Why on earth did it go down on a day when new products were launched? And of course, the assumption is that the MacBooks will be coming soon as well (next Tuesday?).
Why on earth did it go down on a day when new products were launched? And of course, the assumption is that the MacBooks will be coming soon as well (next Tuesday?).
The NASD went down $10.72 today, late in trading. Apple's high for the day was $81.68.
On the other hand, Apple promotes the MacBook Pro as a high end professional laptop, yet they only offer it with a consumer video card.
Apple's high end pricing is lower than those of other high end laptops as well.
Those who use Apple's laptops for pro work don't need a Quattro card. Neither photo editing or video editing benefit. Neither does most of what is done on these machines, such as audio.
Apple isn't competing in the laptop area with high end 3D pr CAD apps. Neither are they competing in the high end gamer market.
Those machines categories generally mean bigger and heavier machines as well. A place that Apple isn't competing in either.
While I'm not at all concerned that this would EVER happen, it still makes me want to vote for some sort of law requiring every person who feels this should be done to have their eyes put out with a hot poker for having such terrible taste.
What is wrong with you people? Beveled keys are about a million times sexier than square ones--which look like something from the 80's. Make the MBP keyboard a little firmer, sure. But don't mess with those beveled keys.
I actually suspect the choice to keep the same keyboard and old latching system are linked. Someone mentioned how the lid stays tightly closed with a magnetic latch on the Macbook but not so with a latch. One of the biggest problems laptop users have faced is those ugly marks that appear on the screen eventually from the keys pressing on the display. They are usually square marks that look like the outline of some keys. With flat keys, the pressure is evenly distributed so I don't think they will cause significant marks even with the screen pressed firmly shut.
Since I know the powerbooks still suffer from the effect, I was hoping the Macbook design would be a solution and that Apple would follow its use in the MBP line. I guess we'll have to wait and see how effective flat keys are against screen key marks. I like both designs but if flat keys prevent marks then I'd rather go with them and suffer a retro look than have to pay hundreds of pounds on a screen replacement.
OpenGL is the industry-standard API for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D applications. Mac OS X has supported OpenGL from the outset and in Leopard it supports the latest OpenGL 2.1 specification which adds pixel buffer objects, color managed texture images in the sRGB color space, and improvements in the shader programming API.
Leopard also provides a dramatic increase in OpenGL performance by offloading CPU-based processing onto another thread which can then run on a separate CPU core feeding the GPU. This can increase, or in some cases, even double the performance of OpenGL-based applications.
10.4.8 brought multi-threaded OpenGL, which will in some cases double OpenGL performance. I guess they will advertise it with Leopard but it's already here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dart_Apple
OS Foundations
The heart of Mac OS X, the Open Source Mach- and BSD-based UNIX layer known as Darwin, continues to see improvements in Leopard. The latest Mac hardware brings more processing power, more cores, and more memory than ever before. The kernel in Leopard has been updated to take advantage of this new hardware.
Leopard certainly won?t be UNIX in name only. Apple will submit Leopard and Leopard Server to The Open Group for certification against the UNIX ?03 product standard.
Official unix compliance is good but nothing we don't know. Kernel optimization is very welcome possibly using Intel's compilers over GCC's. I'm often afraid when Apple say they will take better advantage of the hardware because to me that means they will make things slower by doing more unnecessary things forcing you to buy new hardware.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dart_Apple
Security Enhancements
Leopard brings several new security enhancements to Mac OS X. The first of these is the adoption of the Mandatory Access Control (MAC) framework. This framework, original developed for TrustedBSD, provides a fine-grained security architecture for controlling the execution of processes at the kernel level. This enables sandboxing support in Leopard. By sandboxing an application, using a text profile, you can limit an application to being able to just access only the system features, such as disk or the network, that you permit.
Also new in Leopard is code signing. This means that Leopard will be able to identify applications by using digital signatures and then use that identification to base trust decisions on.
This sounds good too although code signing sounds too much like Windows for me. I don't want a raft of popups for every 3rd party app I run. Limiting application access sounds great. Limiting applications to not be able to use the network means helping prevent spyware apps, which we'd have had to use apps like Little Snitch for. I always thought that should be built into the system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dart_Apple
I can't wait for Leopard... but on the other hand I hope its not released before Spring or before it's ready like some people here (I'm saying it in general btw)
I agree I'd rather it was released fully tested but if that state comes sooner than expected, I would be happy. What I obect to is the comment made at the WWDC that they don't want to release it too early in case Microsoft copy them. Perhaps it's a joke but Vista has way too many problems that it doesn't matter any more so to play games like that is a bit childish when much needed features like Time machine and the security features as well as kernel optimizations could be helping out users sooner.
