Posts by stu 4 775 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
and one of my points was that: the parts are actually very reasonably priced. and that apple labour charge can only be described as extremely cheap.
all-on-ones have always been more 'laptop' than desktop in terms of parts - that's always been the case. clue is in the name.
Really, in my 20 years with PCs, I've never met anyone other than a geek (like me) who has ever even opened their PC up, never mind upgraded it. Yes I used to do it all the time, but I realise I am the exception.
They expect someone to do this sort of thing for them, either by a technician at work for work laptops, or by a specialist they take it to.
changing batteries in a remote control is about as complex as most people want to get.
Look at cars: do we see 'how easy is it to change the oil in the new Ford Focus? How easy can the gearbox be changed?' when a new car comes out ? do we buggery - because hardly anyone services their own cars these days.
30 years ago, it was pretty normal for your average joe to do most car servicing tasks (I know I used to), now hardly anyone would consider it :
1. because we have come to expect the service industry to do this sort of stuff, and a higher standard of living means we don't mind spunking out the cash for a wrench monkey.
2. cars became more complex and harder to DIY as a side effect of technological advances, etc.
I don't see how apple's approach differs in any way ?
I had my mate's macbook pro fixed a few weeks back by apple: internal fan buggered, and dvd drive shafted. parts: 80 quid. labour: 30 quid. and turned around in a day. Why would anyone do it themselves ? truth is: apart from a few geeks like you and me - they wouldn't.
"Let us do X please, we'll only use it for this wee thing"
is constantly their cry.
And time and time again, they are given power to do X, and after a short interval make use of it wherever they can possibly use it.
I'm always stunned at the way Britain in the past 20-30 years seems to have totally abandoned all principles of 'seperation from the state'. As a previous commentard pointed out - we used to uphold our principles of privacy and freedom of speech.
Yet now we are all happy to be videoed 24/7, monitored about where we go, what we buy and who we do it with, and are quite happy when people get locked up for having something written on a t-shirt.
Have we invented a new kind of democratic fascism ?
In a sense I hope it all blows up in their stupid faces and they get what they all deserve.
Unfortunately as I live here too, I'm sure I'll also be its recipient.
stu
I used to use a MBP 17 matte macbook. It cost me a fair amount of cash, though I use it for work rather than the crappy work laptop I have been issued with.
You know the one with the lovely matte screen - with no glass in front.
The number of people who will endevour to 'point out' things on a screen when around your desk and are seemingly unable to avoid poking their 1.greasy. 2. solid fingers into my screen is truly astounding. Seemingly unable to point without making LCD rainbows all over the pressure point, as their apparently monocular vision helps thrust another of their grotty digits into the LCD matrix.
Having now replaced it with a MBP15 retina - I admit to finding the glare of the glass less than welcome - however the fact that my depth perception limited colleagues hit glass with their digits is far less disturbing at least - I need only worry about cleaning the grease off and not having to replaced a cracked screen.
I remember when I went into Besy Buy in the states for the first time : my god - a store that has reasonably prices and cares for its customers.. hell, it even has knowledgable staff! And the damaged stock/etc section has prices to SELL not 10% off with no power supply, manual or box like Comet/Currys/PCWorld/etall.
15 years on, and Best Buy tried to come to Britain and failed, and the high street retailers are still every bit as shit as they ever were. The different now, is that its not just geeks like me that buy stuff from the internet -so long Comet - you will not be missed.
quite.
I do wonder what folk do with these things.
My iphone4 is over 2 years old. I don't have a case. I don't have a stupid plastic cover thing on it all the time or a screen protector.
It hasn't got a mark on it.
Funny enough, having something that cost me 600 quid means I take care of it and DON'T stick it in the same pocket as my keys or lose change. I don't chuck it on the ground, give it to the dog, use it to bash in nails...
It's not freckin rocket science is it - folk these days seem to not give a shit about looking after things (their cars is another example - 2 year old cars with scrapes all over them, never been washed ever, etc).
Personally it's no skin of my nose if you can't be bothered looking after something - but why it then becomes the manufacturers fault for your laziness escapes me.
And it seems a moot point as most muppets then seem to encase the thing is a piece of plastic crap anyway which constantly makes me wonder why Apple bothers - it's like the illogical 'car bra' to stop your bumper being scratched...
why ?
oh- the car would look bad with a scratched bumper.
er.. yeh but it looks like shit with a stupid car bra on it.
but it won't have any scratches if I take the bra off.
eh ? eh ? I mean WTF ?
cases for phones have always struck me as equally fuckwitted.
an 11 inch retina, with quartz debugging enabling full use of resolution would do me.
Failing that, the 13 with same.
