Apple Love/Hate Superthread

[slacker]

dang

the new mac pros are fucking cheap
leopard looks pretty good

guess ol' steve heard the cries that macs are too pricey. hopefully there's some more price cuts and i might just have to pick up an apple next time i'm in the market

macrumors.com has the live feed from wwdc, still goin on.

[euth]

appropriate links:
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/

apple's site, particularly the store, is getting hammered right now. i'd like to check all the configurations available for the mac pro, but it's too slow right now. either way, $2500 is a pretty rad deal for a quad core set up. the 23" displays dropped to $999, so for $3500, you could have a sexy looking, powerful system for a fairly reasonable price. if you just go with one of the dell monitors, you could knock four or five hundred off that price.

what i want to see is more powerful imacs. hopefully they'll put some core 2 duo chips in those machines soon.

[xeper]

Jesus, I'm usually F5-ing the hell out of all the appropriate sites but I somehow forgot about this! WOW!

I know exactly what my next 'puter will be. This can't happen soon enough.

It has 4-16X PCIe slots... I wonder if it'll support SLI in any form :S

edit: DUH it does some form of SLI [up to 4 video cards]

[slacker]

i'd consider it but i need to buy a computer soon and adobe products won't be universal until next year, and i'm sitll iffy about running them via rosetta. however the tower is incredibly appealing. i've always said if macs would drop their prices i'd consider one, and now tha they have, i might have to bite the bullet.

[euth]

i'd imagine rosetta would work pretty quickly on a quad core set up, man. plus, maybe adobe will put out a 64-bit version of photoshop would would take advantage of those dual xeons.

besides, you could always use bootcamp to run windows xp until the universal bin of adobe cs is released. it should work flawlessly, considering leopard's shipping with it. get a second hard drive and make a fat32 partition for saving files in both windows and os x, and you're set.

[slacker]

leopard isn't til spring 2007 tho, isn't it? today was just a "coming with leopard" thing, i thought.

either wya, htis is incredibly tempting. i configured a system for about $3300 (upping ram and a second hard drive). i could just get a second dell monitor for $200 or $300 instead of the $600 apple wants for a 20 inch cinema.

[euth]

i wouldn't get a hard drive or ram through apple. you can get the same stuff elseware for a third of the cost. get a basic system and do the upgrades yourself — you'll probably save a good one or two hundred bucks.

[slacker]

makes sense.

we'll see how it goes. i was planning on getting a new machine this month, just wasn't sure what it was going to be, i was waiting to see what the mac pros were like.

as far as macs go expandability wise, what's the procedure? i know with dell i've had some rough times if i didn't upgrade through them (warranty issues, hardware issues, etc). but if i can just run up a bill at newegg for new HD and RAM, that'd be much better than upgrading thru apple.

[xeper]

i wouldn't get a hard drive or ram through apple. you can get the same stuff elseware for a third of the cost. get a basic system and do the upgrades yourself — you'll probably save a good one or two hundred bucks.

I just wish you could subtract their price of HDD and RAM and have it arrive gutless... :\ oh well

As far as running Adobe stuff, just use Wine or Bootcamp into XP for now.

[yooz]

did they finally fix the finder this time?

[xeper]

did they finally fix the finder this time?

How is the Finder broken?

[slacker]

random thought-
can someone tell me about running games? all i'd want to play would be halflife, but would i have to run bootcamp and use it via windows or is it supported by apple yet?

and for anyone that has a mac and does gaming, what's the speed difference like?

[xeper]

random thought-
can someone tell me about running games? all i'd want to play would be halflife, but would i have to run bootcamp and use it via windows or is it supported by apple yet?

and for anyone that has a mac and does gaming, what's the speed difference like?

As far as I know you can run it in either WinXP via bootcamp, in which case it would run exactly as fast as a comparably equipped PC, or you can run it from within OSX via Wine [if it's out yet] with zero performance hit.

[L3Vi]

Just got a new Mac Book Pro for the birthday/graduation from the rents

I fucking love it, cant stop touching it - it's amazing

I'm about to install boot camp, I'll let you know how it goes

[rob]

did they finally fix the finder this time?

