My girlfriend who is mostly sensible tried to get her hubby to buy her an ipad because it looked cool. Its 10 hour battery and various other restrictions made me cringe at the 800 euro she wanted to spend. Thank god I talked her out of it.. I think her husband wanted to hug me for it. I mean I know she likes fashion accessories and my husband is quite amazed I have yet to buy a Ferragamo shoe and we live in Rome one of the fashion capitals so they say and I go to these parties with her and look like the proverbial poor churchmouse country cousin and am still not tempted. I think my husband panicked for awhile when we became friends. I really cannot understand the appeal of apple.
I bought a new computer last year, and after 21 years of using Windows based P/C's I thought I would try a Mac. The specifications looked pretty good, and powerful so I thought I would give it a go, I got the latest IMAC. It was more expensive than a P/C, but only a few hundred dollars....and it looked nice, and only two cables to plug in, the power cord and the internet connection....great.
I have been playing EVE for six years and I knew they had an Apple client, so that was ok. But, when I started looking around for something else, it's not there. About the only place I can find apple gams is on the Apples APPS site.
Why is it so????? Why doen't anyone want to produce Mac games??
It's a matter of dollars and cents. If you're a developer, you want to be efficient with your spending. Consdering how large % the windows user base is, it makes sense to develop for PC. It's not cheap to develop for multiple platforms, and considering the smaller % of Macs, they just aren't spending the money. Blizzard has always developed for Mac, by the way.
I run all of my games on my iMac via bootcamp and this is the best Windows PC i've ever owned LOL
... that just works out of the box. Then they keep working for several years to come, rarely giving you any troubles. I use a macbook pro for work (mostly involving programming and graphical/layout design). I've abused it like a child, messing about with apps, self-built apps, webservers, SDK's, UI modifications, core file modifications, fan settings, several different OS installations through bootcamp and VM, other windows emulators... You name it. I've been really cruel to it to say the least. I've been doing this for 3 years without re-installing it once. I even dropped it in the floor once and i often keep it in sleep instead of turning it of while travelling.
THE POINT: It's still running as if it was new.
Meanwhile, i've seen friends, and my girlfriend, go through several PC laptops during the same time. Even my own stationary gaming-PC has had EVERY part of it replaced due to hardware failure during these 3 years.
It all depends on your needs. Both sides having their up's and down's. I'm caught in between. I love my mac for normal every-day-usage including work and browsing the net. I also love to mess about with the PC, upgrading/modding it, increasing it's performance etc. There's no reason to "hate" any of them, they both fill needs.
You've had every piece of hardware in a PC fail in 3 years?
You mind if I hazard a guess at the probability of that? Assuming you have a PSU, two sticks of RAM, one GPU, a CPU, an HDD, an optical drive, and a motherboard, that's 8 parts. If we go by high end laptop numbers, the three year hardware failure rate is 15%, so let's take the greater cooling of PCs and bump it down to 10%.
The odds of having eight concurrent failures in three years is .1^8, or 0.00000001, or 0.000001%. That's one in a hundred million. Even if I bent over backward and assumed a 50% chance of desktop hardware failure in 3 years, which is TRIPLE the figures for good PC laptops (and double the worst laptop figures), that would still only be a .39% chance, and that's bending over backward.
I'd say you're either the biggest statistical anomoly in the history of computing, or you decided to submerge you're running desktop in a bathtub one day.
I can't speak to people who can't run Windows competently, but as an educated user, I've had only one hardware failure (DOA) and zero serious software problems in the past three years. In fact, in that entire time, I've only had half a dozen blue screens, and all but two were because of said faulty hardware (which would kernel panic a Mac just as easily, so it hardly counts). On the other hand, I've also been a frequent user of Macs, and I've managed to lock up Macs just as frequently, usually with the "beachball of death". These were poorly maintined Macs, granted, but clearly Macs don't "just work" if the users who work with them are sufficiently stupid. Macs do work better for ignorant people, because it's harder to mess up the Mac OS, but if it's a difference between paying Apple double to triple the hardware price, I'd rather just LEARN to use a computer, so that I could competently operate Windows, rather than letting Apple take advantage of my ignorance by gouging me.
Note that this doesn't apple to all Macs. Some actually are good deals. The Macbook airs presently offer pretty good hardware for the price, and the Mac minis, while a little more expensive for what they give you than big PCs, definitely give at least halfway decent hardware for the price as compared to other small Windows PCs (the $800 model would make an absolutely stellar HTPC because of its unobtrusive size).