I've been 11ing for a few years now, though typing this on my MBP17 I still need for work dev sometimes for the real estate - give me insanely small text and I'll be a happy bunny. At least for another 10 years or so when I start to need racing glasses!
like the lcd wacom, what is the point ? I mean, I have a few wacom tablets - they are great. and the high resolution means you can draw very accurately.
however, as this (like the lcd wacoms) is effectively glued to an extremely low (in comparison) screen the high resolution is utterly useless.
never seen the point of these. I bought one back on 2004 (tablet with pressure sensitive wacom) and it was pants for the same reason.
If you have a look you'll see a Sony UX50 in there.
Now _that_ was a PDA ahead of it's time too.
Came out nearly 10 years ago in 2003.. now remember this is just the same year the first colour phone came out.
bluetooth
GPS
hardware accelerated video playback
camera
480x240 colour touchscreen
expandable memory
keyboard
the weird thing is - it didn't sell well because it cost over 400 quid.
and yet now, we thing nothing of paying 600 quid for an iphone.
it's a strange strange world.
do any still work like that ? I remember that being 'sold' to me by a website 10 years or so ago ?
main benefit seemed to be far smaller dish required as no uplink was needed. There were claims of latency savings too, but not really sure I can see how that bit worked unless is was reliability/data rate or something.
Obviously uprate was hellish aka 56k speed, but downlink speeds were claimed in the 256-512 range at the time.
Is my workhorse.
I find the screen great. I'd love it to be retina, though I understand some people find it too high DPI as it is - not me.
thunderbolt adapters now for gigabit as you say, and also FW 800.
This allows me to have my portable, bus powered 2TB WD 'My passpost Studio' HD with FW800 with me with all my music, photos, vms, and video collections, and camera footage on it, and keep the 256MB SSD relatively clean.
Get 60MB/sec read/write over the FW adapter which makes running parallel VMs, and editing HD video direct off the drive perfectly fine.
I have a MBP17 that now sits in a corner gathering dust.
The air screens have never been as horribly glossy as the pros (my MBP17 is matte) so I find them ok.
I'd love the extra screen real estate of the 13", but it is just soooooo big.
stu
is to be such an uber-geek that you get deliveries of gadgets on a daily basis and know ever courier company driver personally.
Sometimes I've been out at the corner shop or driving my car to work or summit and a courier will be coming the other way flashing his lights for me to stop and take my 'daily' parcel.
My posty signs for my recorded/special deliveries too and hides them in my 'secret place'*
yes... I know I am sad.
stu
*this is not a euphemism
I've got a 133Wh one. Had it a few years. great for long plane flights, camping, adventure sports, etc. cost about 80 quid.
I bought an old non-working PSU for a mac off ebay for a fiver and that got me a maglock connector I could wire up to it.
It outputs 19v, 16v and 5v (USB), so will power just about everything.
I can fully recharge my MBA about 4 times with it, or more usually it provides me with portable power when I'm out paragliding/paramotoring/mountain biking/etc for recharging my iphone, go pro, macbook air, sony camera, etc.
Yes it weighs a wee bit (1.5kg) but its an absolute godsend when you are spending a days or more up a mountain, etc, etc.
On holidays, I usually just keep it in a day rucksack with the air, etc. when I'm not using the air - its plugged in to the pack recharging, so when I pull it out to use it I've always got a full charge.
stu
Having had a Fire since it came out, and a nexus since it came out, there is no comparison.
And HW wise the new Fire HD looks a step up from the old, but still no GPS or gyros and in a 7" factor I use them all the time - it makes a great satnav for example having just used it on a touring trip around scotland.
Hell the old fire didn't even have a mic in it!
But the main thing that made the old fire an absolute DOG was the amazon version of android - it was absolutely hellish. It looks like it still has a version of it which makes it completely unusable imho.
Quite apart form the fact the fire HD is the size of a whale.
stu
Even as a kid of the 70s, I never saw the point of the specialised kits some of my mates had - they just seemed rubbish and limiting to me - I could build whatever kind of space ship I wanted - they could just stick together the crappy space ship kit and that was that... where was the fun in that ?
I remember lots of time playing with my sister and a big box of lego - basic blocks + some wheel blocks (you need them!).
It's strange though, my sister has 2 girls now - 4 and 6 and both and 'girly girls' - pink everything, dolls and furry toys, etc. no interest in lego or any construction type toys at all - and not through parental genderifying (?is that a word... well no.. osx has just underlined it in red... oh well) - maybe it really is just in their genes ?
at the end of the day it would be pretty miraculous if the one 2 things different been the sexes turned out to be tits and a fanny - I think one could make a pretty airtight case that the development of of other differences are almost inevitable from our evolutionary roots - and yet we continue to try to push this 'girls and boys are alike' thing on our society.. it's clearly bollocks.
