illa romza

Updates are expected very soon boys and ghouls! My dealer at a Mac Online Store just sent me an e-mail announcing a $100+ price drop on MacBook Pro laptops.

Maybe Apple just needs to lower its monitor prices to sane levels as opposed to the ridiculous prices that they currently stand at. Justify them all you want, if Apple really wants to push its monitors, those prices need to come down. They might have flew 3 years ago, but enough is enough.

I just got a 22-inch LCD for $370 (US), and it's not a piece. Quite frankly, I can't really tell the difference. Plus it has better adjustments and I/O. It doesn't have the Apple look, and it only has 1050 horizontal lines of res but, that's not worth the extra dollars for me.

You people are incorrigible. I do hope people start reading the thread or doing some research before anyone else makes a fool of themselves.

I find you the one that is incorrigible. The 23" inch price is competitive where it is as your link so eloquently points out. The Apple displays are easily worth a 15-20% mark-up. The problem is since the last time the display prices were updated 20" wide-screen panel prices have dropped nearly in half. So a year ago when Apple released this $699 price point it was a good price because competitors were selling the same panels at $599. Now they are at $399 and some times as low a $299. Apple's display is worth extra just not 75% to 100% extra.

Way to go!

thanks! should be #9 today!

Our team is at 2.147 million points for the last 7 days, the highest I've ever seen it!! Way to go Team!

Macrumors.com - Team Folding - 7 days 2,146,864 Total points 146,241M

We're catching up to those Greeks and will soon pass them.

yeah way to go! i know we've been picking it up lately. i think the more we keep this forum active, the more active the macrumors community will be. to keep posting stuff here

In the music business, Apple has taken advantage of people's willingness to give up some sound quality (ie MP3 and AAC formats) in exchange for ease of use in buying and using the music. I don't expect the movie service to offer HD, at least not for most movies. I expect they'll do the same thing they did with music-- actually offer slightly LOWER resolution than DVD in exchange for a very convenient package.

That's how Apple got the music industry on-board, and it would offer a great story to the movie studios, who are constantly worried that the higher and higher quality formats mean they're "giving away their masters". Instead, people may be very willing to buy lower quality copies as long as it's extremely convenient.

I'd love to move up on to a 6970� as long as we don't get it when the 7xxx is about to be released.

CR hasn't been relevant in at least 5 years. Another mag that made a terrible transition to the web. Welcome to the interweb CR, now will you please hire a web designer? Your site is embarrassing.

I'm thinking about my future 8 core Macpro:
2 questions for you:
- Do you think the 8 core proc will produce a lot more heat than the current core duo 2 ? I'm asking because I need a very quiet computer ...1. Yes. Lots more heat. Also the PSU may not be sufficient to drive the CPUs, memory, video card. two optical drives, four hard disks, all the gizmos on the main board etc... Effectivly Intel fixed the problem with their CPUs being power hungry heat monsters with the Core 2 Duo - and then they made exactly the same mistake by creating a power hungry heat monster with their Core 2 Quads... All just to beat AMD to the "Quad Core"Not exactly. If they go with an 80 watt 2.33GHz Clovertown then no. If they go with a 120 watt 2.66GHz Clovertown then yes. 3GHz Woodies are 80 watts.
-As always: shall we expect this one in the Macpro before 2007 ?I won't. But I will hope so.2. My guess (just a guess mind) is Feb-March next year.That's what I expect as well - with the Stoakley-Seaburg chipset onboard (http://techreport.com/etc/2006q4/clovertown/index.x?pg=1).

I wonder how Handbrake, iDVD encoding, or Quicktime encoding will take advantage of the extra cores?iDVD is not as good an encoder as Toast. If you are encoding DVD images, you should seriously consider using Toast instead. Toast can use up to 4 Mac Pro cores. Handbrake can use up to 3 Mac Pro cores. So they were made for an 8-core Mac Pro, if you, like me, run both DVD encoding and mp4 encoding at the same time in multiples. It is not unusual for me to be creating two DVD images while ripping two different sets of Handbrake batches all at the same time.