The initial realeases always have a few bugs anyway so the longer we have to wait on the first release, the longer we have to wait until we are comfortable with the reviews. This means people might not be using the full Leopard for another 6 months when people are already getting used to the full albeit beta/RC Vista.
This is pretty well known. It's been in all the newspaper busines sections, as well as the technical journals. The bike mags have been bemoaning this as well. I can't comment on your stuff. Go look at the bikes sold today by the bigger manufacturers. They have all doubled, or tripled, this year.
Yeah, the raw price has gone up around 50% (not tripled), but according to a CNet article on the new Carbon Fibre BMW's,
"A recent spike in the cost of raw materials, however, has bumped the price of carbon fiber to $8.50 a pound.
Still, that price is low enough to drive demand, or at least to not crimp it as companies learn to work with the material. "The cost of carbon fiber is no longer the problem," he said. Zoltek had capacity to make 7 million pounds a year in 2005 and will expand that to 30 million pounds a year by 2008."
Also, Sony and Acer already use Carbon Fibre in their laptops, althought the Acer one is pretty damn ugly...
Where did you hear that? Carbon fiber is manufactured and doesn't require any raw materials whose values could have gone up that much, so i have no idea why the price would triple.
About 2 months ago I had a carbon fiber flight case for my double bass custom built, which is about 7 feet tall, 2 1/2 feet deep and 4 feet wide (althought it's moulded to fit the bass), weights about 32-33 pounds and was around 1700 bucks US... Also, i got a Crumpton Bike frame for around 4000 2 years ago, and now they sell for a little over 3...
the price of carbon fiber is definitely going up right now. in some of the composite forums they attribute it to some of the defense contractors working on big projects and basically buying all of the CF out there. even though carbon fiber fabric is manufactured there is a limited production capacity which has lead to a rise in prices in carbon material in the past year or so. your bike frame might have benefitted from economies of scale or perhaps they are utilizing a method to decrease the amount of fabric used. but carbon fiber prices have definitely gone up and the supply is definitely scarce.
Is it really worth paying the extra £200 for a slightly better video card memory, and from 2.16 to 2.33? Why not take the base model and upgrade via crucial??
Is it really worth paying the extra £200 for a slightly better video card memory, and from 2.16 to 2.33? Why not take the base model and upgrade via crucial??
Because you can't upgrade either the GPU RAM or the CPU after you've bought the machine?
And, in a surprise move, Apple are actually charging the same or less for memory as Crucial.
What I am trting to ask is whether it is worth the £250 for these relatively minor things? This is the difference in price even with the baseline mbp upgraded to 2gb!
Yeah, the raw price has gone up around 50% (not tripled), but according to a CNet article on the new Carbon Fibre BMW's,
"A recent spike in the cost of raw materials, however, has bumped the price of carbon fiber to $8.50 a pound.
Still, that price is low enough to drive demand, or at least to not crimp it as companies learn to work with the material. "The cost of carbon fiber is no longer the problem," he said. Zoltek had capacity to make 7 million pounds a year in 2005 and will expand that to 30 million pounds a year by 2008."
Also, Sony and Acer already use Carbon Fibre in their laptops, althought the Acer one is pretty damn ugly...
I can tell you that it's very hard to get. The price per pound doesn't reflect the price of the material. It costs far more than that.
While this is industrial retail, I buy from them. Check out the prices. wide sheets are much more per inch.
But goddamn, they basically have almost the same specs when comparing the "new" 15.4 MBP and the "old" 17 MBP.
For probably the same price in about 2 weeks, you'll get a better card with the "old" 17-inch MBP, faster Superdrive, a bigger screen. All you trade off with the new base MBP is the 64-bit chip...
Comments
Does anyone know if upgrading the mbp's hd void's the warrenty?
I don't think so. If Apple has anything about how to open the machine for owners, then the warranty is not voided.
Why on earth did it go down on a day when new products were launched? And of course, the assumption is that the MacBooks will be coming soon as well (next Tuesday?).
"AAPL: 81.05 ( -0.41 )"
Why on earth did it go down on a day when new products were launched? And of course, the assumption is that the MacBooks will be coming soon as well (next Tuesday?).
The NASD went down $10.72 today, late in trading. Apple's high for the day was $81.68.
