Which has me wondering now, how come the device has fewer drives but the price hasn't gone down?
The current hard drive offerings cost the same as or less than last year's did at the time. Same with CPU and RAM. So how come no price drop to reflect the removed component?
More pixie dust. Laminated screen, friction stir welds, plus the options, even if you don't order them, like the hybrid drive and SSD. R and D costs money you know. Higher wages in China, low screen yields, decreased demand for desktops, decline of dollar, election year uncertainty, inflation, supplier issues with Samsung, etc. The price is what it is.
More pixie dust. Laminated screen, friction stir welds, plus the options, even if you don't order them, like the hybrid drive and SSD. R and D costs money you know. Higher wages in China, low screen yields, decreased demand for desktops, decline of dollar, election year uncertainty, inflation, supplier issues with Samsung, etc. The price is what it is.
Apple are able to push the envelope because generally speaking Apple users are more pragmatic and are used to Apple getting it right even if they initially complained.
Sure, why put a spinning disc in a computer when we can charge you more for an external one?
If you really think Apple did away with internal drives so they profit from their external drives, then I suggest you do yourself a favor and bash your head against a wall a few times.
Apple has great points, flash memory is the future, and disk drives are losing customers. Apple still needs a external DVD drive sold, however they need to up it to blue ray, change it to thunderbolt and get max speed, giving customers a advantage to a Mac even if they are major disk players(prefuralibly a rewritable blue ray). Giving customers like me to switch to Mac. I still might without, just price is a lot higher than a average windows. (Family 2 iPhones 4. One windows laptop. One windows desktop. One 5-6 year old Nokia phone. One wii.)
…giving customers a advantage to a Mac even if they are major disk players(prefuralibly a rewritable blue ray).
The OS still does not and will never support the playback of commercial Blu-ray video discs. Just buy a Blu-ray drive, plug it in, and rip your discs now. Apple doesn't have to make you a drive for that. Heck, I've ripped HD DVDs on my Mac Pro. At least those are recognized as such by the OS!
I still might without, just price is a lot higher than a average windows.
I never understood when Almost Live was lobbying to make Louie, Louie the Washington state song, they didn't pick Rhythm of the Rain instead. Or maybe Goodtime Charlie's Got the Blues—much more locally appropriate, if you ask me.
Apple has great points, flash memory is the future, and disk drives are losing customers. Apple still needs a external DVD drive sold, however they need to up it to blue ray, change it to thunderbolt and get max speed, giving customers a advantage to a Mac even if they are major disk players(prefuralibly a rewritable blue ray). Giving customers like me to switch to Mac. I still might without, just price is a lot higher than a average windows. (Family 2 iPhones 4. One windows laptop. One windows desktop. One 5-6 year old Nokia phone. One wii.)
Apple is one of the few companies that looks at the computer as a whole solution, meaning that they don't expect the customer to "figure it out for themselves." I'll give you a real life example. When you insert a DVD into a PC running a clean copy of Windows XP, Windows Media Player would launch and tell you that Windows doesn't ship with a codec for playing back DVD video, and link you to some web page where you can purchase and download a compatible codec online. Of course, some PC OEMs would include a free copy of, say, CyberDVD or PowerDVD which included the codec, but it wasn't from Microsoft, so the customer was responsible for registering and updating yet another piece of software that wasn't part of the OS. And if you wanted to burn DVDs from Windows XP, that was another piece of software you had to buy. Today, of course, Windows 7 can play video DVDs and burn DVDs out of the box, but it wasn't that way for many years.
Apple, in contrast, always included DVD video playback and DVD burning (and even DVD video authoring) software with every Mac that was equipped with a DVD drive. It was part of Mac OS X, so it was updated by Apple and you didn't have to register or download a separate application, and then worry about it breaking if you ever updated the OS someday.
In a way, this is how Apple has always operated: when you buy an Apple product, they've completely thought through how the customer is going to use it. They thought through, for example, what will happen if you insert a DVD video disc into your new iMac. It isn't like Windows XP where Microsoft didn't license the codecs needed to play DVD video and expected the customer to fix the problem, or the OEM to include the needed software. I was floored the first time I saw that on Windows XP, and it started me on the road to becoming an Apple convert.