SNIP

21.5" (1920x1080) display
3.5 GHz i3 processor
8 GB RAM
1 TB HD
Thunderbolt
ATI Radeon HD 4870 (256MB)
HDMI out
$1499.99

SNIP

That is the one I'll be getting. Why an i3 SB and not an i7 SB? I don't see Apple using an i3 in anything

Fixed!

Typical. Are they 2.33 and 2.66GHz models Aiden? Got links?

SideNote: The Madonna Concert in HD on NBC tonight is groundbreaking broadcast television. One of the most amazing telecasts I have ever seen-heard. I am a huge Madonna fan though. :D Tony Bennett's special last night also on NBC was an amazing HD composition as well.

I just had a (very) brief look, Dell seems to be offering Cloverton in their Precision workstations, but only the low-end E5320 1.86Ghz model:

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=555&l=en&oc=MLB1727&s=biz

I imagine that Apple probably won't use this model in the Mac Pro or Xserves, and are probably waiting on the faster versions to be available in greater quantities, as it seems that they might be in short supply if Dell's only offering the slowest version.

That way, I can stream my music from iPod to Airport Express directly.

I would rather have it the other way around a cheap 512 mb iPod with a screen that can use my music on my mac via wifi. that would be sweet. I have over 100gb of music and want to have access to all of it from everywhere in my house. now a 30 gb or so iPod with wifi would be sweet. load all your favorite music for car rides and stuff and still listen to the rest at home.

Ben

Actually, you can get Sirius in Canada and are able to stream Sirius anywhere in the world IF you have an account registered in the US. I've heard of many international customers setting up accounts to listen abroad.

I may be talking out of my ass here, but my understanding is that Sirius works via satellites in geosynchronous orbit, which means they are way way up there, "locked in" above a specific spot on the ground (they zip around the Earth once every 24 hours, which keeps them above the equatorial spot that is also zipping around a full rotation in 24 hours). It would be physically impossible for a receiver on the "other" side of the world to see a satellite above central America. Maybe Sirius has several satellites, but still if they only officially serve the US market I can't see these venturing any further East/West than the US Atlantic and Pacific coasts (maybe a little out into the Pacific to serve Hawaii better). I seriously doubt that they'd have a satellite where someone in, say, Bombay could hook in.

The other issue that comes up is angle of ascention. While it's a nice just-off-vertical and tilted south for the US customers, once you start moving east/west (or to the extreme north/south) you start making it a far more horizontal angle. Which means, living in an area without a clear horizon you will get poor results. Moreover, the smaller the angle of ascention, the more atmosphere the signal has to go through, causing connection issues.

I could be wrong. Maybe Sirius foolishly wastes its money providing satellite service to the other half of the world just for the small market of folks who are adventurous enough to open a US account just to sign on. Or, maybe they market world-wide service as a key feature for traveling businessmen (possible, but that makes me even less likely to subscribe!) Doesn't seem likely though.

I checked around at comp usa, best buy and even the apple store to see if the mini's they had in stock would be reduced in price because of the new ones that came out.

Best buy and Comp USA had no clue that new models were released and would not budge in price. I dont know what the apple store policy is.

Shouldnt comp usa and best buy reduce the price of the core solo minis they have left?

you can get them refurbed off the Apple site for less. 479 USD for the old lowend, 649 USD for the old high end.

I wouldn't hold my breath on the word processing and web surfing. WebTV showed surfing the internet on a TV sucked because trying to read normal-sized text from six feet away was hard, and bumping the text size up would goof up the page layout generally. Same reason word processing would be silly.



Here is your quote SeaFox.

You are an condescending individual and take my post out of context.

So, easily seen. The employ the exact same codecs.
They CAN use the same codecs. The problem on the BD side is that... all of the Sony discs (and other studios so far) use MPEG2 for video and standard DD or PCM for audio.

