djames4242

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djames4242
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  • Apple's MacBook lineup now world's fourth-largest notebook brand

    djames4242djames4242
    right_said_fred said:
    entropys said:
    I bet MBAs are the top seller.

    i have never seen a MacBook outside of a retailer display.
    Maybe you are in the wrong circles, engineers / pros whatever who use MBr's (seldom) MBA's. You see plenty. I recently travelled east to west coast - saw plenty MBA, even rose gold version.
    I'm assuming the reference was to the 12-inch MacBook nothing, not MacBooks as a whole, in which case I agree. I also have never seen a MacBook in the wild. When we bought our daughter her first high school laptop, we debated the MBA vs MB. When comparing similarly-priced configurations, the MacBook Air is simply more powerful. A tiny amount of portability and the retina screen is sacrificed in leu of a far more powerful processor, and a greater number of useful ports.
    entropyscgWerksSpamSandwich

  • $179 Apple TV 4K boasts high dynamic range support, free 4K upgrades to iTunes movie purch...

    djames4242djames4242
    I have no plans to upgrade my TV to 4k anytime in the next couple of years. I wonder how much the fourth-gen AppleTV will drop to now. We have one in the family room. I'd like to upgrade the third-gen upstairs so we can have Plex in the bedroom.
    zroger73

  • Apple to launch 4K Apple TV model at September iPhone event

    djames4242djames4242
    almondroca said:
    hmurchison said:
    Can we finally get local playback of video from storage?  

    I've hit my Xfinity 1024GB cap consistently.  4K isn't going to make that harder even with HEVC. 


    Ditto. Have had to use NAS storage with Plex app on ATV4. Local storage would be simpler.
    I think Plex is far more simple than ensuring your content is in the proper format and container and manually uploading your content, plus you get enhanced metadata and offline viewing (with a Plex Pass anyway). I have a bundle of content still in a compatible format from back when I was storing content locally on my first-generation AppleTV. I still use Plex to view it rather than using the "Computers" app on my 4th-gen AppleTV.
    polymniajahblade

  • Apple's Mac mini an 'important product,' staying in lineup

    djames4242djames4242
    freeper said:

    Pardon me, but this mentality is precisely why Mac Minis never caught on. Rather than make a legitimate attempt to compete for market share in the PC market, Apple chose to play to the idea that people chose Windows devices over Macs merely because they are cheap, so they threw a bare bones low spec device at people and claimed "here Windows cheapskates now you have no excuse for avoiding our superior brand and tech!" Please. First off, no one is buying desktops anymore. Everyone buys laptops. Which puts a device with no display, keyboard, trackpad/mouse functionality or battery/mobility at a huge disadvantage. For goodness sakes, a company - no matter the size - would have more use for an iPad than an underpowered desktop. And that is another thing: it is underpowered. People do pay attention to specs, even the ignorant, unwashed cheap Microsoft consumers. Virtually no one is going to buy something with 4 GB of RAM and a middling CPU ... basically the same specs that even Chromebooks have these days. A device with so little power can't be used to do much in the way of actual work, even if it does come with macOS, and everyone knows it. Yes, there are bargain basement Windows laptops with 4 GB of RAM and i3 or i5 processors and 100 Mbit Ethernet and/or 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi being sold, but not very many, and nearly all of them are being bought by consumers, not businesses, small or otherwise. Apple is perfectly capable of making laptops that can actually compete with, say, a Dell XPS on specs while costs just a little bit more while still giving a good margin. Just as they were able to sell an iPad for $299 and eventually finally gave in and started selling iPhones for $399 (albeit years too late for it to matter). Why don't they? The same reason why they didn't make iPhones with screens bigger than 4 inches until 4-5 years after it was obvious that such devices were useful and popular: stubbornness and pride.
    I'm not sure that's entirely fair. I work from home 90% of the time and I use a mid-2011 Mac Mini as my primary machine. It has a dual-core, 2.3ghz i5 processor. Pretty moderate even six years ago. It still chugs along just fine and does most of what I need it to do. I run Windows 10 in a VM most of the time with multiple development environments, and I run a number of Mac applications alongside it (right now I've got Aperture and OmniGraffle running, a number of terminal windows, and a flash-based Internet radio site playing in the background).

    I do agree that 4gb or RAM is (and was at the time) too little, and alongside a memory upgrade I also had to immediately replace its slow HDD with a SSD. I will also agree with your points that the $499 Mac Mini is stupidly underpowered, but the other models (especially paired with PCI-E SSD drives) are perfectly usable in a corporate environment. In fact, my Mac Mini hasn't had a moment of unplanned downtime while my Windows laptop using cohorts have all been down on multiple occasions when their machines ate themselves. And those laptops my company provides us are comparatively underpowered even considering the fact that they are five years newer. My company provided laptop (which I never, ever use) runs an i3 processor and came with a whopping 4gb or RAM and a 120gb SSD.
    stompywatto_cobra

  • Apple's Mac mini an 'important product,' staying in lineup

    djames4242djames4242
    scottw2 said:
    I use a Mac Mini as my main computing machine. I'm an advanced user and would like to see the following feature:

    (1) Upgradable RAM & SSD. Apple can make a Mac-not-so-Mini (or call it just a Mac!) to accommodate that

    (2) More ports on the front

    (3) Discrete GPU option (hey, Apple is making its own graphics chips soon)
    I don't see any of these things happening. My (mid-2011) Mini has been upgraded multiple times, from 4gb to 8gb to 16gb RAM, from 500gb HDD to a 250gb SSD, then a 500gb SSD and a second SSD. These upgrades have let me keep my Mini going happily for the past 5.5 years. I've done similar upgrades to my (early 2011) MBP including replacing the never-used optical drive with a second SSD. Unfortunately, Apple is going full steam with the appliance model. Upgrades (and fixes) require a full replacement. It's very sad, but those of us who upgrade are clearly in the minority.

    At this point, I'll be thrilled if the new Mini returns the quad-core option. I'm almost always running at least one virtual machine, sometimes two, and frequently transcoding video. Additional CPU cores would help tremendously. If the next Mini does not offer a quad-core option, I may be forced to find some room on my desk for a 27" iMac.
    argonaut[Deleted User]GeorgeBMac