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Squire said:
Hear, hear! Card readers have to be the most over-hyped, useless ports ever introduced. I know they appeal to some people but, personally, I just don't see the point. It's much easier to just plug the camera in, as far as I'm concerned.
Squire
Card readers are a godsend when you have 5 other people storing their photos on your Mac and none of them ever remember to bring their USB cables (with different connectors to mine) with them.
 
riciad said:
Card readers are a godsend when you have 5 other people storing their photos on your Mac and none of them ever remember to bring their USB cables (with different connectors to mine) with them.
Assuming of course that they have the same types of cards as you can read!
 
GregA said:
Assuming of course that they have the same types of cards as you can read!
5 people, 4 different card types.
Suppose somebody will come out with new and different card eventually and I'll have to upgrade the reader!
 
Fukui said:
What I'm more interested in is how loud the fan is.

That to me is the most important, I can't stand fans anymore. (iMac 1st-gen induced trauma)

I sure as heck hope they do. IMHO Apple insane requirement to keep things as small as possible without a fan or at the minimum having the fan turn on very infrequently is part of the reason why Apple laptops fail, and why my friend replaced the mainboard in his iBook 3 times before they up and replaced it with a new G4 PowerBook. Apple needs to get off their high horse when it comes to fans and put something in their *books that lets the bloody thing breath.

GregA said:
Assuming of course that they have the same types of cards as you can read!

Most cards now a days are formatted with FAT or FAT32 which can be read by OS X.

I see no reason why Apple couldn't put a combined CF, SD slot on the side of a PowerBook. These are the two most common card types out there and will be for the forseeable future. Heck I have a IBM ThinkPad X31 and it took me 3 months to even notice the CF slot with a plug in it on the side of the laptop.

riciad said:
5 people, 4 different card types.
Suppose somebody will come out with new and different card eventually and I'll have to upgrade the reader!

a possibility but for the foreseeable future CF II is the card type of choice for many pro digital cameras. CF has been around since the mid 90's I think. Its not going anywhere. Now SD is starting to catch up but there is a size limitation with SD.
 
one3 said:
Quite a few current PC Notebooks of similar size currently have a battery life of about 3 hours ... so 6 hours is actually quite good in comparison.

And isn't PB's battery-life (REAL battery-life, not "marketeer battery-life") considerably below six hours? Allow me to quote MacInTouch:

I even tried an experiment to try to achieve Apple's 4.5 hour promised battery life. First, I calibrated the battery and reset the NVRAM, and then allowed the battery to charge overnight. Today I turned off everything (Bluetooth, AirPort, no CD in the drive, no ethernet cable, set HD to spin down after 1 minute, and turned the screen off); basically leaving the unit running but unusable. Even in this unrealistic, brain-dead state, the PB ran for only 3.75 hours on battery.

Two hours seemed to be realistic figure for the battery-life in PB. Maybe later models fixed that somewhat. But if You guys will end up getting 6 hours of REAL batter-life from your Intel-PB's, it will be a cause for celebration!
 
ieani said:
But the ibook is not running a 512 graphics card or 2 GB RAM, with the former needing especially a larger amount of power. 6 hours for a PC with this performance is revolutionary. The Dell XPS has under an hour. The Toshiba Quosimo has a little over an hour. And this would probably blow each out of the water in lab testing.

You're not going to get 6 hours out of this laptop just yet...I think it would have to be running in the aforementioned "braindead" state to get 6 hours - my parents have a windows laptop with a "3 hour battery life" and it lasts three hours when running say text edit with the screen quite dim. As for my powerbook's supposed "5 hour" battery life on this 12" one, all I can say is that after 3 years of use it now only lasts 90 minutes, although that is with airport on and using photoshop. I think at the moment Apple and Windows laptop batteries are very comparable on real world usage.

On a complete tangent to life itself...where have all these new members come from, I may only be a "member" but I joined at last years MWSF (yes, the irony) and have posted throughout the year. It seems like there is some crazy macrumors pilgrimage in progress!

Oh, yeh and...W!nD0w5 5ux 4Eva lolzorz M@c iz lYk wE11 kEw1 c0Z i W0z LyK BbQ wTf R u d0!n?! Why oh why?! Nooooooo... *cries profusely...* :rolleyes:
 
amateurmacfreak said:
ugh. ick! I hate you people!:mad: :( Kidding, of course.:eek: But when do you think we'll see iBook? @ MWSF?

Well I could take a wild guess as everyone else and I do see iBooks as a possibility at MWSF. iBook news has to come first as PowerBooks were just updated. (Even though many might argue it wasn't really an update).
 
oingoboingo said:
Yes. In this pre-MWSF frenzy, it might be a good idea for everyone to take a moment to re-read that classic work of Apple analysis, "The Apple Product Cycle". You won't find a better description of how the whole thing works

http://www.misterbg.org/AppleProductCycle/

:D

Thanks, that was kinda what I was refferring to. But I do guess that with this huge step for Apple (the transition) this "product cycle" will change once and for all.
 