So Apple is not going to give you the option of a Blu-Ray burner without including full OS support, and if they do that, they are putting their implicit support behind Blu-Ray, and in effect, telling customers, "this is how you will watch HD videos on your computer." Except for the fact that Apple doesn't see that as the future of HD video. And neither does Microsoft (there's not going to be a Blu-Ray Xbox, HD content will stream from Xbox Live). Or Netflix, or Hulu. Everyone is saying, streaming is the future. Even Sony gets it: they've launched HD video streaming over PSN, and dropped the optical drive altogether from the PS Vita. Surface Pro lacks an optical drive, so much for the myth of "you need an optical drive to be Pro."
At first, I thought this was risky, since everyone assumed that Blu-Ray was the anointed HD successor to the DVD format (HD-DVD gave its life for that to happen). But now with AppleTV and all movie titles available from iTunes Store, and the ability to stream HD from any modern Apple-logo device or computer, I can see where Apple was going when they withheld Blu-Ray support. That vision is finally here.
You can use Blu-Ray burners with Macs, just as you can with PCs, but it up to you to acquire the needed software, depending on what you plan to use it for. But don't wait for Apple to sell you one.
It's not often that Apple chucks out what we all consider to be an important and integral part of the system and more often than not, it has been right in doing so. It would be years before some of these computers follow Apple but right this moment, Apple's gonna take a lot of heat for the decision. Amazing guts.
I respect Apple for not just talking the talk, like all these other companies do, but walking the walk, and actually executing on their convictions. In retrospect it may always seem 'obvious' but in fact its almost always an extremely gutsy move with some inherent risks. Until recently I've been hearing that Apple would 'never' drop the optical drive on the iMac, that it would be 'insane' because its a desktop machine, and consumers simply wouldnt be ready for that. But Apple does things all the way, and if they believe in something, and a certain philosophy, they'll propagate it throughout their entire product line- see flash storage, elimination of optical drives, unibody construction, soldered batteries/RAM, laminated panels, etc. And its absolutely the right thing to do, even if theres the inevitable hand wringing, bitching, and end of the world whining when it actually happens. A few months later, people look back and realize it was a no brainer. The only consistent part is that Apple is always the only one with the guts to first popularize these obvious-after-the-fact decisions and to set the industry on a certain course. The new iMac proves they will have that strong no compromise conviction and ability to execute. SJ would be proud.
I'm not crazy about the idea of removing the Superdrive from the iMac. In laptops it made a lot of sense—and really, how often do you actually need to burn discs when you're out and about? And if you do, is a tiny external drive like Apple's (or some of the cheaper ones) that much of a burden to take along? You're presumably taking a stack of discs....
In a desktop I don't see the necessity to leave it out, but on the other hand, it's probably the most unreliable part of the machine, and an external can be much more easily replaced. I'll go through spells of burning dozens of discs and then go weeks or months without using the drive, so taking it off and putting it in the drawer is actually a pretty good solution—especially since the iMac's drive is so awkwardly placed.
What bothers me about the decision is the mindset it displays—that they believe the techno-hipsters who think "DVDs are dead". The gadget freaks who post on tech blogs may think so, but there's a real world out there that doesn't agree. This download-only dreamworld may be practical on the Cupertino campus and a few other places, but it will be not years, but decades—and by using the plural I don't mean just two—before a large majority of people in this country have the kind of internet service to make it universal. If it ever happens—I've got my doubts.
Yes, DVD sales are down. Many people used to just buy a movie rather than wait around on one foot for it to show up on pay-per-view or On-Demand—and a lot more people would prefer to do without high-tier cable and just buy the rare thing they really wanted to see. That market is gone.
CD sales are down. A whole generation of people have had their ears corrupted to the point where they're willing to pay money (!) for 128 or 256 kbps noise—but that's not everybody. There are a few of us who can still hear.