Also, the current generation BD decks (Samsung and forthcoming Sony deck) cannot decode DD+, Dolby TruHD audio formats. They can only do same DD and DTS as old DVDs. HD DVD decks can decode DD+ and Dolby TruHD (TruHD can only be decoded to stereo in the current decks, though, unfortunately.) Also, the software needs to have audio encoded in DD+ and Dolby TruHD. All HD DVD discs have at least DD+. No BDs have DD+.

If Sony and other studios started using VC-1 or H.264 for video, things might look better for BD... but they aren't using it. I don't think there are any plans for Sony to author discs using VC-1... ever. It's all MPEG2 as far as I have heard.

[Warner Home Video has already released HD DVDs in VC-1... so it would stand to reason they'd just use the same encode for their BDs, but I guess we'll see if that is true.]

That's the trick. Talking pure specs, on paper, before anything was ever released, and BD seemed like it should be equal or better. Reality... I mean actual implementation, of course, is a different matter.

-Terry

I guess you don't read the news. Toyota has recalled millions of vehicles this year, even though not every owner of those vehicles was specifically experiencing the problem.

But his point was that the owner of the car must still bring it in for repair. If they were unaware of the issue it would be unresolved.

Which essentially makes it the same situation as the iPhone. If the owner of the phone has a problem they get the 'fix' if they request it.

But I don't think the magnitude of the problems are anywhere near equal. A $15,000-$20,000 piece of machinery that has a problem that could endanger the operators life vs a $200 cell phone that could drop a call.

I'll tell you why I'd buy a MacBook Air or Thin or Light, and ideally it would be some tablet-style offspring/hybrid of a MacBook and iPhone...Medical Documentation. Here's (sort of) what we're using in my hospital now:
http://www.interiormall.com/images/cat/furn/COW20-CoverDW1_b.jpg
Except ours don't even look that elegant. It's called a "COW" for Computer On Wheels and it is the kludgiest most inconvenient way to move room to room and patient to patient. I can actually access our system by VNSea to my office computer from my hacked iPhone and get more reliable and consistent WiFi reception and UI than using these stupid Dell COWS. I'd buy a iPhoneMEGA or MacBooknano (iPad??!) to walk around with in a heartbeat. Even if the OS itself is limited, as long as it had some sort of Back To My Mac or VNC client on it, it would literally take the place of that ridiculous COW in my life.

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/8707/img0388uf.jpg (http://img7.imageshack.us/i/img0388uf.jpg/)

This is my first Mac computer so nothing special but I love it.

I personally would love to see both formats fall flat on their asses. Both sides are way too stubborn to standardize and are expecting consumers to waste money on one side or the other, just to have their super-expensive players become paperweights when a standard is picked.

Not to mention, the DRM is so restrictive its not even funny. Especially on Blueray. It is rediculous that if you use an analog connection or a non-secured digital connection that blueray down-samples and then up-samples the video to distort it so you cannot somehow make a digital copy. Thats not how the professional pirates duplicate discs! Morons, all they are doing is once again hurting consumers. Blueray players even phone home to tell Sony what you've been watching and download new encryption keys incase someone broke the keys like they did with CSS. Sony has assumed way too much control with Blueray, so if I'd have to pick either format I'd go with HD-DVD. Lets not forget Microsoft is backing HD-DVD on the X-Box 360. Last week when I was at the game store, they said the add-on drive would be coming soon for around $100. Thats alot less than a blueray player. Heck, when combined with this fall's xbox price cuts (we all know its going to happen with the ps3 release), it will be significantly less than buying a PS3 for a blueray player.

We've seen it with Betamax, MiniDisc, MemoryStick, etc. Sony doesn't play well with others, they like their own formats. Heck, take a look at the Sony DRM fiasco from last year with the rootkit CDs. Do you really trust Sony to be checking in on what Blueray discs you are playing and verifying your encryption keys on a dailybasis? There are very few features in Blueray which are consumer friendly.