Evangelion said:
Two hours seemed to be realistic figure for the battery-life in PB. Maybe later models fixed that somewhat. But if You guys will end up getting 6 hours of REAL batter-life from your Intel-PB's, it will be a cause for celebration!
When my 550mhz powerbook was new I could get 5 hours usable battery life out of it and once even watched Lord of the Rings on it on batteries. I guess it depends on what model you have and maybe there are some small discrepancies between batteries that cause some resuts to be poor.

Anyway; batteries degrade after time. My battery is dead and will give me no more than 10 minutes. Well my screen hinge just broke yesterday and the delete key fell of and the DVD won't read CDRW's. Seems the intel macs come just in time.
 
SiliconAddict said:
...Or how about ejecting a DVD? Dragging it into the trash is NOT intuitive. ...

I don't know if anyone else responded, but when was the last time this was true? OS9? In OSX, as soon as you drag any disk image, the trash icon automatically changes into an eject icon (a symbol used on numerous electronic products for years).
 
oskar said:
Well I could take a wild guess as everyone else and I do see iBooks as a possibility at MWSF. iBook news has to come first as PowerBooks were just updated. (Even though many might argue it wasn't really an update).

PowerBooks and iBooks are pretty much on the same footing when it comes to updates. At this point since we are talking transition not update both systems are pretty much equal (That being both are about to be EOLed.) All bets are off right now. There is too many options available to Apple.
Will the iBook go with a Celeron M, current Pentium M, or Core Solo? If the solo when will it ship? We don't even know when Apple is shipping the Solos.
No doubt the PowerBooks are getting the dual cores. Is it going to be Core Duo or is Apple going to wait for Merom? Will Apple announce at MW new PowerBooks or wait until WWDC and announce Merom PowerBooks?
Too many questions and not enough answers at this point. This is the longest week ever. My money is mobilized. A new credit card has been created in the event I can't buy it outright which is doubtful. (Up til now my max limit was $500 from the card I got as a teen. I've been meaning to pick up a new one with Citibank.)

deputy_doofy said:
I don't know if anyone else responded, but when was the last time this was true? OS9? In OSX, as soon as you drag any disk image, the trash icon automatically changes into an eject icon (a symbol used on numerous electronic products for years).


Huh. sorry. My bad. :eek:
 
Seeing things...

SiliconAddict said:
Most cards now a days are formatted with FAT or FAT32 which can be read by OS X.

....... Heck I have a IBM ThinkPad X31 and it took me 3 months to even notice the CF slot with a plug in it on the side of the laptop.

I use to have glasses like that too.

Jim
 
same thought process

deputy_doofy said:
In OSX, as soon as you drag any disk image, the trash icon automatically changes into an eject icon (a symbol used on numerous electronic products for years).
What's the difference?

Before you touch the mouse, your brain is thinking "drag this puppy to the trash".

Changing the trash icon pixels at the last minute doesn't stop the brain damaged initial intent.

And, I'd expect dragging a volume to the trash to delete all the files on the volume, not eject it!

[News flash: Steve Jobs loses round in court case]
 
Squire said:
Is that a fact? I just checked the Dell Canada site and, like Apple, the cheapest version of every notebook model comes with, you guessed it, a combo drive. (I know you wrote "boxes" but this thread is primarily portable-related.)

<edit#2> Just checked the desktops and only the most expensive version of their entry level box comes with a DVD burner. Same with the series above that. The next one up sports a combo drive in the cheapest version. Same with their top-of-the-line box-- basically, combo drive on the cheaper models (or two optical drives: a CD burner and DVD-ROM) and DVD-burner on the top end.

So I have to ask: What are you talking about?

Squire

Are you sure? Dell UK has an Inspiron 1300 for £399 that includes an 8xDVD+RW Drive (ok, I admit its ugly, but £300 cheaper than iBook and has a 14.1" screen, although it sacrifices other things mainly RAM.)
 
UberMac said:
You're not going to get 6 hours out of this laptop just yet...I think it would have to be running in the aforementioned "braindead" state to get 6 hours - my parents have a windows laptop with a "3 hour battery life" and it lasts three hours when running say text edit with the screen quite dim. As for my powerbook's supposed "5 hour" battery life on this 12" one, all I can say is that after 3 years of use it now only lasts 90 minutes, although that is with airport on and using photoshop. I think at the moment Apple and Windows laptop batteries are very comparable on real world usage.

