I bought a brand new iMac on Tuesday. I’m pretty sure this will come as a surprise to some, so I figured I might as well offer some background information about this choice – maybe it’ll help other people who are also pondering what to buy as their next computer.
Not a switcher!
I’m far from new to buying Macs. I bought my first Mac somewhere in 2004 – an iMac G4, one of Apple’s most beautiful machines of all time – and since then, have purchased several other Macs, both new and used. My favourite by far was my trusty 12.1″ iBook G4, but I’ve also owned a PowerMac G4 Cube, a MacBook Air, an original iMac, and I still have a partially disassembled PowerMac dual G4 450Mhz lying around somewhere.
Even though I grew up with DOS, Windows 3.x, and the MSX (I personally never owned one – my best friend at the time did), I laid my eyes on BeOS in 2001, and since then, my perspective on computers changed completely – and it never changed back. BeOS made me realise just how much the popular platforms of the time sucked, and when Be went under, it felt like somebody took my wonderfully perfect Italian espresso away and tried to force me to drink those sugared-and-milked-to-death crap some people have the guts to call coffee.
I didn’t like Windows XP. I liked Linux, but at the time – 2002-2003 – it still had a while to go before it reached a state where I could actively rely on it. Not entirely unsurprisingly, I ended up in Apple’s arms, and became an instant fan of both Panther and Tiger. I’ve virtually always owned a Mac since then, except for the last 12 months or so. I didn’t like the iOS-ification of Mac OS X, and in the meantime, Windows had made huge strides, culminating in Windows 7 which I find a very good operating system all things considered.
But yes, I still believe we’d have been further along had BeOS succeeded.
In any case, my personal life changed completely as well. I’ve now got two university degrees, and two years ago I started my own business which supplies me with a decent enough income. This means that instead of computers being a hobby thing, the computer has suddenly become one of my most valuable possessions – if my computer breaks down, I can’t earn money. If I can’t earn money, I can’t buy coffee. And if I can’t buy coffee, I’ll go nuts.
These past few months I’ve come to realise that when your computer is that of a crucial aspect of your life, you simply can’t rely on self-built computers anymore. I had three desktop computers – main, backup, and emergency – and within the timespan of a few weeks, they all died. As in, some deep motherboard troubles that I can’t fix. Of course, all just out of warranty. And even if they were still within warranty, the process of dealing with faceless Asus or whatever and sending over my equipment sure didn’t seem appealing.
So, I decided I needed to do things differently. I needed a new computer – and instead of just wanting the cheapest and fastest machine possible, I now had to take things like service and proximity of authorised repair points into account. And you know the cold and harsh truth?
Apple bests every other player in this business when it comes to this aspect.
There’s no Dell store. There’s no authorised HP repair service I can just walk into with my machine. There’s no Asus store close by. In fact – they don’t exist at all. There’s no one to talk to face-to-face. There’s no place where I’m valued as a customer instead of a wallet with legs.
By this point, I’m sure some of you are already hitting up the comment section, arguing that I’m just as much of a wallet with legs for Apple – and of course, you’re right. However, this is where it’s very good to be Dutch, because we have a very old – founded in the early ’80s – chain of independent Apple retailers. They grew out of an attic a few towns south of where I live, and they’re now the number one Apple retailer of the country, by far. We’re talking stores all over the country (26 of them), but their oldest store, the one that started it all three decades ago, is still only a few towns south.
I’ve been a long-time customer there, and in 2005, I interviewed the original founder and then-owner of the company for OSNews. The most important thing to remember here is that even though they’re the largest chain of Apple retailers in The Netherlands – far larger than Apple itself, which only has one store in Amsterdam – they’re not actually owned by Apple.
This means that when you talk to their employees, you’re not talking to Apple employees who are forced to abide by Apple’s rules and employee handbooks; you’re talking to people who can say whatever they want about Apple. This means they go the extra mile for loyal customers, something ordinary Apple Store employees won’t do. An off-the-record extra here, a small beneficial change there, a few honest conversations about the dark and shady sides of Apple to boot.
This may seem small and inconsequential, but it actually means a world of difference. This is the only real store with actual people in it that I can talk to whenever I have a problem with my computer. No other brand has this, at least not in The Netherlands or near the hick town in the middle of nowhere I call home. This has huge value to me.
And so, opting for a Mac was actually not that odd of a choice.
‘The next big thing’-syndrome
Several people in the OSNews comments, on Twitter, and yes, even the store employees themselves pointed out that right now might not be the best moment to buy a new iMac, since a redesign is supposedly right around the corner. I was actually aware of this before I drove to the store, but I still opted to forge ahead. Why?
First, even if a new iMac is right around the corner, it will probably not be announced in the coming two weeks. Add to that another few weeks before it’s available in The Netherlands, and another week of shipping delays, and I’d be without a desktop computer for 5-6 weeks. This would mean I’d have to rely fully on my ZenBook – since it’s my only computer left, if it’d break, I’d be without a computer, and thus, without income.
Second, since rumour has it we’re looking at a complete redesign, it’ll most likely suffer from its far share of bugs and early adopter issues. As a long-time Apple customer, I learned one thing: don’t buy rev. A Apple stuff. There’s a considerable chance it’ll break, fall apart, have weird issues, or otherwise not perform as it’s supposed to. This won’t be an issue with the current iMac.
Third, there’s always something new right around the corner. Today people are telling me ‘wait for the redesigned iMac!’. When the redesigned iMac is here, they’ll say ‘wait for rev. B to fix the issues!’. When rev. B is here, they’ll say ‘wait for the next refresh, when it gets better processors’. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Take from it what you will
And so, I settled on a 21.5″ 1920×1080 iMac, with a Core i5 2.5Ghz processor, Radeon 6750 512MB graphics chip, and 8GB of RAM. I had the sales guy replace the crappy Magic Mouse with a Magic Trackpad (since I have my own mouse preference anyway) just for the hell of it – and I find myself actually using the Magic Trackpad with my left hand for switching virtual desktops and scrolling and such.
And it may take the most powerful machine I’ve ever owned (yes, it is for me), but it seems Apple has finally gotten its act together performance and responsiveness-wise. No longer do window operations feel covered in sticky syrup, and application loading and effects are all buttery smooth and instant. Multitasking and resource allocation have improved considerably these past few releases – a friend of mine and I started recording for our own let’s play YouTube channel (first video and second video – and yes, this is a shameless plug), and the iMac can easily render 1080p videos and still dynamically allocate enough power for me to continue to do other stuff without even so much as a hiccup.
Lastly, I have to mention that Windows 8 has played a role in my decision – a small role, but a role nonetheless. I tried, I really did, for months – but Metro just plain sucks balls. There’s no way around it. I’m about as open to different platforms and operating systems as is humanly possible, and while I think Metro will be great for tablets, it has absolutely no place on desktops and workstations, and it boggles my mind that Microsoft is actually forging ahead with this.
The desktop is legacy, and will receive little to no attention from Microsoft. I see nothing in Metro that is not utterly detrimental to my job – in fact, I can’t even do my job in Metro. I have no intention of investing in that platform, and when I spend well over a €1000 for a computer, I’m buying for keeps.
So, there you have it. Do with it as you please, and take from it what you will. While OS X still has enough that annoys me (my eyes still burn whenever I look at crap like Address Book or iCal), at least it’s a proper desktop operating system.
Welcome back!
Enjoy your stay!
Btw you can change the appearance of Calendar
http://osxdaily.com/2012/07/16/remove-leather-appearance-from-addre…
Gone to the dark side?
Classic ain’t going anyway, it might transform, but it still going to be there for years to come.
Have fun with the Mac upgrade cycle.
EDIT: What happened to your Windows 7 license? … 2020 is EOL. There will be probably Quantum Computers by then.
Edited 2012-09-27 20:07 UTC
It’s not just about the OS, it was as much about hardware reliability, warranty, and convenience of repair centers. He was tired of building his own hardware and being his own warranty, so for sane financial reasons he went with what works. I’m sure it might be a bit different if he didn’t rely on his computer for his job, but…wait why am I typing all of this? It’s all covered very well in Thom’s piece. Apparently you didn’t read it at all.
And for what it’s worth, I applaud him. He made a decision based on his needs and budget versus his wants and biases. For similar reasons, I prefer to buy off-lease HP, Dell and Lenovo business-class machines when it comes time to upgrade. Not only do I save a ton of money over buying new, such machines tend to be built better than their consumer lines and are much, much cheaper to obtain and maintain than anything I could build. I’d have to blow my budget to hell to match the quality. Also, since the hardware is fairly standard in the business class, alternative OS support is virtually guaranteed.
The machine I’m typing this on now is an HP slimline that has been rock-solid for the past year I’ve had it. I got it for $40 and with a $70 video card upgrade and another $20 to max out the RAM I have a machine that is dependable, quiet and well supported by its manufacturer. Windows 7 works on it very well, along with every alternative OS I’ve thrown at it. In fact, the only hiccup in that arena has been my aftermarket video card; it’s just too new for GNU right now. The onboard video is fully supported in everything but Haiku.
I already said I agree with this. I was commenting on the Windows 8 bit at the end that tbh had no bearing on the hardware at all, and I don’t think the OS either since Classic is STILL FUCKING THERE.
Good for you, I dunno what the point is.
Again what has this got to do with anything?
You did? Where? This is the entirety of the post I replied to:
There isn’t a single mention of his hardware purchase by you, apart from a sarcastic remark about the Mac upgrade cycle. So tell me again where you agreed with anything he said?
Just an example of my own similar approach to buying hardware based on needs rather than bias. For what it’s worth, I’ll be upgrading at least one machine to Windows 8 some time soon; I don’t have as much of a problem with it as some people. I think Metro on the desktop could stand to be tweaked, but I agree with you: Classic is still there and will see a lot of use by me and many others I’m sure.
Yeah I was probably a bit long-winded on that, just wanted to give a good example of how you can save money and get a reliable machine without necessarily switching OSes. In fact, it was actually more in line with your opinion so I’m not sure why you had a problem with it.
Not to mention the price they charge for that hardware, which honestly isn’t great to start with (An HD6750? Really?) is just insane. And I agree with win 7 lasting until 2020 Ballmer can squirt out his metro all he wants, isn’t gonna affect anybody.
Heck we are just now getting games that support DX10/11 so I doubt seriously there will be any software in 2019 you couldn’t run on Win 7 just fine and hopefully Ballmer will “retire” (be run off by the board) long before then and Win 9 will be back to a traditional desktop with just new features to get you to buy.
So while I’m glad Thom is happy with his new iMac if you were gonna go for the hard to upgrade walled garden why not get a Macbook? at least they keep their resale value longer than the iMacs do.
and that’s something special?
I was thinking the same, my main home PC has a mobo from 2005 and it never had problems with 1080p video, and of next week won’t have problems with 1080p games.
I don’t know anything about Macs, really, but it does sound like something people have been having issues with. I do not know why, like e.g. if it is just something people have screwed up themselves or if it has been some sort of an issue with OSX itself.
On my Windows PC I’ve been playing 1080p games on my primary screen and 1080p videos on the secondary screen for a while now without so much as a hiccup, and under Linux I remember having watched some videos on a secondary screen while a compilation was going in on the primary screen like about 10 years ago — granted, the video was not 1080p back then, but CPUs weren’t as powerful either.
I have a decent GPU and CPU at the time and they are both a bit of a joke now. But my old Pentium M from 2003 could handle Mp4 (just about) and 720p video.
My desktop has a proper Core 2 and a Nvidia 8800 GT machine. It can deal with it.
My old Athlon XP 1700+ from 2001-2002 could handle 720p H264 (just about – using the most optimised CoreAVC, hovering at 90+% CPU usage)
Heck my PC is running a 2 year old AMD Hexacore I paid a whole $110 for and an HD4850 which I got for less than $50 off of Geeks and I can do full 1080P WHILE doing a video transcode and having a chat window open and not skip a beat, there has been many a time I’ve been transcoding a video to DVD in the background while playing a game, nary a hiccup.
So yeah…1080P…My GF’s $300 AMD triple core with HD5450 does that just fine while she checks her FB, so not really a big whoop anymore. Heck even my $350 EEE E350 netbook will do 1080P over HDMI without skipping so I’d say that should pretty much be the LEAST you should look for in a system.
It is for Mac OS X, which was my point
.
Interesting… I have a early 2006 Intel iMac (original Intel iMac, CoreDuo 2GB) that I run two displays on and can do 1080 movies while developing on the other screen. The movies never hiccup! I keep hoping that it will die so I can talk the boss into letting me purchase a nice new 27″ iMac. drool, drool, but it keeps on going :/. Almost 7 years old and still a great machine.
If you don’t think the “independent” store sales/tech reps will fill you full of BS, you are naive. They probably know you will “trust” them more if they talk “honestly” about the product they sell. They are still slimy sales folk.
Krreagan
Really? What was the last Intel Mac you used before this current one? My late 2007 Macbook can do the same and it has a 2.2GHz core2Duo and 4GB of RAM. It can also do low latency audio, which none of my Windows laptops can handle without using the special ASIO4ALL driver that hacks ASIO support.
My phone does this too!
I now had to take things like service and proximity of authorised repair points into account. And you know the cold and harsh truth? Apple bests every other player in this business when it comes to this aspect.
I chuckled a bit when I read this. Sorry, not even close. You’re not an IT professional, so you’re probably not familiar with, say, Lenovo’s support and warranty services. Most Thinkpads sold in Europe come with a three year onsite warranty, and it isn’t wildly expensive. That means that after a phone call and a quick triage someone will be knocking on your door the next day after your machine breaks down. Picking up your hardware and lugging it all the way to a repair point just isn’t done if you’re depending on it to make a living.
Edited 2012-09-27 20:19 UTC
Sony has a very good support too.
The next workday after you call they pickup the PC and they have a commitment to bring it back in less then 8 workdays.
They are however very expensive after warrenty, so taking an extended warrenty can be helpfull.
My experience with Dell seems the same as yours with Lenovo – and all I was in South Africa of all place. Dell tried to fix the issue of the the phone first. Then said they’ll pop in the next day at my office to replace my laptop motherboard. That’s excellent service. And the price for such service is very reasonable too – I think actually cheaper than Apples extra warranty (and you must take you Apple product to their shops).
Dell support is crap. Dell attempted to fix a laptop 3 times before we had to force them to replace it by threatening to go to HP for our next batch of hardware. Sorry, no cigar.
Funny that, over more than 10 years I’ve had nothing but great service on Dell Optiplex/Latitude systems across a large organisation. <99% are fixed the business next day, first time, by an engineer who knows what they’re doing.
Where are you located though? We were in the UK, first line support at the time was based in the ROI (Republic or Ireland, which would be “Canada” to a US analogue) and the support was subcontracted to a service centre somewhere in the UK.
If sending a laptop in for the same easily viewable issue (half of the LCD stopped refreshing and gradually degraded to a greyish block) and it being sent back 3 times as “fixed”, only to *still* exhibit the same issue with in an hour of use – if that is good service, I can live without Dell support, Dell hardware and be a much happier and well balanced individual.
At the time, my job involved presenting to delegates on training courses that averaged to 4 working days in length (Mon – Thurs, 9:30 – 4:30pm, half day of Friday.) Having an unreliable laptop was simply *not* an option. That the MD of my company had to even get involved, threaten the main contact we had at Dell was just pathetic.
