Coming Monday, ‘His Steveness’ will once again hold a keynote, at WWDC 2006, in which he at least will talk about Mac OS 10.5, Leopard. Rumours abound: virtual desktops, .Mac file syncing. iChat Mobile. Improved Spotlight, Safari 3.0. Xeon-based Xserves, Mac Pro, and more. For me, it means ten Firefox windows open with live-text streams, spread out over three monitors. Also fun.
If those rumored Mac Pro specs are true…Why are the stock video cards ATI Radeons? It makes no sense to me to spend a base minimum of 2 grand on a computer that claims to be a “professional” box, but doesn’t even include a professional level video card. (!) I’ve even wondered this about the MacBook Pros.
And 512mb or ram? OS X doesn’t run on 512MB of ram, let alone the apps they’ll be using.
Even the Dell Precisions come with Quadros in the base packages, and they start out with 1gb of ram. Even on the Dell business laptops (Latitude) you can upgrade the integrated Intel GMA9xx to a Quadro…No GeForce, no Radeon. These are “gamers” cards.
The Geforce cards are essentially Quadros in drag, but the Radeons are designed mostly for Direct X…why is Apple using them so much? It makes no sense to me.
As a graphic designer I’m one of Apple’s main markets for their towers and “pro” laptops…excuse me “notebooks”. I know the replies to this comment will be in the order of “but it comes with OS X!” So? I can get my work done on Windows or OS X (or Linux if the Adobe apps were ported to it). I just don’t buy it.
Combine this with their PowerMac quality-control…and, well, I can deal with the ugliness of a Dell and the crappiness of Windows.
It’s the strange and expensive quirks like this that keep me from buying an Apple.
Apple have, for a very long time sold base RAM with the G5s to:
1) Give a low base price for the website and advertising
2) Any Pro worth his salt buys and fits his own RAM
3) Many companies move RAM around and manage it seperately
4) Uses for G5s are many, users prefer to start low and config up to the right number of Gigs. Some things (like internal web serving) will run fine on 512MB.
will run fine on 512MB.
So will it on a pIII-400 with 128 MB. Poor excuse. 512MB in a pro machine is like putting a 1.0l 4 cylinder engine in a Ferrari and claiming it’s a sports car.
And I gave three other additional reasons, you haven’t read.
And 512mb or ram? OS X doesn’t run on 512MB of ram
It runs just fine on my old 466MHz Power Mac G4 (circa 2001) with only 384MB (I got 1GB for my MacBook though)
“And 512mb or ram? OS X doesn’t run on 512MB of ram”
Hate to disagree, but you do know that the old PowerBook G4..from last year run OS X just fine, and came with it…and only have 512MB ram in it. At least the one I bought did.
OS X (Tiger) works perfectly in 512MB of RAM. My sister has an iBook with 512MB and she has never had any problems.
However, if you are expending so much money in a PowerMac (as opposed to say, an iMac), I doubt that you’ll only use iPhoto, iTunes, Mail, and Safari…. As soon as you start using ProTools, Photoshop, Eclipse, or any other professional tool, you’ll have performance problems if you just have 512MB of RAM.
I have to agree with you on the points you made about RAM and graphics cards. My primary job is as an analyst however I also run my own graphic and web design business. Given that this is not a full time pursuit, I’ve often felt that it would be prohibitively expensive to purchase a Mac and upgrade to the specs I need on top of the expensive software requirements that I have. Unfortunately this has kept me from purchasing a Mac. Which is a shame because I used Apple computers from Apple II to System 7 and would like to go back. I really am a fan of apple. Unfortunately it’s just much cheaper to buy a PC. I know Macs come with quality software, but really the only software that is of use to me is Adobe Creative Suite.
I’m thinking that Apple goes with ATI because ATI’s cards have historically always had sharper and more vibrant image reproduction.
ATI stuck with Apple even through the dark days of 1997 and if it’s one thing Steve values, it’s loyalty.
Virtual desktops would be a godsend. Built in virtual desktops, yes!
It’s a pity IBM/Freescale didn’t value his loyalty… then again, they had their reasons.
