New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

27" apple monitor so nice

The early reviews of the 13 rmbp aren't good, T: seems the gfx card is seriously underpowered, and it's laggy and stuttery as a consequence.

Interesting - thanks. The ones I saw a few days ago seemed pretty positive, e.g.:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/29/apple-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review-13-inch/

Are you thinking more of this:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/3585082/13-inch-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review

? That's definitely giving me pause. Actually, it's making me wonder about the 15" rmbp... the same weight as the 13" mbp I'm using right now, I guess (which I usually think is too heavy, admittedly).

I guess I'm just not going to be happy until they bring out a 13" retina mba, really.

This said, I thought everyone complained that the 15" retina stuttered when it came out? Do those complaints still exist?

mine doesn't stutter

would you recommend it?

mine doesn't stutter either. Do recommend!

Another butthurt Apple fanboy checks out:

http://www.businessinsider.com/dear-apple-im-leaving-you-2012-11

I love mine; the only irritating thing about it is the lack of optical drive, which doesn't actually matter if I'm at home because I can access the DVD-ROM drive on my iMac via wireless as if it was a local drive.

what do you still use an optical drive for??

playing CDs and DVDs??

Do you want to know the beginning of the end of our relationship? It was when you decided to include an SD slot in your MacBooks.

...

i'm one of the outliers who needs an optical drive still :(

Yes, looks like it's the Verge one I had in mind. There was a similar one I read elsewhere -- Wired, maybe? will hunt

yeah, I haven't used an optical drive in maybe 3 years? and I think I've only used the mba ethernet adapter once in the last year.

what do you still use an optical drive for??

I bought the laptop because I was working on writing vocal arrangements in Sibelius and I was going to be traveling for an extended period of time right before they were due. I bought the application 18 months ago and still have the installation disks. The Avid website, as far as I can tell, no longer offers the version I own as a download and multiple people have warned me off of upgrading, plus it would be ridiculous to have to torrent a 600GB program I ALREADY OWN THE INSTALLATION DISKS FOR.

Also, whenever possible I still purchase physical media when buying music, because it is much more likely that my hard drive will die (in fact, it's a certainty; the question is "when" and it's a fact of life of all mechanical devices) than it is that my house will burn down. Also, the recordings of my performances with our church choir are all released on CD-R. I don't keep that music on the MBP because the hard drive is tiny, but it would be nice to be able to listen to something that isn't yet in my iTunes library but might be in the bag I carry the laptop around in, particularly if it's a CD-R of something I'm listening to so I can memorize the piece for a show.

dang

but yeah, literally the first thing I needed to do when I took the thing out of the box was put installation disks in it, which I couldn't do because there was no optical drive, and I was intensely furious for about three minutes because I was literally flying out of town the next day before I noticed the "remote devices" link in the Finder window and solved all of my problems

(I had a similar minifit with VMWare Fusion, which was for whatever reason incompatible with the iteration of MacOS X the machine came pre-installed with; I had to update my OS, register my VMWare Fusion serial number on the VMWare website, then download an updated installer, which made me wonder why I even bothered buying the software at the store in the first place and also what exactly the big difference between dealing with a Mac and a PC was supposed to be.)

I always download from the developer if that option is available (which it sounds like it wasn't w/r/t sibelius)

Sure, but why should I waste 30 minutes downloading from the developer if I already have the installation disks?

because those installation disks were out of date and all software should be purchased and downloaded online

tbh it always takes me 45 minutes to find the discs, and then they're outdated anyway, and downloading vmware seriously took me five minutes

All I'm getting from this is DJP is more organized than me, has a slow internet connection, and likes old software

It is a more efficient use of network bandwidth and usually faster to install locally from a disk and then contact a server for incremental updates, which often will have a smaller footprint than the original install package; plus, you have no guarantee that the installer you're downloading is actually up to date. The VMWare situation was the first time I'd run into a situation where a brand new out-of-the-box application wouldn't even install on my brand new computer, but I can tell you as a developer who deals a lot with Microsoft technologies that the idea that their downloaded installers are "up to date" is totally laughable; same with the Blizzard games I've downloaded onto my iMac which still required 90 minutes of downloading after the initial install to get up to the most recent patch level.

DOWNLOAD THE INSTALLER I SAY

*Sandy arrives, power goes out for both of you, winner is person who has hard copy instruction manuals to read about installation even though there's no way to do so*

kind of think vmware lives in a different realm and doesn't give a fuck, true

i have to burn DVDs for festival entries etc & other professional reasons, plus i still DJ off CD-Rs, so opty for me!

FTR I'm on a decent high-speed cable broadband connection and 90 minutes is an exaggeration for VMWare but not for WoW

I confess that I have a $30 external DVD drive for ripping DVDs I borrow from my library

but the App Store kind of guarantees you'll always get the 'latest' installer doesn' it?

I have just enough need for DVD burning (work backups) and DVD watching (entertainment) that I'll have to get an optical drive with the new iMac next month.

If I didn't have the iMac, I couldn't have ripped the tour de force performance of jjj's high school band at our senior year talent show and shared it with ILX.

xp: the only things I have purchased from the App Store are OS- or iLife-related

I have a blu-ray drive in a mac pro for ripping blu-ray films

surely VMware is on the App Store

oh I guess not

oh, I doubt it

pretty sure vmware fusion is their most atypical product and most of their customers are enterprise businesses who have negotiated contracts and spend most of their time downloading software and fiddling with license management on the website

lol that is exactly my day job experience with them so I should have known better, really

their products do work really well tho

true, that

/restarts a couple virtual machines

but anyway, buying wholesale into the Apple Store philosophy is buying wholesale into a capricious monopoly that will fuck you over as long as it thinks it can extract money from you, in a myriad of obnoxious and counter-intuitive ways

that type of one-stop consolidation may be okay on a platform like your phone, where most of the information is either ephemeral or backed up elsewhere, but it's a horrible idea for your computer unless you are super paranoid about security, otherwise you run the risk of this:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/

aside from suspicion of the algorithms, this is why I don't do iCloud and I don't do iTunes Match and I don't use Find My Phone/Find My Computer, and if I did I'd definitely not use the same Apple ID to connect all of these things together

I've already bought wholesale into the capricious monopoly btw

find my iphone is pretty key, I use it about twice a week to make my phone beep a lot in my house

wish that Apple did two-factor auth, although it'd probably be hilariously implemented with an iPhone app

in 15 years of owning a cell phone, I've had my phone stolen once and actually lost a phone once; every other time I've misplaced it, I've called it and discovered it buzzing underneath a piece of paper next to our land line

I've had a cell phone about the same amount of time, never lost or had one stolen, but misplace the fucker all the time. Best part of the Find my iPhone thing: makes noise much longer than calling it would, as it never goes to voicemail. Also, no land line, and calling the fucker via google voice is irritating

I don't think I've actively used a land line in my residence regularly since college when pizza delivery places wouldn't accept orders via cell phone (oh man, try explaining that one to kids). Haven't actually had a land line at all since 2003.

all of our utilities are tied to our land line (including, ironically, the cable company that keeps offering us phone service) and have been since we moved in together in '99, so getting rid of it would be a massive PITA

sure

http://s3-media1.ak.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/HjftFkbTCXh1Y6EbAb7Skw/l.jpg

I have used find my phone on a handful of occasions that would've been dire otherwise (misplacing the thing ~somewhere~ in the hospital)