My experience with Apple is 100% the polar opposite. My iPhone 3G had a few hairline cracks around the dock connector – they replaced it out of warranty, no questions, no hassle, no pain. Later, my 3GS digitizer failed – fixed whilst I waited (yes, it was in Apple care, but that is not the point.) They didn’t need to go out of their way to be courteous and efficient, but they were.
My brother-in-law had an even better experience – his G4 PSU blew, taking the logic board. He had extended Apple Care and they gave him a new Intel based Mac Pro as a replacement.
I know of friends that have had faulty PC equipment and apple UK stores have gone through to the back and swapped equipment no questions asked, and yet I have went into dixons(currys) and asked for a replacement and they look at you as if you had just demanded the till money.
I Need to ask this, but how many stores in the US sit you down and make sure you are comfortable with your purchase before letting you leave with it free? I’ve never seen that level in any PC shop over here(although I believe pcworld do something similar now), maybe the US are spoilt over there with their electronics/PC stores?
This level of support is probably the reason why people go back to apple, at least in the UK.
Edited 2012-09-28 14:50 UTC
You may have noticed I mention Optiplex and Latitude systems which come as standard with a 3 year on-site warranty (i.e. they don’t take your kit away).
I have no experience with their consumer support, maybe your experience is typical but my experience of Dell’s business support has been exemplary over a long period.
This is in the UK BTW, I have less impressive things to say about their account management but the focus seems to be on support.
The laptop was an Inspiron 7500, which at the time was classed as a business class device.
Show me any official marketing that mentions any Inspiron product as a business class device…
You seem to be in the habit of spouting a lot of bollocks on here don’t you?
Ah, Lenovo support. Rude obnoxious engineer comes to my office to fix month old craptop. “This won’t fix it, it’s going to be your third party RAM”. Puts the machine back together badly and breaks the catch.
No, it wasn’t the RAM. It was you cruddy hardware. Same RAM, happy laptop.
Funny, that’s what I thought, too, when I read that snippet. If you are in business, buy a business machine with business support. Everything else is just insane and buying a MirrorMac is even beyond that.
On the other hand, we will see many new articles about the Apple user experience now. That’s something, too
Indeed. People shouldn’t cheap out on the warranty with critical equipment. A Dell Latitude with 4 yrs of ProSupport and Complete Care is standard issue where I work, and the ProSupport techs are much easier to work with then others.
Thom does have a point that VARs add value to the product. They build relations with the customers, and they have experience in implementing/servicing the products they sell.
I’m guessing (like most iMac buyers) you got it without an SSD and it’s a shame. The difference in the experience between an HDD and and SSD is massive nowadays, I could never go back.
I am running a desktop (mobo from 2005 or 2006, first lot of mobos to support Core 2 duo) with RAID 1 SSDs for the OS (60GBs), and it just another world running SSDs.
Yup. I just build my own i7 desktop PC with a 128GB SSD. From GRUB boot menu to fully loaded and functional desktop…. 3.5 seconds. Who needs hibernate! You gotta love Linux+JWM.
I have 4 seconds in Win7.
You lightweight Window Manager doesn’t seem to have any benefit over my “bloated” Windows Install.
INTERESTING.
Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity desktop also boots to fully loaded desktop in 3.5 seconds on my system. Ubuntu has always been (at least for the last few years) very fast at booting, even on a standard hard drive.
Good to know Windows is making progress though.
Windows has always been pretty fast at booting unless you let every application start at boot.
Anyway do people still reboot, I put my PC in hibernate, probably don’t reboot for months. Give me a shout when that works in linux flawlessly.
Why can’t Linux users keep their mouths shut about their choice of OS?
Because some people need a pat on their back to assure them they made the right choice.
This seems to be a problem for Windows users too.
To be honest it applies to iOS users, OSX users, Windows users, Android users, Linux users…
True…
If you love your OS, then you made the right choice.
I’m sure it’s an over the fence thing as well. I think Android guys ALWATS try and “preach” the virtues of it over iOS, but I’m guessing the Android guys feel the same way about iOS users too. We are as bad (or good) as each other.
Perception is key to this too…
Nice to know I’m not the only one that goes “Booting? Why?” because i haven’t booted in ages, even my little EEE with a HDD wakes at around 20 seconds and that is with a lousy 5400RPM HDD. I can’t wait until after the holidays when I’m gonna grab one of those after XMas sale 128Gb SSDs and drop into it, I’m sure it’ll be amazing.
I tried Linux for over 5 years before finally giving up, everything is just too much in flux, from the DEs to the subsystems it seems like every other day somebody on a dev team tweaks something and causes breakage on updates. My XP box in the shop has been running for 8 years now, 3 service packs and who knows how many patches and not a single broken driver, not one,whereas every time I turned around some dev was tweaking something that killed Pulse or trashed my WiFi under Linux.
Really wish it weren’t so, especially with the trainwreck that is Win 8 coming out this month, but even as lousy as Win 8 is at least you can update without breakage. maybe in 5 years they’ll finally settle down and stop the constant fiddling with the guts in Linux…nah.
Did you try distros which actually have a goal of that stability, predictability, dependability, decade-long support, and such? (I imagine you don’t want to pay for RHEL …but there’s always CentOS or Scientific Linux, for example)
Edited 2012-10-02 16:45 UTC
bowkota,
Even though SSD’s are becoming affordable, I’m not keen on their falling reliability levels. First there was SLC – 1 bit per cell, then MLC with 2 bits per cell (4 voltage levels). Now we’re seeing 3 bits per cell (8 distinguishable voltage levels). This produces higher capacity drives for very low manufacturing costs.
Each generation is moving towards ever smaller manufacturing processes: from 100nm in 2007 to 20nm today. This means more cells per area, but also that fewer electrons are available to represent a bit state, and increasing the likelihood of getting stuck electrons.
Combine both of these trends and it spells disaster for reliability. I experienced my own data loss, which is why I’ve been researching these things.
I looked up the specs for NAND chips used in my device, and they officially only spec 3K program/erase cycles before loosing data integrity!!! This is much lower than the million write cycles we had using 100nm SLC NAND.
3,000 P/E cycles (with 24 bit/ 1,024byte ECC)
http://www.jm-chip.com/en/down/H27UBG8T2A.pdf
(link is down)
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2144579
(they talk about it here)
Flash devices use smart controllers to distribute the writes across all cells of the NAND chip to alleviate the effects of any individual sector updates on the logical media. This is fine assuming most sectors rarely change. However if you have a data load that routinely rewrites significant portions of the flash disk – then the average cell lifespan will be consumed fairly quickly. Due to the write-distribution algorithm there is a good chance that all NAND pages will reach EOL at approximately the same time, so once data errors are discovered, there are probably more errors that haven’t even been discovered yet.
Not saying it’s for nobody, but do your research… failure is common. By all means keep backups! ( Ideally not on flash drives
)
I’ve been trying my own hand at performing data recovery off failing flash media, so if anyone does get unrecoverable flash media, I might be able to offer my services
Regarding SSD reliability: I’ve always been of the mind that you should run your OS and installed programs on the SSD for the speed gains and keep your data on a traditional HDD to avoid data loss. On GNU/Linux and BSD this is easy; during installation just put your /home on the HDD and you’re good to go. On Windows you can point your User folder at a different volume with a few extra steps after installation.
That’s what I am planning to do once my SSD arrives: I’ll move my Downloads – folder and most of the contents inside Application Data to a regular disk and link them to their appropriate place via NTFS junction points, but I’ll keep Firefox’s cache on the SSD because there’s a gazillion files there and they’re all very small ones — a situation where an SSD excels and a regular HDD doesn’t.
Would be nice if Windows offered some tools for trimming off the fat, though; at the moment my Windows – directory takes 23 gigabytes of storage, and that’s not including my home directory, Program Files or anything like that.
I use Glary Utilities to fix a lot of the cruft in my Windows installs. It may not make much of a dent in that 23GB you have, but it might be worth a shot. Get the non-toolbar version from their site, or if you install it via ninite.com you don’t have to worry about that at all.
Also, if you’re running x64 Windows it will take up much more space than x86. To me it’s worth the bloat to be able to run with 8GB of RAM.
EDIT: Just checked my Windows directory and it’s at 17GB on a four month old install of Windows 7 Ultimate x64.
Edited 2012-09-28 00:52 UTC
Regarding swap, realistically no high performance rig should use it. Get enough ram and be done with it. The only time memory should be stored to disk is for hibernation.
And in the case of hibernation, it’s one big linear read/write with no seeking overhead. If it’s placed on the outer rim of the disk, this is peak performing scenario for HDD, so I’m not even sure if the hibernation file benefits from SDD. Anyone have performance data on this?
If you have enough RAM in the system then it doesn’t really matter where the swap is as it will mostly go unused anyways. There may be a write here or there occasionally, but atleast on my rig those are very few.
Hibernation files are indeed big linear chunks of data, but performance-wise SSDs still win out: any modern SSD can easily do 500MB/s sequential read and atleast 200MB/s sequential writes, whereas atleast my own HDDs barely manage 100MB/s sequential reads and 60MB/s sequential writes in optimal case — this with 3.5″ desktop HDDs, my 2.5″ ones fare even worse. I can post screenshots from HDTune Pro if needed, but e.g. my laptop’s 500GB drive starts at 75MB/s sequential read speed at the furthest edge of the platter and drops all the way to around 50MB/s sequential read when closest to the center of the platter.
So yes, you’ll still boot up much faster with an SSD.
Now, if boot times aren’t as important to you, ie. only actual runtime – performance matters, then it would make sense to slap hibernation files on the HDD instead. In my own case I usually boot my PC 1-3 times a day so it’s not really a whole lot of time wasted even if I had to wait 3 seconds longer every boot — I usually pop to kitchen and grab a drink anyways while the system is booting. In other words I wouldn’t benefit much from placing hibernation files on the SSD.
WereCatf,
“I can post screenshots from HDTune Pro if needed, but e.g. my laptop’s 500GB drive starts at 75MB/s sequential read speed at the furthest edge of the platter and drops all the way to around 50MB/s sequential read when closest to the center of the platter.”
Well, you’re talking laptop drives, which are often much slower than desktop equivalents due to much slower 5400RPM and a much smaller platter at the rim such that fewer bits fly under the heads per rotation. Your conclusion is absolutely true. However I was wondering about a HDD rig built for performance.
I have to admit thought that 500MB/s seems hard to beat, heck I don’t think my (bargin priced) motherboard could even support that data rate.
Well, the desktop drives I have are in striped RAID so the values reported by HDtune Pro are reflective of that. I still decided to run a benchmark for you, they still show what they need to although transfer rate reported is higher than it would otherwise be. These are 7200RPM 3.5″ drives. Also, these are in use in the sense that my Windows – installation resides on them. I did kill all unnecessary background – processes, though, and let the system idle for a while before starting the benchmark.
First, I did two runs with the stroke – option on, ie. I limited the benchmark to the 8 gigabytes of outermost edge of the platters:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11811685/stripe1.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11811685/stripe2.png
Then I disabled stroke and let it do the whole thing through:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11811685/stripe3.png
As you can see the seek times are consistent with what they should be for a 7200RPM drive and the graph shows quite nicely how transfer rates drop the closer to the center of the platters you go while seek times rise. On a non-RAID setup this would be much sharper, though, do keep that in mind! Also, as you can see even with two 7200RPM drives in striped RAID the system barely manages 200MB/s.
Does this answer your question? Also, I expect atleast a thank you :/
SATA II supports up to around 300MB/s, SATA III is required for the 500MB/s+ speeds.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Revisions
Werecatf,
“Also, as you can see even with two 7200RPM drives in striped RAID the system barely manages 200MB/s.
Does this answer your question? Also, I expect atleast a thank you :/ ”
Yes, thank you for performing the experiment!
Were you surprised to see that much jitter in your graph? For all I know that could be normal. I expected the HDDs to do better. My own drives do an average 150MB/s at the edges, which would theoretically yield 300MB/s bandwidth in a raid. I’m guessing your disks could be slower due to a lower bit density and/or fewer platters. Or maybe your raid itself is a bottleneck?
With 15K disks, the bandwidth should double assuming no other component bottlenecks. So in theory 500+MB/s would be achievable using a raid of high performance drives.
Of course, it’s futile for an HDD to compete with SSD on seek latency, which in my opinion is THE killer feature for SSD. HDD spindle speed is an inherent bottleneck. Although I’ve often blamed operating systems for over-reliance on small files during bootup. If these were packed in a 300MB archive, the OS could read everything into ram easily within 3-4s. The OS would rebuild the archive automatically based on self-assessed dependencies… this is totally tangential to our discussion, sorry.
I’ll close by acknowledging your point, which is that SSDs are a win on performance.
The jitter is because the disks are in use. There’s slightly less jitter on the disks that aren’t in use, but there is still lots of jitter. Jitter is indeed perfectly normal, there is no way to avoid it — it is simply a side-effect of the drives being mechanical objects.
They do around 125MB/s individually, but I can’t test them individually now unless I unpair the RAID and that would require relocating all the data somewhere else and all that. Not worth it.
Aye, that is true. But 15K disks aren’t cheap, you’d save money just by buying two el cheapo SSDs and setting them up for RAID mirroring so that if one dies the other one will still function. Replacing the broken one wouldn’t cost much, and you’d get the benefit of less heat, less noise and lower seek times. Also, as I said, even 15K disks have seek times at around 2-3 milliseconds, whereas SSDs generally have something around 0.02ms.
That is how many liveUSB/CD – systems work: they load the image to memory and only then execute its contents. This improves boot-up by several orders of magnitude, although it requires more memory.
No need to be sorry, plus I agree with you. Alas, I am not aware of any OS that is actually capable of doing that. It also doesn’t seem like a feature worth putting much effort into anymore as flash-based storage media won’t go away anymore. It’s actually much more likely that in the future all mechanical drives will also incorporate some flash-media for OS-files and/or cache, something that completely eliminates the need for such an archive.
WereCatf,
“Aye, that is true. But 15K disks aren’t cheap you’d save money just by buying two el cheapo SSDs and setting them up for RAID mirroring so that if one dies the other one will still function.”
I’d personally be worried about common failure modes of SSD in a RAID. It would be unusual for HDD components to die at the same time, but with SDD the cells could exhaust their lifetimes in parallel especially if they’re mirroring the exact same writing patterns. Once uncorrectable data errors start appearing on one, it’s very likely that severe data errors are already occurring on the other too. Maybe combining an old SSD with a new one could help avoid simultaneous failure?
From a technology point of view, I find it ironic that we’d be moving towards MLC and TLC NAND chips, which explicitly give up reliability in favour of doubling and tripling capacity, and then we’d turn around and use these less reliable chips in a RAID environment with the explicit intend of giving up capacity in favor of gaining reliability.
I’d be more tempted to use an SSD as a cache on top of the HDD. I know some manufacturers will sell a bundle like this for a high price, but I’m not sure if you can take a generic HDD and a generic SSD and setup them up this way on linux or windows?