The Macbook Pros, on the other hand, are absolutely miserable for hardware value. When I turn on my PC, it's so that a desktop appears, so I can click my icons and launch MY programs. Sometimes I'll move files around. That's about the extent of my OS usage 99.99% of the time once I spend an hour setting a computer up. And as an educated user, Windows "just works", because I don't break it. So for me, it was unequivocally a better choice to purchase my Asus laptop instead. It was vastly cheaper than the MBPs out when I bought it (about half as much as the high end models), and vastly more powerful (about 50% more). Even the battery life advantage Apple once enjoyed is now largely gone as other manufacturers have closed that gap, mostly, if not entirely. My Asus, on an aftermarket 9-cell that I paid $50 for, "only" gets 5 hours under normal office use (web browsing, word documents), but given that I get 3 times the hardware for the price, and make use of every bit of it (just like an MBP user would, because they'd buy an Air if hardware power was no issue), there is absolutely no situation, as of that time, in which an educated user should have bought a high-end Macbook Pro.
Some Macs are really a good value, like other Apple devices (Ipod Touches are great). Some are really crappy values. The former are great to buy, and I'll probably look into them in the future; the latter have no non-subjective reason to be purchased.
Meanwhile, i've seen friends, and my girlfriend, go through several PC laptops during the same time. Even my own stationary gaming-PC has had EVERY part of it replaced due to hardware failure during these 3 years.
If you get an awful power supply, it can fry everything like that. So get good quality hardware and that doesn't happen
I've had my PC for over 2 years, and it has never crashed in that time. It's been through numerous power outages and two bouts of flooding in that time, too.
The Macbook airs presently offer pretty good hardware for the price
Only if you're comparing them to Intel's awful new "ultrabooks" that likewise sacrifice all else for the sake of making it thin.
A number of companies have lines have very thin, full featured laptops, and I know a fair number of people for whom such machines make a lot of sense. There are times when lugging around 7lbs of laptop and power adapter just isn't fun for many people.
I'm not one of them, but for people who really do travel to that extent, and need something a few notches above what a netbook offers, getting a Sandy Bridge i5, a 720p screen, and a 64GB SSD in an 11', sub 2.5lbs package that's barely thicker than a USB port for $999 is pretty good. They're very popular here at the university with students who use them for notes instead of notebooks/binders. I find it nice just carrying around my heavy laptop alone, so I would absolutely love to only have to carry around a Macbook air, as much as I walk around this campus and the surrounding town lugging my computer, if there weren't other considerations (gaming capability and CPU power). There is an $1199 model with a 128gb SSD, but for that price, you can just buy your own 1.8' SSD (which I assume they use), and probably sell the old one. Still, I don't blame people at all for buying 11' MBAs in general.
And this is just an example of the stupid prices that apple employ. You aren't paying for build quality or customer service. You are paying for what is nothing more than a perception of something being better or more 'elite'.
A friend of mine bought a mac book pro for recording and mixing music. I was jealous as hell and was actually saving up to get one myself. Then he had to return it because it overheated and broke. He was scolded on the phone by tech support because he had been using his mac book for over 8 hours in a single session. Apparently, you can only use these things in short bursts. I'm so glad I didn't buy one. I have protools running in the background on my pc 24/7 and its been running like a champ for 3 years now.
If you want an SSD, add an SSD and you're still hundreds ahead. Lower power consumption, too.
Making the MacBook Air a little thinner and lighter than the competition has huge drawbacks.
In what twisted world do these machines qualify as "more capable hardware"?
Zacate's GPU is not more powerful than Sandy Bridge's GPU; it's not even as powerful as the desktop variants (I don't know if Intel reduces the power of the mobile version at all, but even if it does, it's not going to be a win for the 6310).
And CPU-wise, Zacate isn't even remotely comparable to Sandy Bridge.
So you get considerably less capable hardware, a heavier machine, a bulkier machine, and you still have to spend $100-$200 adding in an SSD.
A friend of mine bought a mac book pro for recording and mixing music. I was jealous as hell and was actually saving up to get one myself. Then he had to return it because it overheated and broke. He was scolded on the phone by tech support because he had been using his mac book for over 8 hours in a single session. Apparently, you can only use these things in short bursts. I'm so glad I didn't buy one. I have protools running in the background on my pc 24/7 and its been running like a champ for 3 years now.
Yes, Apple relies far too much on the aluminum body for heat dissipation, and not enough on the active cooling system. It's probably some kind of obsession with having a "quiet" machine, as in, Macs are too good to be air-cooled like mere peasant laptops
They have had a history of overheating. The Nehalem i7s in the MBPs, which is what your friend might have had if this was a while back, were known in some cases to very easily exceed 100C, and far more frighteningly, these weren't even the quad core versions, but rather the later dual-core mobile i7s. My laptop cools its 720QM just fine, rarely getting over 70s or low 80s even with very heavy stress; the difference is that it has a real cooling system.
In what twisted world do these machines qualify as "more capable hardware"?
Zacate's GPU is not more powerful than Sandy Bridge's GPU; it's not even as powerful as the desktop variants (I don't know if Intel reduces the power of the mobile version at all, but even if it does, it's not going to be a win for the 6310).