For better video support, Movist is really nice. It's less clunky than VLC imho - and VLC, with its own drivers being its advantage, can also be a disadvantage in that it tends not to support as good HW video acceleration as quicktime or open source FFDSHOW, etc based stuff like Movist.
Also, it supports 5.1 out the box with no fanning around, whereas VLC can be a right pain to get 5.1 out to your amp.
Movist is opensource. BUT there is a newer version also on the app store which is commercial (though only 2.99).
However, the free one plays everything I chuck at it, including smooth playback stuff like raw .mts 1080p 50fps stuff straight from my Sony HX9v SD card with low cpu use - which VLC cannot do.
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/27642/movist/#ratings
I tend to stick to XMBC for playing back MKVs - it has great low cpu usage, great general support. But for just quickly playing a video, my default app is set to Movist for all video types.
stu
yeh - I think my Nexus 7 is great and I'm an appletard.
My totally unscientific pole of 'how many folk have I seen with em in the last 2 weeks' shows me quite a lot of nexus 7s - suggesting a pish load of folk have bought em.
After my Kindle Fire I got at xmas, I had almost given up on android, but it all seems to be working nearly as good as iOS now (though the keyboard, and text selection,etc is still not as good).
Working in IT (albeit as an architect) I am 1st line support for family, friends, and friends of friends of family.
It does annoy me that if I asked one of those folk who happened to be a joiner/electrician/etc to do summit for me, the best I could expect is a discount.
And yet I'd regularly spend 5 hours backing up their crappy laptop, formatting, installing new OS, apps, putting back their data, etc... I mean what's the option ?
Ok, PCs (well macs now for me mainly) are a hobby... but I can't claim it's a coincidence - I got into IT because I liked IT and computers - if you didn't - F^^ck off back to accountancy.
It surprises me is the number of people in IT (as developers, designers or architects) who don't know one end of a PC/ac/linux box from the other.
You may well moan and say 'why should I, I 'architect' systems'... but I'd say - curiosity is one of the defining characteristics of man - and essential for a good engineer. If you can work in front of something 8 hours a day and have not been curious enough about it to become an expert, you sir, are not an engineer - you are an Eloy.
I've been down voted before for this sort of comment, but surely it's not that contravential ?
Anyway, my solution appeared when I started to move all my computers at home to osx and mac (the last hackintosh has gone now ! all apple). Now I give them the line that 'I don't have windows kit anymore so can't support them - but if they get a mac I'll be happy to help'.
stu
unless you are knocking out games, most apps are going to be being written more and more in HTML5 anyway with stuff like PhoneGap/Dojo or wrapped up in Worklight.
If you ARE writing natively cross platform, you'd have to find a pretty good business case to do a WM version these days - android, iPhone and blackberry (coming up way back in the rear) would be your first choices most times I'd have thought. Certainly my company has never been asked by a client to do a WM app since WinCE in the early 2000s.
the guy saying 'if you are doing windows desktop you can do windows mobile is based on the horribly mistaken (imho) microsoft approach that you run the same apps on both (not same TYPE of apps, but the same actual app)- there is no evidence of that whatsoever as far as I can see.
And as an apple fanboy (7 mac inc airs, iMacs, minis, iPhone, etc) I offer this:
It's great! Far better than my kindle fire. I didn't want a big iPad (or a small iPad) as the tablet is more a 'cut down air for me in that I want to root, play mkvs, etc, etc).
lovely screen. very very fast. plays 1080p content nice.
today I'll be rooting it and adding OTG support for my 64gb usb stick! :-)
Can't believe that in 2012, Sony, Panasonic and others are still flogging cameras that shoot in interlaced 50i format - other than some advanced intelligent de-interlacing filters, the first thing thats gonna happen when you import the footage into iMovie, vegas, or whatever you use is that half the frames will get chucked away - unless the user edits in 50i in which case that is very rarely ever what is wanted - and they end up posting an interlaced video to youtube, etc which looks terrible.
Sony in particular's continued use of interlaced AVCHD (even now that P is supported in the format) is a a great example of what is wrong with Sony as a company there days.
The highest out of the box resolution it will do is 1920x1200 NOT 3840x2400.
Yes, that is the size of the image you will save to the buffer if you save the screen, because that is the resolution the GRAPHICS CARD is running at - but it is then scaling it down to 1920x1200 for display on the 2880x1800 screen - compare the real estate size against a MBP17 for proof.
This seems to be confusing a lot of journos for some reason.
You CAN set it native - via switchResX or quartz debug to 2880x1800 though - it's a pity this can't be done on a per desktop/spaces basis though - i.e. it'd be good to have a few virtual desktops at full native res, and some at hiDPI.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1387363
Also, I'm sure it has mic in just like the air - it just uses the same headphone socket for both, just like your phone....
stu
ok, it'd be nice if they were included - but its no different from wanting a mini display port to VGA, etc really.
