illa romza

Nobody wants the 24". That's why they stopped making it. It was useless.

24 inch useless? Thanks god, for telling us what's what.

I seen it as more of a mid model refresh.
TECHNICALLY been the same since 2008.

The fall 2009 refresh was a big redesign. The displays were all different sizes, 21.5 and 27" and went edge to edge. This was the first time since moving to Intel that the iMacs had desktop processors instead of the previous mobile chips. It was not a trivial redesign which is why it's unlikely there will be much different about this year's updates other than ports, processors, and storage upgrades.

Right off the bat, I have two final generation Powerbook G4s (one is mine, one is my son's) so I figured that it would be a good side by side test for the new video formats.

I went to iTunes and grabbed a copy of Grosse Pointe Blank and popped the DVD version in for a side by side test.

I have to say that the quality on the iTunes version was very great. There are portions of the video where the quality definitely look better than the DVD version played back through the Apple DVD Player and portions that without a doubt look significantly worse.

When it comes to Title Sequences (Credits and some text overlays in the begining), the DVD wins hands down as the edges get a very choppy on the iTunes version.

When it comes to your normal scenes where people are talking and not much is going on, the iTunes version seems to have the edge (less pixelized backgrounds, appears to have greater detail around edges of fairly stationary objects, etc.).

When it comes to high action sequences, it really is a toss up between the two as neither really look that great (substantial bluring around moving objects).

For the parts of the show that matter, I would say that h264 (iTunes) scales better on larger high resolution screens than MPEG2 (DVD).

I plan on grabbing some stills and editing them together at the seams to see if there really is a noticable difference or if my eyes are playing tricks on me, but that will have to wait for a couple days.

One step closer to the MacBook Air update.

Weren't they just updated in October? Yes it may be closer, but not for a while yet considering the last update was over a year. :rolleyes:

I recently installed Flash player on the PC side and without my permission McAffe was installed....ARGGGHH.

Bull�hit. It asked your permission, you just clicked through without reading.

You know what's sleazy? Working with a partner while secretly copying that partner's work to create a competing product.

Microsoft did this to Apple with Windows. Google did this to Apple with Android. And Samsung did this with their phone/tablet designs and their UI overlay.

The Beatles did this to Apple, oh wait, they had Apple Records and the Apple logo for over 5 years before Apple Computer existed. But I'm sure that is overlooked.

Sometimes it helps to do a quick search. ;)

They do have surround sound support. (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304277#faq26)

Yes, they have surround sound, but not Dolby Digital. Quicktime can't even decode 5.1 audio (you need a third party plugin (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/27300) for that.)

I hope they bring back the backlit keyboard.

but i thought half the point of TB was that you would only need one output from the computer, and since we don't have any TB displays (or anything for that matter) how do we know that the ports are limited to one display?Displays are at the end of the chain. I believe there is a passthrough for additional displays as well.

You do want additional outputs to avoid the annoyance of unplugging displays. This will be more of an issue on the Mac mini and Mac Pro. I can imagine instances where the displays might not come back at all.