with Intel Core Duo processor and dual-layer Superdrive.

Yummmm.

Now I really, *really* want one.

...or you could get a much more powerful PC for the same money and get a copy of OSX-x86 off BitTorrent...

One button mouse!

Oh yeah, actually, I think that's what I want.

The PC + OSX86, not the one button mouse.

But what's with the $99 leather iPod case. Is that a joke?

I want a rack-mounted server with 16GB of RAM.

I had a lead on a quad-proc box with 4GB of memory for $400 last night, but I went to bed and this morning it was gone. :(

"But what's with the $99 leather iPod case. Is that a joke?"

No, it's revenue.

I guess so, but I would never spend $100 on this:

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/6194004/wo/na4JSoVrs9V82zh7Itn0kfDbwUQ/4.SLID?mco=F1073AFB&nplm=MA135G%2FA

But you'd spend $800 on a Celeron D casemod with no monitor and a reskinned version of FreeBSD?

That's both impractical and overpriced.  Who'd have thought Apple would produce something like that... :)

Umm, not exactly Flasher. That's a bit of slant there, don't you think?

Jeeze, you'd be better off wrappin' the thing in fuckin' duct tape.

Wait a minute... new business idea!

> Umm, not exactly Flasher. That's a bit of slant there, don't you think?

Flasher's been an anti-Apple zealot since way back.

For $800, you could get a very nice Centrino laptop. Here you're getting a Celeron D (there are no dual-core Pentium Ms to the best of my knowledge, and this is a 1.66Ghz chip with a 667Mhz FSB!) with integrated graphics, 512mb memory, a laptop hard drive and no display. It only has two advantages - the size and the natural ability to run OSX.

Nobody really needs a *desktop* machine that small, and there are patches out to run OSX on any PC.

>> That's a bit of slant there, don't you think? <<

Flasher is a Mac hater.
No idea why -- they're quite nice machines, really.
The hype *is* a bit much, though.

Oh, $799 for the Duo.

Anti apple/ms zealots people are wierd. I develop MS stuff (.NET), but I don't have anything against other platforms. I used to do FMP dev on a Mac, but haven't got a new Mac since my blue and white 450Mhz G4. I want a new one.

They're tremendously overpriced. The Mini is incapable of performing any functions beyond surfing, word processing and watching movies. Something accomplished every bit as well by a Dell at half the price with monitor.

I said in the last Mac flame that for all intents and purposes XP is as user-friendly as OSX, and nobody disagreed.

Flasher, you should warn the PC manufactures about those Intel Core Duo's. They're starting to use them, too.

I got my minis for $500, not $800, and I like them just fine. They're used to code, to play reasonable games (nothing with bleeding edge graphics of course), for educational programs for my daughter, browsing, word processing, watching movies, as a development web server, a personal ftp server, and so on.

Don't see why you're so vehement, Flasher.

> They're starting to use them, too.

LOL

What's your point? They're using Intel Core Duos and selling their systems at infinitely lesser margins.

Muppet, you could have gotten a PC system without a monitor for half that would still likely be faster.

But it would have been 8000 times bigger.

They're nice and compact so I can use a tiny desk and still have a good amount of space on it.  They're ABSOLUTELY SILENT which is a huge bonus.  They're on Unix so they're rock solid stable, they've never crashed.  Tiger has built in parental controls so I can filter my daughter's internet/email/IM access very easily within the OS itself.  (My dad has something from McAfee for his girlfriend's kid, and half the time it fails to block the sites he blacklists, the other half it just crashes.  He's tried 5 products so far with similiar results on the PC).

They fit my needs very nicely.  The price was reasonable for the value I get from them.

Flasher, you're missing the point about Macs.  We all know your "buy a cheap car, run it in to the ground" philosophy, but Macs aren't "just a grey box", they're a "lifestyle" purchase too.  They may cost more than an equivalent spec generic PC, but they also look a million times nicer.  Compare them to something like the Sony Vaio media PCs (which are vaguely equivalent in terms of someone actually having thought about their outward appearance, even if it was from a different approach) and you'll find that the Mac is actually very favourably priced.

