PC Peripherals New Apple iMacs, Mac Minis, Mice, etc

[6pack]

^ i think this line sums it all up:

Apple Os works with Apple hardware only!

try putting in any third party hardware and you have a hard time.

 

[R0H!T]

^^

no, i meant, IF they come out with a standalone OS product like MS Windows...

and I dont wanna start a new war with this statement..my actual question is in my previous post.

 

[6pack]

^ i think long time back Apple had started selling their OS separately, but failed since Microsoft Windows was better. (this is what i have read in many apple - windows spats, i dont have any means of verifying it. I think they almost went bankrupt and got saved only cause of Steve Jobs. some story like that...)

So, ultimately, what I want to know is, is the Apple brand [their computer part] popular mainly because of the UI [the OS part] or the hardware is AS IMPORTANT as the software part?

According to my understanding, Apple computers are popular not for the software or hardware, its popular cause of the brand. I say this cause Apple projects their brand like elite stuff.

[strike]The UI and hardware dont have any say in this in any way.[/strike]
Edit: correction since it sound contradictory. The UI and hardware go hand in hand together to give a good experience.
Also since the os is designed to work on a very limited number of hardware devices, they have customized the code [like better battery life management, faster startups] so that you as a customer get very good response from the hardware. So chances of them going retail like MS is very rare now.

 

[hatter]

You do know that majority of the games wont work on MAC so importance of a gaming video card is not high on a MAC buyer's mind.

Yes, I know that. But why charge your valued customers $400 for one year old card? If you are going to put a card anyway, put the one that is latest and has better feature. As far as I know, Leopard is going to make use of OpenCL in a big way. ATI's HD5XXX series is best for now when it comes to OpenCL.

So why chose 4850, 4670 and 4870? Unless of course, AMD, which is looking to get rid of its 4XXX stock, sells them to you at a throwaway prices, allowing you to make a killing by selling these cards non-geek crowd that include very intelligent doctors and creative writers.

 

[superczar]

bah, why does a thread on apple hardware gets derailed each time?

Don't see the Mac "fanbois" lashing out vocally on each new windows based hardware launch.....

Here's the deal guys, some people don't mind paying a so called premium (debatable, but pointless) for apple hardware..maybe it's the looks, maybe it's the perceived brand value , maybe it's the (debatable) zero headache experience, and now that there is a new hardware line from Cupertino, this thread was created!

Point being this thread is meant to be a sane discussion on the pros and cons of the new hardware line up, and not the already-done-to-death OS X vs Windows mudslinging match....

Can we have peace now please?

 

[Shripad]

bah, why does a thread on apple hardware gets derailed each time?

Don't see the Mac "fanbois" lashing out vocally on each new windows based hardware launch.....

Here's the deal guys, some people don't mind paying a so called premium (debatable, but pointless) for apple hardware..maybe it's the looks, maybe it's the perceived brand value , maybe it's the (debatable) zero headache experience, and now that there is a new hardware line from Cupertino, this thread was created!

Point being this thread is meant to be a sane discussion on the pros and cons of the new hardware line up, and not the already-done-to-death OS X vs Windows mudslinging match....

Can we have peace now please?

Actually every single time an Apple fanboy jumps on any statement in Apple related thread that compares any Apple product to anything else which is non Apple and then it becomes a flame war.

By your logic and also ideally, it shouldnt bother anyone if someone compares Apple product to anything else, or chooses something else or says anything other than ZOMG THIS IS BRILLIANT

 

[Styx]

So... Anytime someone makes a positive claim about Apple, it's fanboyism? LOL, that's fair.

 

[sunny27]

@macinstein---this is a question i would like to ask you in particular since you have been strongly supporting apple in every possible way--i am not looking to start a fight or something---why are macs overpriced for the same set of hardware that any other pc builder would assemble for less-we are not talking about the osx here--discount the osx from the equation.

there was an article about a year back on anandtech.com a highly respectable site about how apple made an insanely huge profit on ipods and iphones while the workers in china-worked to death literally in concentration camp like environments--is apple SO MUCH into making some profit that they would ignore the condition of the workers--aren't they humans?

welfare was never steve job's forte-look at his own story-without the other steve--woz---he was nothing-he built nothing and did nothing.woz never got the credit he deserved.

 

[Party Monger]

Gee, it seems you attack apple, you attack these fanboi's ego..

 

[Aces170]

there was an article about a year back on anandtech.com a highly respectable site about how apple made an insanely huge profit on ipods and iphones while the workers in china-worked to death literally in concentration camp like environments--is apple SO MUCH into making some profit that they would ignore the condition of the workers--aren't they humans?

welfare was never steve job's forte-look at his own story-without the other steve--woz---he was nothing-he built nothing and did nothing.woz never got the credit he deserved.

