New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

I don't really notice a big diff between my air w/ the ssd and my mbp w/ a magnet drive, the only diff is in opening apps

It really depends what kind of apps you run! Also, if you reboot it's a lot faster with a SSD.

yeah but the point of having a mac is to NEVER REBOOT

most of my work consists of not doing any work and reading this one plain txt message bord, described as a percentage how much more efficient will i be w/a ssd

i keep oscillating. starting to come back around to the imac. and then my latent SSD-want kicks up, and i'm faced with shit like this, which makes me pull my hair out:

1TB Serial ATA Drive
2TB Serial ATA Drive [+ £112.80]
256GB Solid State Drive [+ £375.60]
1TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive [+ £451.20]
2TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive [+ £564.00]

i mean i want SSD - i have even convinced myself i need it - but do i really want to spend the price of a 1999 Ford Fiesta on it?

honestly I don't think the SSD tradeoff is worth it unless you are a pro photoshop or final cut user

one pro of the mac mini is that everything, including the monitor, is discrete and replaceable should it breaks. imacs are all or nothing after applecare is over, yeah?

yep

well I guess a fried logic board (aka motherboard) is a fried logic board. but a ram/hd would be pretty swappable in a mini if you had a spudger. think you need like magnets and suction cups and a crowbar to get into an imac

by the way i have an Expresscard SSD drive for sale if anyone wants it. never used. it will work on any Macbook with an Expresscard slot (except the very first two Macbooks ever produced, i.e. 1.1 and 1.2, i.e. mine)

it is a FileMateSolidGO 48GB

reckon you should just get the base mini with the 7200rpm hard drive and all the accessories you like

discarding my SSD dreams is making things a lot clearer, and that ^ is a compelling case.

thanks for all the hand-holding everybody

I don't think dayo has actually used a SSD so ymmv

lol I am posting from one right now. yay my apps open 2 seconds faster. what else is a SSD going to help with if you're just browsing the web or word processing? I'd trade an SSD for a fat pipe any day.

Listen, is there any reason that if I wanted a Mini, I would need the Lion server option? For ilx and streaming movies/watching DVDs and storing music/photos on?

I am like the Everybody's Mom of computer usage. Or the Morbius. Or something.

xx-post Low power consumption, no file fragmentation issues, more lightweight. I mean, still might not be issues, but hey... I don't even think the MBA would have space inside for a traditional drive.

Laurel, you have absolutely no need, and if at any point you did, the server stuff is a downloadable add-on pack with Lion, anyway.

I've always wanted a mac laptop and I've never been able to even remotely pay for one, so I'm always wondering how to magically put together a package I can afford. Will keep thinking abt it!

lol I don't begrudge the SSD in my air but at the same time it's not making me run towards swapping a SSD into my mbp. paying a 10x premium on price per gigabyte for getting rid of file fragmentation issues? no thanks

laurel I'd look into apple refurbished - significant discounts sometimes and they come with 1 year apple backed warranties. http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac?mco=OTY2ODY3Nw

Thx, dayo! I don't have $900 either but it is less than $1500!

mh, maybe you can help me understand this about SSDs. let's say that I am a heavy user of editing software like lightroom or photoshop or final cut. I keep all my files stored on an external or maybe even on the same computer but on a traditional, magnet based hard disk. once the app is up and running, what advantages does an SSD offer over running the programs off a traditional hard drive?

Those programs tend to use a "scratch disk" area fairly heavily during editing. I can't speak definitively, and my own SSD use has been mostly related to running files off the actual drive.

When you're doing software builds where it's touching a thousand 10K files... well, that's where my pro-SSD bias is coming from.

yeah - I assume pro setups have 10k rpm scratch disks set up or they pony up for the 500GB SSDs and transfer files on/off as required by the editing process. I was annoyed that for a home setup, even after spending $200 on a SSD, there is still a bottleneck in the shuttling back and forth of files between yer SSD and the HD you're keeping your files on. I'd much rather spend the money on more RAM! RAM!

HAHAHAHA

Sorry man, that may be true for a small outlier of independent pro contractors or heavy video use, but I have never heard of a shop or corporation that shells out for anything near that good.

