Did you just pull those numbers out of thin air? Yes, I think you did. Why not 25% or even 40%? Personally, I'd like to see some statistics for when they did offer matte screens at the same price as glossy. Apple never provided ANY explanation for removing the matte option. All we have is Steve Jobs telling us he likes to see his own reflection in the screen.
manu chao posed a rhetorical question and provided suggested answers. Apple is a business that designs and markets products and sells them for a profit. They make what they believe will be best received by their target market while still maintaining healthy profit margins. Judging by their balance sheet as of late, they do this well. In case you missed the memo, most Apple products look gorgeous compared to other consumer electronics, and although they may cost more than the competition, people want them as soon as they see them. That's why the front of iMacs and Apple displays are made of sculpted aluminum and highly polished glass held on by magnets so that there are no visible fasteners. Although I'm sure Steve Jobs has plenty of influence on which designs are ultimately executed, it's Jony Ive who's been dictating the direction of the industrial design language at Apple for some time now. There has never, as far as I'm aware, been a matte or anti-glare option for any Apple LCD panel that has glass in front of it. They still allow the old-school naked panels surrounded by bezels as a BTO option on the MacBook Pros, so buy one of those, or, god forbid, buy a display made by someone else.
Congratulations. You paid too much for performance that could be readily beaten by USB3.0 for 1/3 less money. FW800 devices have never been cheap and I don't see Thunderbolt drives being any different, perhaps more yet relatively speaking. And while you appear to think USB3.0 over TB is a bad idea, you congratulate Apple for offering FW800, which when used with a modern drive simply chokes the speed on the interface end rather than a potential bus speed limit. At least USB 3.0 over TB could potentially give you the full speed of the drive part of the time while Firewire limits the drive ALL of the time.
Strangely, USB 3.0 interfaces were hard to come by 7 years ago when I picked up my first FW 800 enclosure... Yes USB 3.0 is cheaper and faster, but it's only been shipping for 20 months now. Apple knows that a lot of Mac owners already have FW gear, and a lot of it cannot be replaced by USB 3.0 at this time, so they continue to support it. I applaud this.
I do not think that USB 3.0 over TB is a bad idea at all. I think it's potentially a bad idea to put a host controller that can pump 5 Gbps on the same 10 Gbps channel as another device that requires 5.8 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth for an isochronous application.
Actually, if we're talking 7200 rpm or less hard disks, FireWire 800 almost never limits performance under normal usage. The only time it can is when streaming reads or writes exceed 78 MB/s. Smaller or random reads and writes never come close to that.
Here it sounds like you're trying to convince yourself it's OK that your FW800 drives are taking twice as much time to transfer large files as USB3.0. The point is if the bandwidth is available and the drives are cheaper, USB3.0 kicks FW800's butt from here to the Alamo.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of maximizing throughput, which is why most of my FW enclosures also support eSATA, and USB 2.0 as well, so I can always use the fastest interface at my disposal. I do a lot of backup, data recovery, and drive cloning for various small businesses, and don't mind dropping $200 on a dock or enclosure, because if it gets the job done significantly faster, it can pay for itself in less than a week's time. I would say that more than 90% of the machines I encounter in the field have USB 2.0 (I do still see some real old stuff that's USB 1.1 only), at least half support 1394a (you'd be surprised how many PCs actually do), and maybe 20% have eSATA or FireWire 800. (There's also situations where Gigabit Ethernet between two machines is quicker than using any external storage solution.) I have yet to work on a single PC with USB 3.0 at any of my clients' workplaces. Like most people I also don't own a USB 3.0 enabled machine myself, since I haven't bought a new rig in the past 20 months. For me and my workflow, a USB 3.0 enabled drive, regardless of price, would still be slower in most cases than what I already have.
I imagine that I, for one, would be applauding that they finally embraced it period. Instead, my reaction is that I'd be a moron to buy a monitor today that cannot run Apple's USB 3.0 interface all their computers will have starting next year (since it will be included in Intel's chipset by default). Buying this product today is buying obsolescence right from the start.
Buying any computer technology is pretty much buying obsolescence right from the start. And since there isn't a single display on the market with a USB 3.0 host controller in it, I guess you'd be a moron to buy any display until there is one. And I'm guessing you might be a moron for quite a while yet. What if you actually did need a monitor before then though?
A checklist feature?
I've had my 3TB USB 3.0 drives for over a year. They can do around 30MB/sec under USB 2.0. A similar drive in a FW800 enclosure can do up to 100MB/sec. With USB 3.0, it can do around 140MB/sec. Faster drives or combinations of drives could easily do twice that. Personally, I move a lot of large files seeing I keep all my movies on a server hard drive. Going 40% slower in the name of pride doesn't do anything for me.
As I already said, since I don't have a USB 3.0 host controller at my disposal, FW 800 drives are faster than USB 3.0 for me. And I think I would seek out a PC with USB 3.0 before looking for it as a feature on a display. But since you already have a machine with a USB 3.0 host controller, why do you need another one in your display? And since that machine isn't a Mac, why do want a display that will only work with one? And if you do also have a TB enabled Mac, and are actually part of the target market for the ATD, why did you buy one of those when even a moron would know that they'll be shipping with USB 3.0 enabled Ivy Bridge processors in less than a year?
This post gets my nomination for the biggest suck up to Apple of the year.
I'll just note that you said I was sucking up but couldn't say that I was wrong.
And asking people why the personally haven't designed something is just downright
ridiculous. I haven't designed it because that is not my job (or most others on here). WTF does that have to do with people making stupid decisions at Apple?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
Is it clearly someone else's job to make everything you want in life for you? And your job is what? To bitch about what a bad job everyone else is doing? These "people" at Apple that make these
stupid decisions are called engineers. (Or were you referring to the marketers, because they do make some stupid decisions...) I went to school for computer engineering, and it drives me crazy when people with no idea what the design parameters for a product are bitch about how they've been wronged because it doesn't do something they wanted it to. Often times these objections are combined with a total disregard for the applicable laws of physics or economics.
I was serious about the DIY thing. You should try it sometime, it's very rewarding, you might surprise yourself. You can order sample USB 3.0 host controllers from Renesas for $3.50 apiece. With not all that much time and effort you could actually mod an ATD to add USB 3.0 support and be the first one on your block to have one. And before anyone faints at the notion of modding a brand new $1000 gadget, let me direct your attention to the things people do to far more expensive cars and boats all the time.
Believe it or not, it is possible to make a non-reflective screen with glass (or other type materials like high index plastic). My glasses have it and I get no reflections in them. Apple is obsessed with glass because Steve is obsessed with glass. Whether any of that changes under the new CEO remains to be seen. I think as long as Steve is pulling the strings at Apple in any fashion what-so-ever, we'll continue to get underpowered ultra-thin products with batteries that cannot easily be replaced by the user.
You get no reflections in your glasses because your face doesn't emit light or reflect enough onto them to cause problems. Apple's displays, even the glass clad ones, don't show reflections unless there is a source of light striking them that is brighter than the light being emitted by the display. Once again, I think it's Jony's obsession, perhaps one that is shared by Steve, but none the less. And yes, hopefully we continue to get great products from Apple that are better designed than what most of the rest of the industry can seem to come up with.