“Replacing the broken one wouldn’t cost much, and you’d get the benefit of less heat, less noise and lower seek times. Also, as I said, even 15K disks have seek times at around 2-3 milliseconds, whereas SSDs generally have something around 0.02ms.”
Of course
That is possible, but buying from two different manufacturers would most likely prevent simultaneous breakdown. Especially so if the cells themselves come from different factories and/or batches.
You’re in luck: http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/ might interest you! It’s a Linux-based implementation of a block layer cache that according to benchmarks works exceedingly well, plus it’s easy to set up and there’s a lot of settings you can tweak to your particular uses! As the wiki implies pairing bcache with e.g. a RAID6 setup does overcome the hefty penalty involved with random writes on a RAID6 and you get best of both worlds simultaneously — of course, there are much simpler usecases for it, too, but this goes to show how powerful it can be when put to use.
There are some caching solutions for Windows, too, but I can’t remember them. I only remember that all the ones I saw were quite inferior compared to bcache and that’s why I never bothered to bookmark them. If you find a high-quality one I’d be interested in a link myself.
WereCatf,
“You’re in luck: http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/ might interest you! It’s a Linux-based implementation of a block layer cache”
That’s awesome. I’m a bit wary of relying on linux kernel patches due to frequent kernel interface breakages (as has been my experience with AUFS patching). Never the less I’m really tempted to try it right now, I’ve bookmarked bcache and will have to come back to it on the next kernel I build.
Thanks! Till next time.
Edit: My mainboard has only lists 3Gbit/s SATA, so alas I’d have to upgrade my system to get the most out of SATA III speeds. Some day…
Edited 2012-09-29 02:27 UTC
You know the OS actually expects some Virtual Memory of some sort. It may not need it … but it expects it.
Exactly. You’re playing Russian Roulette running with no swap at all, since there will be a page out sooner or later. Even on my Raspberry Pi I put a small swap file on the external HDD; as it is used as a server right now, I’d hate to have it go down over a random page event.
I agree, this is the way to go if you happen to have an SSD. SSD for the system, hard drive for data. But I have to admit that I don’t trust SSDs for the long term–even when used as a system drive. For example, if you regularly do a fresh install of your OS while keeping your /home directory intact, and you use a distro that has a release cycle of under a year, how many OS installs will you be able to do before bits start to go bad? Never mind the typical package updates throughout the lifespan of a distro; there are usually lots of those.
The fact that these things have to even be considered makes hard drives a more attractive choice in my opinion. Also, if you’re a distro hopper you may run into problems sooner. What about swap space… should you put your swap partition on a hard drive, and then suffer the slowdown of using a hard drive anyway (eliminating one of SSD’s biggest advantages) as soon you start running out of RAM–all because the SSD cannot be trusted for frequent rewrites?
Instead of getting one expensive drive that is just big enough to hold one OS and does not have proven reliability, I honestly think you’d be better off just getting a larger hard drive and partitioning it. Or even get a smaller “system” hard drive, and a bigger one for data. Sure, hard drives are also not known for their low failure rate, but at least they’ve been tried, tested and proven over the decades. It’s a technology you can at least somewhat trust.
Modern computers and hard drives are so damn fast anyway, I honestly can’t imagine an SSD being that big of an improvement over a good quality hard drive, performance-wise. Where SSD can truly beat the shit out of hard drives, though, is in laptops and similar portable devices; no moving parts means no physical damage, crashing, and data loss by accidentally dropping or bumping the computer. IMO, that is where SSDs truly shine. Then again, even in laptops I often hear about the battery or a corrupt/infected Windows installs far more often than a crashed hard drive.
I pretty much agree with you all the way, which is why I have yet to dive into the SSD world.
You mentioned swap and “running out of RAM” but most machines these days have 4GB or more of RAM out of the box, even laptops. While I don’t think one should run without swap, I really don’t see the benefit of putting it on an SSD if it will rarely be touched. The exception would be older machines limited to 2GB of RAM or less, though the cost/benefit equation of an SSD in such a machine is something else to ponder.
OSX runs happily out of RAM with 4GB and Firefox running. After replacing it with 8GB I haven’t heard complaints…
Really the main benefit would be to have something to fall back on in case a runaway process starts leaking memory. Other than that… well, swap is mostly pointless at this point when you’ve got 4-plus gigs of RAM. Even if I had a whopping 16GB of RAM, I would probably still set up, say, 256MB swap, just in case.
I was mostly referring to slightly older machines that may only have 1-2GB RAM. The POS Dell I’m on (from 2006), for example, has a dual-core AMD64 processor with only a gig of memory, and it can only handle a max of two gigs. In fact, I recently downgraded from a 64-bit OS to 32-bit to gain performance improvements by not swapping so much. And so far, it’s helped.
Still though, if it’s a desktop machine in question, if you go the route you mentioned by using SSD for system and HDD for data, it’d be simple and practical to set up a small swap partition on the HDD. And as you mentioned the newest machines come with enough memory that they will probably never need to swap anyway, but you could still have it just for a little extra protection.
A regular consumer-oriented SSD should last around 10 years as a system drive just fine, even with swap on it. There are several websites about this, including specific burn-in benchmarks that just keep reading/writing the SSD until it goes bust.
The difference is like a night and day. SSDs especially excel at reading small files and/or fragments that are scattered all over the disk because of the miniscule seek times. Out of curiosity I tested my regular HDDs the other day and got 7ms and 9ms seek times whereas a USB 3.0 stick got 0.05ms seek times. That’s 140 times faster. And guess what? Typical OS-files and program libraries and binaries tend to be small files, scattered all over the place.
Regular HDDs are still good for sequential data, but even there SSDs these days trump HDDs in speeds, with some going up to 500MB/s sustained sequential write speeds.
Well, two things. First, I’m not sure I can believe that “10 years” figure; I’ve done some reading about SSDs, and it doesn’t seem totally believable to me. Not for a system drive with swap and all your data, at least. It just sounds too far-fetched. Maybe in a perfect world and in perfect conditions, but not in this world.
And second, SSDs definitely have the theoretical edge over hard drives when it comes to the speed of reading files that are laid out non-contiguously on the drive. But… at the same time, in all my time running Linux (exclusively for about 6 years), I have not had any major slowdowns due to fragmentation. It just doesn’t happen. I was leery about moving entirely to an OS that doesn’t even offer a native defragmentation program, but it turns out that it really is needed much less.
On the other hand, before I switched I was using Windows XP, and it seemed like I was running PerfectDisk every week or two just to keep the drive running at peak speed (especially the system drive). So… I guess the moral of the story here is that Windows users have more to gain in terms of performance than Linux users by using an SSD?
I recently found out about the free version of PerfectDisk and had my cousin install it on his Windows 7-based machine… as I expected, just one offline/boot defrag and one online defrag made a very noticeable performance improvement. So apparently on Windows a good defragging is still needed. [Note: Previously, I told him to install the free program Defraggler, which he used until then. IMO, PerfectDisk is a must… if I ran Windows today, I would no doubt buy another license for a recent version of the program.]
the parts about ssd speed and lifetime sound right to me. even on fast new systems, hard drives still thrash left and right when doing lots of stuff.
and think of how many old semiconductors there are still working. the 10 year estimate makes sense because most ssds won’t get worn out enough to kill the NAND. most of the stuff on an ssd just sits there. and when stuff is written, it is spread out across the nand to reduce aging.
The only time the thrashing gets noticeable on my machines has always been when the system is swapping–especially when the swapping gets out of hand. In this case, having to swap is a bad thing in general, and the fix (although it will come at a cost) is more memory. That swapping-related thrashing doesn’t cause a definite and drastic decrease in the the hard drive’s life, but if it were to happen on a purely SSD-based machine, it would. Hard drives really are built to handle some pretty heavy-duty work; I’ve put many of mine through hell over the years especially in terms of swapping, and they never failed to impress me at how long they last before breaking.
I tend to usually have a system drive and a secondary drive for /home though, so thrashing for me tends to be minimal unless the system is swapping. Years ago I put the swap partition on the /home drive, thinking that would minimize hard drive usage and therefore thrashing, but later I found that I was wrong and that putting the swap space on the same drive as the system partition gave better results.
Don’t try to turn this into an anti-Windows argument. You know perfectly well that both Windows and any average Linux-distro consists of thousands of small files. It doesn’t matter whether those files are fragmented or not, they’re still not laid out on the disk in such an order that the drive can read every single one of them in sequential order and that is exactly why low seek times matter.
Also, as I said these days SSDs trump HDDs even in sequential speeds. Check out e.g. http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/adata-xpg-sx300-256gb-msata-ssd… : the SSD can write ~200MB/s incompressible data in sequential order, something that no consumer-oriented HDD can do.
Reading both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Comparison_of_SSD_wi… and http://thessdreview.com/ would do you a lot of good.
A SSD is many times faster than a HDD for my work (programming). My 5 year old ThinkPad T61p (Core 2 Duo, 8GB) with a slow 128 GB, SATA I SSD absolutely stomps my employer-provided ThinkPad W520 (Quad Core i7, 16GB) that has a 7200 rpm HDD in tasks I care about, like compilation. Generally my compile jobs and large application launches (enterprise DBMS) are 4x faster. And this is with a nearly 5 year old SATA I SSD drive (a whopping 128 GB at that).
Another interesting note is that I also have a Samsung 830 512 GB in a newer system and the performance, while better than the super-old SSD, is less than 2x better. The return on investment for high vs low performance SSDs is minimal. OTOH, making sure you buy a reliable drive is money well spent.
This is honestly such a deep, complex subject that everyone could argue the living hell out of it and no one would ever agree on a conclusion.
There are just too many factors involved, and whether you want to hear it or not, the OS involved does make a difference.
I did a quick fsck on my / and /home partitions for the hell of it earlier just to get fragmentation data, and quite honestly, I am amazed at what I saw; it completely backed up what I said, 100%. It was shocking, considering the cringe-worthy state of my system’s partitioning. It’s in desperate need of re-partitioning, and technically I’m doing a lot of things extremely inefficiently and just downright WRONG, yet far fewer fragments were reported than PerfectDisk would typically report in much better circumstances. And the biggest culprits? Exactly what I expected according to filefrag: three VirtualBox disk images.
And BTW, the reason I focused on data fragmentation is because in my experience it tends to have a far more devastating effect than a bunch of little files scattered all over a drive. That is, assuming you’re running an OS and file system combination that is prone to fragmentation in the first place… luckily, in that case there are some excellent tools to keep the fragments under control.
Not to mention, with the general explosion of the data densities of hard drives that has been going on over the years, even if the rotational speeds do not increase a newer drive will still probably read the same amount of data as an older drive, even faster.
The bottom line is that hard drives are wicked fast these days. And with partitioning, it’s easily possible to separate your boot files (/boot), main system (/), programs (/usr), and personal files (/home) and keep them all together to minimize seeking between files… but honestly, in my experience you don’t even have to go that far, because I’ve found (for example) Windows XP running practically exactly the same on a 15GB partition at the beginning of the disk as it did on a 60GB partition spanning the entire drive. The only condition? That the number of file fragments are kept to a minimum.
I will just say that I still stand by what I said and will leave it at that.
Edited 2012-09-28 12:51 UTC
What is there to argue about? Less time spent waiting == more time doing something else.
A seek is a seek, it doesn’t matter how you believe you’ve grouped the files together. What matters is their physical location on the platters: the closer to the outermost edge of the platter the faster the transfer speeds and lower the seek times.
This here quite well demonstrates how little you understand about the topic; the size of the partition is irrelevant, the location of the files is not. You get EXACTLY the same speed with a 200TB partition as you get with a 200MB partition if the files themselves haven’t moved.
Go ahead. Come back when you decide you don’t wish to be wrong any longer.
And if he had used something except Linux (or even cared at all) for the last 6 years (or 10) he would had known that Windows run NTFS now.
UltraZelda64,
“First, I’m not sure I can believe that “10 years” figure;”
I’ve read that manufacturers are targeting 3 years of heavy use. Anything less than that they consider unacceptable. Anything more they consider as an opportunity to increase the tradeoff from reliability to capacity. However all these reliability figures are based on “typical” writing patterns as they’re handled by the wear-leveling controller. If you are going to regularly re-write the entire flash, then the wear-leveling algorithm becomes irrelevant and your back to the NAND chip’s underlying program/erase lifespan (spec’d around 3-5K).
So, whether flash is acceptable depends upon the application. If you are a photographer, you can fill up your flash card a few thousand times before going over the manufacturer’s specs. This is acceptable to most consumers.
Storing swap could be ok, but only if you don’t expect applications to leak into swap very often. If an application enters a period of vicious swapping such that the entire swap area is being rewritten continuously (and assuming the swap space is a large fraction of the SSD capacity), then you’re looking at depleting the NAND chip’s lifespan very quickly.
Flash is much better suited in scenarios where reading is much more frequent than writing, which is usually the case for operating system files. Just be aware of processes that continuosly write to flash.
Do the maths. 3000 p/e cycles per block. So for a 128GB drive with ideal wear levelling, you can write ~3000 * 128GB. If you write 64GB a day (unlikely) you’d get 6000 days worth of writes. That’s > 16 years.
My guess is your SSD will outlive your machine, and may well die a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy) related death before the FLASH dies.
I believe they “did the math” as well as controlled-climate testing when they came up with the conclusion that the Compact Disc would last up to 100 years, did they not? Also, I’ve had a few hard drives outlive the computer itself, so that’s not saying a whole lot about the SSD. Especially when it’s all theoretical anyway.
And in the previously mentioned case of swap use on an SSD, that same math will work out of your favor, speeding up the loss of bits on that device. Unless these drives actually swap bits from different partitions across the entire device. Do they?
Once these things have been in decent use in the real world for about 15-20 years and there is real-world evidence to back it up, I’ll believe.
Of course, by then the newest SSDs of the time will undoubtedly be far more reliable than what there are now.
christian,
“Do the maths. 3000 p/e cycles per block. So for a 128GB drive with ideal wear levelling, you can write ~3000 * 128GB. If you write 64GB a day (unlikely) you’d get 6000 days worth of writes. That’s > 16 years.”
I’ve got a few issues with your calculation. Obviously “ideal wear levelling” doesn’t exist generically: what’s ideal for one pattern is non-ideal for other patterns. And in fact a 128GB SSD is likely to be comprised of at least 8 NAND chips, which for performance reasons are running in parallel and may not take part in distributed wear leveling. So removing your assumptions might decrease your calculation by at least a factor of 8.
We are also talking about reliability on it’s own, but in real devices reliability is one of many conflicting goals: performance, capacity, cost, dimensions. etc. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s not safe to make assumptions. Even if the MTBF was 100% accurate, it only describes a curve with a multitude of failure points. Even with 3-5 years MTBF, you can still fail in a few months time. I’m just recommending those with write-heavy data loads take extra precaution against data loss with flash drives.
There was a study someone did correlating the jitter in flash performance to it’s remaining data longevity. The older flash cells are, the more time it takes to re-program them. I’ll try to find a link to it. It could offer a way of getting feedback about how much life is remaining on one’s SSD.
Of course, there’s also write amplification as well to factor in.
But given how modern SSDs work (basically a log structured device) write amplification should be quite low (approaching 1) and wear leveling will actually be close to ideal once static wear leveling is employed.