Maybe your comparison would be reasonably valid if you compared it against a Dell with a consumer video card rather than a workstation video card.
On the other hand, Apple promotes the MacBook Pro as a high end professional laptop, yet the only available video card is a consumer card.
And of course, the assumption is that the MacBooks will be coming soon as well (next Tuesday?).
Don't count on it. I think Merom supplies are still too constrained.
On the other hand, Apple promotes the MacBook Pro as a high end professional laptop, yet they only offer it with a consumer video card.
Apple's high end pricing is lower than those of other high end laptops as well.
Those who use Apple's laptops for pro work don't need a Quattro card. Neither photo editing or video editing benefit. Neither does most of what is done on these machines, such as audio.
Apple isn't competing in the laptop area with high end 3D pr CAD apps. Neither are they competing in the high end gamer market.
Those machines categories generally mean bigger and heavier machines as well. A place that Apple isn't competing in either.
While I'm not at all concerned that this would EVER happen, it still makes me want to vote for some sort of law requiring every person who feels this should be done to have their eyes put out with a hot poker for having such terrible taste.
What is wrong with you people? Beveled keys are about a million times sexier than square ones--which look like something from the 80's. Make the MBP keyboard a little firmer, sure. But don't mess with those beveled keys.
I actually suspect the choice to keep the same keyboard and old latching system are linked. Someone mentioned how the lid stays tightly closed with a magnetic latch on the Macbook but not so with a latch. One of the biggest problems laptop users have faced is those ugly marks that appear on the screen eventually from the keys pressing on the display. They are usually square marks that look like the outline of some keys. With flat keys, the pressure is evenly distributed so I don't think they will cause significant marks even with the screen pressed firmly shut.
Since I know the powerbooks still suffer from the effect, I was hoping the Macbook design would be a solution and that Apple would follow its use in the MBP line. I guess we'll have to wait and see how effective flat keys are against screen key marks. I like both designs but if flat keys prevent marks then I'd rather go with them and suffer a retro look than have to pay hundreds of pounds on a screen replacement.
Apple just posted this new Leopard developers page http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/
Some pretty neat stuff there:
Quote:
OpenGL Improvements
OpenGL is the industry-standard API for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D applications. Mac OS X has supported OpenGL from the outset and in Leopard it supports the latest OpenGL 2.1 specification which adds pixel buffer objects, color managed texture images in the sRGB color space, and improvements in the shader programming API.
Leopard also provides a dramatic increase in OpenGL performance by offloading CPU-based processing onto another thread which can then run on a separate CPU core feeding the GPU. This can increase, or in some cases, even double the performance of OpenGL-based applications.
10.4.8 brought multi-threaded OpenGL, which will in some cases double OpenGL performance. I guess they will advertise it with Leopard but it's already here.
OS Foundations
The heart of Mac OS X, the Open Source Mach- and BSD-based UNIX layer known as Darwin, continues to see improvements in Leopard. The latest Mac hardware brings more processing power, more cores, and more memory than ever before. The kernel in Leopard has been updated to take advantage of this new hardware.
Leopard certainly won?t be UNIX in name only. Apple will submit Leopard and Leopard Server to The Open Group for certification against the UNIX ?03 product standard.
Official unix compliance is good but nothing we don't know. Kernel optimization is very welcome possibly using Intel's compilers over GCC's. I'm often afraid when Apple say they will take better advantage of the hardware because to me that means they will make things slower by doing more unnecessary things forcing you to buy new hardware.
Security Enhancements
Leopard brings several new security enhancements to Mac OS X. The first of these is the adoption of the Mandatory Access Control (MAC) framework. This framework, original developed for TrustedBSD, provides a fine-grained security architecture for controlling the execution of processes at the kernel level. This enables sandboxing support in Leopard. By sandboxing an application, using a text profile, you can limit an application to being able to just access only the system features, such as disk or the network, that you permit.
Also new in Leopard is code signing. This means that Leopard will be able to identify applications by using digital signatures and then use that identification to base trust decisions on.
This sounds good too although code signing sounds too much like Windows for me. I don't want a raft of popups for every 3rd party app I run. Limiting application access sounds great. Limiting applications to not be able to use the network means helping prevent spyware apps, which we'd have had to use apps like Little Snitch for. I always thought that should be built into the system.
