lemon bon bon.

I still have fond memories of System 7.  Beautiful.

Lemon Bon Bon.

Let's make this simple.  Because Apple, without Steve Jobs, just can't keep things simple (but they can do the stupid...)



Insanely 'sane.'  STEVE GIVES YOU THE CORE 7 MARKETS OF THEIR CORE BASE CUSTOMERS!!!  (IE. Who the G3 Tower is built for.  Now they DON'T know what those markets are?)  And using industry standard parts and why!



The look of love...and here's Phil telling you what their 'core base' customers want.  Telling you it's 'real easy' to upgrade with the 'door.' :PPP  He even used the word 'simple.' 

'Building the fastest machines in the industry is what drives us.'

So, yeah, it's IO, it's CPU, it's GPU, it's storage, it's accessibility, it's expandability, it's sexy...it's...music, it's art, it's 3D, it's games, it's programming it's 'fill in blank' as it was twenty years ago with all the additional markets of today (Today?  It's VR as well, it's development, it's science, it's simulation.  It boils down to 3-4 SSDs in a tower, 2-3 GPUs in there, 1 or two CPUs, 128 gigs of RAM in a 'box' with a door.  Basically.  So, go take the cuboid and round its edges off.  Four models from £1500-£2999 before customisation.)

...what Apple told you twenty years ago!!!  IT'S WHAT APPLE GAVE YOU TWO DECADES AGO!!!

Lemon Bon Bon.

Rougn said:

You got to love how biased this article is. It first tries to discredit the youtube channel and under estimates its accomplishments and credibility.

Ya...I guess 5.6 million subscribers IS more then a million subscribers however clearly it is worded to make it sound like it was barely a million.

Two: This is linus tech tips and anyone in the technology field is aware of them. They are very respected for their honesty and their skills. Yes there are running jokes but through and through it is clear the COMPANY ((Not channel they are a full fledge company with a legal department so again trying to discredit their worth)) has the skills and resources to handle what they where doing. How do we know this? Well lets see what they have been doing from being flown out to do reviews on all the latest techs to helping build the largest super computer in canada. Let me resay that: He was trusted in helping assemble the largest super computer in Canada. That is the level his skill is on. You might say oh well it was just plugging in ram and blah blah blah however if he screwed something up it would take a long while to discover WHERE the issue was which would result in thousands of dollars in man hours and lost revenue. That means it is clear that company trusts him to be good and not damage anything.

Three: It was damaged not by them trying to do "lolz i do stuff" like this suggests. No. It was damaged while they where taking it apart for a review on the product. Showing the components and how it looks. You know much like the Ifixit picture that is posted in this article. 

Four: It is funny the article is adding in more damage to the computer then is revealed. Even going as far as to claim the motherboard COULD be damage in the beginning and by the end of the article talking as if it is a fact the motherboard is broken and listing crazy pricing for repairs. 5600 dollars on a 4999 computer. I dont by that for a minute and I will explain why right now: The only reason repairs start costing more then a new product is when the parts are so hard to come by AND there is an extreme shortage of people who can do the repair. This is one of the latest products which means parts are being mass producted actively and a responsible company would be reserving a portion of components for this exact reason. 

Next: The claim that by the end of it they are losing that much on repairs...No. I dont buy it lets say they DID have to repair it and ALL that was true. Do you know what apple would do? Give a new computer and do a free software/memory transfer. Seriously it costs them at most 4.2k to make the product so by giving them a new computer would save them 1.4k a repair. And no computer company would make it cheaper to give out a brand new computer product then to do basic repairs and frankly that is what this is. A basic repair. Replace the screen. IF by some chance the motherboard was completely broken ((I find unlikely)) that is still easy and frankly not that bad. At most ((and again at most)) 600 dollars for the motherboard ((asus rampage one of the most expensive motherboards at the moment and remember thats buying 3rd party apple isnt going to charge themselves customer price)). Lets say 200 for the screen that is only 800 dollars for the whole repair for parts. Why? Because most of apples cost comes from the mark up of 1: Paying for their Research and Development Department and 2: Paying for the name brand. 3: One of the most expensive components ((the CPU)) couldnt have been damaged as it had its cooler on. 