And CPU-wise, Zacate isn't even remotely comparable to Sandy Bridge.
What happens if you take a 65 W part and cap it at 17 W? Think that will affect performance?
Zacate's GPU will run circles around that in a Sandy Bridge ULV part. And it gets worse for Sandy Bridge if you need to use the CPU and GPU at the same time.
Yes, even ULV Sandy Bridge is faster than Zacate on the CPU side, with maybe double the performance if you're not touching the GPU. But it's a lot easier to find things that Zacate can handle but ULV Sandy Bridge can't than the other way around.
What happens if you take a 65 W part and cap it at 17 W? Think that will affect performance?
Zacate's GPU will run circles around that in a Sandy Bridge ULV part. And it gets worse for Sandy Bridge if you need to use the CPU and GPU at the same time.
Yes, even ULV Sandy Bridge is faster than Zacate on the CPU side, with maybe double the performance if you're not touching the GPU. But it's a lot easier to find things that Zacate can handle but ULV Sandy Bridge can't than the other way around.
That might be true if you're talking about gaming, but if you're trying to do gaming on either, you're basically setting yourself up for nothing but a miserable fail.
High-cost GPU applications are all but irrelevant in this market, because both are so slow as to be barely capable. So that basically leaves CPU. You can claim that someone doesn't need twice the CPU power in a laptop, but regardless of whether or not you think that's relevant, you can't categorize a CPU that's half as fast as "more capable".
What happens if you take a 65 W part and cap it at 17 W? Think that will affect performance?
Zacate's GPU will run circles around that in a Sandy Bridge ULV part. And it gets worse for Sandy Bridge if you need to use the CPU and GPU at the same time.
Yes, even ULV Sandy Bridge is faster than Zacate on the CPU side, with maybe double the performance if you're not touching the GPU. But it's a lot easier to find things that Zacate can handle but ULV Sandy Bridge can't than the other way around.
That might be true if you're talking about gaming, but if you're trying to do gaming on either, you're basically setting yourself up for nothing but a miserable fail.
High-cost GPU applications are all but irrelevant in this market, because both are so slow as to be barely capable. So that basically leaves CPU. You can claim that someone doesn't need twice the CPU power in a laptop, but regardless of whether or not you think that's relevant, you can't categorize a CPU that's half as fast as "more capable".
Never mind gaming. How about watching videos? How about browsing flash-heavy web pages? Zacate can do that just fine, but an ULV Sandy Bridge will sometimes choke. And what happens if you want to run anything on the battery? Zacate wins by a mile there.
What happens if you take a 65 W part and cap it at 17 W? Think that will affect performance?
Zacate's GPU will run circles around that in a Sandy Bridge ULV part. And it gets worse for Sandy Bridge if you need to use the CPU and GPU at the same time.
Yes, even ULV Sandy Bridge is faster than Zacate on the CPU side, with maybe double the performance if you're not touching the GPU. But it's a lot easier to find things that Zacate can handle but ULV Sandy Bridge can't than the other way around.
That might be true if you're talking about gaming, but if you're trying to do gaming on either, you're basically setting yourself up for nothing but a miserable fail.
High-cost GPU applications are all but irrelevant in this market, because both are so slow as to be barely capable. So that basically leaves CPU. You can claim that someone doesn't need twice the CPU power in a laptop, but regardless of whether or not you think that's relevant, you can't categorize a CPU that's half as fast as "more capable".
Never mind gaming. How about watching videos? How about browsing flash-heavy web pages? Zacate can do that just fine, but an ULV Sandy Bridge will sometimes choke. And what happens if you want to run anything on the battery? Zacate wins by a mile there.
I've never seen a Macbook air choke on any of those applications. Perhaps you could link me to something that one would choke on so I could see for myself?
And none of thsoe machines advertises battery life better than the Macbook Air. Even if that's because of a bigger battery, it's a moot point here, because the machine is still smaller and lighter.
Originally posted by Catamount Originally posted by Foomerang A friend of mine bought a mac book pro for recording and mixing music. I was jealous as hell and was actually saving up to get one myself. Then he had to return it because it overheated and broke. He was scolded on the phone by tech support because he had been using his mac book for over 8 hours in a single session. Apparently, you can only use these things in short bursts. I'm so glad I didn't buy one. I have protools running in the background on my pc 24/7 and its been running like a champ for 3 years now.
Yes, Apple relies far too much on the aluminum body for heat dissipation, and not enough on the active cooling system. It's probably some kind of obsession with having a "quiet" machine, as in, Macs are too good to be air-cooled like mere peasant laptops They have had a history of overheating. The Nehalem i7s in the MBPs, which is what your friend might have had if this was a while back, were known in some cases to very easily exceed 100C, and far more frighteningly, these weren't even the quad core versions, but rather the later dual-core mobile i7s. My laptop cools its 720QM just fine, rarely getting over 70s or low 80s even with very heavy stress; the difference is that it has a real cooling system. Hmm thats interesting. Thanks for the info!
