Just ordered a Macbook Pro

[handrewmoore]

I want a new one, bought this Macbook Pro in 2006 and it won't die!!! So I have no excuse to get a new one. They are built like a tank, mine is still humming right along and never had so much as a hiccup. I had a Powerbook since 2002 but passed it along to my mom once the Intel Macbook Pros came out, she still uses it everyday without any problems.

[gonzp]

Hi J,

I have had a mac for the last 5 years and I purchased the macbook pro 13" a few weeks ago. You will not be disappointed in your purchase! The updates to iPhoto and iMovie are awesome. The face recognition in iPhoto is amazing! Hope you enjoy!

[Olorin]

Mark, if you go to System Preferences, Energy Saver, and uncheck "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible," your drives will stay spun up.

[4tay]

Mac afficianados rejoice: Apple has now surpassed Microsoft in value. This, back from the brink of extinction about 14 years ago.

Steve! Steve! Steve!

[J.4knee]

iiiiiittttsssss hhhhheeeeeerrrrrrreeeee!!!!!!!!!!

[Bill H.]

[<)]

[Olorin]

Mark, if you go to System Preferences, Energy Saver, and uncheck "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible," your drives will stay spun up.

Not My external drives. I've tried everything, asked all kinds of questions on Mac boards - nothing worked. The final solution was a script application which "tickles" each drive once a minute to prevent them from spinning down. PITA. It's just one example of how OS/X is uncompetitive for production work. I say production work, because if all you do is browsing and some email it's not noticeable. But, I often work in 5 programs at once trying to build web sites or other media related output and the OS is always in the way. I refuse to keep buying faster machines, I want them to make a faster OS!

I feel your frustration and I know it's always painful when things don't work the way we'd like them to. Can you elaborate on what you mean by "external" drives? Are we talking portable USB, FireWire, SCSI raid in a chassis? eSATA?

[J.4knee]

LOL I typed "iiiiiittttsssss hhhhheeeeeerrrrrrreeeee!!!!!!!!!!" geeesh Mark I thought you'd have picked up on that! []

I am moving photos, video and music onto it for now that should keep me busy for a bit. 11 seconds to boot 3 seconds to shut down. Moving the video is going to be a slow process mainly becasue of the volume of data involved and it will be stored on an external drive so it will be a USB - USB transfer from my camcorder via the MacBook to the ext drive.

[Olorin]

Well, it's not all that painful. I was just making a careful observation.

I have an older Seagate 300GB firewire, a newer Iomega 500GB firewire and a very new Iomega 1 TB USB 2.0. Of course, it's a legitmate critique to suggest I ought to be using a Mac Pro (desktop frame) and install multiple internal drives. iMac isn't particularly useful for adding a boatload of peripherals.

You're right about both of these things, and we've landed square on the root cause of your problem. []

None the less, this business with drive spin down is but one of many complaints I have about the doggieness of OS/X. It's bloated, and it's slow.

The path Apple has been following is this: make the OS bigger, then peddle faster hardware to make the new bloated OS run about like it did on the previous release. Case in point. I bought an early iBook clamshell G4. It was the bomb when I got it. Ran quite zippy. After say 7 years, and 4 OS upgrades, it pretty much wouldn't even boot! And, when it did, it might take 2 minutes to load a browser. Now, the hardware didn't deteriorate. It didn't grow mold. Now the point isn't that I held on to a 7 year old notebook, the point is as the OS evolved it was obviously slower.

Second example. I gave my mom a white ball iMac. Ran fine. Then we upgraded the OS a couple times and SLOSH!!! it slowed to such a crawl it was absolutely unusable. Junk, Crap, not a useable computer. So, I erased the HD and loaded Ubuntu. Fire shot out it's arse, and it runs like a demon. Completely perfect for web browsing and email which is what she wanted to do. The Ubuntu looks cooler, runs faster, is more secure and oh wait - - it's FREE.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, and I hope I don't come across as argumentative, but I think what you're describing is largely a matter of perspective. In my view, the hardware and software have both evolved as time has gone by, and it's natural, normal product evolution in computers that processors and memory get faster, and hard drives become larger. Old hardware can run old software quite happily forever, since they were
literally made for each other, but old hardware is crushed by new software, as new software is made for more powerful, more capable new hardware. This isn't a vendor-specific phenomenon, but rather a characteristic of computing as a whole.

