71–80 of 163 posts
Apple needs to fix Mavericks before I ever buy anything from them. They have so much cash, and so many bugs in Mavericks?
iOS is insecure, Mavericks buggy as hell, iCloud can't keep the lights on. One has to wonder what all their engineers are actually working on.
A 1 year warranty is such a joke for this much money. I think this and the new mbp where should anything break you need a full replacement basically, need to have some serious warranty coverage changes. 3 years minimum in my mind. Just another way to nickle and dime you on something like an almost required extended warranty. Apple, your stuff is mostly nice. Fix your product warranty and maybe I'll open my wallet.
Isn't it worth it to purchase the Applecare warranty for $250 which extends the warranty period to 3 years? When you're spending $3k on a computer, I don't see how $250 will really affect the bottom line...
payoff * Probability of payoff = EV
3000 * Probability of payoff = 250
3000 * P / 250 = 250/250
3000 / 250 * P = 1
12 * P = 1
∴ P = 1 / 12
You require 8.3% of the computers to fail in years 2 and 3, and for the failure to cause $3000 worth of 'damage' avoidance, and for it to be something covered under the warranty terms, for your gamble to make sense.
Judging by the fact they offer the warranty, I would imagine the fail rate to be somewhat lower than this, or for the failures to be vastly less expensive than that - else they'd be losing money.
Do a lot of folks here generally like Mac desktops? I've grown to like Macbooks because I do like working on a portable UNIX-y platform, and have had generally bad luck with Linux laptops in the past. On desktops though, I'm willing to put more effort into settling software update issues/device conflicts, since I probably have to do that anyway to write performance-optimized code (depends on the exact purpose of the…
I code with a focus on TDD and small unit tests, so even though I do mostly statistical computing work, my development tests use small amounts of data and low computing power. When I actually need to run big production stuff, it goes off to the Linux box or a Linux server cluster.
My beef with the imac is that it is not really that much faster than my MBPr, but has terrible heat management. When I am running big jobs on it, it gets a few degrees off from a toaster and heats up my office. A 2.5k linux box would not have this problem and would be way faster.
The one strange assumption that most Mac Pro reviews start with is a baseline of two compute cards -- that the Mac Pro is competitive when compared with other machines with two high-end compute cards. But I don't want two high-end compute cards, and I suspect that many who are trying to convince themselves that they'll benefit from it will gain no value from it. For many, many workloads, modern compute still represen…
so you think 2 compute cards is bad. but what about the mac pro approach 2 gfx cards? good or bad? not sure what position you're taking and curious.
Wow. For me, the big takeaway from this review are the benchmarks showing the iMac and MBPs beating out the Mac Pro. That shows that this machine is really for niche markets like professional video editing. Makes you wonder why Apple even bothers.
It's a "forward looking" architecture (to steal the line from the iPhone 5S pitch.) They're betting big on GPU compute. I wouldn't say it is for "niche markets", though perhaps today it is only useful to smaller markets, it's that this computer is going to over time get faster and faster relative to the 2013 iMac and MBPs as more apps take advantage of the GPUs. It's kind of a unique phenomenon and makes the benchmar…
My PC had the same price three years ago, but it has 5GHz CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB on SSDs and 5 TB on spin HDDs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
so you think 2 compute cards is bad. but what about the mac pro approach 2 gfx cards? good or bad? not sure what position you're taking and curious.
Are you debating nomenclature? One of the GPUs is effectively dedicated to compute, while the other is architecturally chosen to optimize compute. These cards are geared to compute and not graphics.
Only a domain expert could be expected to automatically know whether double GPUs is effectively the same thing as double CPUs or not. Apple has put a lot of effort into making their GPU structure effective (in general, not just for a few special cases), and I didn't know if you were saying they'd failed or not. i know parallel processing is hard, but i also know apple has smart people who've worked on it. i don't know things like whether "lack of unified memory" is a problem for apple's design too, or not. it seems completely plausible to me, not knowing the domain that well, that apple could have had something that works well in general, or not – i don't really know and you didn't say, just assumed your reader would somehow know what you meant (which will basically only work for people who already know your point and have no need to read your comment at all).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS is insecure, Mavericks buggy as hell, iCloud can't keep the lights on. One has to wonder what all their engineers are actually working on.
How is iOS insecure?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold.
I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.
Which, instantly, should be reason enough to understand that said criticism is BS.
Apple products are among the best in the industry, period. Not just from the industrial design part of it, but overall: coherence of product vision, attention to important characteristics for the target market (battery time, portability, weight), quality machining and materials, attention to small details (from multitouch touchpad to magsafe adaptor and from backlit keyboard to magnetic, non protruding, lid hinge).
These people think that because they are not speced and designed like gaming PCs they are not worthy ("I can have a better GPU for less money in my custom box, and with xeon lights on the sides too).
And they attribute their popularity to some BS "reality distortion" effect, ignoring the fact that hardcore hackers, prominent programmers and old school neckerbeards, from Rob Pike, DHH, and Duncan Davidson to Jamie Jawinsky and Miguel De Icaza (the frigging founder of the Gnome desktop) down to Linus Torvalds, who waxes poetically about his MacBook Air as the best in the market.
So, "fawning over Apple" justs translates to "did some favorable reviews of products, instead of making up BS reasons to dislike them".
He's basically dumbfounded by the current situation :-)