My point was that for most people, you’re unlikely to hit the FLASH p/e limit even with 3000 p/e cycles. Firmware issues are more likely to toast your data than physical FLASH errors, which I admit has been a problem with the early generations of drives. But firmware is getting better and the market more mature.
Was reading a review of the latest Samsung SSD’s and for all the talk/tech about how well it functioned the one thing that caught my attention was the 5 year guarantee!!! Compare that to the risible guarantees that now come with mechanical HD’s.
“My point was that for most people, you’re unlikely to hit the FLASH p/e limit even with 3000 p/e cycles.”
I don’t disagree, for many people with typical usage flash will outlive the device, but it all depends on your writing patterns. I stand by my opinion that if you regularly update very large datasets, the lifespan of these newer 3K P/E NAND chips can be consumed quickly. Mind you, I’m not trying to imply that everyone is at such a high risk. The most troubling common use case that’s been mentioned is using NAND for swap “just in case a badly behaving app exceeds available memory”, well that badly behaving app could be trashing the NAND’s cells for no good reason.
That might not seem so bad if you’ve only got a small swap file. However the flash controller will be busy re-provisioning healthy under-utilized cells (where static files reside) and replacing them with highly active swap pages. This is done to extend the average lifetime overall, however it implies even more writes than the swapping alone, and it puts the static data in additional risk by moving them to older cells. We mustn’t overlook the controller’s own writes for it’s page tables. Unlike a HDD where the disks are clicking like crazy, with SDD you might not even notice.
I think people may not realise just how flaky these MLC NAND chips can be. Not to scare anyone, but just to provide some insight, here is a screen shot of the NAND dump for the last flash case I worked on, which was one of the more popular brands.
http://i.imgur.com/A03mO.jpg
Here we read in 5 pages, each page being read 4 times and repeated on screen. (We’re only seeing the first 100 or so bytes out of the full ~6K page.) The colors highlight inconsistent read errors on each page (not showing the write errors). This is perfectly normal in newer chips where the controller’s ECC is designed to compensate on the order of 30 bit errors per 1KB. It’s fine as long as the errors don’t exceed the ECC as engineered
Never the less, due to the probabilistic nature of some of these bits when read, it becomes non-trivial to deterministically calculate how many bits are bad by reading them once as the controller does – therefore it’s conceivable that the controller will write data in a page, *thinking* it’s still correctable via ECC, only to find out the data actually contained more bit errors than it’s ECC could compensate for. Of course the engineers should anticipate this and should mark the page bad even when there are correction bits to spare, however unless the flash is heavily over provisioned, the controller has to be conservative in order to not prematurely use up all it’s spare pages…it’s a delicate balance resulting from the conflicting goals brought up earlier.
Anyway, I hope the main take away is: enjoy the real benefits of SSD, but please remember to keep a backup.
I was thinking about this last night and it would be an exceedingly interesting project to try and measure what kinds of workloads yield what kinds of results. It’s easy enough to automate such testing under Linux, for example, all you need to do is collect enough information about the different kinds of workloads and then accelerate them, then do the math when the drive goes bust about how much real-world time it would’ve taken. I’m actually formulating a way of collecting said information right now and how to apply it to a benchmark, too bad that I have no financial means of buying a bunch of SSDs and burning them through until they die.
Yea, my geeky curiosity couldn’t justify that experiment. “Donor disks” are useful for another purpose: reverse engineering the encoding/mapping algorithms used by a particular controller, which is immensely helpful in reconstructing sector data from a raw flash dump in a data recovery scenario.
But instead of talking about it I’ll just drop this link.
http://www.flashbackdata.com/blog/?p=195
Well, I am waiting for my turn to win the lottery.. I did actually win 16.80 euro last night!
Not enough to buy two dozen SSDs just to burn through them in the name of science but, hey, you never know.
That’s actually really nothing new to me. I follow SSD-related news every now and then and most of the stuff discussed here doesn’t really apply to SSDs: SSDs by design use commonly-accessible NAND-chips, but the actual controllers are always proprietary and often only accessible to 1-3 manufacturers. As such the NAND-chips aren’t physically paired with the controller and recovering the chips is straight-forward.
Now, even though recovering the chips is straight-forward there are two hurdles to overcome if you want to recover the data on said NANDs, and these hurdles are: 1) Compression — most controllers these days do compression of data in order to minimize actual writes to the chips and thereby provide longer lifespan. 2) Encryption — most controllers also employ encryption of data exactly because recovering the chips themselves is easy. Old SSDs didn’t employ encryption, but it’s a standard feature nowadays and cannot be disabled. The encryption-scheme is obviously not documented anywhere and is only accessible via NDA and the keys used are unique, they are not shared even by drives from the same batch.
I’ve only moved to a SSD drive some 3 months ago. There is a HUGE difference in performance. Applications (no matter how big) load near instant. Any apps that use disk IO are dramatically improved.
Don’t believe me, view the many Macbook Pro SSD vs Standard HDD videos. It is really just as you see it in those videos. The nice thing of those Macbook Pro comparisons is that you know the hardware is identical, just the hard drives are different.
I have a 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD. With 460MB/s read and write performance and a constant 0.02ms access time, standard hard drives simply pale in comparison. Obviously I still use large standard hard drives for general data storage, simply because they are cheap.
The firmware can also greatly help or hinder the reliability of a particular flash chip.
You should always be prepared by keeping regularly backups with one of the many free or commercial backup programs–regardless of using an SSD or a spinny disk.
I think it is fairly evident that you should have a decent backup plan SSD or not.
This is not new.
Yup. I have an SSD in my MacBook Pro. The difference is like day and night. My work machine still uses a hard disk and it is annoyingly slow.
I use onsite backup (Time Machine) and offsite (backblaze), so when my SSD crashes, I’d be up and running again in no-time. Not that I am too worried about it, because the average SSD lifetime is a lot longer than I use a particular machine.
lucas_maximus,
“I think it is fairly evident that you should have a decent backup plan SSD or not.
This is not new.”
Of course you should have backups. But what is new compared to HDD is that NAND flash itself has a very limited number of writes before dying, even if none of the components have broken down. A hard drive can obviously break down, but as far as I know it’s media can take virtually unlimited number of writes without worrying about significant data integrity losses.
“Sudden death” is also new – or at least, the severity of it. Because it happens also to HDDs of course, but there it tends to impact only the electronics board – so swapping it for one from an identical drive quite often did the trick, as far as copying the data goes.
With SSDs being just one electronic board, it’s bound to be more messy…
Good luck on recovery as I’ve tried my hand at it too and with SSDs it seems like the controller goes bad more times than not so you are just boned. this is one of the reasons i always push my “backup backup backup” mantra upon customers, especially my gamer early adopters, as its just too easy to get bit by new tech failing.
But this is why I say there are places where SSDs make sense and places where it doesn’t. If its a mobile and you have a USB drive to backup important data? Makes sense as no moving parts and you can easily slap the drive you pulled from the unit to go SSD into an external case and use it for a backup. Gamers where its just the OS and a few games? Again makes sense, they can have a disc image and if it dies just use a HDD until your replacement arrives. Businesses or anything that is mission critical? Does NOT make sense, the risk of failure and the cost of downtime makes it not worth the extra speed.
So I’d say SSDs are like any other tool in that you have to know where its a good fit and where its not. I’ll personally switch my HDD in my netbook for an SSD after the first of the year, the extra battery life and faster boot times will make it worth the hassle and risk. On my desktop where I only put the system to sleep? Not gonna bother because with 8Gb of RAM for Superfetch even with my OS drive being a 5400RPM EcoDrive it just wouldn’t be worth the increased risk.
bassbeast,
“Good luck on recovery as I’ve tried my hand at it too and with SSDs it seems like the controller goes bad more times than not so you are just boned.”
Well, I actually desolder the NAND chips and work on data reconstruction from there so I’m not limited to recovery through a bad controller.
“But this is why I say there are places where SSDs make sense and places where it doesn’t.”
That’s the bottom line. I’m hoping reliability problems are solved. Maybe one of these alternatives will replace NAND all together:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/the-future-of…
i just got the macbookpro retina machine. and you are right.. SSDs are awesome. the only downside is the getting less space and paying more money.
The test I’ve seen seem to suggest an SSD cache is enough and give most of the benefits.
I used to be into this whole “same day cum on-site cum extended warranty” thing, but then I realized that if the problem was even remotely serious (eg: PSU, gfx card) you’d have to trust the system with them for at least a couple of working days, whether Apple Mac Pros or HP workstation class units or whatever. Sure, the rig would usually come back good as new in a few, but that was still an inconvenient amount of downtime.
Hence, I went the build-it-yourself route, and made sure I always allocated spare cash to buy replacement components on the spot if anything went wrong. That way I could still get work done and send the defective part for a warranty claim if applicable, knowing that once it arrived I’d have an extra lying about in case something went wrong with the same part again, or sell it off.
Macs are good computers, if a little overpriced. OS X has (imho) gone a bit downhill since after Tiger, but it’s still a decent enough bit of kit.
Edited 2012-09-27 20:37 UTC
I like this strategy and have taken it so far as actually buying items in duplicate (and more) after I find that it works well for me. I have four Crucial M3 256 GB drives. One is a spare that I also use for backups when upgrading firmware. The “spare” actually rotates in each upgrade cycle (think of volleyball rotation) and one active disk rotates out to become the spare.
We’ve had a dell technician show up on site and change the motherboard out in a failed latitude e4300 laptop. Their warranty work on servers, for us, has been exceptional as well. We’ve had less than stellar success out of toshiba who comes off as a bunch of slow bureaucrats.
Your main argument seems to come down to – you want to be able to have someone else take care of the hardware when it breaks and you want that someone else to just around the corner.
It seems to me you could do a lot better for yourself (in terms of money and hardware quality) if you took over that role yourself and build and maintain your own hardware. Are there no PC component shops in the Netherlands anymore? Or are you just wanting to be a consumer who when it comes to the insides of the magic box, “doesn’t deal with that stuff”?
As for your recent motherboard failures, you might want to get your electrical setup checked out. I’d be really sad if your brand new expensive iMac suffered harm as a result of electrical problems on your end…
Edited 2012-09-27 20:41 UTC
Up-voted for the electrical system check up. I’ve lived in some extreme environments where the the electricity has killed motherboards, power supplies, hard drives and more.
If you had that many pc’s die from mysterious electrical problems… It really does point towards a problem with the electricity.
This is why you should always surge protect the PC.
What happens when the surge protector erupts in flames?
Is this right after the rapture or when the Mayan prophecies come to light?
Lets make up ridiculous scenarios to prove someone wrong.
Hey, it happens. Several times I’ve seen cheap surge protectors do the opposite of what they are supposed to. I once did a service call where the Staples brand surge protector had melted, shorted itself and subsequently destroyed the power supply in the client’s computer.
I’ve always told my clients, friends and coworkers to seek out a good UPS instead of a common surge protector for expensive electronics. You get a lot of added benefits like line conditioning (brownouts can cause damage too) and the obvious safe shutdown window. If you have Windows 7 or GNU/Linux with the proper drivers, your OS will treat the UPS as a built-in battery and give you health and status info as well.
I’ve seen this happen several times. Using government provided power in third world countries has its risks.
Isn’t it supposed to go to such lengths in order to protect your hardware ?
Don’t have numbers in mind, but surely those must be much cheaper than 3 PCs.
It would also be cheaper to just investigate and fix the problem, most likely. If you have three pcs going belly up due to bad electricity, surge protectors might not last very long. You;d always have to check the protection light on them to make sure they are still protecting the computers. Obviously there are things like power conditioners and the like that will do a better job at a higher cost. And those also like to erupt in flames at times.
Just asking an electrician to investigate would be a prudent first step.
Ah, ok, now I understand what you meant.
I had this erronerous mindset of surge protectors = protection against external events like lightning. Did not consider that the household power installation itself might be to blame.
I don’t know, that could end up quite costly – if the computer (room, house…) was, say, unattended at the time
I once lost two microwaves within a period of two months. I put the third one on a surge protector, and it’s been running for two years without a problem.
Note that surge protectors degrade over time. Each surge that passes through the varistor will degrade its capacity, and increase the chance of a total failure at the next surge. If your livelihood truly depends on computers, then replacing your surge protectors every few years is a cheap form of insurance.
In fact, if your livelihood depends on computers, then you should not rely on plug-in surge protectors. You should hire an electrician to install a whole-house surge protector.
If you do not install a whole-house surge protector, then the plug-in surge protector will depend on a high-quality ground path. Many houses have terrible ground paths, even houses built quite recently! The problem is that the ground path is never really tested until an emergency occurs. Whereas you’re much more likely to notice flickering lights from a bad hot or neutral.
You can now buy Chinese circuit testers for less than $90 on eBay. Buy one and test the ground impedance on every receptacle in your house. If there are any problems, call an electrician and get them fixed. If you use a plug-in surge protector on a receptacle with a bad ground, then it’s serving a largely placebo effect.
Also, I’ve found that a a lot of people, including engineers, do not seem to realize that power strips are not surge protectors. If you plug a computer into a power strip that is not a surge protector, then you might as well plug it directly into the wall. It’s not protected from surges at all.
Edited 2012-09-27 21:43 UTC
Also, a number of surge protectors also have a light on them that indicates weather they can still protect you from a surge. Once that light goes off, all bets are off.
I had a couple of good quality PSUs go bad on me. Thought it was a motherboard problem at first. Finally figured out (from clicking noises from fan not quite starting up) that I was getting current spikes for about a minute twice a day (even small ones induced with PSU plugged in but physically switched off) from the street lights outside my house automatically going on/off at sunrise/sunset.
So… I guess surge protectors not necessarily a luxury even for home PCs.
Though I think Thom decision for a Mac has primarily been because he doesn’t like Win8 rather than anything else … I have to defend the support option
If something breaks and it is affecting your source of income, waiting for a RMA’s PSU or something just isn’t an option. You need to be up and running ASAP. End of.
I have pretty vanilla hardware and there is not one shop in 10 miles of Gibraltar that can supply me with spare parts for my main computer at home within a week.
In fact could probably get something posted by the Royal Mail faster on regular postage.
Edited 2012-09-27 20:49 UTC
I guess here in the US I’m pretty spoiled. I can order a part from Amazon in the AM, and with Prime next day shipping I can have a replacement component on my doorstep the next afternoon. Then I can deal with the warranty issues, and if I get a replacment, I can ebay the replacement. At most 2 business days of downtime, which even Apple can’t beat with in-store service.
Well not the whole world is like that. Spain is very different from the UK (which is usually 1 business day on post).
Spain is “when we can be arsed and only if we can have a siesta”.
You can do that just fine in the Netherlands, most western countries really.
Agreed with the electric problems. I live in a state with many thunderstorms and other electrical fun. A power filter, not just a surge protector, is a very good investment. Beware of just putting things on a UPS. A line-interactive UPS will not filter the line. A double-conversion UPS will filter the line. Similar comments apply to many surge protectors–they don’t do any line filtering.
If you regularly have under voltage conditions on your lines, components could be overheating causing premature failure.
Personally, I don’t have the time nor patience to do my own builds, much less maintain them. So I usually buy my PCs from an outlet like Avadirect, and if it breaks down, there’s a guy here in town that will come get the machine and usually have it back to me fixed the next day.