Pair this up with the fact they asked ok. If you cant do the repair can we get the parts so WE can do the repair? This means the argument that even the fast technician would cost them money is voided. They are now being asked "Hey I screwed up my computer can i please buy stuff from you so I can repair it?". And the answer is no. No you may not. The only option out there is to buy a brand new one. Do not argue we are Apple. The article made fun of his analogy about driving a car into a pole saying it is not the same but really it is. In both situation something happened to the product the manufactorers would not recommend. In both situations the product is not able to work. In both situations there is no solution on how to proceed with the product other then buying brand new.

And finally: This ties perfectly into their fight against right to repair. They do not want anyone to have the ability to repair their products. They will not sell parts to anyone and not have licensed 3rd party repair technicians anymore. Imagine again your car. You only option is to go to the dealership for everything and pay their price with no negotiation. From tire rotations to oil changes. That is what apple wants.

I enjoyed reading this post.  I also enjoyed reading Wizard's posts.  His post seem more rational and thought out than ever before (I hope that doesn't sound back handed.). But as Apple have bumped up the prices of Pro Towers and iMacs he seems to make more and more sense.  (They haven't made the the Mac Pro and Mini more capable for less money in the last 5 years!  Under Jobs, hardware would generally offer more for the SAME price, not MORE!). They could have dropped the Mac Pro case into the mini tower range and sold it as a more powerful mini.  But their ego won't allow them to do it.  It has to be 'their way' or the 'highway.'  They can't see it because they're locked into a sales guy and marketing holding pattern.  The Mac line has been stale since 2013.  They didn't follow up the Mac Pro with even ram, SSD bumps or price reductions or re-fashion it into a more prosumer tower which it would be nicely purposed for with its thermal envelope.

My problem with Apple is the one of 'irony.'  Something they appear not to understand.  They very same thinking that got them locked into a great design for the wrong market.  It's the lower end to mid-tier of pros.  But it didn't have the thermal elasticity for the High end Pro or higher end pro.  Didn't they learn from the Cube which had the same vertigo in the 'pro' market.  Boutique.  Not something you could accuse the original G3 Tower of.

Back to the article.  But isn't this stench of hubris all the same thing?!

This, the 'pants down' admission that they don't know their core base anymore, the Apple Park monument to Steve (it's very nice...) being completed in the time it took them to realise that and the current PR nightmare with Linus are all linked.  The flurry of 'Mac Pro' articles at Applesinsider (yes, typo, but I left it in...heh. Pun not intended...) makes this even more ironic and po-faced.

Linus has done well for himself.  Great channel.  They cover the plethora of choice's that PC owners have.  Not many Mac fans have asked for this confusion of choice as they know it leads to M$ syndrome.  But Apple Tower owners enjoy less choice now than when Job's returned!  There isn't even a tower, really.  (Can we really call the 'Can' a Tower?). They cover Macs and have the same barking dog complaints about 'Macs' that most Mac Pro or Former Mac Pro (now PC?) owning tower users have.  Linking or not is the editorial's prerogative.  But it's not in the spirit of internet journalism and somewhat churlish.  Besides, Barbara Streisand syndrome?  Don't draw attention to it if you don't like it.  Well done to Linus on his 2 million hits.

Apple could have played the game and avoided a PR nightmare by agreeing to fix this.  It's Linus' money, right?  Sure, they broke the warranty.  But they didn't claim otherwise.  Sure.  It's a bit of an 'accident' that they 'broke' it.  There is a bit of showmanship to this.  As is the slightly veiled tongue in cheek way they review Apple products.  But they gave the iMac Pro a fair shake with a decent review and even did a gamer's follow up review.  (5k for a gaming set up...again.  Ironic.  Apple used to have £1500 towers that you could upgrade to a decent NV or ATI card for this purpose!  Memories...). So they're not out to really click bait Apple.  But Apple, as a 250$ Billion company are fair game for scrutiny.  From the lack of choice, to the weak points of their hardware, pricing and their back up service to pricey kit.  Especially in light of the iPhone slowdown PR nightmare.  It didn't look good regardless of the arguments.  The word on the street is that Apple slows your kit down after you pay a fortune mark up for a phone that is made cheaply in China.  

In this instance, it's Apple won't fix your rig you paid £5000 for a sealed unit.  And they won't even let you upgrade your ram as a minimum of upgradability.  