That said, everyone's a prosumer now!

ssd >>>>>> hard drives, for everything except size. It makes so much shit so much ridiculously faster.

I've got a smallish SSD boot drive, then three disks raided together in the other bays, and you can *still* tell when an app's running from the raid.

once the app is up and running, what advantages does an SSD offer over running the programs off a traditional hard drive?
Apps are continually reading stuff from their .app folders, and Adobe ones hit the disk pretty hard. Also helps a lot when switching between apps, as one app's memory is written out to disk and another one is read in.

Tracer: if you don't like glossy screens why even bother with an iMac? The screens aren't all that, anyway. They're better than they were, though -- the original 20" alu-iMac's screen was atrocious.

Apps are continually reading stuff from their .app folders

I kept trying to think of a way to say this, but this is probably the cleanest way of doing so. From a file system standpoint, a .app in OS X is really more like a folder with a set of files than a file. So if the .app is 200MB, you're not going to see 200MB of memory taken up when you run it -- just the size of the actual executable (which is within the MacOS directory of the .app iirc) and any extra files it loads on initial runtime. Some apps are constantly pulling assets from disk.

TRACER i want that SSD what are you charging for it?

ok that makes sense xp

so developers who don't make their apps self-contained but install folders into your apps folder are just assholes, right?

pretty much, unless it's a file meant to be used outside of the app

Sometimes it's for legacy support; like ancient code bases from days of yore, but basically, yes, it should all be in the bundle.

Tracer, I've been having the same argument with myself. I've been torn b/t a mini/imac/mpb/mba for over a year. My main concern is future-proofing. I've been using a Powerbook G4 12" for 6 yrs and I'd like to not think about buying another comp for at least that amount of time. Also, paying more than a grand for a comp is not feasible right now. My plan is to get the mid-range mini (for the radeon), bumping it up to an i7 (which is unfort only dual-core), then getting the regular stock of everything else. RAM is cheap and installing is easy. Installing an extra HD looks daunting but in my experience in taking apart my PB, it's just an hour's worth of focused work. So that'll set me up for a huge HD plus an SSD when the price comes down. MBP and iMac are too expensive for me, and the MBA will get old in 4 yrs. All this has been tumbling in brain for a long time. Hopefully I can lock it down this weekend.

Also, question for anyone: My idea in getting the i7 is that it won't be as sluggish as the i5 as it starts aging. True? I can't find anything that would indicate any other benefit since they both have Hyper Threading and Power Boost.

did you look up benchmarks between the i5 and i7? ime speed bumps are not worth it but getting a different architecture might help

The specs aren't that different. The i7 BTO option is only dual-core so the only difference b/t that and the stock i5 is an extra .2 GHz and 1MB of cache. I don't know much about how processor caches work. Will that extra 1MB make it more efficient by orders of magnitude? Or would just an extra meg work just like how it sounds (ie, meh)?

interesting stuff shaane

V4HID - I think I've sent u webmail but I'm not sure if it worked; I am tracerhand AT gmail

Has anyone mentioned the ups factor? If you get a mini or an imac you don't get a built-in battery, so one brief power cut and you're fucked.

http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/teardrop_skepticism

So, let me pull out my trusty old Magic 8-Ball to finish this off:

<3 gruber

this thing looks like the business -

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/382087-382087-64283-72270-3884471-5163686.html

21.5" matte screen
Displayport, HDMI
4-port USB hub
IPS with LED backlighting

etc

this plus a rock-bottom bone-simple mac mini on educational discount that i can tinker w/for years

jfc 8 GB of memory is.... less than £40? i love living in 2011!

mh, do you know if they fixed the 6 GB or w/e limitation of earlier MBPs?

No idea, my MBP has 8GB

Usually the limitations are just "this is the maximum memory size available in this form factor" or in the worst case it needs a firmware update or it's using a lame processor/motherboard chip that can't address that much memory

the apple page says mine only supports up to 4gb ;_;

http://support.apple.com/kb/sp499

people are saying that 8gb works now after 10.6

hmmmm