Good to know we were all just imagining the pain in our eyes that comes after reading screens for a while.
The next time I see someone print something off their computer avoid looking at a screen to read it, I'll be sure to call them a nutter and that the cheap printer paper there reading it off could actually be worse than the screen there staring at.
Or perhaps this persons wrong and staring at a screen that is basically a light for an hour while you read, may not actually be that good for you. Could explain why people that look at screens tend to need glasses more than those that don't. That's not to say that there's people it doesn't effect, but given the number of people that say it does I think we can safely say LCD screens cause eye strain (just not for everyone).
No one is saying that eye don't get strained, but you have offered no imperial data, just a weak hypothesis.
Let's look at your last statement... "people that look at [LCD] screens tend to need glasses more than those that don't." Why wouldn't that be genetics? Why wouldn't eye strain be a result of reading small text, in general? Do you have anything to show an explosive growth rate in the corrective lens market or a need for corrective lens at a young age?
Remember, 1st world children have been using game consoles for decades now, while adults have been using computers for work and in their personal life for nearly as long. If there were evidence of monitors ruining our eyesight or causing excessive eye strain that reading print under various light sources and intensities could never cause then Occam's Razor says that this would have been clearly evident without speculation on the matter.
That is not to say that LCDs, monitors, reading anything for a duration, not blinking or intense concentration cannot cause eyestrain, headaches, psychosis, seizures, daylight vision (cone vision), nighttime vision (rod vision) or overall visual degradation (misshaped lens) in some regard, but neither apophenia nor confirmation bias should be used to assess this risk. Scientific method all the way, Baby!
Hmm... maybe I'm just imagining it then... It must have been my old MacBook that came with those in 2006.
They used to have the Office for Mac "Test Drive" and then later the iWork 30-Day Trial. Sometime back in Leopard, I think after they updated iWork to include Numbers they dropped both. Most likely they had a contract with MS that required them to include it for x-many years. Now, if you want either you have to get them online in or in their retail boxes.
No one is saying that eye don't get strained, but you have offered no imperial data, just a weak hypothesis.
Let's look at your last statement... "people that look at [LCD] screens tend to need glasses more than those that don't." Why wouldn't that be genetics? Why wouldn't eye strain be a result of reading small text, in general? Do you have anything to show an explosive growth rate in the corrective lens market or a need for corrective lens at a young age?
Remember, 1st world children have been using game consoles for decades now, while adults have been using computers for work and in their personal life for nearly as long. If there were evidence of monitors ruining our eyesight or causing excessive eye strain that reading print under various light sources and intensities could never cause then Occam's Razor says that this would have been clearly evident without speculation on the matter.
That is not to say that LCDs, monitors, reading anything for a duration, not blinking or intense concentration cannot cause eyestrain, headaches, psychosis, seizures, daylight vision (cone vision), nighttime vision (rod vision) or overall visual degradation (misshaped lens) in some regard, but neither apophenia nor confirmation bias should be used to assess this risk. Scientific method all the way, Baby!
There's a lot of info about this. It's just a matter of finding the real information, and separating it from the bogus.
They used to have the Office for Mac "Test Drive" and then later the iWork 30-Day Trial. Sometime back in Leopard, I think after they updated iWork to include Numbers they dropped both. Most likely they had a contract with MS that required them to include it for x-many years. Now, if you want either you have to get them online in or in their retail boxes.
Most people would likely prefer iLife anyway.
This is in contrast to the junkware that comes on most PCs. The difference, something that many people don't understand, is that all of those sample programs, starter versions, 30 to 90 day trials are something that the computer manufacturer is getting paid to install on their machines. This can amount to so much money, that for the cheaper machines they sell, it can account for all the profit!
As Apple doesn't do this, it's another reason why their machines cost more. While it wouldn't make much difference for an expensive machine, for something like the Mini, it can add $30 to $50 to the selling price, and that's a decent percentage for some people.
Macs come with Mac OS X and iLife. There is no shovel or crapware on Macs. Not a single app is trial only. The only item on your desktop is the Macintosh HD icon.
The inclusion of iLife is to sweeten the deal, like other OEMs do by including full version apps on their systems.
It looks cool. Is it full-featured, or are these starter programs for simple uses?