As the poster above notes.  They've sealed off all avenues of user repair or 3rd party repair pretty much so you 'buy once' (expensively and even more expensively to upgrade at point of sale because it's pretty damn impossible for Johnny average or even skilled repair people to do affordably.)

The G3 tower wasn't really cpu upgradable as such.  But you could do the ram, hard drive, cpu and pick the monitor of your choice...  And you could add components as you could afford them.  Not everyone is a lawyer or doctor.  Most public sector workers in the UK haven't had a pay rise worthy of the name in the last ten years.  But that hasn't stopped Apple bumping up prices in the UK.


But all this highlights the market Apple are trying to capture with this market.  Funny that they won't fix it.  They won't give them a Mac they can fix themselves.  They won't compromise.  They don't even listen.  (It took them 5 years to admit something needed fixing with the Mac Pro and then admitted they don't know their core base...because they weren't listening in the first instance and took them five further years after punishing PR forced them to come out with their tail in-between their legs...not once...but twice(!)...but most Pro's at the time just wanted an updated Mac Pro Tower with 'just new specs', it was fine bar a bit of trimming to reflect SSDs rather than HDDs...  I'm sure many would take the Bauhaus now in Space Grey with an SSD trim.  Why over think it?  They've had great tower designs from the Quadra, G3, G4, G5, Intel...  Not only don't they listen they don't follow through on their core base.). Because this market WANTS to fix their 'Macs' if they could buy the Mac they WANTED.

An unassuming, stylish tower with industry standard parts for a fair price.  Funny.  That's what Jobs was touting with the G3 blue tower keynote.  Proprietary stops you being current, it's harder to keep up with the market!  That's what he said.  Yet we got the 'Can' which is proprietary industry parts.  Just enough to force you to expensively upgrade at the point of purchase.  iMac Pro.  Nice as it is.  Same thing.

Jobs returned to Apple.  He made things quick.  Affordable.  Value engineering.  And?  Open.  That's how they were able to put the tanks on M$'s lawn.  Proprietary is great when you're ahead (see iPhone...) but when you're behind (and it seems like Macs have always been behind too often...) it's a difficult sell to people who aren't on a lot of disposable income.  I'm not talking about Google craptops or M$ £399 Dell towers or £300 laptops.  I could get an Apple desktop, mid-tier model for £1999 inc VAT in 1997.  Now I have to pay £2999 for an entry model in 2018.  That's not progress.

Now?  It's going more proprietary, difficult to upgrade.  (Remember iMacs, G3 Towers and Mac Mini's that Apple and Jobs boasted the user could open up themselves?  Distant memories.). No screws and masking tape and glue (Prit stick?) holding everything together on cheap labour.  But when companies get bigger they close things off in the quest to nickel and dime even more money for shareholders.  £100 per hour service charges?  It shouldn't cost that if the machines were self serviceable.  That's Kinda the point.  No one wants to go the car dealer and pay 100% more because it says Citroen or Ford on the parts and service.  or even 200% more.  Sealing everything off is doing so that all avenues are closed off and £££££ when it goes wrong.  If Apple had such conviction about their best in class hardware, why not offer a 3 year warranty? :P 

Apple have given the finger to the very enthusiast market they've treated with contempt over the last 5 years.  The very one they're trying to design for.  Irony.  Or better still, point Linus to a 16 core AMD thread ripper CPU with SLI Nvidia 1080Tis that could probably be had for the same price.

Steve Jobs gave the G3 Tower (Blue and White) 7 addressable pro'/prosumer markets.  Accessibility.  EXPANDABILITY.  The latest components.  The latest GPUs.  The latest games.  What happened?

He had it simple.  An iMac for the consumer.  £595-£1000+.  A Pro tower for Prosumer/Pro.  £1495-£2995.  Dual options came the G4 and G5.  Affordable engineering.  Consumer and Pro friendly.