I've never seen a Macbook air choke on any of those applications. Perhaps you could link me to something that one would choke on so I could see for myself?
And none of thsoe machines advertises battery life better than the Macbook Air. Even if that's because of a bigger battery, it's a moot point here, because the machine is still smaller and lighter.
I can't find a link at the moment, but a review of another laptop with the same hardware found that ULV Sandy Bridge couldn't do a 720p video properly in a window. I'm not sure of the file format.
Zacate has an 18 W TDP, but that's only if you stress everything at once, which is hard to do. Sandy Bridge can easily hit its 17 W TDP with the processor or graphics alone. Bobcat cores get better performance per watt than Sandy Bridge cores, and AMD graphics gets you several times the performance per watt of Intel graphics. Intel's Huron River platform has a bunch of bits burning power that are completely missing from Brazos. A MacBook Air is going to use a lot more power under nearly any load than a Brazos laptop of the same size.
Originally posted by Foomerang A friend of mine bought a mac book pro for recording and mixing music. I was jealous as hell and was actually saving up to get one myself. Then he had to return it because it overheated and broke. He was scolded on the phone by tech support because he had been using his mac book for over 8 hours in a single session. Apparently, you can only use these things in short bursts. I'm so glad I didn't buy one. I have protools running in the background on my pc 24/7 and its been running like a champ for 3 years now.
Yes, Apple relies far too much on the aluminum body for heat dissipation, and not enough on the active cooling system. It's probably some kind of obsession with having a "quiet" machine, as in, Macs are too good to be air-cooled like mere peasant laptops They have had a history of overheating. The Nehalem i7s in the MBPs, which is what your friend might have had if this was a while back, were known in some cases to very easily exceed 100C, and far more frighteningly, these weren't even the quad core versions, but rather the later dual-core mobile i7s. My laptop cools its 720QM just fine, rarely getting over 70s or low 80s even with very heavy stress; the difference is that it has a real cooling system.
Hmm thats interesting. Thanks for the info!
There is no time restriction on using a MBP, but a lot of MBP's do overheat (the aluminum case as a heatsink is very true), and 9 times out of 10 it's because they are run at high loads for several hours, usually on top of a bed spread or in a lap, and not on a flat hard surface like a desktop.
They do have a cooling fan, the vent is hidden in the hinge for the screen. But with the casing being part of the heat sink, if it's not slightly elevated on it's feet (the little nodules in the aluminum casing) - such as being up against your blue jeans, or smothered on a pillow while you use it in bed - they will overheat after a long time. The fan can't keep up on it's own.
And your exactly right, it's because of noise and power - they are designed to run 100% indefinitely only while on a flat hard surface, and run pretty much only at low power (browsing the web or watching Netflix) while in your lap or on your couch or whatever. Mine MBP is a few years old now, and you can OMG tell when the discrete video card kicks in, because it's like a portable electric heater (and the battery meter goes from 4+ hours to 25 minutes remaining), and when it kicks off it cools right back down almost instantly. It's similar when you peg the CPU (which is harder to do, not a lot can really stress a CPU anymore - ripping video or something is about as harsh as I can stress the CPU).
Also keep in mind that all laptops, while plugged in, are not only running the computer but also charging the battery, which can significantly add to the heat production. A computer with a heavily drained battery will make a lot more heat than one with an already charged battery at the same load.
You can call that a design flaw - I guess if you wanted to do AutoCAD while using it in your lap, or rip DVD's from the comfort of your bed, but Apple pretty well thinks that if you have the unit plugged in and your working it hard for hours on end, you probably can set it on a desk too. I can kinda agree with both sides of this issue: yeah, it would be nice if Apple had a bit beefier cooling system in there (because they do get hot in your lap), but at the same time, I've used systems with heavy duty fans and I'm glad my MBP doesn't spin up and sound like a mini-turbine when it gets hot and stays pretty well silent.
As far as the Macbook Air goes: Full Sized Back-Lit Keyboard. That's all I can say about that. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, you can get cheaper. Yes, you can get better performance. I still want an Air, because I love the full sized keyboard, I love that it's back-lit (not everyone cares about this, and I'm a touch typist, but for some reason I still really prefer a lit keyboard, even on my desktop and gaming machines) and the fact that it's so darn light while still having good-enough performance. If you don't like it don't buy it - but even if you do like it (and I do, a lot) - it has no place really being discussed in a gaming forum. It uses Intel on-die video with no other options (and older versions used nVidia integrated video, which wasn't really any better or worse), and it's built for (almost) no-compromise portability. It's Apple's version of a netbook - they won't go any smaller because that's as small as they can make a full sized keyboard: you want more portable get an iPad. They put as much performance as they can while keeping the form factor. And that's what you get... And yes, they charge a huge premium for them, because they can afford to. They don't want everyone to afford them - because then they are no longer status symbols.
