
Quote: Originally Posted by
Qdos
And if you smoke, your Mac warranty is null and void...

That's like the craziest thing ever. I live in los Angeles. Stick a fan in a window non smoking and by the end of summer it will be covered with black as the air quality is that bad. After reading that article on the mac warranty voided which I hope ends up in court, I went to the EPA website and found that living in places like Mexico and china is like smoking two packs a day. I'm sure california is preety close too plus they (Apple) make no mid range desktop as their desktops are made of server parts to increase profit margins and they will argue that most sales are laptops which they are but are normally crippled unless you buy the 17" which is the only machine that has an exress slot.
if you have a good, great gaming machine by Apple, you also have a device that will run their Pro Apps and oddly, Apple assumes they will lose money as the Pros, 2~3%, would buy the cheaper alternative, and their right, we would but so woudnt the gamers (who make up more sales then video sales and music sales combined), as well as the millions of ProSumers who don't really have the cash for a server made desktop but do have the talent, not to mention all the studios that had mac pros would also buy these non existent devices for their smaller rooms. In a nutshell, Apple would MAKE money not lose money due to lack of sales but they can't seem to figure that out yet.*
Avid/Digidesing did!!!! They saw people were no longer buying their $$10,000 TDM (processing chips in a card, thus reducing CPU latency which you cannot have in music), and saw computers were getting faster and faster and more core on a single dye were happening, so they purchased M-Audio which relies on the cpu only. In music it's caled native recording vs TDM. In fact, for the mac pro, for those left with the express slot, now only the 17" has it forces yet higher prices on the pro, with an express card, you can purchase something similar that puts all the processing on the card that goes into the express slot. Google. "UAD laptop express" card and you'll see what I mean. Apple could make more money simply by adding an express slot on the iMac. Add in esata and the sales go even higher. *
Anyway, Apple can do it but won't as I said earlier great grahics normally mean it can run pro apps and they don't really want that and rather have you buy the mac pro when in fact they would make so much more anyway.*
Check it out. Let's pretend apple released a $1000 i7 core with a great graphics card, 1000 FSB, normal memory, headless and in the future you could swap the CPU out. *
You would have thousands of gamers buy them.*
You would have millions of musicians buy them and buy their own ram after market, similar to gamers.*
You would have everyone that is tired of windows but has nice HDMI DVI diplays buy them.*
You would have the more semi pro photographer buy them. *
You would have most all semi pro video users buy these.*
And ironically, all the pros apple were afraid they would lose sale to, would buy these instead of the pc rendering farms as well as place them in their smaller studios, so it not a matter of how come, it more like their are misguided somehow. I mean they really only care about the iPhone now, example, One to One and Pro C are used to be one program. Now it's seperated and most of the training used to be pro apps, and is now iLife and $99 each. So why not go ahead and build them. *There is a huge market out there. The only problem I would see is people would want their own video card at new egg or Frys pricing and apple would have to start supporting numerous cards but all the companies are gone and there's only nvidia and ati, so that wouldn't be that big of a deal and it would for sure, put a dent in the hacntosh.
There are millions of users waiting. Just take a page from what digidesign did.*
They would have 20% of the marketshare within a year and to top it off, it would increase the sales of iMacs as business and enterprise started off with these mid range machines. 30% in less than 5 years. Is it really so hard to understand Apple?
On the other hand their iLife and iWork software is fluid throughout. For example, when I discovered pages, which is their version of word, it can open and save as word documents. Tge coolest thing though is that it's more like Indesign or word on steroid ond is ver cheap which also includes nubers like exce and keynot like power point and all have really nice templates and work fast. It sort of works like you think it should too. For exampele in pages you can just drag an image and poof, there it is. It has shadow and reflection alll ready to gi at a moments notice ir making a mask with any shape. Great for news letters and stopped using the clunky Indesign after about 1 week with pages.
The othervcool thing is all the toolbars are present on all their software bexample. If you learn how to use the inspector in pages, it's going to be the same in iPhoto, numbers, keynote. Sure each will have additional features but even iMovie willmhave inspector and there is nothing that comes close to there free iLife suite on new computers and iMovie is pretty powerful for what it is.
Like I said though. Apple tailors to either the consumer or pro and completely misses the boat with the prosumer. Example. Your a audio artist. Sure the iMac quad is faster than some newer mac pros but you have no esata ports no expansion and are stuck with what they think is best all because they fear the pro market would buy these cheap products instead of the pro machines. Fail. Pros would buy both and when it come to graphics, forget anything like after effexfs as you have to get the MacBook pro line and 17" at that if you want a smidget of expansion. My advice. Check out insanely mac at osx86,com and build yourself a $800 machine that will give the graphics of your choice and because you still have bios you can overclock and run circles around their $3000 machines.
Peace.