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
The cheaper the system the more crapware and shovelware you'll find. This helps the OEM lower the cost to the buyer by selling space on their OEM installations and restore discs. These tend to start up in the background even upon the first launch, as I'm sure you are aware.
Very true, and very annoying.
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
OEMs have also made the move in recent years to make their own apps to run as widgets on their systems. From my experience these seem to be more of a nuisance than a useful tool.
Agreed. It's one thing to have stuff for special hardware buttons, but the added UI stuff is usually crap. Not to mention the "Please Subscribe" stuff that the OEM throws in there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
Note that MS is legally prohibited from supplying Windows with a robust app suite like iLife and supplying other apps, like DVD player, in the OS itself
Is THAT why you need to DL a DVD player, or plugin, rather than it playing in the stock Media Player? I never knew that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
Here is a review from PC Pro in the UK testing various OEMs preinstalled crapware. The MacBook came with less RAM than the other machines but it had no crapware, used the least amount of RAM and started up the fastest. You can save money with a crapware filled machine but personally I's prefer to spend a little more not to have it.
Could explain why people that look at screens tend to need glasses more than those that don't.
That's from staring at a fixed focal length for long periods of time, isn't it? I thought that the usual advice for that would be to look into the distance occasionally.
Quote:
Originally Posted by timgriff84
That's not to say that there's people it doesn't effect, but given the number of people that say it does I think we can safely say LCD screens cause eye strain (just not for everyone).
Well, yeah.
But I think that the "need glasses" and "eyestrain" problems have different causes.
It's more than ok. Since swapping to gloss, calibration is a dream, the print always matches what I show the client on the screen, and the Matt screen white-out I used to experience on bright days is a thing of the past. I will never go back to a Matt display.
What kind of calibration do you do? What sort of equipment do you use?
Is there a rough and dirty consumer-grade method you could recommend?
It looks cool. Is it full-featured, or are these starter programs for simple uses?
These are full featured apps. They aren't professional apps, they are consumer apps designed to be simple to use, but that are far from being simple starter apps. For instance, iPhoto can hold over 100k(?) images and video. It has Places and Faces, something Aperture just received. It has smart albums and many consumer-focused non-destructive editing tools. Then iMovie and Garageband are from being simple. I don't even know of a Windows alternative for those two that is priced for a consumer.
Quote:
Agreed. It's one thing to have stuff for special hardware buttons, but the added UI stuff is usually crap. Not to mention the "Please Subscribe" stuff that the OEM throws in there.
As melgross mentions, above, this is big business. Cheap machines could even be sold at a loss and still make a profit on the back end.
Quote:
Is THAT why you need to DL a DVD player, or plugin, rather than it playing in the stock Media Player? I never knew that.
Remember the antitrust issue with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator? I have no idea where the line would be drawn, but seeing as though many companies make their money from supplying these apps to Windows and hardly anyone was coding for Mac OS back then I'd say it's a fairly good reason for the disparity.
Here is a review from PC Pro in the UK testing various OEMs preinstalled crapware. The MacBook came with less RAM than the other machines but it had no crapware, used the least amount of RAM and started up the fastest. You can save money with a crapware filled machine but personally I's prefer to spend a little more not to have it.
I looked at the article. Their summary for Dell looks about right, from my limited experience: "If you’re searching for a system without the usual crapware then you could do a lot worse than a Dell." Mine still has some stuff on it that no longer starts at boot, but has not yet been uninstalled.
I glanced at the Sony article too, given that I don't like Sony's consumer policies. Har!
"Sony’s extensive range of software was responsible for the worst boot time of any of the laptops, with our sample machine taking more than three minutes to boot.
General application performance was hampered, too, with the VAIO exhibiting one of the biggest performance disparities in our 2D benchmarks"
There's good reasons why Sony should be avoided.
This surprised me: "As expected, then, the MacBook Pro returned a slimline set of test results: a boot time of 49 seconds is faster than every Windows laptop on test that had to churn through dozens of additional applications, although it’s 10 seconds slower than the 37 seconds clean boot time of the Dell Inspiron 1525."
I can't imagine why it's slower to boot than the bottom-of-line economy model Dell.