Another ignorant rip off without understanding the concept, most of the electronic hardware are manufactured by EDS and EMS (Electronic manufacturing services) based companies in China, the biggest in the world being Honhai precision (better known as Foxconn in NA) they more or less manufacture everything from HP notebooks, to Asus mobos, to Apple Iphones/Ipods to what not, infact 75% of the components in your PC/mobile/laptop etc would be manufactured at Honhai precision. The suicide incident was co-incidentally with a worker engaged with Apple hardware, but you can cannot blame Apple as they have just contracted the services, if you can blame Apple, so are almost all big electronic brands to be blamed as all of them contract the product manufacturing to Honhai.

And you cannot blame Apple for over-pricing anything, its a free economy, and there is no dearth of cheaper competition, if yet they are able to sell its because of their perceived brand value. Apple has more or less cross-over to the luxury brands, ask yourself why are GAS/Diesel jeans 2-3X of Levi's for eg?

 

[coolraghav]

I hate coming to topic like this anymore, its like fookin zombies out here.

when will ppl grow up ? when will there be vaccine ?

 

[Styx]

@macinstein---why are macs overpriced for the same set of hardware that any other pc builder would assemble for less

Here's my counter question, Why is MS Windows overpriced? Windows 7 Ultimate license costs almost around 12000 bucks.

See, Apple makes it margin on hardware and Microsoft makes it on guess what? Software!

But this whole notion that "Macs are overpriced" needs to die, seriously. The total cost of ownership including the software changes the equation easily.
Still, If you consider just the hardware which doesn't make any relevant sense in a real world scenario where software plays an equally significant role, let me sum it up to you this way.

A Mac's hardware costs more than a most comparable Windows counterpart, but do companies like Dell and HP make their laptops out of solid aluminum, laser-carved? Nope. Flimsy plastic.
Do they have glass screens? Nope.
Do they have 7-8 hour batteries? Nope?
Do the co. like Acer, HP etc. give a damn about sophisticated design and engineering or innovation? Nope.

If i'm still short of satisfying you, i do not care beyond this point.

 

[sunny27]

ok how about desktop hardware???

you can't argue that a mac workstation cabinet is superior to anything made from coolermaster or antec or one of those high end cases---and i wasn't mentioning laptops here--i was talking abt hardware that goes into your pc---why is mac hardware so obsolete? don't tell me it isn't obsolete---everyone knows it is obsolete!

 

[Lord Nemesis]

@ Lord

Are you talking about Fujitsu FMV series or Averatec all in one desktops by any chance?

It isn't Fujitsu for sure. Its some other Japanese or Korean local brand that isn't known to me. China and South east have several companies that have been manufacturing single piece computers for some time now. One that I know is amazepc (although it has some crappy offerings ), I knew about this company because they used to sell motherboards earlier (in the Pentium II/III era) and I used to own one of their exceptional boards. However the one I was referring to was completely known to me. Unfortunately for me, most of the magazine was in Korean with just a few bits and pieces like numbers and some specs in English. If I had known the english name of the brand, I would have simply googled and posted it.

 

[Lord Nemesis]

I have a genuine question for all of you who have used Mac's..

how important is the hardware in terms of user satisfaction? what I mean is, if Apple started selling OS alone line Windows, then do you think people would still want to own a Apple Desktop/Laptop or they would prefer custom-built rig [for desktop] and any other brand laptop? since you can get same configuration for cheaper price.

leave the looks aside..coz many buyers want their machine to work well. looks matter for first few months only

So, ultimately, what I want to know is, is the Apple brand [their computer part] popular mainly because of the UI [the OS part] or the hardware is AS IMPORTANT as the software part?

I use a 20" Core 2 Duo based iMac as my main development workstation these days and I have Win XP Professional SP3, Tiger patched to 10.4.11 and Leopard 10.5.7 installed on it. I don't need great looks and special effects from my OS. I need performance and stability and I found Win XP to be the best once I setup my full production environment on all three. Its the same with most developers at my office. We have an internal system of rigorously testing any new OS before Its allowed to be deployed as our main development platform. Before apple made the jump to Intel processors, we were happily running Mac OS 9 on some machines and Mac OS X Panther on our Power Mac G5's and although G5's are no match for C2D's they were a lot snappier than the HP Pentium 4 machines we had. Panther was one of the best OS I ever used. Then came along Tiger with an improved UI and and half the stuff broken. It took 4 patches before it was certified internally. On a fresh install and and all 11 patches installed it does seen to be pretty snappy compared to a typical fresh install of Win XP. But then you install XCODE and the rest of the software and tools and it becomes a nightmare to use compared to a typical Win XP with two versions of Visual Studio, MS Office and lots of other software and tools. Then came along Leopard with more improvement's in the UI and some other things, but breaking most of the larger professional publication applications. After 7 patches, it was recently certified internally. However it still has the same problems. Snappier than Windows with a fresh install with patches installed, but deteriorating a lot worse than Windows once you began to use it for a professional work (either development or publishing). Then came along Snow Leopard which supposedly is just a performance tweaked and UI improved version of Leopard but broke a lot of stuff for professional publishers and they are really very unhappy about it. (Check the snow leopard thread where I posted details) Professional publishers constitute a major part of Apples desktop market and these are the people who are ready to spend whatever apple wants for their ultra high end and ultra costly Mac Pros with Double Quad Xeons and the high end iMacs and the Mac Book Pros , but apple has been ignoring their needs in favor of causal users and for their other product lines.