*edit* And the trackpad - no one else even comes close to the trackpad on Apple's laptops. They are huge, the gestures are nice, and I can't go back to using any other trackpad - I keep trying to side-swipe or pinch or scroll or tap and everyone looks at me funny. You get used to one and it's really, really hard to use any other trackpad.
The Macbook Pro is basically an overpriced, amazingly poor design, at least for the past generation or two. I can't really think of any way to slice it.
If you can overload the MBP just with moderate usage without absolutely perfect ventilation, then it's not hard to see why, even caring for them properly, I've heard more than a few stories about people simply overloading the maximum dissipation capability (such as in serious gaming that stresses both CPU and GPU), and damaging the computer. My computer is barely audible, even in a dead silent room, even churning out vastly more heat than its contemporary MBPs were ever capable of producing, but that's because it's a computer, designed for serious people who want serious function, as opposed to being an expensive piece of jewelery with a screen attached.
The Air, on the other hand, is a fairly unique computer with enough processing power to do fairly serious tasks when needed, but is lighter and easier to transport than just about anything else. That makes it pretty good. I disagree that it's priced as a "status symbol"; that would be inconsistent with the groups Apple is targetting with that particular machine.
If Apple ever did start treating it that way, the way they do their MBPs, I'd never put forth another recommendation, even conditionally, to get one again. I grew up beyond the need for "status symbols", even having money, when I was... oh, let's see... 12? I'm just a pragmatic scientist who likes being an adult more than shoving my money in everyone's face, and likes his cool toys to be cool because they do cool things, not because I paid a lot of money for them. I could pay $500 for a common rock to sit on my desk if I wanted, but that doesn't make it anything but a common rock. I've spent nearly $7000 on Newegg since 2005, when I first started buying from them, and every single penny has been spent intelligently; I'd rather show off brains and tech/shopping saavy than money.
It has always been like this, even when Mac's weren't as popular as they are now, you had to usually wait 1-2 years in the old days and if something was popular enough, you may get a version for the Mac.
I dislike Apple's approach to things, they try to make everything to you have to go through them, mp3 files...convert, etc...The old ipods that were made to be disposible basically when the battery ran out.
I know people can say the same to an extent about Microsoft, but they have been sued enough, that they are a ton more open than Apple imo now.
I do not own a ipad, iphone, ipod, etc... I don't like to support a company that runs like it is the dictator of technology imo.
Comments
My girlfriend who is mostly sensible tried to get her hubby to buy her an ipad because it looked cool. Its 10 hour battery and various other restrictions made me cringe at the 800 euro she wanted to spend. Thank god I talked her out of it.. I think her husband wanted to hug me for it. I mean I know she likes fashion accessories and my husband is quite amazed I have yet to buy a Ferragamo shoe and we live in Rome one of the fashion capitals so they say and I go to these parties with her and look like the proverbial poor churchmouse country cousin and am still not tempted. I think my husband panicked for awhile when we became friends. I really cannot understand the appeal of apple.
It's a matter of dollars and cents. If you're a developer, you want to be efficient with your spending. Consdering how large % the windows user base is, it makes sense to develop for PC. It's not cheap to develop for multiple platforms, and considering the smaller % of Macs, they just aren't spending the money. Blizzard has always developed for Mac, by the way.
I run all of my games on my iMac via bootcamp and this is the best Windows PC i've ever owned LOL
You've had every piece of hardware in a PC fail in 3 years?
You mind if I hazard a guess at the probability of that? Assuming you have a PSU, two sticks of RAM, one GPU, a CPU, an HDD, an optical drive, and a motherboard, that's 8 parts. If we go by high end laptop numbers, the three year hardware failure rate is 15%, so let's take the greater cooling of PCs and bump it down to 10%.
The odds of having eight concurrent failures in three years is .1^8, or 0.00000001, or 0.000001%. That's one in a hundred million. Even if I bent over backward and assumed a 50% chance of desktop hardware failure in 3 years, which is TRIPLE the figures for good PC laptops (and double the worst laptop figures), that would still only be a .39% chance, and that's bending over backward.
I'd say you're either the biggest statistical anomoly in the history of computing, or you decided to submerge you're running desktop in a bathtub one day.