This surprised me: "As expected, then, the MacBook Pro returned a slimline set of test results: a boot time of 49 seconds is faster than every Windows laptop on test that had to churn through dozens of additional applications, although it?s 10 seconds slower than the 37 seconds clean boot time of the Dell Inspiron 1525."
I can't imagine why it's slower to boot than the bottom-of-line economy model Dell.
That is a bit of a mystery. Looking at the Windows-based machines, most of the slower machines booted faster than the faster machines, according to their benchmarking. The only thing i can think of is the complexity of the logic board.
The Dell Inspiron 1525 has Intel X3100 integrated graphics while the MBP and perhaps the other Windows machines with higher benchmarks use a GPU. If they would have started up the MBP with the Nvidia 9400M IGP I wonder if it would have been better. I know my 13" MBP boots faster than the MBP they used, but I have no discrete GPU to which to test.
What kind of calibration do you do? What sort of equipment do you use?
Is there a rough and dirty consumer-grade method you could recommend?
You can buy a device for as little as $100 from Pantone. I forget the model number. That's about as cheap as you can get.
Apple does have a program built-in for this purpose. It's in the monitor preferences. Go to "color". On the right side the last option is to calibrate your display. If you open that, you will be given the chance to do that manually. But, I have to warn you, even though I've been in the commercial photography industry since 1969, and was an expert in color, even I can't calibrate my display by eye the way you must do with this, and other programs that use no hardware. If you're not experienced in color work, the chance that you will do even a half way decent job is much less.
What kind of calibration do you do? What sort of equipment do you use?
Is there a rough and dirty consumer-grade method you could recommend?
Sorry, i use a professional calibration service who come in once every 6-9 nine months to check workflow based on specific workflows and print bureau - it's not my area of expertise, and I don't trust a £100 piece of hardware with multi-thousand-pound contracts - the calibration is so good that we've actually reduced ink/substrate consumption as we no longer need to print - many repeat business clients are happy to see the very rich glossy display version and accept to print from that. Colours are stronger/truer and we have more control over the displays - the matt would get a white sheen that simply rendered them unusable if too much natural light came into the studio - unless we have a comp that is heavy in black, there is no reflection issue with the glossy - and black on a matt screen tended to look washed out and lacking in intensity anyway. We get to have the blinds open and work in natural daylight now - so much better for working environment and easier on the eye.
I find most people who refuse to purchase the iMac in gloss simply haven't used it day to day and have only seen it on display in apple stores and the like - you lay out your workspace properly and the issues people claim to exist, don't. I was nervous about 'going gloss' before i moved to the gloss range of macs, but once I'd bought my worries disappeared. It seems the people who warned me off had never actually used one - now they've seen the studio, they're all moving in the direction of the gloss screens.
People like to complain without actually experiencing what they're complaining about (for instance those complaining about the iPad, or those who talk about the joy of flash on android devices (who clearly haven't experienced the nightmare of 'flash lite' on android)) - the criticism is based on assumption and heresay, rather than real world experience.
This is telling. Gates' recent comments about how little he thinks of the iPad are undercut by his company's decision to offer Office for it.
It's not HIS company anymore. Why is it that people have such a hard time understanding that concept? Thus Gates' comments about the iPad and Microsoft's potential support are completely unrelated events.
It's not HIS company anymore. Why is it that people have such a hard time understanding that concept? Thus Gates' comments about the iPad and Microsoft's potential support are completely unrelated events.
In addition, the Mac Business Unit was made independent of the Windows business units, so they get to make their own decisions as to what they develop, and how it comes out. As Apple customers become a bigger source of income for MS, that makes sense.
And considering how bad Gate's prediction of the Windows tablet market was, his thoughts on the matter are hardly being taken seriously.
Just as I've always maintained (and been criticised for saying here a few times), there is really no evidence that "eye strain" is caused by reading from a screen as opposed to paper, or that ePaper is any easier on the eyes than an LCD. It's basically a popular misconception.
It's not a popular misconception, I can feel it on my eyes. I don't need bad science to tell me what reading experience kills my eyes. After only a short time on a screen, I have trouble focusing into distance, and I get head aches. The same does not happen with paper, provided it's decent paper. Further, these studies always come out when relevant products show up. Researchers are paid, funded, and they want to get publicity. A study like this is perfect for the purpose, and if you phrase the research topic narrow enough, then you can come up with results that seemingly support almost any premade conclusion.