Of course, I realize everyone isn’t lucky enough to have someone locally who makes house calls AND does good work, but you never know what you might find if you look
As a side business, I’m that “house call guy” and I’ve actually had to dial that business back some as it was beginning to affect my full time and part time jobs. Just word of mouth alone was getting me more hours than I could fit in one day.
Thankfully, a couple of local computer shops have opened up and I’ve been able to refer customers to them (after checking them out first of course). If it were possible to get decent health insurance in this country without a government job, I’d drop the full time job and just do consulting. But it’s just not realistic right now.
Right dude, i agree.
Thom lives somewhere “in the sticks”* I guess there most be no PC shop near by ?
I would have choose a mom & pop PC shop too, they can build anything you ask them to and fix any issues if they arise.
We have Dell at my work place, mostly servers and I’m not impressed with their help.
* I think that the English or American expression.
Edited 2012-09-29 10:20 UTC
I also picked up the Magic Trackpad on a whim a while back and have enjoyed it, which surprised me. I even managed to link it up with my Nokia (where it appeared as a mouse sadly).
Your comments about Rev A hardware apply to Apple and virtually all hardware/software companies. I am regularly a Rev A buyer and know what I am getting myself into. It seems that I actually enjoy the experience, as I keep on doing it (insanity). But, I never use such hardware or software as my primary. I have a highest-spec MBP Retina that I ordered shortly after announced and still use my 2010 MBP as my main work machine. The Retina is my test machine for things working on Mountain Lion while my main machine is still on Lion.
The skeumorphicisms drive me crazy as well. Address Book is just awful to use; making a mail group in it for a friend was truly painful (back and forth repeatedly).
Lastly, don’t forget the SuSE slogan: Have a lot of fun!
I settled on the Mac a few years ago because it is a tool to me. And I want my tools to be reliable. I have a stack of other machines that I use as a hobby or for learning running various OS’s but my Macbook is my main machine. It is as utilitarian as Linux for a network administrator but has almost all the interoperability advantages of Windows.
This brings me to a problem that I have with this site. All of the reporting on Patents and how Apple is being a bully. I don’t really care about that stuff when choosing an OS and hardware. I just want it to work. I always thought when reading your articles well maybe it matters that much to him. But in this case you have failed to “put your money where your mouth is” and have given your hard earned pay to a company you consider evil. If Apple’s business behavior doesn’t matter enough for you to avoid buying their products why waste your time writing about it. Any future article I read of yours decrying that Apple is a horrible horrible company will now come off as disingenuous.
I don’t get it either
Not really. Thom’s been pretty “anti-corporate” overall, Apple just happens to be extra obnoxious. Most of the bashing is against iOS related things anyway. And also you’re confusing a quantitative difference for a qualitative difference. Purchasing from a patent troll doesn’t mean that their patent trolling is inexcusable (just as loving, say, a son who has become a thief does not condone his crime), it means that the importance of having a reliable tool to earn a living > the importance of enforcing corporate responsibility by voting with Euros. I think he made it clear from the article that it is not choice that he made with particular relish.
I write this having reverted my MacBook to OS X from Slackware because I had the exact same realization as Thom and have also been holding out because of the exact same reservations about Apple. Fiddling around in smb.conf and fstab trying to get shares to work properly is the last thing I need when an important piece of work is due tomorrow and the file is on my home server.
That said, I trust my own hands more than any OEM to build quality desktops.
Although I don’t disagree at all with the other things you said, smb works pretty badly in osx. Sure, you (usually) don’t have to fiddle, but if something is not working you’re pretty stuck.
Also I should mention that the way osx mounts network shares is icky..
Uh no actually you seem confused on when to use qualitative and qualitative. There is no reason to use them in this discussion.
If you don’t like how a company acts then don’t support the company. It really is that simple. Companies live on income and by feeding them you endorse their behavior.
Don’t be such a stickler. “Difference by degree” vs. “absolute difference”. Better?
Not if there are more important factors. I don’t necessarily like the way my government does X, doesn’t mean I don’t support my government (because of Y, Z, and Q). I think Thom illustrated that is the case very clearly.
Because it makes you think about the tradeoff. Thom also sees that the patent system is the real problem, corporations are being stung by it as much as they are exploiting it.
Well, if you are then you would probably be bound to a contract saying you can not say they paid you but I still wonder if Apple gave you or OSNEWS money for that.
Sorry, but anyone who buys an Apple product after the recent spate of patent trolling Apple has wrought on the tech industry is a fool. Oh wait…when one “buys” an Apple product, they don’t really own it. Enjoy Thom.
That’s not true, I have usually build all my desktops and home servers, and if you know what you are doing, and how to research your parts, you can build a wonderfully stable system and have some fun, all at the same time. The support is handy, but most parts come with 1, 3 or 5 year warranties, so it’s not like you are left out in the cold.
Other than that, good article.
And you can make sure your hard drive/ssd is top of the line which is the weakest link in the system.
Last I checked Apple uses middle-tier storage components. They also don’t have a Blu-ray option, because after all optical media is dead. Dead as in billions in sales per year and in every retail store. Dead…yep.
Not dead, just competing with distribution of content via iTunes Store…
Yeah, *if* you know what you’re doing
😛
I’ve been working with computers since 1979. The first ones were mainframes and min-mainframes than Atari 400s and 800s. When I first used a DOS PC there were no books anywhere besides the users manual that came with it. The same was pretty much true about PC Servers. I had to learn everything by the manuals that came with them and trial and error.
From 1983 to 2001 I hand built quite a few computers for myself and friends and repaired a lot more than that, including the name brand computers we bought for work.
I worked LOTS of hours during that time and got ****ed off when I came home and I had to fix one of my computers. The night that I arrived home and three of my five computers were having problems and it had been a long day, well I’d had enough.
I had friends with Apple computers. My joke then was that I liked them despite their choice in computers. By 1998 I’d known that they had a LOT less hardware and software issues than the computers I used. And I was able to fix any hardware problem blind folded. Literally. All I needed was the parts and the proper screw drivers. Like a soldier I could take them apart and put them back together without breaking a sweat.
Was I happy with Windows computers? No.
Was I happy with IBM’s OS/2? A LOT more than Windows but there were issues that would take too long to go into but it just wasn’t able to do everything I wanted to. I loved OS/2 but sometimes it just doesn’t work out.
Was I happy with BeOS? ABSOLUTELY. BeOS was great. In some ways not as good as OS/2 but in other ways definitely better. If only someone could put those two together … and then BeOS was dead.
There is Haiku now but it still not mature enough for what I need.
Linux? I started using Linux in the early 90s starting with Corel Linux and WordPerfect for Linux. After that I literally used over 12 different Linux distributions looking for the holy grail, including LinSpire and Ubuntu and RedHat and … the list would go on and on.
In 1998 I bought my first iMac. It was a Bondi blue CRT iMac with no floppy drive and it has Mac OS 9.
It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t great. I still have it. I still mess around with it once in awhile. It wasn’t as good as OS/2 or BeOS but Apple was on its ways to what it is now.
Each year Apple computers have gotten better and for the most part so has Apple OSs.
Nothing is perfect. Nothing is perfect. NOTHING is perfect. But some things are better than others.
When Mac OS X came out it wasn’t great but you could see that it could be. It was BSD Unix with a graphical shell and there were hints that it was going to have some of the things that I loved about OS/2 and BeOS. Maybe not in the way that you might think about those OSs compared to Mac OS X but for me its true.
I’ve had five Apple desktop computers since 1998 and one used Apple laptop. I’ve only had one hardware issue with my 1996 iMac and that was fixed under warrantee when I took it into an Apple store. I left it and picked it up the next day. I’ve also had four iPhones and three iPads. None of which have had any hardware problems. Zero.
I used to do everything with computers. Program, manage servers and desktops, hardware and software. I was always on call. I worked long hours. I got sick, figuratively and literally, and decided it was time to change jobs and where I worked.
That was 15 years ago. I’m a Systems Analyst and don’t work crazy hours anymore but still get pretty good pay. I’ve got time for hobbies and took up photography and video. It just so happens that Macs work better than Windows with this. Plus in the device and almost always the driver will already be there and Aperture or iMovie will recognize what I am using and they make it easy for me to do what I do with my pictures and video. Well, those and GIMP.
Since I got my first iPad I haven’t used my desktop Macs or laptop nearly as much. Then I used them even less when I got my iPad Retina display. I’ve got almost everything I need between my Canon camera and Sony digital video camera and my iPad to do what I want and amaze my family and friends and friends of theirs with the finished products. Usually they think I hired some company to create what I do. But no. It’s just me.
Life is much better since I’ve never had to worry about hardware failures or very many software issues. For those I still have my job and I get paid to put up with that ****. I’ve got a life. I want to spend my time being happy and not fixing **** when I’m not being paid. My wife is much happier with me now too. That and our Macs and our iPads. I also get the benefit of playing with BSD UNIX when I went to too.
That’s just what works for my wife and I. Everyone has things that work for them and if you love what you use, I’m more than happy for you. If you still like building your own. That’s great too. Been there, done that. Got tired of it. Not burned out but it was like spending my life working on Yugos and one day deciding it was stupid and that I’d rather spend my time with BMWs or Mercedes.
Totally with you on this, I’ve been playing with 486sx PC towers and windows 3.1 since 1990s and have always been pro windows and anti apple.
I think I just got bored with destroying towers to put better hardware and software into them every few months to keep them top notch, and to be fair, as many of you will admit, it can become a very expensive hobby.
I love music and photography, and found the likes of garageband and aperture absolutely brilliant (although I do have photoshop elements on my hard drive too), I feel that the likes of ilife really work, ntuitive and sometimes you don’t want to be into the guts of software(and sometimes hardware) to do a specific job.
The fact is that some of the software that apple brings to the table is brilliant, however I hope that osx does not eventualy turn into iOS.
You just stated right there your own failure: you kept upgrading the thing every few months. Some people seem to have the mentality that if it is possible to keep upgrading the thing constantly then you’re required to do so.
I built my PC something around 1.5 years ago and the only upgrades I’ve bought so far have been a new display, a USB 3.0 card and an SSD, and I haven’t yet even placed that USB 3.0 card in there because I’m waiting for my SSD to ship. Haven’t had any need to constantly open the thing up or fiddle with the hardware, the only thing I do is open it up about once a year to clean up all the dust inside — something that wouldn’t even be possible with iMacs.
same here
my athlon 64 x2 from 2005 lasted me until last year
sure there were some minor upgrades (ram, hdd), but those were done in a few minutes
Correct, and I admit that was my failure.
I learnt the hard way
and to the moron who’s screaming sheepie, There is not another program that can deal with musical publishing and recording on a household level on a budget that is as easy to use and intuitive as well as garageband or logic pro.
I would know, I’ve bought them all, and in my opinion(not fact) these two programs are the best at what they do.
If these programs were available for pc format then I would not have looked at a mac.
on a different note, I do not agree with the way apple is suing everyone just now, but if I was going for principle then I wouldn’t have touched windows neither. Who cares about principles when all you want is equipment or software that will do a job for you?
Right on. I loathe Sony, Apple, Oracle and Microsoft for their shady business practices. Yet until four days ago I owned a Sony laptop (that I have since sold to buy an Asus EeePad Transformer РLOVE IT!), I have bought Macs in the past and bought my fianc̩e an iPad for her birthday this year, and I use VirtualBox on Windows 7 daily. Call me a sellout, but I just use the tool that gets the job done the best way for my needs.
Yeah, funny thing about Logic Pro (and its offshot, Garageband) – it was available on Windows, before Apple bought its developer and immediately discontinued Win version…
Walls of text is the best way to convey opinions.
It just so happens that Macs definitely don’t work better with video… for example: http://eugenia.queru.com/2009/04/11/stay-the-fuck-away-from-imovief…
(also, I’ve never been to an official Apple FCP presentation where it wouldn’t crash at least once)
With photos, you took too much to heart the then-old propaganda, when moving to Macs at the end of 90s (times when they were clearly an inferior and more expensive product, just kept alive by a bit insane user base – readily upgrading to that inferior product to “help save Apple”, even openly refusing to pirate it http://www.forbes.com/1997/08/08/column.html ); both major platforms are comparable for quite a while (except, one gives much better value of course…)
What I did before my massive “record 24 HD channels of Olympics for 2 weeks” setup was actually buy more than one PC. OK, I actually bought 4 in all (2 for grunt work, 2 Acer Revos for media centre clients), but the idea’s still sound.
The high spec PCs were ordered from two different PC builders (I avoided loading up with RAM/SSDs/HDDs and bought most of that separately) and I then bought two different makes of 240GB SSD and something like 8 * 3TB HDD’s spread across the two machines. Yes, I did have a spare one or two 3TB drives (and a spare SSD from an old machine) and didn’t bother with RAID because of that.
I used one of the spare 3TB in a USB 3 external enclosure for backups and also added in stuff like two decent UPS’es, a couple of different model 24″ monitors and two different plasma TVs. At the end of the day, if anything breaks down, I can resume in a matter of minutes/hours, not days. The full lowdown is on my Olympecs blog at http://olymprecs.blogspot.co.uk/
As far as OS’es goes, it was Ubuntu 12.04+XBMC 11.0 (Pulse Eight version with Live TV) for the Acer Revos and Ubuntu 12.04+tvheeadend(git) for the 2 custom PCs (after the Olympics, I changed that to CentOS 6+Windows 7 on my main custom PC and left Ubuntu on the other one for normal TV recording post-Olympics).
Post-Olympics, I further upgraded the RAM, so am now on 32GB on one PC and 16GB on the other. 32GB is great for running VMs – you can give 8GB per VM! Oh, the custom PCs had Sandy Bridge i7 2600’s and, yep, an Asus motherboard.
I work in a Gambling company and we didn’t have such a silly setup, and we are UK based in the London Olympics.
How can you support this company, Apple, when they have been dicks. What a moron.
Whilst I don’t agree with him. The product he bought actually works for him.
Unfortunately you don’t seem to get he doesn’t give a fuck overall about this shit as long as he can get his work done.
He paid for a machine that worked how he wanted it to.
He didn’t pay for something that conformed to some distorted ideologies that are imposed by other people (myself included .. should have stuck with Windows Thom).
I wish more people on here actually decided by actually putting the money where their mouth is.
Ah yeah, just what we need, more brainless idiots throwing their money to corporations and patent trolls.
So that in a few years we get put down by crap like SOPA and more software patents.
Congratulations for being a sheeple and a brainless idiot.
I do remember Thom going off on Apple for being a patent troll and then he sends them a check for over a grand.
You bastards! Now take my money!
Edited 2012-09-28 01:15 UTC
I used to do the exact same thing with Microsoft lol
Yeah, how dare you pay people money to get a job done. You sir are a moron.
“Sheeple”? Seriously? How old are you?
True bit I think what irks might be the disconnect between what he’s been saying and what he’s now actually done.
“Don’t buy Apple products, they’re an evil company and a patent troll. Don’t support them by buying their products.. etc etc etc”
“Oh, yeah, I got a new Mac today”.
….what?
I’ve never actually said not to buy any company’s products. I just inform – I don’t tell anyone what to do.