I can't speak to people who can't run Windows competently, but as an educated user, I've had only one hardware failure (DOA) and zero serious software problems in the past three years. In fact, in that entire time, I've only had half a dozen blue screens, and all but two were because of said faulty hardware (which would kernel panic a Mac just as easily, so it hardly counts). On the other hand, I've also been a frequent user of Macs, and I've managed to lock up Macs just as frequently, usually with the "beachball of death". These were poorly maintined Macs, granted, but clearly Macs don't "just work" if the users who work with them are sufficiently stupid. Macs do work better for ignorant people, because it's harder to mess up the Mac OS, but if it's a difference between paying Apple double to triple the hardware price, I'd rather just LEARN to use a computer, so that I could competently operate Windows, rather than letting Apple take advantage of my ignorance by gouging me.
Note that this doesn't apple to all Macs. Some actually are good deals. The Macbook airs presently offer pretty good hardware for the price, and the Mac minis, while a little more expensive for what they give you than big PCs, definitely give at least halfway decent hardware for the price as compared to other small Windows PCs (the $800 model would make an absolutely stellar HTPC because of its unobtrusive size).
The Macbook Pros, on the other hand, are absolutely miserable for hardware value. When I turn on my PC, it's so that a desktop appears, so I can click my icons and launch MY programs. Sometimes I'll move files around. That's about the extent of my OS usage 99.99% of the time once I spend an hour setting a computer up. And as an educated user, Windows "just works", because I don't break it. So for me, it was unequivocally a better choice to purchase my Asus laptop instead. It was vastly cheaper than the MBPs out when I bought it (about half as much as the high end models), and vastly more powerful (about 50% more). Even the battery life advantage Apple once enjoyed is now largely gone as other manufacturers have closed that gap, mostly, if not entirely. My Asus, on an aftermarket 9-cell that I paid $50 for, "only" gets 5 hours under normal office use (web browsing, word documents), but given that I get 3 times the hardware for the price, and make use of every bit of it (just like an MBP user would, because they'd buy an Air if hardware power was no issue), there is absolutely no situation, as of that time, in which an educated user should have bought a high-end Macbook Pro.
Some Macs are really a good value, like other Apple devices (Ipod Touches are great). Some are really crappy values. The former are great to buy, and I'll probably look into them in the future; the latter have no non-subjective reason to be purchased.
If you get an awful power supply, it can fry everything like that. So get good quality hardware and that doesn't happen
I've had my PC for over 2 years, and it has never crashed in that time. It's been through numerous power outages and two bouts of flooding in that time, too.
Only if you're comparing them to Intel's awful new "ultrabooks" that likewise sacrifice all else for the sake of making it thin.
A number of companies have lines have very thin, full featured laptops, and I know a fair number of people for whom such machines make a lot of sense. There are times when lugging around 7lbs of laptop and power adapter just isn't fun for many people.
I'm not one of them, but for people who really do travel to that extent, and need something a few notches above what a netbook offers, getting a Sandy Bridge i5, a 720p screen, and a 64GB SSD in an 11', sub 2.5lbs package that's barely thicker than a USB port for $999 is pretty good. They're very popular here at the university with students who use them for notes instead of notebooks/binders. I find it nice just carrying around my heavy laptop alone, so I would absolutely love to only have to carry around a Macbook air, as much as I walk around this campus and the surrounding town lugging my computer, if there weren't other considerations (gaming capability and CPU power). There is an $1199 model with a 128gb SSD, but for that price, you can just buy your own 1.8' SSD (which I assume they use), and probably sell the old one. Still, I don't blame people at all for buying 11' MBAs in general.
If a bit thicker and just over 3 lbs is acceptable, you can get more capable hardware for half the price:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834127542
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834246103
http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_can_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=notebooks&a1=Processor&v1=AMD&series_name=dm1z_series&jumpid=in_R329_prodexp/hhoslp/psg/notebooks/AMD/dm1z_series
If you want an SSD, add an SSD and you're still hundreds ahead. Lower power consumption, too.
Making the MacBook Air a little thinner and lighter than the competition has huge drawbacks.
A picture is worth more than a thousand words
http://thenextweb.com/apple/files/2010/09/mac01.jpg
And this is just an example of the stupid prices that apple employ. You aren't paying for build quality or customer service. You are paying for what is nothing more than a perception of something being better or more 'elite'.
A friend of mine bought a mac book pro for recording and mixing music. I was jealous as hell and was actually saving up to get one myself. Then he had to return it because it overheated and broke. He was scolded on the phone by tech support because he had been using his mac book for over 8 hours in a single session. Apparently, you can only use these things in short bursts. I'm so glad I didn't buy one. I have protools running in the background on my pc 24/7 and its been running like a champ for 3 years now.
In what twisted world do these machines qualify as "more capable hardware"?
Zacate's GPU is not more powerful than Sandy Bridge's GPU; it's not even as powerful as the desktop variants (I don't know if Intel reduces the power of the mobile version at all, but even if it does, it's not going to be a win for the 6310).
And CPU-wise, Zacate isn't even remotely comparable to Sandy Bridge.
