Is Apple About to Make Sam Very Happy?? (1 Viewer)

[Thomas Newton]

You could order a DisplayPort adapter and use your 27" iMac as a monitor for your Mac Pro.

 

[Richard Travale]

I saw the cnet.com quick report on the 27" iMac...I was amazed that physically it's not a heckuva lot bigger than the '09 24" model. This means I now have no reservations about ordering one.

This is the configuration I think I'm set on.

• 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x2GB
• 1TB Serial ATA Drive
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB

• Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) and User's Guide(Because I hate not having the number pad)
• 8x double-layer SuperDrive
• Apple Magic Mouse
• Country Kit

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Richard,

Where did you find the 3.06 configuration?


On the Apple order page there is only the 2.66 i5 and 2.86 i7 configurations.

 

[Craig S]

Originally Posted by Ronald Epstein

Richard,

Where did you find the 3.06 configuration?


On the Apple order page there is only the 2.66 i5 and 2.86 i7 configurations.

Ron, the 27" 3.06 config is the third out of four on the iMac order page.

 

[Richard Travale]

Yep, what Craig S said.

 

[Sam Posten]

I think its totally worth it to go for the quad and get the better video card. Personally if I was buying the 27 I wouldnt buy anything less than the i7 version with the 4x2 ram configuration and the fastest video card. Tho I'm surprised, I thought the i7s liked to have their memory in 3 slots rather than 4 or 2. My XPS is set up with ram in 3 slots I'm pretty sure.

 

[Carlo_M]

Sam, re: i7 RAM chips, even though Apple is claiming they are using the desktop CPUs, they are still using the mobile chipsets which use 1066MHz RAM instead of the 1333MHz RAM that the desktop i7 chipsets use. So perhaps that is why there is a disconnect between preferred number of RAM slots between your XPS (and other i7 desktops) and the iMac?

Just hazarding a guess.

 

[Sam Posten]

I thin it will make a negligible difference on the benchmarks but thanks for the explanation. I don't get all tweaked over specs but this did seem 'odd'.

 

[Sam Posten]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Carlo Medina

Richard, I very much like the new screen sizes, when PPI and DPI are taken into account. While people were wowed by the 24" iMac screen, I never was. I am coming from a 6 year old Dell FP2001 (1600x1200 @ 20.1") monitor that at the time was cutting edge. It has a .255mm dot pitch which is still very good. The 24" iMac had a .269mm dot pitch, and I always felt I could make out the pixel structure, especially in comparison to my Dell monitor. By comparison the 15.4" MBP has a dot pitch of .230mm, which is why things look so much smoother on my laptop than on the iMac.

The new sizes give you much better dot pitches (hence sharper images with less visible pixel structure). The 21.5" at 1920x1080 would yield a dot pitch of about .248mm, which is better than the .269mm of the old 24" iMac, and also the .256mm of the 20" iMac.

What really wows me is the 27" iMac at 2560x1440 will have a dot pitch of .233mm.

I saw this today and it made me remember the above quote:

But the Nexus One does have a few advantages over the iPhone. Unfortunately, most of these advantages will only appeal to geeks and not the larger consumer base. For one thing, it has a faster processor and a much higher resolution screen. The faster processor isn't all that obvious in day-to-day use, however, because Android 2.1 doesn't seem to leverage the GPU for most OS-level tasks. Things like table scrolling (for example) are often skippy, which is just inexcusably bad engineering given the 1Ghz chip and powerful GPU inside. That big screen is also partially responsible. The Nexus One has an awful lot more pixels to push than the iPhone, and the end result is that it simply can't do as much work per second as the half-year older iPhone 3Gs, though a firmware update might be able to rectify that, at least for games specifically written to take advantage of the GPU.

The higher resolution screen makes text and drawn elements look a touch smoother and less jaggy, but there's a high price for something most people won't notice. I could see a difference when placed side-by-side next to my iPhone, but the Nexus One's screen didn't jump out at me as that much noticeably better than the iPhone's screen, and even when placed side-by-side, the difference wasn't earth-shattering. Besides that, having all those extra pixels to display text smoothly is rather a waste given that text on the Android's quite simply looks like ass.

The iPhone's 150 ppi screen has a higher-resolution that the vast, vast majority of LED or CRT devices ever created. I don't know of a single person who ever looked at the iPhone's 150 ppi screen and said "if only I needed a more powerful magnifying glass to see the jaggies". The Nexus One's screen seems like a pure case of trying to compete on specs without regard to whether there was any need for a better spec. In other words, a solution looking for a problem. After all this time with the Nexus One's "better" screen, I don't find my iPhone to be at all lacking in that regard.