I have to agree with you.
This kind of consumer cognitive dissonance and then the subsequent rationalizations is what allows corporations (not just Apple) to continue with their atrocious behavior without any real consequences.
Because he chose a computer that worked for him rather than based on the political winds of that particular moment.
I thought you had moved on to Linux.
Anyway, I knew you’d go back to Macs since you have such a love/hate affair with Apple.
Wow it can play 1080p without a hiccup omg that’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.
Funny you were one of my favorite osnews editors, but I can’t take you serious anymore after this article.
All non-arguments about self built pcs and a lot of pro-Apple fanboy talk geez.
Olease tell us someone hacked your osnews account and wrote this for fun. Maybe an early april’s fool joke?
I don’t see the problem in what the op was stating, he didn’t have any problems using 1080p whist doing other jobs……what’s wrong with that?
Oh no you bought a model of computer I don’t agree with, you’re dead to me…….I mean seriously?
Dude, chill!
Edited 2012-09-28 01:15 UTC
God those things are rock solid.
I keep two laptops because the turn-around time with taking a computer into a shop is too long for me.
Having 3 computers fail is pretty bad luck. If I liked OSX I would build a hackintosh. I also find those Apple stores to be creepy, like a weird cult for hipsters.
Yep, Dell Latitudes and Vostros are some nice kit, and you can get them extremely cheap from off-lease vendors. At my part time job the manager has a preferred customer account with a Dell reseller and we run mostly off-lease Dells in house. My test bench machine is an Optiplex that is the coolest and quietest Core2Duo machine I’ve ever used, apart from a Mac mini. Even our server is a Dell, and it has never had downtime apart from system updates in the past five years.
Apple has een online store without the hipsters.
It is a bit slow, no next day delivery.
I have a mac mini and I like it.
But I hate the way it works with USB storage or a Kindle.
Always writing little hidden files to CF cards, always complaining that it wasn’t removed properly.
To prevent system files:
http://osxdaily.com/2010/02/03/how-to-prevent-ds_store-file-creatio…
When removing a memory card, drag it to the trashcan, eject it from the Finder or right click and select the right option. Then remove the card when its icon disappears.
Yes I know but that doesn’t always work.
Edited 2012-09-28 11:59 UTC
That’ll only stop .DS_Store from being created on network shares. It has nothing to do with USB media at all and, even if it did, .DS_Store files are the least annoying files OS X creates (at least there’s only one of those per folder). What get far worse are the OS X shadow files, e.g. say you have file.txt you might also get ._file.txt. Plus the .SpotlightV100, .Trashes, etc.
What you really want is this:
http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest4/
Imho this functionality should be part of OS X but, until it is, Blue Harvest will take care of all Apple files on any combination of media types and/or folders you wish. I really don’t know what I’d do without it, as I have to do a lot of file sharing between machines. Plus, not to drag this off topic, but Windows has its own annoying files that get placed in folders (Desktop.ini, Thumbs.db, Folder.jpg). Some of those, like thumbs.db, can be easily disabled but others like Desktop.ini are not so easy.
Before you do that, make sure Finder is set to display externally connected drives on your desktop (by default it no longer is, stupid move Apple). Also, regarding drive eject, it’s not commonly known but you really should follow a similar procedure in Windows as well (via the safely remove hardware icon in the Windows system tray). Otherwise, you actually can corrupt your media by just taking it out of your USB port or card reader. It’s less likely, as Windows performs a cache flush much more frequently than OS X or other *nix do, but still quite possible. I’ve been on the receiving end of that a few times and learned the hard way.
I used to build my own computers back in the day when jumpers were jumpers and plug and play was not invented. I used to spend plenty of time tinkering, building, and enhancing my rigs. But as time when on, the work I did with my computer took precedence and I had less time to be tinkering inside computer. I slowly, replaced the computers in my home with macs and generally find I get less runaround with warranty issues than I did with other vendors. When my computers were strictly built from parts there were plenty of times the various vendors would point fingers at each other instead of supporting their product.
I understand where Thom is coming from because I am in exactly the same place. I prefer to operate with a primary machine that is in warranty because it is part of my lively hood. I know how to tear them down and fix them, but that does not mean I have the time to do so when I have other deadlines to meet.
These past few months I’ve come to realise that when your computer is that of a crucial aspect of your life, you simply can’t rely on self-built computers anymore. I had three desktop computers – main, backup, and emergency – and within the timespan of a few weeks, they all died.
What a load of crap.
Apple are notorious for using cheap, nasty and unreliable components in their consumer PCs.
It is quite easy to build a very reliable whitebox PC.
Buy a high quality power supply and case. The cheap-arse models are unstable, noisy and overheat.
Yep. His own lack of knowledge caused him to write this article without realising that he was the real issue here.
No-where did he admit that he just doesn’t really know what he’s doing, and that’s the real reason why he needs something ‘off the shelf’.
I really tuned out when I read his comments on Dell support. Knows absolutely nothing of this sector, he really doesn’t.
Which part of what’s in the article is false? You mean there IS a Dell Store? You mean a starting and small one-person business with limited funds will get the kind of corporate support other commenters are hinting at?
He’s not wrong. Dell has great support if you’re a large company or education institution. They’re support for individuals is terrible. You call completely different call centers. It’s not the same techs.
I would argue that apple support sucks at times too. They’re phone support is good. The support at a “real” apple store is terrible. Left my computer there for a week because I didn’t feel like buying a suction cup and they gave it back to me with a broken hard drive and charged me $70 to not fix it. I ended up going to an auto store, buying a dent remover and the replacing the hard drive myself anyway. I was out a computer for a week because they couldn’t be bothered. My computer was 1 month out of warranty (didn’t get extended apple care). Even with the $70 + hard drive cost + suction cup it was cheaper than apple care would have been. I then sold that iMac for $400 two years later.
Macs are getting harder to work on and it’s a shame. The Mac Pro is the only system left that’s decent to fix. I upgraded a 2006 mac pro to quad core 5300 series xeons (2×4), threw in some extra ram, a new radeon 5700 series graphics card and some extra drives. IT saved me thousands on a new one. xeons were $35 on ebay
And even then, if you buy PC’s off the shelf there are many companies, both small and large, that offers support contracts equivalent to Apple.
This behavior kinda reminds of those IT guys who automatically buys Cisco gear and overpriced support contracts because “everyone knows it’s better” even when that’s patently not true.
I agree, if you build your own PC using cheap parts, then you get what you paid for.
I find this funny where by you’ve moved over to the Mac platform and I’ve moved back to the Windows/PC platform in the last week (I have a ThinkPad X1 Carbon ultrabook and a ThinkCentre M92p on its way shortly – the ThinkCentre came with a three year on site warranty). At the end of the day there are vendors out there offering similar levels of support (or better than) Apple but very few who are in the ‘Windows is automatically cheaper’ mindset are willing to pay the extra for said services for a computer running Windows. The only downside with the Thinkpad was the crap installed – yes, I call the Lenovo customisations crap beacause all said functionality cna be delivered by the operating system itself hence it is surplus to requirements. The issue of crapware can easily be solved by downloading the Windows 7 iso off Digital River and then clean install using the OEM serial with phone activation.
A side not unrelated to the said article: There seems to be this double standard where people automatically make the assumption that if it doesn’t run Mac OS X therefore it must automatically be cheaper and if it isn’t therefore the company must be ripping you off as a customer (ignoring the fact that the said company is probably only making a 3% profit margin on the good in the first place). It reminds me of the Microsoft Surface device and the screaming by some about the pricing ignoring the fact that it is close to the same spec’ed out iPad and to top it all off you get a copy of Microsoft Office 2013 (sans backwards compatibility in some areas) which alone makes the price worth while.
Oh well, back on topic – enjoy your new computer and remember it takes a while to get used to Mac OS X especially the new iterations with gestures but once you’ve got it all covered then things are pretty cool.
thom will learn from this experience when his imac breaks at the same rate as anything else. it will be harder for him to fix himself than a big computer, and the people at the store will be just as stupid as the people at the big computer store who fix big computers.
good luck with your laptop-in-a-big-monitor, thom! lets hope you dont see any good monitor deals online. being tempted like that would suck!
I agree with mostly all of the sentiments of the article
I love the supported nature of the apple Eco system and they way the machines are really built to workstation class standards. Pc’s are great but they are a lot more plasticy.
The chef reason I am a big fan of apple computers is that I work in it, I maintain and run pcs all day, when I come home I don’t want to do that anymore. When I was a kid it wasn’t so much of a problem as I had a lot more time. Now my time is more precious, I wanna go out with friends, catch a movie etc… So I want my computer to be reliable, I don’t want to tweak or maintain updates upon updates and scans upon scans. I wanna do what I need to do quickly, such as importing photos editing them, sticking them in the cloud or taking them with me on a memory stick, I just don’t have time to keep messing about.
Slightly off topic, at the moment I’m seeing a bit of a decline in apples push to new and daring technology and design, with the release of the iPhone 5, which is just a 4s with an extra row of icons. I mention this as I hope that it has no bearing on their desktop line, that they don’t rock it too much and in the same breath don’t allow it to wither away and die.
I don’t understand what you mean about tweak updates? Windows Update is set it and forget it, it doesn’t even bother you. All the Task you mentioned are everyday task in Windows, importing photos, watching movies, there is not different it and OS X. Maybe if you said, you like the way OS X does compared to Windows and you are bored of seeing Windows everyday.
I agree it’s more automated, however there are still a lot more things going on and things to take care off. My antivirus for example, it works well, scans on demand but on my windows pc I would never leave it unchecked, same for fragmentation.
For photos, plug in a memory card, iPhoto comes up, says do you want to import, you click yest, it says after you’ve imported do you want to wipe the memory card clean. It then puts the photos in an event, I.e. groups them together, ready to be emailed out as a whole, quick edits etc..
Windows, I out the memory card in, I have to copy these across make a folder, when finished I then have to format the card. Sounds easy but each requires a number of steps more.
This is not taking into account that macosx even has RAW photo support built in for the majority of the DSLR cameras, unlike windows 7. Again not a massive problem, but these add up to a easier whole.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not a windows bashed, I love windows 7 it’s a great system, but I’ve found running computers over a number of years that the mac sox machines keep their speed and reliability than windows 7 machines, which tend to get bogged down a bit, nothing major but there is a noticble different in a reformat/reinstall on a windows 7 pc than a macosx machine.
Edited 2012-09-28 12:02 UTC
Or just install Picasa and be done with it, with better overall effect than iPhoto
…Windows is an operating system, you know, a fairly open ecosystem – the whole point of those is to be able to easily install appropriate/optimal tools and not being limited to what’s just in the default package.
Security / lack of viruses is an illusion under OSX, coming from its relative obscurity …so far. Because it’s starting to get targeted now.
With fragmentation/filesystem you shot yourself in the foot – OSX has quite horrible one, among the worst in currently shipping OS. Here’s what Linus Torvalds says about it: “Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.”
You’ve been buying the wrong PC’s.
It was the same with all iPhone refreshes, even excluding (and reintroducing with great fanfare…) some tech that was taken for granted for quite a while in mobile phones in general…
There’s more to that than cases / overall build quality of most Apple machines is fairly in line to run-of-the-mill PC. And you know, if you want to pay for “non-plasticy”, you do have that choice in the PC world …thing is, most people can’t pay for that, and it’s good they have that choice (if it were for Apple, such “lesser” people would probably have no computers – after all, Apple openly a) aims to target only the few most profitable percentages of the population b) tries to block other companies from any supposed innovation brought to the table; if you bring those two to their logical synthesis…)
Edited 2012-10-05 00:07 UTC
I bought my first Mac in 1986 or thereabouts. Until then I had been using a CP/M machine and still marvelled at the wonder of word processing. But we needed a DTP system in our design studio and after a lot comparison research we settled on a MacII with a 13 inch colour monitor and a huge 8 megs of RAM linked to a Laserwriter and running Aldus Pagemaker. I think it cost nearly £5000. After it had been delivered and set up, a process that involved plugging all the cables in and turning it on, I stayed late to play with this weird looking new system. A white screen – how unusual, all the screens I had seen and worked on before were jet black with glowing green letters. I ended up staying way too late that first night and by the time I finally turned it off I knew that I would never want to use another system ever again. The next day when I booted up my CP/M machine (it was an Amstrad PCW word processor) I found the command line interface absurd and wished I was the designer who had been allocated the new mac system in our team.
I have only really had a few such moments with computer kit since then like those first few hours with the Mac. One was when I first got a Palm Pilot and dumped my Filofax, another was when I first used an iPhone and another was when I first used an iPad. Getting my first digital camera was also a bit magical after three decades of film photography. I wonder when the next such moment will come. and with what.
1986, and still then marvelling at CP/M, not even seeing anything not green-on-black-text? Seems you didn’t really follow what was going on also back then… NVM even C64 and its capabilities, Amiga and Atari ST were out for a year. At least the former eventually becoming quite big in the UK …if you’d just get one, there be much less rubbish around (but then, maybe that’s just person type, maybe we’d have Amiga rubbish)
AFAIK, these two were never exclusive.
So, how could you know it’s “instead of”, while it’s the more probable “not just” ?!
😉
buying imac supports the war against android and samsung
It’s a two-sided war, make no mistake. Everyone is calling Apple the bully, but Samsung’s actions after the big verdict have proven that they are simply asking for it and they don’t care if they are labeled infringers.
Don’t forget they aren’t some mom-and-pop business that just started up; they have been around a very long time and are one of the biggest LCD manufacturers in the world. They also have a finger in just about every other tech industry in Asia, right down to the silicon. It would be the equivalent of Apple going after Sony or Microsoft, though I doubt in those cases people would be so quick to defend the latter companies.
Their CEO is also involved in some shady mafia-esque stuff, though that didn’t come out at trial to my knowledge. I also doubt that if somehow Android were to go away, Samsung would stop making phones. They would simply switch to Windows Phone 8 for the flagship devices and ramp up development on Bada for everything else.
Bottom line, you can’t trust ANY corporation, and I’d rather watch them fight it out from a distance than get directly involved.
The jury didn’t care about prior art and the whole thing was a farce
and you need a severe vision problem to not see the difference between iphone and samsung galaxy s2
Edited 2012-09-29 20:11 UTC
Oh believe me, I’m not defending Apple on this. I think they were major assholes to do this, not only because I feel they had no basis for the suit in the first place, but also that they were using it as part of an attack on Android in general. Even though I’m not an Android fanboy I feel Apple should compete on merits, not in the courtroom.
I was referring to Samsung’s latest hardware releases which truly do ape Apple hardware in overt ways. Their Windows 8 tablet hybrid looks so much like a slightly thicker MacBook Air that it could easily be mistaken for an Apple device. It’s almost as if they are saying “come at me again, iBro!”
As for the Galaxy phones, I’m in full agreement with you. They look and operate nothing like an iPhone, which in my personal opinion is a good thing.
My position remains the same though; they can fight it out all they want but I’m not taking sides by “voting with my wallet” anymore. Why limit myself because of something that my little purchases won’t affect anyway? Most of the hardware I buy is secondhand anyway, so even if I do own a Sony or Apple or Samsung or whatever device, they never saw my money.
On the other hand, if we all reasoned that way no positive change would ever occur.