So yeah UI may be the more important thing for a casual user, but hardware and a stable OS (even if its minus a snazzy looking UI and special effects) is really what a serious user wants. I have always found that any commercially supported Unix clone to be almost always better than Windows in terms of stability (although most of windows stability woes can be attributed to a combination of some what poorly protected kernel and poorly written third party drivers and software). Mac OS X deep down is a FreeBSD implementation, so it can't be that bad. I would much rather have the OS without all the crap that apple puts on top of it as that's the source of most of the troubles we face with Mac OS.

 

[R0H!T]

^^ thanks for the detailed post

 

[Styx]

Wow...well, that exact "detailed" response is what i've generally seen in most Apple related threads whether or not it is actually relevant to the question in a true sense.

There are thousands of Apple developers and Software engineers who absolutely enjoy the platform and have been churning out some amazing applications for years. There's a reason why the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference generates such a staggering response every time, the event has been a sell-out for the last 2-3 years, developers/designers love working on the platform.

But at the same time, no platform is 100% trouble free to work with, and then some 3rd party applications, largely due to their own shortcomings fail to retain compatibility across OS versions but labeling the OS unstable for that, is ignorance.
In fact, Mac OS X is largely popular and loved because users find it much more stable and trouble free to begin with.

Calling Snow leopard a "supposedly tweaked and UI improved version of Leopard" is again an understatement by a large extent. Snow leopard actually incorporates a massive rewrite of apps into 64-bit Cocoa(OS X's native API), Apple went through close to 90% of the OS code, re-factoring, improving and adding new advanced technologies like Grand Central Dispatch and Open CL, native Exchange support and many other noticeable performance enhancements throughout the OS.
Apart from a few remote issues which Apple seems to have acknowledged and working upon, Snow Leopard is a good release and it has generated a fair share positive response/reviews.​

Now to answer your actual question, would you just buy something because its cheap and "works" or do you care to look if its build quality is any good or if it would withstand rigorous usage overtime. Its a fact that quality always comes at a price and Apple hardware is just that.(read my previous posts)
Both hardware and software are equally significant to Apple, which is why it makes Mac OS X software for its hardware lineup.
Apple cares more about the user experience and innovation rather than using the latest and greatest GPU in their machines which may or may not be actually required by the user and their formula seems to be working great.

And once again, comparing PC desktops to iMacs is nonsense, because an iMac despite being a "desktop" machine is an All in One.
Instead, pick an AIO from Dell and then do the comparison.​

 

[Shripad]

So... Anytime someone makes a positive claim about Apple, it's fanboyism? LOL, that's fair.

No, the fanboyism is impulsive aggressive response to anything that is said against the company that he/she is fan of.

Countless people diss microsoft, we all cursed them for Vista. You dont see all those who posted here going ga ga in every thread where someone is criticising MS.

Being a fanboy is not a crime, but most of the times, they end up completely ruining the same thread where they try to defend their brand.

On the personal note, I love Apple products aesthetically. But I dont end up buying them most of the times due to 1. Price and 2. Artificial restrictions they put on the users. (Main reason I didnt buy iPhone for all these years when I kept buying other high end offerings from Nokia and HTC. )

When I got a good deal on 2nd hand Macbook, I picked it up. Its a good notebook for day to day use. Gets most things I want done. But I bought it mainly because it looks great, feels great and was value for money at 38k I paid for it

 

[ReekingArchvile]

Only if someone could explain me why ive seen a Mac at every goddamn studio ive visited, i dont even use Pro Tools

 

[Anish]

Only if someone could explain me why ive seen a Mac at every goddamn studio ive visited, i dont even use Pro Tools

Welcome to my world! The answer to your question in almost 70% of the cases is one word, Logic.

The rest of the cases, its because Macs are by and large virus free and largely more productive than Windows when it comes to a specific application range.