I hope if 10.5 does have virtual desktops, they will promote and explain them properly (yes, even if it has to be ‘look at this great new feature no one[Microsoft] else has!’), so people aren’t suddenly confronted with two (or four) desktops to put their programs on. It would be rather confusing to suddenly start losing programs because- oh! They’re on desktop 2! Virtual Desktops are great tools, and I’d hate to see people write them off because they’re done badly.
Hmm… at the very least, this would need a new desktop widget or some way to identify which desktop your programs are on…
“this would need a new desktop widget”
It would indeed. Here is a suggestion as to how it might work. It might consist of a series of little squares in the taskbar, each one representing one of the virtual desktops. Then, there could be little icons which would represent open documents. It might even be possible to allow a user to move a document from one of these little windows to the other, thus moving the app from one virtual desktop to the other.
We will need a new name for this innovation. We could call it the ‘Virtual Desktop Switcher’.
Another really neat thing we could do is stick a little pulldown menu in each window. This would allow you to move the window to the desktop of your choice – right, left, desktop number x.
Perhaps we could also let the user set the number of virtual desktops he wants, by using the preferences for the Virtual Desktop Switcher?
This really must have suddenly become a parallel universe. The great thing about it though is that brilliant innovation is so extraordinarily easy.
Edited 2006-08-04 07:39
No one is calling this an innovation, just that it would be nice to have it built-in as opposed to as a free third party little app:
http://youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_sort=re…
Brillant!
I hope if 10.5 does have virtual desktops,
Unix has them for ages.XGL has given even more schwung recently.
Unix has them for ages.
No it hasn’t, but X-servers running a window manager would have them, no matter which operating system they are working on, including OSX. 🙂
Yeah. It shouldn’t be terribly difficult. I’ve missed that feature on Windows ever since I started using Linux three years ago.
Virtual desktops would be a godsend. Built in virtual desktops, yes!
Purely speculating:
CodeTek’s long and mysterious silence re: a Universal version of VirtualDesktop is because they’ve negotiated a deal with Apple for it and we’ll see the results in Leopard.
ATI stuck with Apple even through the dark days of 1997 and if it’s one thing Steve values, it’s loyalty.
The funny thing is that because of Apple using mostly ATI, it’s a piece of AMD technology they got in their Intell Macbooks
maybe because they want to keep the system temp down for those who do not require the power of nvidia or ATI.
Order your Mac Pro with the Nvidia Quadro you want, and the RAM you want (OS X runs better in 512MB than Windows XP does in 1024MB). I really get weary of the Mac bashers who really don’t know squat about using Mac’s (I know I’ll get lots of flames for this). We us mostly Mac. Our experience with attempting to set up PC’s looking to find cost effective routes for our expansion has been a miserable failure over the last 2 years. PC’s are just too expensive overall (TCO is far more than cost of hardware). The office folks are using some of our PC’s with WinXP, and we have a group here using some boxes converted to Linux doing some wonderful work with GIMP and LaTex. We are open to setting up workstations to satisfy staff members preferences, but the bottom line is they need to produce. When our customers need their ads, sites, presentation and/or training material they need it ASAP and it it needs to be quality, and none of us have room for excuses. I am happy you like Dell and Windows. Be well, but don’t make excuses for why you don’t use something you don’t really know anything about.
(OS X runs better in 512MB than Windows XP does in 1024MB)
That is absolute garbage. My Mom’s iMac with 512 MB RAM and dedicated video RAM was slower than her Compaq desktop with 512 MB RAM and shared video memory (the Compaq had less RAM in other words). In-fact, it was so painful that she pushed her 3 day old iMac out of the way and stuck with her Compaq until her RAM upgrade arrived for the iMac (2 GB, she loves it now). OS X is awful to use with less than 1 GB of RAM. My old Powermac G4 with 768 MB RAM was painful before when it had 512 MB.
Rosetta obviously doesn’t help, but I have never seen an OS suck up RAM and run out as fast as OS X. Right now I’m running Firefox and iTunes and nothing else and I have 256 MB RAM left out of 1 GB.