Why shouldn’t I buy goods produced in sweatshops under terrible conditions? Me not purchasing the goods wont change anything.
Why should I vote? My vote changes nothing.
Etc etc.
A single person, or even a handful of people, not buying such products would indeed not change a thing. Even if I gathered together 2000 people and convinced them to never, ever, buy anything from Apple it would simply be too little of a change for Apple to even notice it.
Your rhetorical question of “if we all reasoned that way” is simply not based on reality, it is based on ideals — when you know there’s billions of people out there buying a product you buying the product or not buying it won’t affect the overall effect in the slightest.
Yes, pondering the morality of one’s purchasing habits is healthy, but there is nothing wrong with taking the practical approach either.
You know what they say, every journey starts with a single step.
Well, perhaps not in this case but there certainly are cases when it is wrong. The fact that you can rationalize it as practical doesn’t make it any less wrong.
The thing is, I have the freedom to choose the path I want to take. For a long time I actively boycotted Sony and Microsoft, and later Apple. If I hadn’t boycotted, say, Apple during that time, I would have bought at least one more new Mac. If I were to choose to buy a Mac tomorrow, that would be two that I would have bought instead of one. Either way, it’s a blip on their radar and in the end I’m just choosing how I want to limit myself.
So by that token, I decided my need for a stable, reliable, functional smartphone meant I would buy a Windows Phone, and I’ve been overwhelmingly happy with it for the past year. I also bought a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate nearly two years ago because I found I couldn’t rely on GNU/Linux and Haiku 100% of the time, and I don’t have a Mac right now (and can’t afford one). If I were laptop shopping and Sony offered the best deal in my price range, that’s what I would buy.
In other words, I’m choosing not to let the big companies make my choices for me. In a sense, I have more freedom than I ever had when boycotting.
You certainly do.
Well, not really since the boycott was self-imposed. You could stop at any time you wanted.
At any rate, this was all more about Thom’s rather adamant “don’t support Apple” stance and then buying a Mac. Do what I say not what I do.
Less in my opinion as presumably the boycott was the considered action of a freeman whereas the incoherence of not being able to keep ones opinions for longer than ones whims is not.
Bit like claiming to give up the demon weed only to start toking a couple of days later.
Hmm… I’m not sure that I would fully agree with that.
Perhaps the owner of the device you’re planning to buy is just waiting to sell her stuff, in order to buy (using the money you’ll give) the brand new iteration of that same device.
If you start thinking about it that way then you can’t EVER use money at all. I mean, at one point or another one of the hands you’ve given money to will give some of that money to some other entity and sooner or later it’ll still end up in the pockets you don’t want to support.
Maybe so, but if they didn’t sell their old kit to me they would have sold it to someone else. Either way they will be buying another new item from that manufacturer, whether I bought from them or not. It’s out of my hands.
no it’s not
you just don’t understand how a boycott works
sure it doesn’t matter if you buy something or not
but when lets say 100000 people start to boycott a company, they will notice it
on the other hand when 100000 people think like you and don’t even try it, nothing will change
I understand very well how a boycott works, but I’m no community organizer. I don’t even know 100 people, let alone 100,000. Even if I called/emailed everyone in my contact list, all 40 people I know on Facebook and Google+, tweeted to my 20 or so followers on Twitter, and took to the streets of my suburban city shouting and holding up a sign that said “don’t buy Brand X!” I would change maybe one or two minds. I would also promptly lose friends and contacts and maybe even be arrested and subsequently unemployed.
Sorry but you’ve got the wrong guy for the job.
nobody demands from you to start a revolution
just don’t buy products from bad companies, thats all
if someone asks you why, you can explain it to them
maybe they agree with you, maybe the don’t
thats their decision
and don’t try to be a missionary
those guys have a bad reputation for a reason
Or I could do whatever I damn well please without your permission, thank you very much. Like I said, I used to boycott. First you told me I was doing it wrong, now you tell me I was doing it right. Make up your mind already!
And so it can perpetuate / what Soulbender says. It definitely works also for 2nd hand market – at the extreme example, if some items would become essentially non-resalable , the original companies would definitely lose out.
this is a macbook air copy
http://en.wikinoticia.com/Technology/Gadgets/65182-116-inch-macbook…
I saw that article when it first came out and I was surprised Apple never went after them, especially since they went so far as to put an Apple trademark on it as well.
But you know very well that what I’m referring to is a different thing altogether. What you linked to was some third-rate overt clone of an already released product. What Samsung’s tablet hybrid looks like — at least to me — is perhaps where Apple had planned to take the MacBook Air for its next big revision. In fact, owning a “tablet hybrid” for the past week has made me wonder why Apple didn’t do this long ago, perhaps with the second iteration of the iPad.
Either way, I applaud Samsung’s brass balls in this instance; taking a questionable verdict and throwing it out the window, flipping Apple off with a device that takes Apple’s own design cues and puts them to work in a way that makes every iDevice out there seem a decade old.
I hope that yours wont goes belly up like most did everywhere else, as in France.
Otherwise, you may find out that there is only one single repair store, the brand one, where you’re more a wallet with legs than a customer.
Will sounds like going back to square one…
Again.
I actually think Windows 7 is quite a fabulous OS: best from MS by a long way and actually good all round.
Windows 8… I’ve tried it (each public release up to final) and tried living with the final for a while (via VMWare Player dual monitor) and… it’s a horror show. I can’t deal with how bad it is to use in a desktop (and in particular dual screen) setup. Never minding the mess of “Modern UI”, the trigger points for menus is horrible in dual monitor setup, the use of the start screen with a mouse is rubbish, the context switching between MUI and desktop is ghastly. It’s just rubbish.
So when I saw that was the way it was going to be with no backing down from MS, I decided it was time to try out the – always looked at askance but never tried – Apple hardware.
I went with an Apple supplied refurbished Macbook Air (2011 model, bought just before the new models came out and still got a several $100 refund due to the drop in price of refurbs at that point) and can honestly say that it’s fantastic.
Having only “tried” OSX over the years but never owned it I’ve not got the baggage of people using it a long time disliking change but I feel that OSX with Mountain Lion is the convergence of Desktop and Mobile computing OS done right. The idioms of iOS are through OSX but they are never intrusive. You can go all you want without looking at the grid arrays of app icons if you so wish for instance.
The hardware is also fantastic. Beautiful, reasonably specced but solid. Certainly far more so than any of the Ultrabooks I was considering at the same time (when I got cold feet just before putting my cash down on the MBA)
As of right now the *only* thing stopping me from committing to a Mac OSX future computing platform is gaming. I love games and Windows is still where that is at.
But maybe a beefy iMac that I can use Bootcamp on would be the way to go for that too. We’ll see.
I really don’t get this argument.
Really Windows 7 will remain for a long time, so why would you need to switch ?
(not that I care, I’m a Linux user myself)
Edited 2012-09-29 11:49 UTC
Oh my Windows PC will remain. I might leave it there and just replace one of my dual monitor setup with an iMac initially. So I’ll have my PC where it was but single monitor and the iMac where my current 2nd is.
But I won’t be chasing hardware/performance upgrades in the Windows system anymore because in a ‘few’ years I won’t be able to get software upgrades.
And possibly sooner than that, we’ll start to see games that are Windows 8 only.
The fact that my Windows environment is now in the EOL countdown means I should start looking elsewhere so I’m prepared.
I don’t have to worry about Windows so much, because I only use it part of the time at work.
But I would say, Windows 8 is like Vista, a rushed job, Microsoft still needs to figure out how to do it proper.
I went for a Lenovo Thinkpad, running Linux. For the following reasons:
1. Hardware: the screen is matte, not glossy. The keyboard sports real keys, not those chicklets. I can take the thing apart and replace every parts (versus Apples “glued together non repairable” approach)
2. Software: I have Linux taylored to my needs. My choice of window manager, file systems (yes, multiple), and so on. It’s rock stable and fast.
And of course I have an image on a seperate disk.
If you’re wanting to focus on use of it – and for a business in particular you generally would – that is the *last* think you want to be doing though.
In your personal life it’s more of a choice and certainly I used to be that man, building every machine for me, friends and family even. But I’m done with that now. I want “just works” combined with “when it doesn’t, someone fixes it for me”.
Everyone’s circumstance is different of course.
Well, that sums it up nicely.
which IMHO goes hand in hand with “I’m a wallet with legs”
Oh yeah definitely. I knew I saved money from the wallet by doing all that stuff myself; picking and choosing components, putting it together, dealing with the retailers or worse the manufacturers myself if it went wrong.
For some years I used to actually enjoy that stuff (was I mad!?) but after a while it was drudgery that I accepted because… I was saving money.
That was the justification to continue doing it at that point but it took no account of the worth of my time or quality of my life.
Strangely, concurrently to this period I ran my own business and another small organisation for some years and for them I would never have thought of taking that on by myself: for business continuity AND use of my time viewpoints.
It took me a while to get to the point where I realised why am I doing it in my private life?
Again, everyone is in a different place; some people are where I was, some people are where I am, others might be somewhere way different.
For those who want to cobble their computer together to save money, the obvious question is: What is your time worth?
brichpmr,
“For those who want to cobble their computer together to save money, the obvious question is: What is your time worth?”
I am left to wonder if this was meant as a sincere or rhetorical question? But my answer is yes, I can get exactly what I want on my own builds. I’m kind of mystified at the comments that tend to imply it’s such a difficult task to do.
There could be a difference for linux users though since most shops don’t cater to us. Even my favourite online store doesn’t sell linux systems. Linux users don’t really like buying a system with windows pre-installed, paying the ms tax, and then installing linux over it. Just buy a barebones system, add ram, disk & whatever peripherals you want, then your golden. I’ve actually been using the same computer case for a decade now, it’s high quality and I’m happy with it.
Incidentally, I’ve accumulated a large stockpile of keyboards and mice owing to family who’ve bought complete systems and which come with peripherals they already have. Instead of throwing them away they give them to me.
I’ve never been inclined to judge anybody by whether or not they assemble their own systems, I find it odd that others do.
It’s not a judgment, but a legit question. If your time has any significant value, then you may want to figure that into the calculus of building a system vs selecting a retail system.
I don’t think anyone would build their home system on their own unless that counted as “time spent on hobbies”, anyway.
It’s a flawed reasoning. The choice (web research and such) of components takes pretty much the same amount of time whether you build the machine yourself or not (or it doesn’t take much of any time at all, if you don’t care much). The time of shipping or hopping into a shop …also pretty comparable.
So that leaves the difference of putting it all together and configuring… but it’s not some intensive task, you can do that while essentially relaxing (just like, say, cooking your favourite foods; when listening to music in the background or smth – do you really see such that, do you really see all your time, in the categories of “what is it worth”?)
Edited 2012-10-05 00:12 UTC
You can program the top of the magic mouse just as a trackpad. I swipe with two fingers to change virtual desktop, can back & forward in a web-browser, scroll, etc on it too. It’s not the cheapest mouse around, but it’s spot on for my usage.
With Lion you have reasonable default configure options for the magic mouse, something you needed an extra program for on Snow Leopard.
I’ve been looking for a way to leave the windows platform, especially now since Windows 8 is so disappointing. Linux doesn’t cut it so OSX is the only option. If it wasn’t for Apple’s stupid lawsuit and patent abuse I would have gotten a Mac already, but as it is I just can’t support a company that behave that way.
You will probably be hard pushed to use a system (or components) from a company that has not been involved in the patent lawsuit game.
If the Apple situation in particular grips you then so be it, but don’t believe they are the lone bad guy here.
The only places I can’t imagine have brought patent lawsuits are the linux distros but whatever hardware you run on, you’ll fall into that.
Apple is one of the worst companies at least. I don’t know many other technology companies that engage in such ridiculous patent litigations to hinder fair competition. Microsoft in second worst IMO which is why I don’t want to use their products either.
You mean as opposed to Microsoft demanding royalties for every Android device sold? Microsoft and Apple are both equally awful when it comes to their legal dealings. Microsoft is a bit more behind the scenes about it, that’s all.
Why do you think I want to leave the windows platform?
Anyway I get Windows for free from MSDNAA and I don’t develop for windows so they don’t get anything back for giving it to me for free. Besides Apple has proven lately that they’re worse than Microsoft.
Holy crap Thom! What is this story about 3 desktops died at the same time?? Really do you expect us to believe this shit? If so, you should check your electrical setup in your home, and not blaming self-made computers. Or maybe that was just a story to justify your iMac to yourself.
Come on Thom, i guess you’re a grown man, don’t lies to yourself. If you really wanted to buy an iMac, you could just say “becouse i like it”, and not setting up all this bullshit about customer service and the joy-to-speak-to-a-real-person. If you are able to build a desktop with your hands, then you are able to fix any problem. Ram failure? Ok, new ram 20€. Hd failure? Well i hope you’ve got a backup, otherwise no iMac can save you. PSU failure? New psu 40€. Motherboard failure? No problem , i buy i new one (cost very different depending from the model).
So i really don’t understand the need to explain the reason you’ve got a new iMac. Or…well, i get it, but i want to hear it from you.
I find it interesting that most people seem to either build their desktops themselves or buy mass-produced commercial ones.
Considering that my next desktop will serve fairly exotic use cases and that I don’t like playing with hardware much, I have been thinking for some time about a third option : going to some local computer shop that I trust, telling them what I want, getting a price and a component list from them, and quickly checking on the web if their proposal makes sense before accepting their offer.
This way, I get all the benefits of a homemade machine for relatively little extra cost (the cost of manpower is generally relatively cheap with respect as compared to that of the various components), yet all the homework I have left to do is to enumerate my use cases and read some reviews of the most sensitive components (PSU, storage…). Sounds like a balanced solution to me, so why do so few people around here seem to do it ?
Edited 2012-09-28 15:14 UTC
Atleast in my own case it’s simply a matter of almost non-existent budget: the more I can save on the costs the more money I have left to actually buy components with. Sure enough, it costs around 50€ to pay someone to slap the thing together, but I could instead use that 50€ to buy an even better GPU so I can get by with it for a slightly longer time if I just go ahead and do the work myself.
Indeed, we are doing things differently there. Myself, I would tend to wait a bit for the extra money if I can in such a situation.
(Where “if I can” essentially means “if I have another usable machine in the house for the time being”)
Actually, Neolander, when I say “build-it-myself”, it’s usually what you’re saying. I haven’t really built a computing rig from scratch myself (just not enough hours in a day) for almost a decade now, to be frank.
Usually do my research online with regards to component compatibility with OpenBSD and Linux. Once done, I get a friend who runs a store to source and build it for me. Leave the choice of casing, wiring and cooling to him, since he’s good at it. Might not be the cheapest possible option, but I value him enough to pay him whatever he asks for. Plus I get great support; he’s open on weekends, he sometimes drives down to my place with parts I ordered, or at least sends someone down to the lobby of his building so I can just do a “drive-thru” (which I just did 2 weeks ago picking up a new Plextor SSD), and best of all, I can buy on credit if times are tough.
Only perform minor upgrades, cleaning or parts replacements by myself.