Blu-Ray hasn't achieved the volume DVDs did, and it never will. But there are millions of us who've waited all our lives to be able to watch movies in our homes at better quality than any theater. We may be a small percentage, but there are a large number of us just the same. These markets may shrink, but they're not going away completely for a long time.
When thumb drives are cheap enough that you can get say 4 GB of capacity for 25¢ or 30¢, then we can revisit the matter but until then, optical discs rule outside the techno-echo-chamber.
That being said, Apple did not suddenly abandon disc drives—they sell disc drives. You can still do anything you could before, and if your drive craps out you don't have to take your computer apart to replace it. To be honest, what's going to sell me a new iMac is the screen—laminating the LCD to the glass is what makes the huge difference. Never mind "Retina" resolution—I challenge anybody to resolve the pixels on an iMac at the distance you ordinarily sit at—and the display is what you interact with. A tiny increment in performance is not going to make any difference to me—if you're a video editor or something, that's different.
As for abandoning HDDs—that's another story. Flash memory has its applications, obviously in mobile devices, but I'm leery of the idea of a device with no moving parts that nevertheless promises to "wear out" after a certain number of uses. WTF? HDDs never "wear out". They can fail—but be honest, that's pretty damn rare these days. Maybe I'm a Luddite, but I don't know if I'm ready to trust flash for the real storage in my actual computer. And oh, yeah—the flash memory you want to trust over optical discs to distribute content? In addition to costing 20-40 times as much as DVD-Rs per GB—the flash in thumb drives is of enormously lower quality than that used in SSDs. So there's that....
I respect Apple for not just talking the talk, like all these other companies do, but walking the walk, and actually executing on their convictions. In retrospect it may always seem 'obvious' but in fact its almost always an extremely gutsy move with some inherent risks. Until recently I've been hearing that Apple would 'never' drop the optical drive on the iMac, that it would be 'insane' because its a desktop machine, and consumers simply wouldnt be ready for that. But Apple does things all the way, and if they believe in something, and a certain philosophy, they'll propagate it throughout their entire product line- see flash storage, elimination of optical drives, unibody construction, soldered batteries/RAM, laminated panels, etc. And its absolutely the right thing to do, even if theres the inevitable hand wringing, bitching, and end of the world whining when it actually happens. A few months later, people look back and realize it was a no brainer. The only consistent part is that Apple is always the only one with the guts to first popularize these obvious-after-the-fact decisions and to set the industry on a certain course. The new iMac proves they will have that strong no compromise conviction and ability to execute. SJ would be proud.
I bolded the part I want to discuss. After my last post you may think I'm a total stick-in-the-mud, but I absolutely agree with this part. The unibody construction was to eliminate all the broken connections due to case flex in laptops. Connections are the root of all evil. Soldered connections are bad enough, but the kind that dirt and corrosion can get into, like replaceable memory, need to be eliminated tout suite. Battery doors and swappable batteries—just another failure waiting to happen. Apple won't be happy until they can make a computer one solid lump—and I agree with them. Of course, they're the only ones whose laptops are expected to last longer than a couple of years anyway, so they have to meet a different standard.
They've been on this rigidity campaign for a while now. Remember when the unibody case was ready, but the lithium-polymer battery for it wasn't, so they had to sell MacBooks for a whole year with the unibody but the old cans-in-a-box battery? They had to sacrifice something—they picked the firewire port and listened to a year of bitching rather than delay the debut of the new rigid case. They're serious about this—if people want a kit computer, well, they're going to have to look elsewhere....
It can be. I don't know if there still are, but there used to be decent quality Windows boxes out there. My total cost of ownership was quite a bit lower on my last hot-rod Sony than on any of the three MacBook Pros I've owned since, and I would still describe the ownership experience, aside from Windows just not being quite as elegant to use, as "comparable."
The new iMac proves they will have that strong no compromise conviction and ability to execute. SJ would be proud.
"No compromise?!" How about making the chassis so thin that there's no room for a high capacity drive? Or cramming stuff in so tight that it can no longer dissipate heat effectively enough to allow for even a high speed version of the mini drive? Those not only meet the accepted definition of "compromise," they also do a lot more than just hint at "Form over function."