Not to be too much of an Apple apologist, but rather to look at things from another angle -- by way of comparison, would you expect to load Windows 7 on a seven year old PC and get XP-like performance? If your answer is no, then why would you expect to load its Apple equivalent on a seven year old machine and get a good experience?

Back to being helpful . . . as I feared, what you have is a systems architecture issue. Unfortunately you have a square peg in the form of the work that you're doing, and the iMac is a round hole, and it's not that OS X isn't a production-capable OS, it's that the iMac is a
consumer-grade computer and you're asking it to do professional, production-level work. The same result would come from trying to do video editing on an entry-level PC as opposed to a highly spec'd gaming or workstation machine; your productivity and your user experience would suffer because the hardware wouldn't be up to the task.

You might be able to improve things by making sure all of your scratch drives for Photoshop and so on are are the main, internal drive. The bandwidth available to the internal drive is several times that available to the external drive, especially the USB drive. USB drives are really only suitable for low-impact storage like iTunes libraries, and for unplugging and taking data with you that needs to travel. They're hopeless as primary or even secondary I/O devices. The FireWire drive does have decent I/O but, unless your iMac is old and uses ATA instead of SATA drives, FireWire performance isn't at the level of the internal drives. I think if you approach this as a sytems engineering problem, you'll out pretty well at the end.

[neo33]

Got my MacBook Pro 17" on Memorial Day for $1,200!

17" (1920x1200) LED Full HD Display, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz (6MB Cache), Nvidia GeForce 9400 & 9600 Graphics (512MB DDR3 VRAM), 4GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB SATA 7200 HD, 8X SuperDrive, Backlit Keyboard, Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Incredible machine for peanuts! No PC Laptop can beat this in term of price and power!

15.4 inch Glossy HD display
2.53 GHZ Intel Core I5
4 GB DDR3 Ram
500GB SATA 7200 drive
8x Superdrive
Backlit Keyboard
iWork
Bento 3


Yeah I am stoked

[neo33]

See my post above regarding Macs being expensive!

Regardless of what you think, Mac OS/X and Linux are both UNIX clones!

Macs are very expensive computers, and generally that expense has been justified for my tastes. But, that justification is getting more difficult as I compare Mac to Linux PC. Windows? Rubbish as far as I am concerned. I bought a little netbook a few months back that sadly came with Win 7 Beginner Edition. Gawd, it was pathetic. Beyond pathetic really. A new computer which out of the box barely ran. I replaced it with Ubuntu and made a magnificent little netbook out of it. With an Atom 100 it runs GIMP faster than my iMac runs Photoshop. That's cool. That's hard to ignore.

[Marvel]

I think OS/X has gotten bigger and slower while offering precious little in improvements

Snow Leopard has a substantially smaller footprint than Leopard, and performs much better on the iMacs and MacBook Pros I have upgraded.For our school, $29 for the newer OS per machine is a bargain. And you don't get different versions like you do with Windows... I can, however, get Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate for $10 under the Microsoft Work at Home program.

A netbook without the 2 gig of ram, will be slow with Windows. I put 7 Professional on ours in our department, with MS Office 2007. Performance is fine. It IS still an Atom, but it works quite well. I'm surprised the Dual Core Atom hasn't found it's way into the netbooks. With 1 gig of ram, the drive would be spooling constantly.

What I don't like (coming from a Windows environment) is how it still isn't very good as a multi user OS. Better, but it still isn't there yet. Safari still won't allow blocking or allowing individual popups. You allow all or none.

Bruce

[neo33]

BTW, Windows is not a real OS!

coming from a Windows environment

[Marvel]

BTW, Windows is not a real OS!

Actually, it is, with over 90% market share. The Mac )S is over 5%, while the SunOS is way down around .01%.Of course, the SunOS or Solaris .01% controls a LOT of data. Windows 7 is already over 7%.

Windows fulfills most definitions of what an operating system is and does.

I'm still waiting for BeOS to make a comeback. Maybe now that HP bought Palm, they will find a better use for it than as an appliance OS.