They didn't DEMO any change in the Finder, but they did say that they were reserving some of the features just to keep Microsoft guessing.

[wok]

New tabbed Finder.

[slacker]

hm

the macpro site talks bout the heatsynchs on the ram to make it cool better... i'm going to go to the apple store and ask bout upgrading with third party ram.

and then probably buying one of these tomorrow.

[tres]

i secretly switched last month.

macbook sans pro for the blackness though.

[xeper]

hm

the macpro site talks bout the heatsynchs on the ram to make it cool better... i'm going to go to the apple store and ask bout upgrading with third party ram.

and then probably buying one of these tomorrow.

It uses standard DDR2 RAM... I'm almost 100% certain you can use any old RAM that meets the speed requirements.

[slacker]

Expansive Memory
With Mac Pro, you’ll not only enjoy highly reliable and extremely fast 667MHz fully-buffered ECC memory, but you’ll find it incredibly easy to add memory to your system.

That’s because every Mac Pro comes with two memory riser cards, each with four fully-buffered DIMM slots. With a total of eight DIMM slots available, you can install up to 16GB of memory. To help dissipate heat, every Apple DIMM you purchase for your Mac Pro comes with its own preinstalled heat sink. This unique heat sink lets fans run slower — and quieter — yet keeps the memory cool enough to run at full speed

i'm sure i can put non propriatary mem in, thta just sounds like a technicality i want someone from apple to work out for me.

[wok]

I'm guessing an "Apple DIMM" is simply a dimm with an effin' heatsink strapped to it. All that means is you'll have tons of room to slide in your cheaper, smaller, equally as good 3rd pary dimm.

[euth]

yeah, slacker, the heatsink is no big deal. if you want a heatsinks on your ram, you can install them yourself or buy some third party ram with heatsinks pre-installed.

there's only one thing i want to know — can ecc ram be mixed with non-ecc? from what i've read, ecc ram is completely pointless for 99% of all computer users and it costs a whole lot more than non-ecc. if you can't mix and match, it would still be cheaper to rip out the stock ecc ram and install your own: apple's charging $300 for a gig of ram and you can buy a gig of 667mhz ddr2 from newegg for like $70.

[slacker]

eec ram (according to wiki) is for high end calculations and server loads, yelch.

i remember when i bought my comp it had rdram and it totally fucked me about a year later to upgrade. this would be helpful info fo shizzle.

[euth]

i'm not completely sure, but if a motherboard is looking for ecc ram, you have to install ecc ram. you can still find much better deals on ecc fb ram, though.

here's a 1gb module for $180 at tiger direct. in other words, you can install 2gb of ram for $60 more than apple is charging for 1gb (or 4gb for $20 more than apple's charging for 2gb).

[Quik]

The harddrives are in their own casing, so that they can be removed without touching cables.... I wonder if that means the markup will be massive and you'll need Apple™ hdds?

[euth]

i'm pretty sure those are trays, not custom enclosures. take a look at the chassis.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/expansion.html

if i'm wrong, i'm sure the markup will be substantial.

[slacker]

i'll ask about ram and hds when i go to the apple store today.

[xeper]

They are just rails for the HDDs. They are standard S-ATA HDDs with standard connections. As for the RAM, yeah, ECC RAM has a CPU on board to handle shit like load-balancing and caching etc and needs to come in pairs [it's also dual-channel]. Surely you will find it for cheaper on Newegg or the like. Those cards on the bottom are memory risers and each have 4 RAM slots. PLENTY of room for upgrades. [plus you can stick your own Core2Duo chips in further down the road since it uses standard busses and sockets.]

[yooz]

[..]How is the Finder broken?

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/18

[slacker]

from the apple store dude:

- any sata hd would do. apple won't cover the shit they don't sell but that doesn't matter much with the hd. he opened the box up, it was rad to see how it all is.

-with ram, he seriously suggested (both the dudes i talked with did) getting apple ram. like, super strongly emphasized it, but if not, its okay to get other shit so long as you make sure to have the heatsynchs on or else it could really fuck with the system and mess up the ram.

but yeah. i'm ordering one in the next couple days, probably just upping the ram to 2gb.