Yes and no. Apple does some things other companies don't, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it's not because other companies are necessarily 'afraid' to do the same. To the contrary, this is evidence that Apple still clearly doesn't understand the enterprise. Eliminating 'legacy' parts in computers may be fine for consumers, but businesses still need to purchase systems that are compatible with decades-old technology.
As an IT Admin, it is now becoming almost impossible to integrate Macs into my organization. Apple apparently doesn't understand that there are thousands, if not millions of systems out there that are NOT connected to the internet. It is not possible for us to buy and deploy new operating systems using the "Mac App Store". That distribution method has pretty much put the last nail in the coffin for our use of Macs in our enterprise. We have to deploy updates using good "old fashioned" optical media, or even USB sticks.
Unfortunately Apple has pretty much cut off any system not connected to the internet. For example, we recently bought a Mac mini server. The machine is not/will not be connected to the internet. The machine does not come with any restore media (adopting a stupid, foolish PC industry trick). I would not normally mind since I can provide my own USB stick ($10 extra), however, the OS and Software images are not included on the hard drive either. To make a long story short, I needed to reconfigure and re-image the drive(s), but since there is no way to create a bootable installer image even with my own media, I had to go to the Mac App Store on a different machine and purchase another copy of the OS ($20 extra) and make an image from that. (Before anyone mentions the "restore partition" you should be aware that it does not contain the full OS or Software images - it's only a subset - totally insufficient to re-image a new or reconfigured drive).
To add insult to injury, I also need to update the "Server" App that makes the machine a "Server". Since the machine will not be connected to the internet, and the only way to update the Server App is through the Mac App Store, I copied the Server App to a USB stick that I took to a Mac that is connected to the internet, but the App Store refuses to update it! So now the only way to update the Server App is to buy another copy from the Mac App Store ($20 more)!! That's pretty piss-poor Apple. It's not just the extra money, it the annoyance, inconvenience, and extra time required, not to mention the stress of trying to figure out why the hell "it just works" isn't working at all. Needless to say, this will be the last Mac "Server" our organization will ever be buying. Apple's "foresight" has just cost them future business.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by v5v
Which has me wondering now, how come the device has fewer drives but the price hasn't gone down?
The current hard drive offerings cost the same as or less than last year's did at the time. Same with CPU and RAM. So how come no price drop to reflect the removed component?
More pixie dust. Laminated screen, friction stir welds, plus the options, even if you don't order them, like the hybrid drive and SSD. R and D costs money you know. Higher wages in China, low screen yields, decreased demand for desktops, decline of dollar, election year uncertainty, inflation, supplier issues with Samsung, etc. The price is what it is.
And yet somehow it always adds up to $1299.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dasanman69
And yet somehow it always adds up to $1299.
No...the bottom-of-the-line iMac has previously been $1199 for many years now.
Apple are able to push the envelope because generally speaking Apple users are more pragmatic and are used to Apple getting it right even if they initially complained.
Originally Posted by rain
Don't listen to the trolls.
This is good advice: never listen to rain for any reason.
Originally Posted by Darthgorilla
Still feel the iPad mini is a fraction over priced.
Yeah, 1/10th of a cent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tylersdad
Sure, why put a spinning disc in a computer when we can charge you more for an external one?
If you really think Apple did away with internal drives so they profit from their external drives, then I suggest you do yourself a favor and bash your head against a wall a few times.
Originally Posted by Curtis Hannah
…they need to up it to blue ray…
For what reason?
…change it to thunderbolt and get max speed…
Can Blu-ray even saturate a USB 3 port?
…giving customers a advantage to a Mac even if they are major disk players(prefuralibly a rewritable blue ray).
The OS still does not and will never support the playback of commercial Blu-ray video discs. Just buy a Blu-ray drive, plug it in, and rip your discs now. Apple doesn't have to make you a drive for that. Heck, I've ripped HD DVDs on my Mac Pro. At least those are recognized as such by the OS!
I still might without, just price is a lot higher than a average windows.
Nope. Not over its lifetime, it's not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
This is good advice: never listen to rain for any reason.
"Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain
Telling me just what a fool I've been...."
God, I'm old!
Originally Posted by Mac-sochist
"Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain
Telling me just what a fool I've been...."
Far too long since I've heard that. Kudos.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Far too long since I've heard that. Kudos.
I never understood when Almost Live was lobbying to make Louie, Louie the Washington state song, they didn't pick Rhythm of the Rain instead. Or maybe Goodtime Charlie's Got the Blues—much more locally appropriate, if you ask me.
Apple is one of the few companies that looks at the computer as a whole solution, meaning that they don't expect the customer to "figure it out for themselves." I'll give you a real life example. When you insert a DVD into a PC running a clean copy of Windows XP, Windows Media Player would launch and tell you that Windows doesn't ship with a codec for playing back DVD video, and link you to some web page where you can purchase and download a compatible codec online. Of course, some PC OEMs would include a free copy of, say, CyberDVD or PowerDVD which included the codec, but it wasn't from Microsoft, so the customer was responsible for registering and updating yet another piece of software that wasn't part of the OS. And if you wanted to burn DVDs from Windows XP, that was another piece of software you had to buy. Today, of course, Windows 7 can play video DVDs and burn DVDs out of the box, but it wasn't that way for many years.
Apple, in contrast, always included DVD video playback and DVD burning (and even DVD video authoring) software with every Mac that was equipped with a DVD drive. It was part of Mac OS X, so it was updated by Apple and you didn't have to register or download a separate application, and then worry about it breaking if you ever updated the OS someday.
In a way, this is how Apple has always operated: when you buy an Apple product, they've completely thought through how the customer is going to use it. They thought through, for example, what will happen if you insert a DVD video disc into your new iMac. It isn't like Windows XP where Microsoft didn't license the codecs needed to play DVD video and expected the customer to fix the problem, or the OEM to include the needed software. I was floored the first time I saw that on Windows XP, and it started me on the road to becoming an Apple convert.
So Apple is not going to give you the option of a Blu-Ray burner without including full OS support, and if they do that, they are putting their implicit support behind Blu-Ray, and in effect, telling customers, "this is how you will watch HD videos on your computer." Except for the fact that Apple doesn't see that as the future of HD video. And neither does Microsoft (there's not going to be a Blu-Ray Xbox, HD content will stream from Xbox Live). Or Netflix, or Hulu. Everyone is saying, streaming is the future. Even Sony gets it: they've launched HD video streaming over PSN, and dropped the optical drive altogether from the PS Vita. Surface Pro lacks an optical drive, so much for the myth of "you need an optical drive to be Pro."
At first, I thought this was risky, since everyone assumed that Blu-Ray was the anointed HD successor to the DVD format (HD-DVD gave its life for that to happen). But now with AppleTV and all movie titles available from iTunes Store, and the ability to stream HD from any modern Apple-logo device or computer, I can see where Apple was going when they withheld Blu-Ray support. That vision is finally here.
You can use Blu-Ray burners with Macs, just as you can with PCs, but it up to you to acquire the needed software, depending on what you plan to use it for. But don't wait for Apple to sell you one.
It's not often that Apple chucks out what we all consider to be an important and integral part of the system and more often than not, it has been right in doing so. It would be years before some of these computers follow Apple but right this moment, Apple's gonna take a lot of heat for the decision. Amazing guts.
I respect Apple for not just talking the talk, like all these other companies do, but walking the walk, and actually executing on their convictions. In retrospect it may always seem 'obvious' but in fact its almost always an extremely gutsy move with some inherent risks. Until recently I've been hearing that Apple would 'never' drop the optical drive on the iMac, that it would be 'insane' because its a desktop machine, and consumers simply wouldnt be ready for that. But Apple does things all the way, and if they believe in something, and a certain philosophy, they'll propagate it throughout their entire product line- see flash storage, elimination of optical drives, unibody construction, soldered batteries/RAM, laminated panels, etc. And its absolutely the right thing to do, even if theres the inevitable hand wringing, bitching, and end of the world whining when it actually happens. A few months later, people look back and realize it was a no brainer. The only consistent part is that Apple is always the only one with the guts to first popularize these obvious-after-the-fact decisions and to set the industry on a certain course. The new iMac proves they will have that strong no compromise conviction and ability to execute. SJ would be proud.