So you get considerably less capable hardware, a heavier machine, a bulkier machine, and you still have to spend $100-$200 adding in an SSD.
Yes, Apple relies far too much on the aluminum body for heat dissipation, and not enough on the active cooling system. It's probably some kind of obsession with having a "quiet" machine, as in, Macs are too good to be air-cooled like mere peasant laptops
They have had a history of overheating. The Nehalem i7s in the MBPs, which is what your friend might have had if this was a while back, were known in some cases to very easily exceed 100C, and far more frighteningly, these weren't even the quad core versions, but rather the later dual-core mobile i7s. My laptop cools its 720QM just fine, rarely getting over 70s or low 80s even with very heavy stress; the difference is that it has a real cooling system.
What happens if you take a 65 W part and cap it at 17 W? Think that will affect performance?
Zacate's GPU will run circles around that in a Sandy Bridge ULV part. And it gets worse for Sandy Bridge if you need to use the CPU and GPU at the same time.
Yes, even ULV Sandy Bridge is faster than Zacate on the CPU side, with maybe double the performance if you're not touching the GPU. But it's a lot easier to find things that Zacate can handle but ULV Sandy Bridge can't than the other way around.
That might be true if you're talking about gaming, but if you're trying to do gaming on either, you're basically setting yourself up for nothing but a miserable fail.
High-cost GPU applications are all but irrelevant in this market, because both are so slow as to be barely capable. So that basically leaves CPU. You can claim that someone doesn't need twice the CPU power in a laptop, but regardless of whether or not you think that's relevant, you can't categorize a CPU that's half as fast as "more capable".
This thread is too long for the title,
would of been about about one page if you just asked, "whats right with mac's?" instead
Never mind gaming. How about watching videos? How about browsing flash-heavy web pages? Zacate can do that just fine, but an ULV Sandy Bridge will sometimes choke. And what happens if you want to run anything on the battery? Zacate wins by a mile there.
I've never seen a Macbook air choke on any of those applications. Perhaps you could link me to something that one would choke on so I could see for myself?
And none of thsoe machines advertises battery life better than the Macbook Air. Even if that's because of a bigger battery, it's a moot point here, because the machine is still smaller and lighter.
They have had a history of overheating. The Nehalem i7s in the MBPs, which is what your friend might have had if this was a while back, were known in some cases to very easily exceed 100C, and far more frighteningly, these weren't even the quad core versions, but rather the later dual-core mobile i7s. My laptop cools its 720QM just fine, rarely getting over 70s or low 80s even with very heavy stress; the difference is that it has a real cooling system.
Hmm thats interesting. Thanks for the info!
Mac's are too expensive and not upgradable enough and not as software/game friendly as a good ole PC.
No bitchers.
I can't find a link at the moment, but a review of another laptop with the same hardware found that ULV Sandy Bridge couldn't do a 720p video properly in a window. I'm not sure of the file format.
Zacate has an 18 W TDP, but that's only if you stress everything at once, which is hard to do. Sandy Bridge can easily hit its 17 W TDP with the processor or graphics alone. Bobcat cores get better performance per watt than Sandy Bridge cores, and AMD graphics gets you several times the performance per watt of Intel graphics. Intel's Huron River platform has a bunch of bits burning power that are completely missing from Brazos. A MacBook Air is going to use a lot more power under nearly any load than a Brazos laptop of the same size.
There is no time restriction on using a MBP, but a lot of MBP's do overheat (the aluminum case as a heatsink is very true), and 9 times out of 10 it's because they are run at high loads for several hours, usually on top of a bed spread or in a lap, and not on a flat hard surface like a desktop.
They do have a cooling fan, the vent is hidden in the hinge for the screen. But with the casing being part of the heat sink, if it's not slightly elevated on it's feet (the little nodules in the aluminum casing) - such as being up against your blue jeans, or smothered on a pillow while you use it in bed - they will overheat after a long time. The fan can't keep up on it's own.
And your exactly right, it's because of noise and power - they are designed to run 100% indefinitely only while on a flat hard surface, and run pretty much only at low power (browsing the web or watching Netflix) while in your lap or on your couch or whatever. Mine MBP is a few years old now, and you can OMG tell when the discrete video card kicks in, because it's like a portable electric heater (and the battery meter goes from 4+ hours to 25 minutes remaining), and when it kicks off it cools right back down almost instantly. It's similar when you peg the CPU (which is harder to do, not a lot can really stress a CPU anymore - ripping video or something is about as harsh as I can stress the CPU).
Also keep in mind that all laptops, while plugged in, are not only running the computer but also charging the battery, which can significantly add to the heat production. A computer with a heavily drained battery will make a lot more heat than one with an already charged battery at the same load.