Like I said, HD-DVD and Blueray both suck in my opinion, too many DRM controls, too expensive, not enough difference really over DVD for most people....

So.......back to the main topic, what do I want Apple to do?
Nothing, don't include either. I knew someone who felt very betrayed when he purchased a PowerMac with DVD-RAM drive. He was convinced because Apple chose that drive that it was where the industry was headed. A year later he could barely find media for it and he couldn't use the discs on anyone elses machines. He actually has always been a pro-mac person, preaching to everyone, but that absolutely infuriated him.

Until there is a standard, Apple should stay out of the way. It doesn't matter if they put it in the highend mac or not, people say people spending that much don't care.........thats not true. They do care, they usually spend that much extra to get a job done with extra features they need. Compatibility and future proofing is a BIG DEAL to these people.

So......apple should not put Blueray in anytime soon. BTO option? MAYBE....BUT......they should put lengthy and wordy warnings when selected informing users that it may be a paperweight in a year.

Add to this the fact that the iPod's storage capacity has remain unchanged for, perhaps, the longest time in iPod history. With video capability, 60GB just isn't that big anymore. Hasn't Seagate had an 80GB 1.8" drive available for several months?

We need to have a new, improved, (and thinner?) form factor, with larger capacity, at the current price point.


But.... I never keep ALL the vids i've downloaded on the iPod. Do you personally need to? or can you do as I do and just uncheck the boxes in the iTunes lib (or use the manual transfer method) for videos you don't want at that time/for that trip?

I usually put enough to last me a trip and a few extra - my oldest son insists on his Clone Wars Vols. 1 and 2 and some Mystic Force Rangers, my youngest, Baby Einstein and some ripped kids shows off of Tivo - not Tivo supported yet on mac but my wife's PC laptop from her lab gets the shows transferred and I muck about with it - COME ON Tivo, get with it!!!! - and I insist on my Streets videos and presentations in Keynote.

On that point, someone mentioned wireless usefullnes in the presentation arena but it is quite easy to just use the iPod as an HD and run it from there or use a dock w/ remote, but I do appreciate/like that wireless idea for this app nonetheless :cool: ; maybe as an add-on like an FM transmitter or iTalk with its own power supply/easily swapped AA, AAA, independently rechargeable or whatever batteries so as to avoid my issues with wireless killing iPod play time capacity during untetherd use?

Not as elegant or "SEXY-WOW!," as mobile OS X or whatever but I've sold quite a few old-time PC guys on the merits of apple by showing them the difference between the real Keynote presentation straight off a mac laptop and the exported - more or less; less mostly - PPT show run from the iPod through their windows box in the briefing area.

The iPod mobile Firefox and the ability to do that with any software really (given the effort and skill) also had them excited. Security, uniforminity and transportability of essential info/prefs/forms data/ pushing info out to such devices in the hands of squad leaders and even the regular soldier/security contractor a la an ITMS type interface are a big concern for us which this type of development provides to a degree.

And the iPod or a mac laptop coupled with Keynote and it's ease of use, clarity and attention grab during the few briefings I've handled has already convinced a few of my superiors to 1) pay for a new mac laptop for me asap and 2) requisition some more on a test basis to work out just how much more secure they are than leaky windows boxes and, I extrapolate, the Zaney or whatever MS will call their iPod Killer if it makes it to market. (comments, ideas, proof-of-concept walk-throughs would be helpful in my crusade in this area. Maybe "Crusade," is a poor choice of words....:rolleyes:

The rest of my family's personal vids, video-grams, "miss you" videos, etc I keep archived in iTunes on one drive location shared by all computers authorized to do so - or backed up somewhere if you'd rather do it that way - but with drive storage getting even more affordable by the minute and the soon to be pervasiveness of Network Drives without the need to log into a "server" as such, I've no issue keeping them (unchecked so they don't sync to the iPod next time) in my regular library shared between all my computers (when I'm at home).