It's obviously not the fact that the display is active (i.e. a light source) that is the problem, because photons don't carry a label telling the eye that they bounced off of something or come directly from an emitter.
There are IMNSHO mainly THREE factors at work, some of which is being conveniently neglected:
1) screen flicker
2) ambient lighting
3) glare
1) LCD screens are being refreshed, both the display and the backlighting flicker. While perceptually we don't notice that, this doesn't mean that on a low level it doesn't affect our eyes. Our physical bodies react to many things that don't penetrate all the way up to our consciousness, and to neglect these things is rather shortsighted (pun intended).
2) a passive reading surface requires a proper amount of ambient light. If you stare at a bright screen against a dark surrounding, your eye will strain, because it will have trouble adjusting the iris to a proper setting. The light sensitive areas that are responsible for eye adjustment take average light readings, while for proper adjustment in such a setting you'd need a spot meter, to use photography parlance. Thus a passive screen forces you to have proper lighting (unless you start using one of these clip-on book lights and read in total darkness...) An active display allows you to read in almost any lighting condition, regardless how good or bad for the eyes.
3) Apple has become so focused on what sells, that the short-term eye-poping-high-contrast effect of glossy screens has become more important to them than ergonomics, which in a time long ago was one of Apple's strengths. For Computer displays, there would even be a solution: optical coating of the smooth surface screens, like on camera lenses. That would combine the benefits of a glossy screen with massive reduction in glare. Unfortunately, that doesn't come for free, and hence Apple doesn't do it, not even as an option.
Further, for laptops, vendors like Toshiba have long offered transreflective LCD screens as an high-end option. The result is these screens can be used in bright sunlight, when Mac users are force to go packing. The only drawback is a reduction in color fidelity, but that's a minor issue on laptops that people want to use while on the go. (If you need color fidelity, you can have a second screen at home/office).
Unfortunately, optical coating isn't an option on a touch device, because finger prints would render the coating ineffective. Transreflective screens might be too thick for Apple's obsession with thin, to be used in an iPad.
In short, the iPad is pretty much unusable as a serious reading device. It's yet another consumer gadget for the typical US household that has a library with about five books in it. For some casual browsing in Cosmopolitan or Sports Illustrated, watching some You Tube, etc. it may be fine. For anyone who wants either a high-quality e-book reader or a highly mobile computing device, the iPad just doesn't cut it. For the former, the display is not going to be pleasant on the eyes for long stretches of reading, for the latter, the closed nature of the device that won't give the user full access to the hardware they own, is an absolute anathema.
For me, the iPad has only two potential uses:
a) introducing my 80 year old parents to the internet in a device that doesn't require them to learn everything that goes along with a regular computer
b) as a electronic picture frame to bring my photo shoots to clients and demo them, without having to give out copies that could be stolen before they are paid for.
There is obviously some use for the device in vertical markets, since corporations seem to have long ago stopped caring if their data is held hostage or who could get access to the data on the device.
For uses where the extreme feature set of Office isn't needed, iWork is just dandy.
But, Office has over 95% of the Office software market. There are businesses who need various features iWork doesn't support, for them, having a lighter form of Office on this could be a deal maker.
Both suites are great at what they do, but are aimed at different audiences. I see no reason why having MORE software available isn't better than having less. Apple knows that too.
Its not dandy for anyone that needs even moderate functions performed by Excel.
They used to have the Office for Mac "Test Drive" and then later the iWork 30-Day Trial. Sometime back in Leopard, I think after they updated iWork to include Numbers they dropped both. Most likely they had a contract with MS that required them to include it for x-many years. Now, if you want either you have to get them online in or in their retail boxes.
They must have dropped it quite some time after introducing Numbers, the MacBook I got in 2009 came with a iWork demo disc, and it was pre-installed
Its not dandy for anyone that needs even moderate functions performed by Excel.
Such as? I can layout data in table form, perform calculations on it, format the data and create graphs of that data, reorder and delete/insert rows/columns. Are those not the base moderate functions? For a piece of software less than four years old, it seems pretty good to me - I'm sure more functionality will be added as the software matures - in the meantime I'd suggest that pages, numbers and keynote do most things that the average user requires.
Comments
Good to know we were all just imagining the pain in our eyes that comes after reading screens for a while.
