I know that Vista can be a pain in the butt, but you can trim it down to make it look and work almost the same as XP. You can turn off the annoying 'confirm' dialogues and everything. It's not so bad.
You *can* do a lot of stuff, but you should not have to. Windows architechts clearly have their heads deep inside marketing deparment asses, or they seem to think touching a mouse makes people somehow stupid. I don't want that in my life.
I stopped giving Windows help years ago and that decision has improved the quality of my life considerably. I'm just so sorry about people who have all these problems (not to even mention the virus problem) and their computer makes them feel stupid even if they are not.
If a system needs a lot of work to be usable, then clearly that work needs to be done. But it needs to be done by the manufacturer, not the end user. That's why I use Apple's systems.
Does anyone think this is the end-of-life for this design? (
) My prediction is we'll see a big update to the MBP at MacWorld '08.
I cannot really say, but I hope it's not. The current design is so beautiful and iconic that I'd hate to see it changed. In fact, I fear that the next design is worse than this, just the way G5/Intel iMacs are not so beautiful than the G4 iMac (which was also iconic design).
I like the use of real aluminum in the design. Far better-looking than any plastic or composite material. Human eye seems to be attracted to real materials, such as metal, glass or wood. Plastic does not look natural at all.
Now, how do I convince the wife to let me buy one? This morning I tried subliminal tactics. I SMS'd her:
I've taken the chicken macbook out of the freezer macbook. How many pieces macbook do we need for dinner macbook?
Chicken. I'd SMS her "Just ordered a new MacBook Pro a minute ago. It'll hold ten times as much photos as the old one! Looks pretty too."
Be a man
I went for it to make my lappy last longer. This laptop will see me through leopard and onto the 10.6 i hope so i think its wise to go with 256 instead of 128.
Wake up, we're talking about video memory here. My 40-month-old PowerBook has 64MB video memory and not once has it been the worst bottleneck. The base model has 2X vram compared to this and while I can see that it can be substantial regarding future operating systems, how on earth would 4X vram help me during the next five(ish) years? They did offer 128MB video ram back in the day, but I decided against and look where we are now: lesser video memory is perfectly okay, but everything else (CPU, GPU, RAM, resolution, HD-storage, wireless) have been bumped and the difference really shows. 40-month-old is really beginning to show age compared to the new models, but it's not because the old model had too small video memory. It's the other things that count.
It's all marketing hype. Companies like to be selling bigger numbers, while in reality they're selling you "performance notebook" which you will happily use for years. IMO, the lowend model is the best deal in the five years I can remember accurately. Fully-loaded 17-incher is great as well, but as a more expensive unit it's not as great as the lowend bargain.
You will see that the 160 GB 7200 RPM disks have actually _lower_ internal transfer speed (59 MB/sec) than the 160 GB 5400 RPM disks (67 MB/sec). The reason is most likely that the 5400 RPM disks have higher data density, while the 7200 RPM disks use more platters at lower density.
More disks mean more reading heads, which means there's a possibility for really low seek times. But if everything you seek has been stored in a single platter, there's no advantage.
Sometimes more platters means more performance, but not always. Higher density usually means higher transfer speed, but not always.
That's a tradeoff not a win-win for some design.
Code:
Disk Test 26.97
Sequential 40.42
Uncached Write 41.67 25.58 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 37.67 21.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 42.69 12.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 39.99 20.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 20.23
Uncached Write 7.00 0.74 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 44.05 14.10 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 58.52 0.41 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 66.79 12.39 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Very slow disk performance! My 4-year-old Hitachi 7k60 performs like this while being 80% full:
Code:
Disk Test 36.55
Sequential 61.78
Uncached Write 70.08 43.03 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 59.32 33.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 64.56 18.89 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 55.17 27.73 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 25.95
Uncached Write 8.81 0.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 64.47 20.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 73.45 0.52 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 86.63 16.08 MB/sec [256K blocks]
I find it unacceptable if 4 years old hard drive outperforms anything currently sold.
In "theory" USB 2 is faster than FireWire 400. Doesn't work that way in the real world.
That's because USB is clocked at 1kHz while FireWire is clocked at 8kHz. There's a huge real-world difference! And to continue on the subject, the PCI is clocked at 33/66MHz so that's why internal hard drive should always beat external USB/FW drive hands down without a competition.
(WIth LED!!)