I can't wait for Leopard... but on the other hand I hope its not released before Spring or before it's ready like some people here (I'm saying it in general btw)
I agree I'd rather it was released fully tested but if that state comes sooner than expected, I would be happy. What I obect to is the comment made at the WWDC that they don't want to release it too early in case Microsoft copy them. Perhaps it's a joke but Vista has way too many problems that it doesn't matter any more so to play games like that is a bit childish when much needed features like Time machine and the security features as well as kernel optimizations could be helping out users sooner.
The initial realeases always have a few bugs anyway so the longer we have to wait on the first release, the longer we have to wait until we are comfortable with the reviews. This means people might not be using the full Leopard for another 6 months when people are already getting used to the full albeit beta/RC Vista.
This is pretty well known. It's been in all the newspaper busines sections, as well as the technical journals. The bike mags have been bemoaning this as well. I can't comment on your stuff. Go look at the bikes sold today by the bigger manufacturers. They have all doubled, or tripled, this year.
Yeah, the raw price has gone up around 50% (not tripled), but according to a CNet article on the new Carbon Fibre BMW's,
"A recent spike in the cost of raw materials, however, has bumped the price of carbon fiber to $8.50 a pound.
Still, that price is low enough to drive demand, or at least to not crimp it as companies learn to work with the material. "The cost of carbon fiber is no longer the problem," he said. Zoltek had capacity to make 7 million pounds a year in 2005 and will expand that to 30 million pounds a year by 2008."
Also, Sony and Acer already use Carbon Fibre in their laptops, althought the Acer one is pretty damn ugly...
Where did you hear that? Carbon fiber is manufactured and doesn't require any raw materials whose values could have gone up that much, so i have no idea why the price would triple.
About 2 months ago I had a carbon fiber flight case for my double bass custom built, which is about 7 feet tall, 2 1/2 feet deep and 4 feet wide (althought it's moulded to fit the bass), weights about 32-33 pounds and was around 1700 bucks US... Also, i got a Crumpton Bike frame for around 4000 2 years ago, and now they sell for a little over 3...
the price of carbon fiber is definitely going up right now. in some of the composite forums they attribute it to some of the defense contractors working on big projects and basically buying all of the CF out there. even though carbon fiber fabric is manufactured there is a limited production capacity which has lead to a rise in prices in carbon material in the past year or so. your bike frame might have benefitted from economies of scale or perhaps they are utilizing a method to decrease the amount of fabric used. but carbon fiber prices have definitely gone up and the supply is definitely scarce.
Is it really worth paying the extra £200 for a slightly better video card memory, and from 2.16 to 2.33? Why not take the base model and upgrade via crucial??
And, in a surprise move, Apple are actually charging the same or less for memory as Crucial.
Yeah, the raw price has gone up around 50% (not tripled), but according to a CNet article on the new Carbon Fibre BMW's,
"A recent spike in the cost of raw materials, however, has bumped the price of carbon fiber to $8.50 a pound.
Still, that price is low enough to drive demand, or at least to not crimp it as companies learn to work with the material. "The cost of carbon fiber is no longer the problem," he said. Zoltek had capacity to make 7 million pounds a year in 2005 and will expand that to 30 million pounds a year by 2008."
Also, Sony and Acer already use Carbon Fibre in their laptops, althought the Acer one is pretty damn ugly...
I can tell you that it's very hard to get. The price per pound doesn't reflect the price of the material. It costs far more than that.
While this is industrial retail, I buy from them. Check out the prices. wide sheets are much more per inch.
http://www.mcmaster.com/
type in :
87365K14
Right below the top of the page.
a case would require at least three square feet before being trimmed.
Would anyone in their right mind buy the new "low-end" MBP? Other than the 64-bit capability, wouldn't it smarter to just buy a MBP 17-inch CD?
Edit: I'm also taking into consideration that no one will upgrade the base model...
Which reminds me, I have a question...
Would anyone in their right mind buy the new "low-end" MBP? Other than the 64-bit capability, wouldn't it smarter to just buy a MBP 17-inch CD?
Not if you don't need the screen space. I'm assuming that you are comparing the 15 to the 17.
But goddamn, they basically have almost the same specs when comparing the "new" 15.4 MBP and the "old" 17 MBP.
For probably the same price in about 2 weeks, you'll get a better card with the "old" 17-inch MBP, faster Superdrive, a bigger screen. All you trade off with the new base MBP is the 64-bit chip...
Didn't realise you weren't counting those things as a case re-design. I'm not sure anyone was really hoping for anything more than this.
This should interest you.
http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.ph...of_mac_laptop/
(That's what I did.)