I'm not crazy about the idea of removing the Superdrive from the iMac. In laptops it made a lot of sense—and really, how often do you actually need to burn discs when you're out and about? And if you do, is a tiny external drive like Apple's (or some of the cheaper ones) that much of a burden to take along? You're presumably taking a stack of discs....
In a desktop I don't see the necessity to leave it out, but on the other hand, it's probably the most unreliable part of the machine, and an external can be much more easily replaced. I'll go through spells of burning dozens of discs and then go weeks or months without using the drive, so taking it off and putting it in the drawer is actually a pretty good solution—especially since the iMac's drive is so awkwardly placed.
What bothers me about the decision is the mindset it displays—that they believe the techno-hipsters who think "DVDs are dead". The gadget freaks who post on tech blogs may think so, but there's a real world out there that doesn't agree. This download-only dreamworld may be practical on the Cupertino campus and a few other places, but it will be not years, but decades—and by using the plural I don't mean just two—before a large majority of people in this country have the kind of internet service to make it universal. If it ever happens—I've got my doubts.
Yes, DVD sales are down. Many people used to just buy a movie rather than wait around on one foot for it to show up on pay-per-view or On-Demand—and a lot more people would prefer to do without high-tier cable and just buy the rare thing they really wanted to see. That market is gone.
CD sales are down. A whole generation of people have had their ears corrupted to the point where they're willing to pay money (!) for 128 or 256 kbps noise—but that's not everybody. There are a few of us who can still hear.
Blu-Ray hasn't achieved the volume DVDs did, and it never will. But there are millions of us who've waited all our lives to be able to watch movies in our homes at better quality than any theater. We may be a small percentage, but there are a large number of us just the same. These markets may shrink, but they're not going away completely for a long time.
When thumb drives are cheap enough that you can get say 4 GB of capacity for 25¢ or 30¢, then we can revisit the matter but until then, optical discs rule outside the techno-echo-chamber.
That being said, Apple did not suddenly abandon disc drives—they sell disc drives. You can still do anything you could before, and if your drive craps out you don't have to take your computer apart to replace it. To be honest, what's going to sell me a new iMac is the screen—laminating the LCD to the glass is what makes the huge difference. Never mind "Retina" resolution—I challenge anybody to resolve the pixels on an iMac at the distance you ordinarily sit at—and the display is what you interact with. A tiny increment in performance is not going to make any difference to me—if you're a video editor or something, that's different.
As for abandoning HDDs—that's another story. Flash memory has its applications, obviously in mobile devices, but I'm leery of the idea of a device with no moving parts that nevertheless promises to "wear out" after a certain number of uses. WTF? HDDs never "wear out". They can fail—but be honest, that's pretty damn rare these days. Maybe I'm a Luddite, but I don't know if I'm ready to trust flash for the real storage in my actual computer. And oh, yeah—the flash memory you want to trust over optical discs to distribute content? In addition to costing 20-40 times as much as DVD-Rs per GB—the flash in thumb drives is of enormously lower quality than that used in SSDs. So there's that....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slurpy
I respect Apple for not just talking the talk, like all these other companies do, but walking the walk, and actually executing on their convictions. In retrospect it may always seem 'obvious' but in fact its almost always an extremely gutsy move with some inherent risks. Until recently I've been hearing that Apple would 'never' drop the optical drive on the iMac, that it would be 'insane' because its a desktop machine, and consumers simply wouldnt be ready for that. But Apple does things all the way, and if they believe in something, and a certain philosophy, they'll propagate it throughout their entire product line- see flash storage, elimination of optical drives, unibody construction, soldered batteries/RAM, laminated panels, etc. And its absolutely the right thing to do, even if theres the inevitable hand wringing, bitching, and end of the world whining when it actually happens. A few months later, people look back and realize it was a no brainer. The only consistent part is that Apple is always the only one with the guts to first popularize these obvious-after-the-fact decisions and to set the industry on a certain course. The new iMac proves they will have that strong no compromise conviction and ability to execute. SJ would be proud.