Hey guys, suddenly I see that Flasher is completely and perfectly right. Turns out we were all wrong. Oh well.

And thanks, Flasher.

not to mention the OS itself...sure XP isn't bad, but tiger is *really* good.

with macs you are paying the extra 10-20% for the quality of the product.  its as simple as that.

Theres no *shame* in being a cheap assed loser who is willing to settle for second rate crap merchandise just to save a couple of bucks...no one here *judges* you for that....so why not leave the mac lovers alone and go and enjoy your cheap, hacked together boxen running a mass produced OS?

the only thing I casn't figure out yet is how to find the current full directory path in finder :-)

finding something with spotlight is easy, but apparently getting it to give you the path is not :)

heh.  apple-up arrow  backs you up a folder, so you can trace your way up.

its definitely a missing feature though...if you really need it, start the terminal and drag the file into that..it will give you the shell path from the dragged item.
<g> still not *quite* what you want, but hey..

"Theres no *shame* in being a cheap assed loser who is willing to settle for second rate crap merchandise just to save a couple of bucks..."

WTF? You're the one who buys second rate merchandise, and pays out the ass for it, just because it's in a pretty white case.

"They're nice and compact so I can use a tiny desk and still have a good amount of space on it."

They're half the desk footprint of a miditower. Vertical space is cheap. And you can put a tower under your desk, anyway. Helps with cabling.

"They're ABSOLUTELY SILENT which is a huge bonus."

So is a low-end PC with passive cooling.

"Macs aren't "just a grey box", they're a "lifestyle" purchase too."

Kinda like Nike trainers which you aren't actually supposed to use for running, right? Yeah, that's my point.

"Compare them to something like the Sony Vaio media PCs (which are vaguely equivalent in terms of someone actually having thought about their outward appearance, even if it was from a different approach) and you'll find that the Mac is actually very favourably priced."

A person who cares about the visual appearance of their PC does casemods. I prefer to choose for myself what I think looks good, not be told by Apple's marketing department. The choice of case styles for PCs is near-infinite.

I've been saying all along that OSX is the Mac's only advantage - though I've used a G5 and didn't find it particularly intuitive. The reason why Apple is fighting so hard against a generic x86 OSX distro is because it wants you to spend thousands on cheap hardware to go with it.

mmm.....I *love* that case.

and I *love* the OS.


Almost every mac developer I know loves their operating system, almost every windows developer I know hates theirs.

you explain why :)

"Theres no *shame* in being a cheap assed loser who is willing to settle for second rate crap merchandise just to save a couple of bucks...no one here *judges* you for that...."

Hold on - we're talking about linux/openoffice?

[g,d,r]

"almost every windows developer I know hates theirs.

you explain why :)"

Sheer bloody-mindedness. The old sk00l devs have been conditioned by Win95/98/ME to produce the "Windows Must Die!" reflex on call. Ask a Windows dev what is *actually* wrong with XP?

Fuck all you.  BeOS on Solaris rulez!

"mmm.....I *love* that case."

Lemming.

"A person who cares about the visual appearance of their PC does casemods."

Er...  You mean a person who cares about the visual appearance of their PC and who is handy with a Dremel, a glue gun, and a CNC mill does casemods.  (And frankly all the PC casemods I've seen would be embarassing to have in the living room -- stupid flashing lights, superfluous knobs and dials, and all manner of tacky plastic crap.)

Ok, so you don't like Macs, fair enough, but your arguments against them are worse than mine -- try a bit harder!

"They're half the desk footprint of a miditower. Vertical space is cheap."

right, but then you end up with a much more crowded feel on your desktop, or around your feet...either way its unpleasant.

"So is a low-end PC with passive cooling. "

great! and so is a mac. 


"Kinda like Nike trainers which you aren't actually supposed to use for running, right? Yeah, that's my point. "

its also *my* point.  Im happy to pay for a mac because it provides value in areas that most other pcs do not.