Edited 2012-09-29 02:16 UTC
I would say it was the way in quite a few places, for a while – one went to a small shop, selected components, and after a short time a new PC was waiting. Even without any explicit manpower costs, it was understood that paying for the listed price of all those components was more than enough – not a small sum, after all. And also that the machine will include a pirated 98, 98SE, or XP…
Mass-produced commercial brands were even hardly visible in consumer market, pre-laptops.
Though it wasn’t perfect – some shops were seemingly popular mostly because of weird word-of-mouth between the people who were paying for the PCs, not their primary users (parents vs kids); popular, while being at best nothing special. Also some weird practices, almost-rituals, or ignoring quite elementary things… cases sealed with a sticker; ridiculously loud cooling fans (I remember that once, when I specifically asked for “as quiet as possible” CPU fan, the salesman looked at me as if I were an alien, apparently he just didn’t think on that level prior to that …and he still gave me IMHO ridiculously loud one; think how much human thought, creativity, was wasted by those whining fans); some hardware that “must” be there for some reason (in the era of first Celerons, most of them worked on Slot 1 motherboards with slotkeys – what for? They were never upgraded to Pentium2, it only added cost; also, SB Live! soundcards were pointless in most cases, especially considering…); pushing pitifully low quality speakers that weren’t worth the energy/food required to throw them into trash container; thoughtless fascination with numbers (it was hilarious/sad when nice Celeron Tualatin setups were “upgraded” to Celeron Willamette – yeah, the clock was almost 2x higher, but the new PC was slower; in 99 or so I’ve also heard ~”oh, Matrox G200 8 MiB? No, no, you need a 16 MiB GFX card to do anything on a computer” in one shop); except, always neglecting RAM amounts.
Of course, it was largely still in pre-Internet era, so some complications stemmed from that…
But at some point, in the middle of the naughties, everybody just started getting laptops – after some time (not immediately) even typically with a licensed Windows. Overall, probably a good thing that times changed.
I think is odd that people are still use desktops pcs for working, I’ve been using laptops exclusively since 2006.
Well everyone’s use case is different. No matter how much you spend speccing out a monster gaming laptop, two years later it won’t be good enough to play the most recent games and there’s usually no way to upgrade the video and CPU. With a desktop PC, you can upgrade components individually as needed and save money over time.
There are some excellent cases for using a laptop exclusively too, of course, as it seems you have discovered. My current setup is an HP desktop machine with upgraded video and RAM for daily use (gaming, serving media to the Xbox in the living room, compiling/editing audio and video etc). My go-to computer for light stuff like Internet browsing and general media consumption used to be a Sony Vaio laptop but is now an Asus Eee Pad Transformer with the keyboard dock. It makes a very nice netbook that can become a tablet instantly, and so far I’ve gone the entire week without charging it.
At my part time job we use a mix of laptops and desktops, and part of my function there is to set them up and ensure they all stay running. We use laptops at workstations that need to save space, and we have one floating laptop for warehouse work (though for my part I’ve been taking the Asus to work and it serves very well as a mobile workstation, especially with the camera on the back for scanning barcodes into our inventory system).
Oh, and about my customer service experience, I’ve had that with Sony and HP, and booth exceeded my expectations.
Edited 2012-09-28 16:45 UTC
News from Thom.
So exciting!
Why not buy a cheap PC? I’ve old computers, 10 years old and more and they hav’nt failed on me. And if any gets broken you could buy a second hand gear very cheap. Why invest a lot of money on yourself when it’ll harm the environment and you could spend it on more important things than new high class computers that will be outdated in a few years? I’m just wondering?
Edited 2012-09-28 21:14 UTC
Maybe it is just me, but I think the newer computer break faster then the old ones.
I blame RoHS
Edited 2012-09-29 11:58 UTC
I think you’re mostly just looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses …microcomputers of the 80s and 90s were notoriously unreliable. But we do remember better the relatively few examples which remained operational for a long time, remained visible, that’s just how our memory works.
You seem to have forgotten the capacitor plague from a decade ago… effects of which were BTW before ROHS, so things overall likely greatly improved since its introduction (generally http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROHS#Reliability_concerns_unfounded & how the process of its introduction improved our understanding of that tech aspect and methods; NVM the overall benefits of limiting our exposure to RoHS-banned stuff…)
Edited 2012-10-04 22:47 UTC
You just bought worst Mac ever made!!
All Aluminiums Macs are know that have problem with dust in LCD panel!
After sometime dust acumulated in display and become visible as brown/yellow smudges!
Yeah just been on mac rumours and warranty covers it, and apparently easily rectified if its not
Edited 2012-09-29 07:13 UTC
Yes, i change Three times display in 2010. 27″ iMac and find quite astonishing that Apple did not fix this issue for THREE years!!!
It is like Porshe 911 – if you cut right plate with 20$ saw you can open it in 2.34 minutes. Porshe never fix this issue – it is way better to ignore it than to give it meddian attention.
I wouldn’t trust Apples warranty.
But then I’m in Sweden and not the US.
Also this service shit doesn’t make any sense. ATM we actually do have a Apple premium seller / service whatever in this town since they are popular nowadays but we didn’t earlier.
But regardless the computer store at the university do warranty repairs for kinda all brands so you can likely go there with your ASUS laptop or whatever.
Back when I didn’t wanted my Dell IPS screen due to the stupid anti-glare (I hate the idiots who argue for that thing, they don’t get they argue for spreading light over the screen?) they paid for the return even though there was nothing wrong with it. It worked very smoothly.
My MBP was the most stupid purchase ever if you also include the price of it.
Edited 2012-09-29 17:54 UTC
Something else than “matte”?
I don’t understand all the animosity here. I really don’t. Thom bought an iMac, and now everyone starts saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing when he builds his own machines, and a whole lot of other bullshit conclusions pulled out of their asses? Are we dealing with technology here or some religion? It’s getting quite difficult to tell the difference, and I’m wondering why Thom even bothers to write anything here if this is the response he gets. This place is starting to remind me more and more of Slashdot; it’s getting impossible to have a real discussion about oses and machines here due to the fanatics going mod-crazy and hurling insults from the peanut galleries. If you don’t like someone else’s choice, that’s fine. Everyone has the right to their own opinion, imho. There is, however, no need to degenerate into baseless insults when you don’t agree and, in fact, it says far more about you fanatics than it does about the person being insulted. This arrogant religious elitism displayed by so many on here really needs to stop.
Both.
I don’t know, atleast I just had some discussion with Alfman about SSDs and HDDs. You just have to realize that on the Internet there’s ALWAYS someone who feels his or her opinion and tastes are superior and will thusly point out in plentiful amounts, and then to learn to filter such stuff out.
I tend to ignore most of the stuff, but every now and then I lash on to something not because I’m offended, but because I hope to prevent the less-knowledgeable partakers from mistaking the lies/wrong information as fact.
Unfortunately for many here their computer/smart phone/tablet/insert device here and brand are an extension of who they are – they express what they are as a person, the values they hold etc. hence the insecurity when someone ‘leaves the ranks’ and ‘goes to a competitor’. You see the same sort of reaction by Android/iOS fanboys when someone announces they’re going to a competitor or when a person moves from one platform to another with fanboys trashing them (“they weren’t true believers”) whilst the supports of the other platform trumpet it as a win for the ‘A’ team.
End of the day we use the said platform that serves us best and I would assume that geeks here would be more interested in the technology behind the operating systems than the politics fanboys get wrapped up in. For me, I’d sooner hear about the improvements of WDDC 1.2 or the new driver model for Wayland or even how LLVM is having an impact on various projects that utilise it from an operating system perspective. Maybe I’m just asking a return of OSNews.com to its roots – where people would focus on the technology rather than the organisations behind them.
Edited 2012-09-29 14:41 UTC
HERETICS!!1
But IIRC it wasn’t so rosy in early OSNews years – back then it was probably between distros. Oh, and MS bashing is not a new phenomena…
I doubt wether hardware is a valid reason to switch to an Apple system.As your mileage varies i think the OS and applications in order to get your job done is the prime reason.Assembling a system with A class hardware is a dead brainer for most of the Osnews attendees i assume.
after having 2 pc’s just die on me i switched to mac. it was the best decision i made.. first acer computer lasted a year and then totally died. then i got a dell it lasted about 2 years before it started randomly blue-screening.
i bought an imac, i used it for 2 years then sold it for 1000, when i wanted to get a new computer. Also sold a used macbook air for 800. Macs are better made, and hold their value better. even though they are more expensive.
i have had such a good experience with mac’s that i doubt i will ever go back to windows. especially now that windows has become a tablet os..
iphone and itunes helped me make this decision too. i got an iphone. and started using itunes. now i own movies and stuff on iCloud, and it just made sense to get a mac, and i plan on getting an apple tv sooner or later.
I’m not bashing your decision but colour me confused that you went for two vendors with two of the worst reputations for quality and you’re surprised at the results? If you get an computer from non-reputable vendors are you surprised at the result?
I rely on my computers for my business too.
But I prefer to be in charge of my own destiny, rather than relying on some vendor’s repair centers and “help” service.
I use stock PCs with stock parts, so I can replace any broken component immediately myself. I can swap parts between machines at will. Apple offers high-quality hardware but I can’t imagine relying on them for this.
I also use stock software (Linux etc). It’s not only free, it gives me the greatest degree of control over my machine. I also benefit from the fact that there is no hidden vendor agenda compromising my machines.
So my advice would be — don’t rely on Apple or any vendor. If you depend on your computers for your livelihood, take control! Use stock PCs, stock parts, and FOSS software.
You can probably buy two cheaper PCs for the price of one Mac anyway 😉
Redundancy is the best if you don’t want to have to rely on the vendor.
Just use the other computer when one breaks, that would only you a few minutes to switch.
Edited 2012-09-29 17:10 UTC
You know, most of Linux development is financed by big iron vendors, directed at servers and such …and there were instances of some Linux kernel devs expressing their displeasure of that situation, & how it negatively impacts ~desktop utility.
Is there nothing better going on to post about than an explanation of why someone bought an imac?
And yet here we are, 250+ comments later, which certainly makes it at least one of the most popular OSNews topics…
While I might agree about the Mac hardware (I use the word MIGHT), there are tons of Linux OSes out that are better and more stable and possibly more feature rich. Different versions of Linux Mint have been hyper stable and reliable.
Quite often the OS doesn’t really matter, it’s the applications available that do, and well, this is exactly where Linux tends to fall short.
Maybe he just don’t want to use Linux?
Just because you and I use it and like it doesn’t mean it would work for him.
i’ve read a lot of retarded (mostly comments) on this site. a post with over 200 comments bickering over which which pc platform some dude none of us should care about purchased is the most retarded.
And yet you chose to not only read the story and the comments, but to comment yourself. If you truly thought it was “retarded” why not just move on without joining in? Sounds like you might be the retarded one…just saying.
(And yes I know you’re trolling and I’m feeding you but I’m bored so I felt like wasting a few seconds of a lazy Sunday on you.)
…the iMacs are great machines. Maybe not the latest or greatest HW, but put together in such a great way the negatives seem to vanish…
I have a 21″ and 27″ here at home and love them both, just add extra memory (and SSD if you can (easy to remove the front screen yourself on the latest ones)), just be sure not to buy the memory from Apple and you’ll do OK 🙂
IMHO…
Can you use the display as a screen for another computer, like e.g. one day when the warranty’s gone and the CPU/RAM/mobo/etc. goes bust does that also mean the display is useless also?
If you can’t, well, then I have to disagree. With traditional computers you get to re-use lots of parts which contributes to less electronic waste, but with all-in-ones you actually contribute to the mountain of electronic junk occupying large areas in the developing countries.
I have to agree. It’s one of the reasons why I hate myself for buying a tablet. However considering it cost as much as my graphics card, not too much.
My mate got a 27″ iMac, his batch had noisy drives. After getting his first replacment he gave up and accepted it. He now has a noisy clattering drive a foot or so from his face, that requires serious and scary disasambling to change or even add another drive.
Sure it’s fine if something fails under Apple Care, but not so much if you just want to do a minor upgrade to extend the life of your very expensive computer.
Edited 2012-10-01 11:59 UTC
Yes you can, you can use the other imac as a screen using the thunderbolt and display port.
It’s on YouTube as part of a review and was pretty impressed by it tbh.
But not sure if screen will still work as display if other components are knacked though :/
Edited 2012-10-01 16:27 UTC
I just Googled it and apparently you cannot use it as an external display unless it can still boot to OSX, meaning that the display will be entirely useless once the thing cannot boot to OSX any longer, plus it’s a horrible waste of electricity to have to run two computers simultaneously just to use one as a display.
In other words my point stands: it’s a waste of resources and contributes to the e-junk problem. But alas, I am apparently the only one here who cares.
You’re not. I admittedly didn’t pay much attention to electronics recycling until recently. Ironic since I’m big on recycling everything else. Anyways, after doing some homework on the subject and what impact not doing it is having, I’m 100% with you on this. Hopefully others will get on board and start taking the problem seriously.
No, you are not. It is simply a minority position currently with regards to consumer goods. I always try and recycle my technology, and I often re-purpose things for other uses. The main reason I never went for an iMac or any other AIO is for this very reason. The monitor will last longer than the other parts and ultimately it will be a great waste.
On the newer ones you can…. At least if you are replacing it because it is old. I am sure some kinds of failures of the main board break that feature.
They always come back. Sometimes it takes some time, but they always come back.
“I bought my first Mac somewhere in 2004 – an iMac G4, one of Apple’s most beautiful machines of all time – and since then, have purchased several other Macs, both new and used. My favourite by far was my trusty 12.1″ iBook G4, but I’ve also owned a PowerMac G4 Cube, a MacBook Air, an original iMac, and I still have a partially disassembled PowerMac dual G4 450Mhz lying around somewhere.”
Dude, Apple robbed you, aren’t you aware of that?
My 10 years old pc still works fine, I don’t need to get replacement that often like your apple computers.
Minimac is small and noiseless, kind of nice to have around. Processing power is good enough for most of my uses. It plays some of my favorite games well also, and infact better than my bigger linux box. (on windows).
If you want to play games that require power, windows + a big box is probably the best.
Professional audio/video is typically best on OSX. (and probably a minimac will do.)
Linux is ofcourse the best for browsing, with chromium and programming, and probably runs well on both. If you haven`t played classic games like doom 3, it can be great fun to play on low-jitter kernels, where smoothness and performance is better than windows-version. And tracker-enthustiasts will also like Renoise on linux, which works well at 1ms latency.
1ms latency is also doable on windows and mac.
Linux requires a low-latency kernel, and windows requires some intense disabling. OSX comes default as 1ms “compliant”
Games in general run poor on OSX though.
See also my blog for reducing jitter on windows (smooth games/low latency audio) http://paradoxuncreated.com/Blog/wordpress/?p=1783
And a low-jitter kernel for Ubuntu 12.04: http://paradoxuncreated.com/Blog/wordpress/?p=2268
Peace Be With You.
I have a mid-2011 Mac Mini i5 with 8 gigs of ram driving an Apple 24″Cinema Display. It is fast, silent and has an almost invisible form factor. Runs Mountain Lion like a champ as well as Win 7 Pro via Parallels.
I don’t build my systems although I respect the skills of those who can; but my little rig is very useful, even including some games. For example, Real Racing 2 is rather smooth and visually awesome on this system.