You can call that a design flaw - I guess if you wanted to do AutoCAD while using it in your lap, or rip DVD's from the comfort of your bed, but Apple pretty well thinks that if you have the unit plugged in and your working it hard for hours on end, you probably can set it on a desk too. I can kinda agree with both sides of this issue: yeah, it would be nice if Apple had a bit beefier cooling system in there (because they do get hot in your lap), but at the same time, I've used systems with heavy duty fans and I'm glad my MBP doesn't spin up and sound like a mini-turbine when it gets hot and stays pretty well silent.
As far as the Macbook Air goes: Full Sized Back-Lit Keyboard. That's all I can say about that. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, you can get cheaper. Yes, you can get better performance. I still want an Air, because I love the full sized keyboard, I love that it's back-lit (not everyone cares about this, and I'm a touch typist, but for some reason I still really prefer a lit keyboard, even on my desktop and gaming machines) and the fact that it's so darn light while still having good-enough performance. If you don't like it don't buy it - but even if you do like it (and I do, a lot) - it has no place really being discussed in a gaming forum. It uses Intel on-die video with no other options (and older versions used nVidia integrated video, which wasn't really any better or worse), and it's built for (almost) no-compromise portability. It's Apple's version of a netbook - they won't go any smaller because that's as small as they can make a full sized keyboard: you want more portable get an iPad. They put as much performance as they can while keeping the form factor. And that's what you get... And yes, they charge a huge premium for them, because they can afford to. They don't want everyone to afford them - because then they are no longer status symbols.
*edit*
And the trackpad - no one else even comes close to the trackpad on Apple's laptops. They are huge, the gestures are nice, and I can't go back to using any other trackpad - I keep trying to side-swipe or pinch or scroll or tap and everyone looks at me funny. You get used to one and it's really, really hard to use any other trackpad.
Hey i have a good joke, read this..
General
Brand Name:
Apple
Screen Size:
15.4 inches
Display Resolution Maximum:
1440x900 pixels
Processor
Processor Brand:
Intel
Processor Type:
Intel Core i7
Processor Speed:
2.4 GHz
Processor Count:
1
Memory
RAM Size:
4 GB
Memory Technology:
SDRAM
Computer Memory Type:
SDRAM
Hard Drive
Hard Drive Size:
750 GB
Hard Drive Interface:
Serial ATA
Additional Specifications
Hardware Platform:
Mac
Operating System:
Mac OS X v10.7 Lion
AMD Radeon HD 6770M with 1GB GDDR5
2,199.00 (quoted from Amazon.com)
har har har har..
*Corsair Obsidian Series 650D *i5-2500K OC'd ~ 4.5
*Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 mother board
* Radeon HD 7970
*8GB (4GBx2) 1600MHz Kingston HyperX
*240GB Corsair Force GT Series SATA-III SSD
The Macbook Pro is basically an overpriced, amazingly poor design, at least for the past generation or two. I can't really think of any way to slice it.
If you can overload the MBP just with moderate usage without absolutely perfect ventilation, then it's not hard to see why, even caring for them properly, I've heard more than a few stories about people simply overloading the maximum dissipation capability (such as in serious gaming that stresses both CPU and GPU), and damaging the computer. My computer is barely audible, even in a dead silent room, even churning out vastly more heat than its contemporary MBPs were ever capable of producing, but that's because it's a computer, designed for serious people who want serious function, as opposed to being an expensive piece of jewelery with a screen attached.
The Air, on the other hand, is a fairly unique computer with enough processing power to do fairly serious tasks when needed, but is lighter and easier to transport than just about anything else. That makes it pretty good. I disagree that it's priced as a "status symbol"; that would be inconsistent with the groups Apple is targetting with that particular machine.
If Apple ever did start treating it that way, the way they do their MBPs, I'd never put forth another recommendation, even conditionally, to get one again. I grew up beyond the need for "status symbols", even having money, when I was... oh, let's see... 12? I'm just a pragmatic scientist who likes being an adult more than shoving my money in everyone's face, and likes his cool toys to be cool because they do cool things, not because I paid a lot of money for them. I could pay $500 for a common rock to sit on my desk if I wanted, but that doesn't make it anything but a common rock. I've spent nearly $7000 on Newegg since 2005, when I first started buying from them, and every single penny has been spent intelligently; I'd rather show off brains and tech/shopping saavy than money.
This, plus apple is evil:P
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
It has always been like this, even when Mac's weren't as popular as they are now, you had to usually wait 1-2 years in the old days and if something was popular enough, you may get a version for the Mac.
I dislike Apple's approach to things, they try to make everything to you have to go through them, mp3 files...convert, etc...The old ipods that were made to be disposible basically when the battery ran out.
I know people can say the same to an extent about Microsoft, but they have been sued enough, that they are a ton more open than Apple imo now.
I do not own a ipad, iphone, ipod, etc... I don't like to support a company that runs like it is the dictator of technology imo.