"A person who cares about the visual appearance of their PC does casemods."

nope. thats a person who cares and has the skillz and the interest level to implement it themselves.  the rest of us lazy asses want to pay someone else to do it for us.

luckily apple is willing to do this :)



"I prefer to choose for myself what I think looks good, not be told by Apple's marketing department."

fair enough.  care to show us a pic of your current casemod?  Id love to see what you believe looks good.

"Er...  You mean a person who cares about the visual appearance of their PC and who is handy with a Dremel, a glue gun, and a CNC mill does casemods."

Not at all. Go to a PC superstore, you'll find shelves upon shelves of bolt-on bits that require nothing more than a Phillips head screwdriver.

And casemods aside, my point still stands: there is a great variety of styles for PC cases out there, a lot of them extremely elegant.

Hell, just this morning I read a review of a high-end Gigabyte motherboard that had an external sound processing module that you install in a 5" slot - a lovely machined aluminium surface with a VU meter and a *lamp* amplifier for the sound output! Lamp, man!

Eh. Stupid mistranslation. Vacuum tube.

"Ask a Windows dev what is *actually* wrong with XP?"

Crappy asynchronous I/O?  Defective security model?  Hopelessly confusing DLL dependencies?  The fact that the .Net redistributable is enormous?  The fact that pretty much every user runs as admin?  All the conflicting advice on MSDN?  The millions of legacy APIs, and all the appcompat shims that can induce instability?  The more-or-less-broken DPI/font/GUI element sizing?  Etc...

(Note: never developed for the Mac, so I don't know how it compares.

Fine. Now ask a Mac dev what's wrong with OSX. I'll even tell you what they'll say.

3% market share. :P

"there is a great variety of styles for PC cases out there, a lot of them extremely elegant. "

absolutely. and all of which you have to pay more for.

Yeah, twenty bucks more. Not two hundred bucks more.

"3% market share."


which still represents several millions of people.  larger than, for instance, new zealand.

and companies distributing physical goods with large overheads still make hundreds of millions of dollars of profit in new zealand.

so if any software dev cannot make money from the mac market, I suspect its not the fault of the mac market share.

"Not two hundred bucks more."

You're obviously buying cheap shitty PC cases, then... :)

FNR - so what would you prefer to be then: the top retailer in New Zealand, or Walmart?

Mat, you have dual 7800GTX video cards. You are not representative of the larger computer-buying public. :P

Given that the market share on the PC is so large and already has massively established players in most areas, unless you get really lucky you'll probably sell to <1% of the 97% market share.  On the Mac, where the choice of apps is more limited, you could probably get a much larger chunk of Apple's slice of the pie...

huh?  neither, clearly.  or I would work in retail.

sure you can potentially make more in windows (which I assume is your point), but so what? 
since when do any of us select our paths and careers based entirely on how much money we could make?

my point is simply that the mac marketshare is perfectly ample to make a good living from.

"You are not representative of the larger computer-buying public."

True, but unimportant.  (I loooooove high-end PCs, and I know that mine could almost run as fast as a Mac Mini without me even needing to plug it in, but even so I like what the Mac Mini represents; it makes most PCs look like the ugly bricks they are and is far more suitable for the "average Joe" who wants something that fits in with his nice clean decor and doesn't really care that it's not the fastest thing ever or that he could have picked up a functionally equivalent machine from Dell for half the price.  For most people the PC isn't the focus of their living area. :)

Yeah Mat. But I would like to see Apple start reducing that ridiculous margin.

"it makes most PCs look like the ugly bricks they are"

I've actually seen a Mac Mini in person just recently. Yes, it's small. But I've seen much prettier ATX cases.

"is far more suitable for the "average Joe" who wants something that fits in with his nice clean decor"

The average Joe does not have a pearly white living room. :P The Media Center PCs that look like hifi equipment are much more appropriate in that regard (although I am not a big fan of Media Center either).

"doesn't really care that it's not the fastest thing ever or that he could have picked up a functionally equivalent machine from Dell for half the price."

Like I said, lemmings.

"For most people the PC isn't the focus of their living area. :)"

For all the time they spend on it, it ought to be.

Besides:

"For most people the PC isn't the focus of their living area. :)"

So why spend extra money to get one that looks 'hip'? Why not just have a generic miditower stuck under the desk?

"So why spend extra money to get one that looks 'hip'?"

They're not getting one that looks hip, they're getting one that doesn't look like it's even there...

"Why not just have a generic miditower stuck under the desk?"

Because it still looks ugly, it gets in the way, it makes a noise, and if you're keeping it on the floor it'll get filled up with fluff and other assorted crap.

Face it -- you're not the target market for this, and you can't come up with a cogent argument as to why they're "bad" other than they cost more than a commodity PC, so you're on a hiding to nothing.  The whole argument can be summed up as "if you're the kind of person who likes this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you'll like". :)

[ But I would like to see Apple start reducing that ridiculous margin. ]

Their profit margin doesn't really enter into it.

When you go to buy a new car, do you get bent out of shape because Toyota made $800 profit on a $16k Corolla?

Sure, Apple makes in the 20-30% margin range (or at least, that's what I've heard that Steve's goal is for each product line).  But what does it matter to you?  The price is the price -- if you don't like the price at store.apple.com, there's MacMall or one of the other resellers (don't look for any tremendous savings, though).  Or you just don't buy one.

It matters because I would like it if more people at Best Buy end up opting for the Mac. I would like it if Apple were a more serious competitor in the consumer pc market.

I would like to see Microsoft have to respond to that. (I'm not sure what to think of their *six* versions of Vista.)

I think that would be good for the consumers.

example, did you read the thread? Did I ever say that Apple was gouging or anything? (Okay, there's the ridiculous $99 iPod case.) Or are you just being stupid for the moment?

Completely changing the subject and jumping back a dozen threads, could I just mention to Flasher that while vacuum tube is the American term for said item, we like to be different in Britain and therefore we call them valves? Thus, valve amps are the expensive pretty glowing things that audio buffs might like to have in their living room.

Well, there was that word "ridiculous" used.  One would naturally assume that you meant they were gouging their customers by that.

And you're right about the $99 iPod case -- Even Coach has most of theirs priced below $90 .. except for the one in Python snakeskin at $178.  Ouch.

http://www.coach.com/aspx/content/product.aspx?product_no=7676&category_id=200

If you haven't seen FrontRow, check it out:

http://news.com.com/Company+debuts+its+smallest+Intel-based+computer/1606-2_3-6044210.html

Flasher T,

"Here you're getting a Celeron D (there are no dual-core Pentium Ms to the best of my knowledge, and this is a 1.66Ghz chip with a 667Mhz FSB!) with integrated graphics, 512mb memory, a laptop hard drive and no display."

The Core Duo and Solo are the replacements for the Pentium M, per Intel's desire to eliminate the name Pentium from their marketing. Yonah (the design of the Core chips) is a redesign, improved version of the Pentium M.

In other words, the Pentium M is obsolete. The new chips are in no way "Celerons", they're an upgrade.

Oh, and it is interesting how quietly Intel has regrouped and started putting their eggs behind the "old" technology. The Pentium M was based on much of the classic Pentium design (versus the ultra-long pipeline P4), and now the Core Solo and Duo are based on the Pentium M....

So the legacy of the P4 is effectively being killed.

Fine, it's a Pentium M.

A Pentium M with 512mb and no monitor still shouldn't cost eight hundred dollars. :P

$800 for a small form factor Pentium M with 512MB isn't bad, actually -- add maybe $250 for a TFT, keyboard, and mouse, and you've effectively got all the components of a laptop for a reasonable sum.  (Yeah, yeah, it's not battery powered like a laptop, but I'm just pointing out that the price isn't as high as it seems.)