I bolded the part I want to discuss. After my last post you may think I'm a total stick-in-the-mud, but I absolutely agree with this part. The unibody construction was to eliminate all the broken connections due to case flex in laptops. Connections are the root of all evil. Soldered connections are bad enough, but the kind that dirt and corrosion can get into, like replaceable memory, need to be eliminated tout suite. Battery doors and swappable batteries—just another failure waiting to happen. Apple won't be happy until they can make a computer one solid lump—and I agree with them. Of course, they're the only ones whose laptops are expected to last longer than a couple of years anyway, so they have to meet a different standard.
They've been on this rigidity campaign for a while now. Remember when the unibody case was ready, but the lithium-polymer battery for it wasn't, so they had to sell MacBooks for a whole year with the unibody but the old cans-in-a-box battery? They had to sacrifice something—they picked the firewire port and listened to a year of bitching rather than delay the debut of the new rigid case. They're serious about this—if people want a kit computer, well, they're going to have to look elsewhere....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Nope. Not over its lifetime, it's not.
It can be. I don't know if there still are, but there used to be decent quality Windows boxes out there. My total cost of ownership was quite a bit lower on my last hot-rod Sony than on any of the three MacBook Pros I've owned since, and I would still describe the ownership experience, aside from Windows just not being quite as elegant to use, as "comparable."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slurpy
The new iMac proves they will have that strong no compromise conviction and ability to execute. SJ would be proud.
"No compromise?!" How about making the chassis so thin that there's no room for a high capacity drive? Or cramming stuff in so tight that it can no longer dissipate heat effectively enough to allow for even a high speed version of the mini drive? Those not only meet the accepted definition of "compromise," they also do a lot more than just hint at "Form over function."
Yes and no. Apple does some things other companies don't, and there is nothing wrong with that, but it's not because other companies are necessarily 'afraid' to do the same. To the contrary, this is evidence that Apple still clearly doesn't understand the enterprise. Eliminating 'legacy' parts in computers may be fine for consumers, but businesses still need to purchase systems that are compatible with decades-old technology.
As an IT Admin, it is now becoming almost impossible to integrate Macs into my organization. Apple apparently doesn't understand that there are thousands, if not millions of systems out there that are NOT connected to the internet. It is not possible for us to buy and deploy new operating systems using the "Mac App Store". That distribution method has pretty much put the last nail in the coffin for our use of Macs in our enterprise. We have to deploy updates using good "old fashioned" optical media, or even USB sticks.
Unfortunately Apple has pretty much cut off any system not connected to the internet. For example, we recently bought a Mac mini server. The machine is not/will not be connected to the internet. The machine does not come with any restore media (adopting a stupid, foolish PC industry trick). I would not normally mind since I can provide my own USB stick ($10 extra), however, the OS and Software images are not included on the hard drive either. To make a long story short, I needed to reconfigure and re-image the drive(s), but since there is no way to create a bootable installer image even with my own media, I had to go to the Mac App Store on a different machine and purchase another copy of the OS ($20 extra) and make an image from that. (Before anyone mentions the "restore partition" you should be aware that it does not contain the full OS or Software images - it's only a subset - totally insufficient to re-image a new or reconfigured drive).
To add insult to injury, I also need to update the "Server" App that makes the machine a "Server". Since the machine will not be connected to the internet, and the only way to update the Server App is through the Mac App Store, I copied the Server App to a USB stick that I took to a Mac that is connected to the internet, but the App Store refuses to update it! So now the only way to update the Server App is to buy another copy from the Mac App Store ($20 more)!! That's pretty piss-poor Apple. It's not just the extra money, it the annoyance, inconvenience, and extra time required, not to mention the stress of trying to figure out why the hell "it just works" isn't working at all. Needless to say, this will be the last Mac "Server" our organization will ever be buying. Apple's "foresight" has just cost them future business.