My wife has no issue keeping up with this way of doing things while I'm away and she's not really as computer savvy as I :p and includes a work PC :mad: in the mix. We just point all the home machines to one of our big external drives dedicated to music and video - or you could use an alias on each machine that does the same thing I suppose. She's been able to troubleshoot that herself with minimal input from me after the initial walk-through/discussion of the theory behind it. Once I cycle back to the states and spend some cash we will be able to afford - and I hope I will be able to convince my wife of the necessity of getting netdrives; it'd be convenient for her work from lab - yeah that's it... and we're going to soon need to have separate HDs for music and video with the relevant appps pointed accordingly to the right location. Two, three clicks in the apps pref panel. Easy as making MREs.

This also does away with the need to have shared music libs on the same subnet, duplicating libraries on each machine and thus wasting space, the headaches of making sure we all have the same access to the same libraries or doing backflips/using unsupported hacks to make sure everyone has the latest download purchased on "Machine X" available for all other authorized computers - all you need do is access the drive(s) wherein resides the "real" library you need for that particular app.

That said, being rather far from home at the minute I have been reduced to having a real (read: extra) copy of everything on my laptop here and it's a real pain in the ass. Especially when one of us buys a new track or video and I need to get it FTPd from her to me, me to her or sent some other way back and forth so we all have an actual copy, but this is only temporary one way or the other...:eek: It was just too snail slow doing it the aforementioned way from here.

Depending on quality offered with the alleged movie service, however, a bump to 80Gig wouldn't be bad but I think I could make do with my 60gig with some planning ahead as noted above.

I think we all agree on the need for bigger screen real estate but when you start adding the bigger/better res screen, an HD bump of at least 20gig high end, the no-touch thingy, the wireless everyone but I seems to find useful/feasible, etc... into the price factor, the iPod looses some of it's appeal to the masses and becomes the must-have-tech-geek-mac-fan gadget my gen 1 was way back when.... Oh you should have heard my wife then. And do you still remember being in public with one - the only one? :)

Geeky, but we (or, more precisely, Apple) were right.

Also, the "smaller" form factor you mention would, I think make battery life even less satisfactory for long haul trips w/out the ability to recharge often or at all. Add the wireless some are clamoring for and you might get 30 minutes if you're lucky. Hell, the latest Streets exclusive video is longer than Thriller at 20 minutes!

Tangentially, has anyone else seen the news stories (mostly since the Dell battery issue) about fuel cells or some other sort of power source for these devices that seem to be more and more dangerous from a heat standpoint?

Anyone with some technical background in that area with some insight on cost, size, cell life, feasability for an iPod like device, etc??? Would that make sense in a next gen iPod (and/or laptops, tablets (come on apple! I still love my Newton!!), an iPhone/vid chatter/presentation device thing, etc...??) maybe that's a partial solution to some of my and others' concerns with all this wireless talk and hoped-for new features.

Not concerned with the impending refresh? Or do you plan to return and rebuy post-refresh?

I bought an 08 MacBook Aluminum. So No i'm not concerned or care about the upcoming refresh.

Hi, can anyone explain me how is the Cinema Display 30" "flying" in Transporteur's 2007 setup (page 79, Part 13)? :confused:

Is he using a VESA wall mount?

Thanks!

I don't think it is flying. I think is it leaning towards the wall.

Must we get involved in this? Can't France do something for once by themselves, or any other european nations for that matter? When was the last time they even fired a weapon? You know, the taliban were once known as freedom fighters too. I'm so sick of these countries, let them self destruct, maybe some day they will choose to civilize themselves. Please, no more US to the rescue, and then they all wonder why many Americans have a feeling of exceptionalism. :rolleyes:

...but we know that the mini-tower is inevitable....:)

Well of course, but that still doesn't excuse his hypocritical post. :D :cool: