The Apple thread

[RiK]

It's still an Apple Cupboard though, although I really like the retail experience of having someone bringing a shiny bag of mac to you! Took bloody ages mind. Is the London apple store like this too now with the concierge (sp?) taking an order on the showroom floor and then running off to fetch it for you?

Yup, though they still have tills too for software sales etc.

[Bubba]

Ace . To be honest I think I could manage with that coupled with some kind of Time Capsule NAS. The two are obviously going to work wonderfully together The 32gb iPhone / Touches are a good sign that flash is dropping in price though so hopefully mark 2 of the air will be flash only. I can't see the typical market of the air using more than 19gb to be honest, it'll give you plenty of room for some music (I bet there's WiFi sharing a la Zune planned for the Touch) and Office / iWork. I also suspect that there's plenty of crap that can be trimmed out of the default install if space is a real issue - stuff like all the printer drivers under the sun can safely be removed.

Cheers

Bubba

[Atty]

Dunno if it's been mentioned atall, but they recently (November, I think) opened an Apple store in Exeter, in the new princesshays shopping plaza off the high street.

http://www.apple.com/uk/retail/princess ... 80203.html

Found a good shot of it that someone took on flickr.


It's a pretty nice store, with loads of assistants wandering about, but it's still a pretty narrow space and gets very packed with people fiddling with the new ipods. The software, accessories and genius bar (and possibly the tills) are up some glass and brushed metal stairs. When I checked a couple of days ago they didn't have the MB Air in, but they may well have some display models by now.

[Kemper_Boyd]

The 32gb iPhone / Touches are a good sign that flash is dropping in price though so hopefully mark 2 of the air will be flash only.

Flash has dropped quite a bit in the last few months, but I've only recently
seen prices that beat the best at this time last year, the middle of last year
was considerably more expensive for some reason or other. I don't know if
that is a seasonal trend, perhaps a lot of flash gets dumped after Christmas?

Anyway in case anyone is interested rough guides for current prices are £11 for
2GB of SLC and £3 for 2GB of MLC. Those are contract prices for chips not the
price of cards, SSDs or flash drives.

[hahakid]

Still waiting for my Mac Pro. Estimated shipping 25th feb..

Same! 22nd...

I take it you wanted the 8800 too then..

Yup! Are they really that thin on the ground ?
The phone rep told me it would be about 2-3 weeks to deliver, website order tracker then said 5, looks like the internet was right (as always).

Oh well.

[Rod_S]

Some retrotastic icons to download:

http://iconfactory.com/search/freeware/arcade

[Atty]

If anyone's interested, they've got a display Macbook Air in at the Exeter Apple Store. Judging by the gawks it was getting from the shop assistants, it's probably new in today and I very much doubt they've got any actual stock in for sale yet.

I have to concur with what Gravy said earlier, really. It's a beautiful bit of kit, and it feels far more robust than I expected. The multi-touch trackpad is very large and gestures are quite useful, especially the 3-finger swipe. I didn't really try out any programs, but presumably it's similar to the macbook's performance - very fast for most things, but a bit crap at 3D.

Definitely in stupendously rich bastard territory, but quite impressive nonetheless.

[disciple]

The bottom two pics are packaging for install discs.

Timeless.

Apple's first logo. entitled "Newton … A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone."

In 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs ("the two Steves") designed and built a homemade computer, the Apple I. Because Wozniak was working for Hewlett Packard at the time, they offered it to HP first, but they were turned down. The two Steves had to sell some of their prized posessions (Wozniak sold his beloved programmable HP calculator and Jobs sold his old Volkswagen bus) to finance the making of the Apple I motherboards.

Later that year, Wozniak created the next generation machine: Apple ][ prototype. They offered it to Commodore, and got turned down again. But things soon started to look up for Apple, and the company began to gain customers with its computers.

The first Apple logo was a complex picture of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. The logo was inscribed: "Newton … A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought … Alone." It was designed by Ronald Wayne, who along with Wozniak and Jobs, actually founded Apple Computer. In 1976, after only working for two weeks at Apple, Wayne relinquished his stock (10% of the company) for a one-time payment of $800 because he thought Apple was too risky! (Had he kept it, Wayne’s stock would be worth billions!)

Jobs thought that the overly complex logo had something to do with the slow sales of the Apple I, so he commissioned Rob Janoff of the Regis McKenna Agency to design a new one. Janoff came up with the iconic rainbow-striped Apple logo used from 1976 to 1999.

Rumor has it that the bite on the Apple logo was a nod to Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science who committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple. Janoff, however, said in an interview that though he was mindful of the "byte/bite" pun (Apple’s slogan back then: "Byte into an Apple"), he designed the logo as such to "prevent the apple from looking like a cherry tomato."

In 1998, supposedly at the insistence of Jobs, who had just returned to the company, Apple replaced the rainbow logo ("the most expensive bloody logo ever designed" said Apple President Mike Scott) with a modern-looking, monochrome logo.

[gravy]

This is unexpected, benchmarks are indicating that the air's graphics performance is worse than the macbook. This is despite having a later Intel with specs that -look- far better than the chip in the macbook.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware ... review.ars

The Mac book has a GMA 950 and the Air a GMA X3100

Going off the idea of getting one a bit now

[Cloudane]

I guess the other slow bits and bobs (which are all slower than the base model MacBook) are holding it back.

Certainly not the one for me - I'd rather pay £500 less(!) for a better machine, it's only an inch or so thicker and it's not yet been converted to the monotonous aluminium that they're obsessed with these days

[gravy]

Well the new GFX should reduce CPU load, the old one emulated vertex shading in software whereas the new one has hardware T&L

[tufty]

Well the new GFX should reduce CPU load, the old one emulated vertex shading in software whereas the new one has hardware T&L

Should be good for surfing pr0n then.



























Oh, T&L. I'll be getting me coat.

[Atty]

This is unexpected, benchmarks are indicating that the air's graphics performance is worse than the macbook. This is despite having a later Intel with specs that -look- far better than the chip in the macbook.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware ... review.ars

The Mac book has a GMA 950 and the Air a GMA X3100

Going off the idea of getting one a bit now

I thought the Macbook had a GMA965 (X3100s) too, thesedays? Unless you mean that the specific macbook used in that test is an older GMA950 model?
Either way, the macbook air is starting to look like a bit of a lemon in the cost-to-performance stakes.

[Dio]

Well the new GFX should reduce CPU load, the old one emulated vertex shading in software whereas the new one has hardware T&L

Intel know a lot more about software than they do about 3D hardware .

[RiK]

I thought the Macbook had a GMA965 (X3100s) too, thesedays? Unless you mean that the specific macbook used in that test is an older GMA950 model?

Yup, according to the Apple store, the Macbook and Air both have the X3100, MBP is a Nvidia 8600 with either 128 or 256Mb ram.