And I'd imagine a lot of air users will be upsizing, so used to that + no DVD.
Personally I can't remember the last time I stuck a DVD into either of my 2 mac minis, 3 iMacs, MBP17 or MBA11. It was years ago that's for sure. Similarly I think Apple got it just right to not bother with blueray media shite.
I agree it is a bit of a bummer to pay extra for these, however it might be worth pointing out to those considering apple purchases, that discounts are available. For example employee (not of apple - YOUR employer) discounts of around 300 quid can be had on a 2700 quid macbook-retina.
http://store.apple.com/uk_epp_137053
OK, 2400 quid is still a lot for a laptop I know... but you're worth it :-)
Not anymore DeMello, that's one of the benefits of SSD. Along with no defrag issues.
So the old mantra of 'never set your data/scrub/temp' to same drive as boot drive is nonsense now.
Unless you are planning to plug another SSD into your USB3 or thunderbolt you are going to slow things down far far more using an external HD rather than using the system disk.
fair point - but there will still be a fair number of cases where an external isn't requred. Especially with the 512MB. I'd have 350 gig or so to play with which should be enough for most shoots.
Upgrading wise - when I moved from Vegas/Windoze over to FCP/mac about 5 years ago, upgrading was an issue for me.
What I've found though is that I now tend to upgrade my laptops every 1-2 years anyway which I'd never do on windows. Why ? Because the residuals on the macs are so good, plus the new models have usually had a killer feature you'd never really be able to upgrade to anyway. So I'm not fussed about upgradability really.
Take the late 2008 MPB I have. 3.05Ghz core duo.
It had been sitting looking forelorn in a corner since I got the first MBA11 in 2010, and even more since that got upgraded to the 2011 model.
I swapped out the HD for a 512 SSD, and moved the DVD out and put the 512HD in there as a secondary, upped memory to 8g.
But it is still about 50% the speed of the i7 air. Stuff moves on so quick, that short of everything being upgradable in trigger's broom fashion, upgrades just don't cut it.
Take the MBA2010 vs MBA2011.
Both were specced to max, so around £1200. I sold the 2010 for 700, so cost me 500 to upgrade. I'll get about 700 now for the 2011 one if I decide to go for the MBP15HiDPI.
That 500 quid, got me, 2xSSD+twice as fast SSD, around 100-200% increase in speed and much better hardware acceleration. That seems a pretty good deal to me.
MBPs seem to have even better residuals - my 2008 cost me 2200, and after 4 years, the going price is around £1000-1200. 50% after 4 years is pretty amazing for a computer! Not even a BMW can beat that :-)
I'm with you on the 512 - and will probably end up getting one. I'd go for the upgraded CPU (and memory) anyway, so it is an option.
The 'don't do editing using an internal/system drive' though is waaay too 90s.
Even FW800 gets around 40-60MB/sec or so tops.
My little air gets 250MB/sec,
On my 256SSD I have around 100 gig free and thats with all my pro apps (FCP, FCPX, plugins, adobe creative suite, garageband + all sample packs, etc).
I manage my photos in Aperture and create a library per project - I can then easily archive the library off the SSD when I'm done.
I do the same effective thing with my video files, either through archiving the FCPX events, or my own directory layouts.
To instead be editing your video - reading/writing your video and previews, etc on a FW800 with a super fast SSD internally available would be absolute madness.
er.. it's a pretty much open secret that the beeb is big on FCP (and now FCP X), and a lot of that is gonna be in field on a MBP.
Why don't you think pros use laptops ? I have a 27" iMac which is great if I'm editing in the office, but I need something in the field too - I was using a MBP17 until a few years ago, when I found the MBA11 was sooo much faster, more portable.etc. The downside : 1366x800 screen makes for constanting zooming in and out to check certain edits.
I think you are gonna see lots of editors going for the new MBP15-hiDPI.
SSD wise, I tend to use external for archives, and can usually fit the project I am currently working on on SSD free space. When I'm done it gets archived onto the HD.
stu
crazy isn't it ? I mean, I remember when I had my Amiga, I'd have various CLI windows doing things, maybe a game open in another window, etc.
Technical people especially like to work that way - on my mac I tend to have a browser open with one or more windows, each with multiple tabs, Mail open, and also might be working in Aperture, PS and Final Cut. I'll have my spaces set so that each 'productivity space' has the apps I need to work concurrently on all available at the same time to hop back and forward, monitor, etc.
Nothing special about the mac here by the way - linux, windows just as capable of doing this.
And now Windoze 8 take us back to a windowless (DOS?) world where you do one thing at a time.
utter mince. you do wonder what they are smoking sometimes.
It seems like the dumbing down on tv, news, society has finally reached the OS.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
