with Apple Inc. to the point that they can flout Steve's policies without incurring either public wrath or being cut off of their reseller status. Maybe someone else in the thread has more inside details.
But whatever, there's Apple pricing almost everywhere else (but see below) and then there's Amazon Apple pricing.
This may be changing, at least on some software, as this thread contains a link to a smaller seller offering a $40 rebate on Leopard, and I saw a reference to a price of $99 elsewhere, but to date Amazon's the only place I've ever seen a big hardware rebate on Macs.
According to Wikipedia, the law that supports this has changed, but they're not very detailed about how or how Apple (and to an extent BOSE and a few others) can continue this practice.
It might just be that they give smaller discounts to retailers so there's less room to cut the price. Apple is rumored to have among the smallest retailer discounts in the computer industry.
Has anyone tried making a clone of there Time Machine back up yet? So far it has failed with Finder, Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper.
You may think I am crazy to want to copy a back up; but the first back up is very slow (once done it is fast) and I wanted to experiment with Airport Extreme Wi Fi backup. In case i screwed up the first backup done directly (a way to get APE to work we think) in testing this theory I tried to clone it but no dice.
If anyone knows how to let me know
The first back up is always going to be slow. The subsequent backups are equivalent to database snapshots where only the changes are recorded. Enterprise Object Frameworks (EOF) had this back in 96.
How can Amazon USA offer such a good discount?
Actually amazon didn't have the best deal. Other retailers had better offers like MacMall and LA Computer. We only paid 99.00 for our copy