"Because you can" is rarely a good reason for including a feature.

http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2010/02/nexus-one-from-iphone-developer.html

Apples and Googles (er oranges) I know, but still, something to consider. To me there is a LOT more to consider about a display than sheer DPI, PPI or Dot Pitch. DPI is a factor but by far not the most important one. Buying a monitor on Pitch or DPI alone is like buying a boat only knowing its horsepower. You might get it home and find out your 2000 horsepower new toy isn't a speedboat but a tug =)

Sam

PS still no Blu on the horizon, sad panda.

 

[Sam Posten]

Don't hold your breath on this one:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/03/01/apple_prepping_first_macs_with_hdmi_sources.html

 

[Carlo_M]

Sam, any reason you say to not hold our breaths? I know of Jobs' disdain for Blu, but I would think HDMI would have to be a logical next step (especially since I think it's already on the Apple TV, right?). HDMI is now a near universal connection for current HDTVs and more and more people will want to use a Mac Mini as a "super Apple TV".

 

[Sam Posten]

Two words: Display Port.

I'd be happy to be wrong tho.

That's the nice thing about being a pessimist tho. For any given prediction you are either RIGHT or pleasantly surprised

 

[DaveF]

Better broadly right than specifically wrong. (Not that I follow that advice

 

[Carlo_M]

Oh now I get ya, Sam!

I do hope that Steve can draw a distinction between his opinion about Blu-Ray being a mess which doesn't hurt most consumers due to Blu Ray's still small market penetration, and his support of a connection port that quite frankly has an even smaller market penetration than Blu!

I think back on Apple's championing of Firewire (which I love and use every day) and how they've even started to back out of that. Newer iPods/iPhones don't support it, some of their lower end notebooks have dropped it. I'm hoping he recognizes DisplayPort as a very small niche product and replaces it with HDMI (which I think can be easily connected via adapter to DisplayPort).

 

[mattCR]

Let's be really blunt about the DP Vs. HDMI.. HDMI became and was always intended as the digital media standard for connection to TVs, etc. where the standard resolutions would be set and they would exist as an endpoint.


Displayport was designed to replace VGA/DVI for Computer displays where the resolutions could be more arbitrary, and the idea of daisy chaining and passing data would matter.
In many ways, Displayport is considerably better based for a PC.. though not so hot for a digital direct output. Because the one area where Displayport really mucked it up originally is that, as a format intended to carry display signals ala computer, it didn't originally intend to add an audio interface, which has later been bundled on. Displayport is also not a HDCP item, so yes, content protections like Bluray, etc. will not like displayport.

This isn't to say that Displayport is good or bad. It's kind of like Firewire Vs. USB. Firewire had a ton of significant advantages over USB. But the problem with firewire was that there weren't enough adopters to push out a ton of hardware using it, slowly relegating it to a lesser product to the point where ven apple had to migrate to a more USB oriented platform away from Firewire standards.

Apple adopting Displayport, based on their past standards and their influence over ATI, who now has a series of displayport ready cards in the 5xxx series would make a likely companion.

 

[DaveF]

The problem is this increasingly arbitrary distinction between "TV" and "Computer" display. It's all an AV output for digital bits. This is the same nonsense that leads NBC to say "Hulu's for computers, not for TV's". Harumph!

 

[Ted Todorov]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mattCR
Displayport is also not a HDCP item, so yes, content protections like Bluray, etc. will not like displayport.

That's not true: Display Port supports HDCP -- it certainly does in Apple's current implementation. It also does support audio, however does NOT in Apple's current implementation.

My choice: Apple sticks with Display Port but does provide audio over DP and include the rumored DP to HDMI dongle.

 

[Sam Posten]

I'm thinking that if this is true, what we are likely to see is HDMI for the consumer items (Macbook, iMac, Apple TV) and Displayport with dongles for the Macbook Pro & Mac Pro.

 

[Ted Todorov]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sam Posten

I'm thinking that if this is true, what we are likely to see is HDMI for the consumer items (Macbook, iMac, Apple TV) and Displayport with dongles for the Macbook Pro & Mac Pro.

I think you mean MacMini -- AppleTV has had HDMI all along.

FWIW: there are mini Display Port to HDMI dongles out right now (Monoprice has one or more), but for video only. There actually are dongles tat include audio, but they are more expensive as they have a optical or USB to HDMI audio converter.

Personally I get no benefit from audio on HDMI, as my HDTVs sound is permanently off, and audi goes through my AVR, via optical digital (my Denon AVR doesn't even support HDMI). I have a newer Denon AVR that does, but when I tried it I found the amplifier sounded like dogmeat compared to the older one -- so back to gathering dust i the bedroom it went).

 

[DaveF]

Give me a laptop that supports HDMI with audio and video, and I'll be happier. That would make it trivial to connect my computer to the living system to watch a show on Hulu if Tivo misses it (or reception was bad).