All this gnashing and wailing at what a pro is?  Apple decides it is £3k for a crappy quad core and you're not a pro is you can't afford that?  What kind of partisan thinking is that?  A pro could be someone who uses his mini, iMac or Tower.  But at least offer the latest specs at sane price points.  The G3 Tower had 4 addressable price points.  Low, medium, high and higher.  Now it's high, higher, insane and ludicrous.  iMac 'Pro' starting at £5k.  iMac consumer 27 inch pretty much 2k to start.  £1,749.00 inc VAT for an i5 with mediocre GPU and 8 stingy gigs of ram....Yes.  No SSD included.  Take away the screen and you have a mediocre PC.  You could pretty much get an 8 core Ryzen and 1070 GPU for that.  No screen granted.  But with a choice of screen you wouldn't pay the £1k apple would want for a 4k screen.  

Apple, you act like your core's friend, reach out...then kick them in the nuts when you have a new consumer friend to play with.  I never grudged Apple their iPhone mini Mac success....but I'm not the fan of their products now that I was in 1997-2000-ish.

THT's timeline was interesting reading.  But it was damning.

Lemon Bon Bon.

EsquireCats said:

To follow that up: for Macs with external GPUs: Radeon RX 570, Radeon RX 580, Radeon Vega 56, Radeon Vega 64, Radeon Vega Frontier Edition (Air-Cooled), Radeon Pro WX 7100, Radeon Pro WX 9100.

EsquireCats said:

To follow that up: for Macs with external GPUs: Radeon RX 570, Radeon RX 580, Radeon Vega 56, Radeon Vega 64, Radeon Vega Frontier Edition (Air-Cooled), Radeon Pro WX 7100, Radeon Pro WX 9100.

You know.  If Apple actually upgraded the Mac mini and Mac Pro (both of which are a disgrace to Apple and desktops...out of date and insanely priced instead of insanely good and value priced...) then we could have up to date rigs that could run the latest choice of GPUs internally and externally and push those GPUs harder rather than throttling.

Intel have i7s, i9s now.  AMD have cooler running cpus that have 6 and 8 cores in them!  Plenty of options to have a broader gaming, VR and workstation tower (remember, folks?  Like the Blue and White G3 state of the art tower?) solution for more Apple 'creative' customers.  There's plenty of cpu choice.  There's plenty of solutions.  Apple don't have to be HP in terms of 'choice' but right now, Apple customers don't have a tower choice.  At all.  Apple had this nailed twenty years ago...how did they design themselves into this decrepit design cul-de-sac?

How hard to have a mini with update to CPU that can run an external GPU?  It's not like their Core base haven't been telling this for 6 years.  And they finally decide to listen?

The mini is still an important product but they don't update it?  They said that with a straight face.

Meanwhile, 'red' iPhone.  Whoop-de-dee.

Lemon Bon Bon.

cornchip said:

tallest skil said:

cornchip said:

Blender eh? Will have to look into this. Will this work on 4K iMac? 

Meaning “do I have the specs to run it” or “does Blender itself work”? I guess the distinction is irrelevant; Blender has been around for Macs forever. It’s really powerful and free. You’ll be able to run the software no problem. Whether what you build with it will render with just a single machine is another question. 

Yes, I meant will my 4K iMac (at work) run the rendering software. I’ve been using blender on Mac for over a decade  

And I HIGHLY doubt anything I’ll be rendering will require a farm! 

xsmi said:

Cornchip, my guess is you would need the 2017 4K iMac because the older ones had mobile GPU’s. I don’t know if they have a pro side to them. 

I’ll check the specs Monday. Can’t remember if it was 16 or 17.

Cornchip, how are you finding Blender?  (I remember my Linux toting friend being a big advocate of it back in the early days and he did this 'cel' render on it with Asterix the Gaul and seemed impressive then (seems like twenty years ago?) in-between him playing with the venerable Truespace (shame it got M$'d...). 

(I have downloaded Blender, yet to install it...been looking the Hype machine surrounding the new 2.8 and Eve real time preview...looks crazy good....)

Myself, I've had Lightwave 3D which I like as an affordable end to end package for a great price.  Only $295 for an upgrade to LW 2018!  (I've had 6, 7, 8 and LW9!)

Shame Appleinsider didn't review it, they've done some great work on the renderer this time around though the 'still decent' modeller needs some modernisation of features.

How do you find the interface on the 4k iMac?  I'm pre Retina on my iMac.  Every time I go into PC World (in the UK...) I bewitched by the 5k display...

Lemon Bon Bon.