The next time I see someone print something off their computer avoid looking at a screen to read it, I'll be sure to call them a nutter and that the cheap printer paper there reading it off could actually be worse than the screen there staring at.
Or perhaps this persons wrong and staring at a screen that is basically a light for an hour while you read, may not actually be that good for you. Could explain why people that look at screens tend to need glasses more than those that don't. That's not to say that there's people it doesn't effect, but given the number of people that say it does I think we can safely say LCD screens cause eye strain (just not for everyone).
No one is saying that eye don't get strained, but you have offered no imperial data, just a weak hypothesis.
Let's look at your last statement... "people that look at [LCD] screens tend to need glasses more than those that don't." Why wouldn't that be genetics? Why wouldn't eye strain be a result of reading small text, in general? Do you have anything to show an explosive growth rate in the corrective lens market or a need for corrective lens at a young age?
Remember, 1st world children have been using game consoles for decades now, while adults have been using computers for work and in their personal life for nearly as long. If there were evidence of monitors ruining our eyesight or causing excessive eye strain that reading print under various light sources and intensities could never cause then Occam's Razor says that this would have been clearly evident without speculation on the matter.
That is not to say that LCDs, monitors, reading anything for a duration, not blinking or intense concentration cannot cause eyestrain, headaches, psychosis, seizures, daylight vision (cone vision), nighttime vision (rod vision) or overall visual degradation (misshaped lens) in some regard, but neither apophenia nor confirmation bias should be used to assess this risk. Scientific method all the way, Baby!
Hmm... maybe I'm just imagining it then... It must have been my old MacBook that came with those in 2006.
They used to have the Office for Mac "Test Drive" and then later the iWork 30-Day Trial. Sometime back in Leopard, I think after they updated iWork to include Numbers they dropped both. Most likely they had a contract with MS that required them to include it for x-many years. Now, if you want either you have to get them online in or in their retail boxes.
No one is saying that eye don't get strained, but you have offered no imperial data, just a weak hypothesis.
Let's look at your last statement... "people that look at [LCD] screens tend to need glasses more than those that don't." Why wouldn't that be genetics? Why wouldn't eye strain be a result of reading small text, in general? Do you have anything to show an explosive growth rate in the corrective lens market or a need for corrective lens at a young age?
Remember, 1st world children have been using game consoles for decades now, while adults have been using computers for work and in their personal life for nearly as long. If there were evidence of monitors ruining our eyesight or causing excessive eye strain that reading print under various light sources and intensities could never cause then Occam's Razor says that this would have been clearly evident without speculation on the matter.
That is not to say that LCDs, monitors, reading anything for a duration, not blinking or intense concentration cannot cause eyestrain, headaches, psychosis, seizures, daylight vision (cone vision), nighttime vision (rod vision) or overall visual degradation (misshaped lens) in some regard, but neither apophenia nor confirmation bias should be used to assess this risk. Scientific method all the way, Baby!
There's a lot of info about this. It's just a matter of finding the real information, and separating it from the bogus.
http://www.google.com/search?client=...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
They used to have the Office for Mac "Test Drive" and then later the iWork 30-Day Trial. Sometime back in Leopard, I think after they updated iWork to include Numbers they dropped both. Most likely they had a contract with MS that required them to include it for x-many years. Now, if you want either you have to get them online in or in their retail boxes.
Most people would likely prefer iLife anyway.
This is in contrast to the junkware that comes on most PCs. The difference, something that many people don't understand, is that all of those sample programs, starter versions, 30 to 90 day trials are something that the computer manufacturer is getting paid to install on their machines. This can amount to so much money, that for the cheaper machines they sell, it can account for all the profit!
As Apple doesn't do this, it's another reason why their machines cost more. While it wouldn't make much difference for an expensive machine, for something like the Mini, it can add $30 to $50 to the selling price, and that's a decent percentage for some people.
Macs come with Mac OS X and iLife. There is no shovel or crapware on Macs. Not a single app is trial only. The only item on your desktop is the Macintosh HD icon.
The inclusion of iLife is to sweeten the deal, like other OEMs do by including full version apps on their systems.
It looks cool. Is it full-featured, or are these starter programs for simple uses?