On a complete tangent to life itself...where have all these new members come from, I may only be a "member" but I joined at last years MWSF (yes, the irony) and have posted throughout the year. It seems like there is some crazy macrumors pilgrimage in progress!

Oh, yeh and...W!nD0w5 5ux 4Eva lolzorz M@c iz lYk wE11 kEw1 c0Z i W0z LyK BbQ wTf R u d0!n?! Why oh why?! Nooooooo... *cries profusely...* :rolleyes:


Windows was tolerable and then we got a new PC with XP and its pissed me off from day one with its glitchy subpar operation. Then I needed a notebook for school and in researching I discovered this site.
 
AidenShaw said:
What's the difference?

Before you touch the mouse, your brain is thinking "drag this puppy to the trash".

Changing the trash icon pixels at the last minute doesn't stop the brain damaged initial intent.

(And, I'd expect dragging a volume to the trash to delete all the files on the volume, not eject it!)

Agreed. The computer industry is full of mixed metaphors. Witness dragging files from one folder to another. If the folder happens to be on the same disk, it is a move, if the folder happens to be on a different disk, it is a copy. How brain dead is that?
 
dernhelm said:
Agreed. The computer industry is full of mixed metaphors. Witness dragging files from one folder to another. If the folder happens to be on the same disk, it is a move, if the folder happens to be on a different disk, it is a copy. How brain dead is that?
Yes, that's sometimes annoying - but at least you can force "copy" or "move" by pressing the right meta-key.

Maybe it made more sense when you only had a C: drive and the A: floppy :eek:

(And BTW, it's now "copy" or "move" in XP/2K3 depending on volume layout, not simply the disk (partition or drive letter). If a volume is located as a mount point, dragging between different directories under the same root drive letter is a move - even if the directories are on different disks, partitions or volumes.)
 
deputy_doofy said:
SiliconAddict said:
...Or how about ejecting a DVD? Dragging it into the trash is NOT intuitive. ...
I don't know if anyone else responded, but when was the last time this was true? OS9? In OSX, as soon as you drag any disk image, the trash icon automatically changes into an eject icon (a symbol used on numerous electronic products for years).
True that the hardware eject can be intutive, but I have to say that I've never been a fan of the software eject. This goes back to the days where floppy was ejected via the command "eject" from a terminal window in a SPARCstation. I remember some floppys wouldn't like to be ejected that way, and you had to use a paper clip to stick into the manual eject button, which was a pain in the a$$. I guess that's why I'm against software eject. Otherwise I think it's a good idea, and I like the keyboard eject button too. The side loading disc drive with no buttons or seems on it looks sleek too. ;)
 
windowuser82 said:
OSX may be wonderful, I don't know... I don't use it (yet) but I do know demand isn't as high as current users swould like to think. Markets are very fickle, computer users aren't as "dumb" or "average" as some would like to think. We on the pc side are waiting. If something wonderful doesn't arrive most will wait for Vista's release.
And wait, and wait, and wait...................................
 
ieani said:
Windows was tolerable and then we got a new PC with XP and its pissed me off from day one with its glitchy subpar operation. Then I needed a notebook for school and in researching I discovered this site.

[/Off topic mode=1]

Did you reinstall the OS from scratch?The FIRST thing I do before I boot a new computer into an OS is take the restore CD that usually comes with the system and reinstall just the OS. No helper apps. No helper services. No call home to mama utils. Just the OS. I'm dead serious when I say that, that takes care of 70% of the glitchyness. OEMs do a REALLY piss poor job at rolling their own copy of XP.

[/Off topic mode=0]
 
SiliconAddict said:
[/Off topic mode=1]

Did you reinstall the OS from scratch?The FIRST thing I do before I boot a new computer into an OS is take the restore CD that usually comes with the system and reinstall just the OS. No helper apps. No helper services. No call home to mama utils. Just the OS. I'm dead serious when I say that, that takes care of 70% of the glitchyness. OEMs do a REALLY piss poor job at rolling their own copy of XP.

[/Off topic mode=0]


VIA Chipsets..Ha!
 
Randall said:
.......I guess that's why I'm against software eject. Otherwise I think it's a good idea, and I like the keyboard eject button too....

Good that someone finally mentioned the eject button. It sure is more convenient than any software eject, and imho negates this whole silly argument.

It's a while since I've checked into MR, but it is depressing to see how much of a Mac/Windows flamefest this thread has become.
 
MacinDoc said:
And wait, and wait, and wait...................................

The room of people actively waiting for vistas release with some sort of awe and anticipation is a rather empty one. People are starting to figure out that vista is nothing more than XP warmed over (which was really nothing much more than 2000 warmed over in the first place). Just wait to see how many corporations actively migrate to vista right out of the gate, very very few. Vista does not give them anything new beyond what they have beyond XP or 2000.
 
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