That may be with the iMac your Mom has. My fathers Mac Mini does wonderfully with 512MB. I sent this to replace his Athlon 2800XP machine with 512MB that he had nothing but trouble with. He is doing the things he likes (I don’t know what he uses it for in general) but he finds the Mini faster. I know in our experience that Windows machines when put task didn’t manage the memory nearly as well as the Mac workstations with graphics and video software (I won’t name them so as not to excite the worn out old Mac software bashing arguments). Applications start up fast in Windows, but running tasks in the background was overall less productive.
BTW, I am not bashing Windows or PC’s. We use a variety of machines, and they are appropriately placed and do well for us. I would prefer not to work with Microsoft, but we do and XP Pro does well for us in those areas. Appropriate systems for the task. What the parent to this thread was saying is really out of line as far as being able to purchase a Mac Pro machine with better (in his opinion) options. Just go to the Apple Store on line they have options available to order with Nvidia Quadros and much more RAM. The parent was also attempting to compare Dell quality control and overall cost of machines to place Mac’s in a negative position. I say nonsense (of course I expect to get flamed by the unrealistic).
We evaluated Windows PC’s properly configured ( I will not name hardware or specs to avoid the usual childish “mine is better than yours” or “you just didn’t configure it right” crap). We installed very well built, high end PC’s with Window XP Pro for staff members who wanted them, who were Windows users. Now take any combination of TOC factors you like and apply as you wish. We found the Windows PC’s in that environment were far to expensive (productivity plays a significant role). You might say the users were not up to caliber, but some of them are now using Mac’s, some are doing very well Linux (again I wish to avoid the “my distro is better than yours”), and my gosh we still have some of those same users working very productively with Windows. Like I said, I really get weary of the Mac bashers who really don’t know squat about using Mac’s.
Edited 2006-08-04 00:54
Whatever makes you most productive is the best solution.
Remember that Macs are used a lot in sound studios and design studios. Neither of them* needs a better graphic card. And if you need it, you can change it when you buy the PowerMac.
I’m pretty sure there are many more professionals who don’t need a powerful graphic card, so it’s logical that the base model doesn’t include one.
I agree with the fact that the PowerMacs are expensive for what they offer, though (considering that it’s only “headless” upgradable Mac), and 512MB in a PowerMac is really, really, silly.
* Unless the design studio does 3D, but most of the ones I know only use 2D apps, and the performance difference between a Quatro and a card like the ATI Radeon should be negligible (if there is any).
I see your point and I wholeheartedly agree. However may I point out to you that we have a full featured workstation with 8 hdds in raid and a dual core opty with 2 gigs of ram and an ati 1900 xt with 512 mb of memory. It is great for doing any sort of HD video editing. I just wanted to point out you dont need Quadros for everything. That is I am sure your needs are more high end and yes then Quadros are essential. In fact we are looking to get that new Quadro with the real time HD capabilities soon…problem is the price!
There must surely be more to be announced than dual booting, virtual desktops, ATI Radeons, and a new version of Safari. There must be. They cannot possibly be having a conference to announce that. Or its some kind of strange parallel universe we have all fallen into!
lets see what happened from that apple/sun zfs talk that took place earlier
I’m a bit weary of the new “improvements” in Finder, or rather where they’re leading. Let’s hope Apple doesn’t try and pull a Microsoft by attempting to go completely search-based. It was a bad design back with winfs and it still is.
Let me save queries as smart folders. Integrate iTunes into it, so that my playlists are nothing but saved spotlight searches. Let iPhoto use the filesystem for it’s database, and let me search those with spotlight without needing a “feed” plugin for the thing.
Oh wait, I’m asking for BeFS on OS X.
Oh wait, they hired Pavel and Dominic.
Gee. I wonder where this might be heading.
If it’s going where I hope it is, then I’m all for something like OpenTrac…errrr I’m all for the new Finder on OS X. Please do something to get rid of these *&%$&#$ing beachballs on my screen!!!
You can blame Next Inc for the beach balls… straight out of Openstep, and Nextstep I assume too. Now go do something useful – finish the Java port, or something 😉
Also, built in virtualization would be nice, altough it seems like BootCamp is as far as Apple is willing to go for now.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gE1XQyT_IbA&mode=related&search=