The cheaper the system the more crapware and shovelware you'll find. This helps the OEM lower the cost to the buyer by selling space on their OEM installations and restore discs. These tend to start up in the background even upon the first launch, as I'm sure you are aware.
Very true, and very annoying.
OEMs have also made the move in recent years to make their own apps to run as widgets on their systems. From my experience these seem to be more of a nuisance than a useful tool.
Agreed. It's one thing to have stuff for special hardware buttons, but the added UI stuff is usually crap. Not to mention the "Please Subscribe" stuff that the OEM throws in there.
Note that MS is legally prohibited from supplying Windows with a robust app suite like iLife and supplying other apps, like DVD player, in the OS itself
Is THAT why you need to DL a DVD player, or plugin, rather than it playing in the stock Media Player? I never knew that.
Here is a review from PC Pro in the UK testing various OEMs preinstalled crapware. The MacBook came with less RAM than the other machines but it had no crapware, used the least amount of RAM and started up the fastest. You can save money with a crapware filled machine but personally I's prefer to spend a little more not to have it.
I'll read it.
You've obviously never used the iLife suite,
Right.
Could explain why people that look at screens tend to need glasses more than those that don't.
That's from staring at a fixed focal length for long periods of time, isn't it? I thought that the usual advice for that would be to look into the distance occasionally.
That's not to say that there's people it doesn't effect, but given the number of people that say it does I think we can safely say LCD screens cause eye strain (just not for everyone).
Well, yeah.
But I think that the "need glasses" and "eyestrain" problems have different causes.
It's more than ok. Since swapping to gloss, calibration is a dream, the print always matches what I show the client on the screen, and the Matt screen white-out I used to experience on bright days is a thing of the past. I will never go back to a Matt display.
What kind of calibration do you do? What sort of equipment do you use?
Is there a rough and dirty consumer-grade method you could recommend?
It looks cool. Is it full-featured, or are these starter programs for simple uses?
These are full featured apps. They aren't professional apps, they are consumer apps designed to be simple to use, but that are far from being simple starter apps. For instance, iPhoto can hold over 100k(?) images and video. It has Places and Faces, something Aperture just received. It has smart albums and many consumer-focused non-destructive editing tools. Then iMovie and Garageband are from being simple. I don't even know of a Windows alternative for those two that is priced for a consumer.
Agreed. It's one thing to have stuff for special hardware buttons, but the added UI stuff is usually crap. Not to mention the "Please Subscribe" stuff that the OEM throws in there.
As melgross mentions, above, this is big business. Cheap machines could even be sold at a loss and still make a profit on the back end.
Is THAT why you need to DL a DVD player, or plugin, rather than it playing in the stock Media Player? I never knew that.
Remember the antitrust issue with Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator? I have no idea where the line would be drawn, but seeing as though many companies make their money from supplying these apps to Windows and hardly anyone was coding for Mac OS back then I'd say it's a fairly good reason for the disparity.
Originally Posted by solipsism View Post
Here is a review from PC Pro in the UK testing various OEMs preinstalled crapware. The MacBook came with less RAM than the other machines but it had no crapware, used the least amount of RAM and started up the fastest. You can save money with a crapware filled machine but personally I's prefer to spend a little more not to have it.
• http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/352927/the-crapware-con
I looked at the article. Their summary for Dell looks about right, from my limited experience: "If you’re searching for a system without the usual crapware then you could do a lot worse than a Dell." Mine still has some stuff on it that no longer starts at boot, but has not yet been uninstalled.
I glanced at the Sony article too, given that I don't like Sony's consumer policies. Har!
"Sony’s extensive range of software was responsible for the worst boot time of any of the laptops, with our sample machine taking more than three minutes to boot.
General application performance was hampered, too, with the VAIO exhibiting one of the biggest performance disparities in our 2D benchmarks"
There's good reasons why Sony should be avoided.
This surprised me: "As expected, then, the MacBook Pro returned a slimline set of test results: a boot time of 49 seconds is faster than every Windows laptop on test that had to churn through dozens of additional applications, although it’s 10 seconds slower than the 37 seconds clean boot time of the Dell Inspiron 1525."
I can't imagine why it's slower to boot than the bottom-of-line economy model Dell.
This surprised me: "As expected, then, the MacBook Pro returned a slimline set of test results: a boot time of 49 seconds is faster than every Windows laptop on test that had to churn through dozens of additional applications, although it?s 10 seconds slower than the 37 seconds clean boot time of the Dell Inspiron 1525."
I can't imagine why it's slower to boot than the bottom-of-line economy model Dell.
That is a bit of a mystery. Looking at the Windows-based machines, most of the slower machines booted faster than the faster machines, according to their benchmarking. The only thing i can think of is the complexity of the logic board.
The Dell Inspiron 1525 has Intel X3100 integrated graphics while the MBP and perhaps the other Windows machines with higher benchmarks use a GPU. If they would have started up the MBP with the Nvidia 9400M IGP I wonder if it would have been better. I know my 13" MBP boots faster than the MBP they used, but I have no discrete GPU to which to test.
What kind of calibration do you do? What sort of equipment do you use?
Is there a rough and dirty consumer-grade method you could recommend?
You can buy a device for as little as $100 from Pantone. I forget the model number. That's about as cheap as you can get.
Apple does have a program built-in for this purpose. It's in the monitor preferences. Go to "color". On the right side the last option is to calibrate your display. If you open that, you will be given the chance to do that manually. But, I have to warn you, even though I've been in the commercial photography industry since 1969, and was an expert in color, even I can't calibrate my display by eye the way you must do with this, and other programs that use no hardware. If you're not experienced in color work, the chance that you will do even a half way decent job is much less.
What kind of calibration do you do? What sort of equipment do you use?
Is there a rough and dirty consumer-grade method you could recommend?
Sorry, i use a professional calibration service who come in once every 6-9 nine months to check workflow based on specific workflows and print bureau - it's not my area of expertise, and I don't trust a £100 piece of hardware with multi-thousand-pound contracts - the calibration is so good that we've actually reduced ink/substrate consumption as we no longer need to print - many repeat business clients are happy to see the very rich glossy display version and accept to print from that. Colours are stronger/truer and we have more control over the displays - the matt would get a white sheen that simply rendered them unusable if too much natural light came into the studio - unless we have a comp that is heavy in black, there is no reflection issue with the glossy - and black on a matt screen tended to look washed out and lacking in intensity anyway. We get to have the blinds open and work in natural daylight now - so much better for working environment and easier on the eye.
I find most people who refuse to purchase the iMac in gloss simply haven't used it day to day and have only seen it on display in apple stores and the like - you lay out your workspace properly and the issues people claim to exist, don't. I was nervous about 'going gloss' before i moved to the gloss range of macs, but once I'd bought my worries disappeared. It seems the people who warned me off had never actually used one - now they've seen the studio, they're all moving in the direction of the gloss screens.
People like to complain without actually experiencing what they're complaining about (for instance those complaining about the iPad, or those who talk about the joy of flash on android devices (who clearly haven't experienced the nightmare of 'flash lite' on android)) - the criticism is based on assumption and heresay, rather than real world experience.
This is telling. Gates' recent comments about how little he thinks of the iPad are undercut by his company's decision to offer Office for it.
It's not HIS company anymore. Why is it that people have such a hard time understanding that concept? Thus Gates' comments about the iPad and Microsoft's potential support are completely unrelated events.
It's not HIS company anymore. Why is it that people have such a hard time understanding that concept? Thus Gates' comments about the iPad and Microsoft's potential support are completely unrelated events.
In addition, the Mac Business Unit was made independent of the Windows business units, so they get to make their own decisions as to what they develop, and how it comes out. As Apple customers become a bigger source of income for MS, that makes sense.
And considering how bad Gate's prediction of the Windows tablet market was, his thoughts on the matter are hardly being taken seriously.
always has been.
always will be.
Just as I've always maintained (and been criticised for saying here a few times), there is really no evidence that "eye strain" is caused by reading from a screen as opposed to paper, or that ePaper is any easier on the eyes than an LCD. It's basically a popular misconception.
It's not a popular misconception, I can feel it on my eyes. I don't need bad science to tell me what reading experience kills my eyes. After only a short time on a screen, I have trouble focusing into distance, and I get head aches. The same does not happen with paper, provided it's decent paper. Further, these studies always come out when relevant products show up. Researchers are paid, funded, and they want to get publicity. A study like this is perfect for the purpose, and if you phrase the research topic narrow enough, then you can come up with results that seemingly support almost any premade conclusion.
It's obviously not the fact that the display is active (i.e. a light source) that is the problem, because photons don't carry a label telling the eye that they bounced off of something or come directly from an emitter.
There are IMNSHO mainly THREE factors at work, some of which is being conveniently neglected:
1) screen flicker
2) ambient lighting
3) glare
1) LCD screens are being refreshed, both the display and the backlighting flicker. While perceptually we don't notice that, this doesn't mean that on a low level it doesn't affect our eyes. Our physical bodies react to many things that don't penetrate all the way up to our consciousness, and to neglect these things is rather shortsighted (pun intended).
2) a passive reading surface requires a proper amount of ambient light. If you stare at a bright screen against a dark surrounding, your eye will strain, because it will have trouble adjusting the iris to a proper setting. The light sensitive areas that are responsible for eye adjustment take average light readings, while for proper adjustment in such a setting you'd need a spot meter, to use photography parlance. Thus a passive screen forces you to have proper lighting (unless you start using one of these clip-on book lights and read in total darkness...) An active display allows you to read in almost any lighting condition, regardless how good or bad for the eyes.
3) Apple has become so focused on what sells, that the short-term eye-poping-high-contrast effect of glossy screens has become more important to them than ergonomics, which in a time long ago was one of Apple's strengths. For Computer displays, there would even be a solution: optical coating of the smooth surface screens, like on camera lenses. That would combine the benefits of a glossy screen with massive reduction in glare. Unfortunately, that doesn't come for free, and hence Apple doesn't do it, not even as an option.
Further, for laptops, vendors like Toshiba have long offered transreflective LCD screens as an high-end option. The result is these screens can be used in bright sunlight, when Mac users are force to go packing. The only drawback is a reduction in color fidelity, but that's a minor issue on laptops that people want to use while on the go. (If you need color fidelity, you can have a second screen at home/office).
Unfortunately, optical coating isn't an option on a touch device, because finger prints would render the coating ineffective. Transreflective screens might be too thick for Apple's obsession with thin, to be used in an iPad.
In short, the iPad is pretty much unusable as a serious reading device. It's yet another consumer gadget for the typical US household that has a library with about five books in it. For some casual browsing in Cosmopolitan or Sports Illustrated, watching some You Tube, etc. it may be fine. For anyone who wants either a high-quality e-book reader or a highly mobile computing device, the iPad just doesn't cut it. For the former, the display is not going to be pleasant on the eyes for long stretches of reading, for the latter, the closed nature of the device that won't give the user full access to the hardware they own, is an absolute anathema.
For me, the iPad has only two potential uses:
a) introducing my 80 year old parents to the internet in a device that doesn't require them to learn everything that goes along with a regular computer
b) as a electronic picture frame to bring my photo shoots to clients and demo them, without having to give out copies that could be stolen before they are paid for.
There is obviously some use for the device in vertical markets, since corporations seem to have long ago stopped caring if their data is held hostage or who could get access to the data on the device.
For uses where the extreme feature set of Office isn't needed, iWork is just dandy.
But, Office has over 95% of the Office software market. There are businesses who need various features iWork doesn't support, for them, having a lighter form of Office on this could be a deal maker.
Both suites are great at what they do, but are aimed at different audiences. I see no reason why having MORE software available isn't better than having less. Apple knows that too.
Its not dandy for anyone that needs even moderate functions performed by Excel.
They used to have the Office for Mac "Test Drive" and then later the iWork 30-Day Trial. Sometime back in Leopard, I think after they updated iWork to include Numbers they dropped both. Most likely they had a contract with MS that required them to include it for x-many years. Now, if you want either you have to get them online in or in their retail boxes.
They must have dropped it quite some time after introducing Numbers, the MacBook I got in 2009 came with a iWork demo disc, and it was pre-installed
Its not dandy for anyone that needs even moderate functions performed by Excel.
Such as? I can layout data in table form, perform calculations on it, format the data and create graphs of that data, reorder and delete/insert rows/columns. Are those not the base moderate functions? For a piece of software less than four years old, it seems pretty good to me - I'm sure more functionality will be added as the software matures - in the meantime I'd suggest that pages, numbers and keynote do most things that the average user requires.