Richard Hunter said:
Deathshadow...
One of the reasons that Apple does this is precisely because many of their customers don't WANT to hear fans or noises of any kind.
I, for one... HATE loud, noisy, overclocked computers. Great for the 1 hour a week I get to play Unreal Tournament... but otherwise a pain in the ear (literally).
Where I've been using computers for so long, that if a computer isn't making noise I assume something is broken.
It's actually a pet peeve of mine... because to be honest, (and please people, this is tongue in cheeck, no offense meant
)... my usual response after 30+ years of using computers on this subject is:
"These limp wristed tofu eating vegetable loving {censored} who complain about the noise of a modern computer need to spend some time next to a TRS-80 Model II with the 8" drives, an XT with a pair of Bernoulli boxes, or a PDP-11 with those wonderful 18" 5 meg winchesters; or even better, an office where all three are in use at once!"
(and as the poor bastard who spent a couple years seated at a Dec Rainbow...)
But then, I have trouble getting to sleep with the comptuer off now - it's too quiet. (kind of like putting a baby to sleep by running the vacuum cleaner)
Richard Hunter said:
The other issue is the tight packaging... ever notice how full featured and crammed in a tiny shell the Powerbooks are?
No. At least, they wouldn't be if they didn't have a redundant three layers of RF shielding... You can generally reduce the weight and make room for things like actual heat sinks by just pulling out the extra layers of shielding (leaving the outermost one intact if you want to have children) and generally speaking there's a LOT of unused space inside the apple laptops, although the crappy e-cheapo iBooks are worse for this than the powerbooks (which are MUCH better laid out internally).
Richard Hunter said:
Try buying a Dell with ALL THE FEATURES of the PowerBook (or MacBook Pro)... it is MUCH LARGER... by comparison.
Depends on the Dell... the Inspiron 1700 series isn't really that much bigger than the MacBook Pro... not that I would ever buy a dell or recommend a dell to ANYONE for ANYTHING. (You think I'm harsh on Apple - Buy Dell, they're like Packard Bell only worse!)
I mean, compare the crappy little $2500 15.4" Macbook pro to something like the Acer TravelMate 8200... Same processor, and the differences end there. First off you get a full aspect 15.4" instead of a sawed off 'wide-screen'. (if it's no wider than the competition offers in normal aspect... you know it's suspect), double the ram, 20 more gigs of disk space, and 8x DVD+/- Dual layer with a real tray instead of a 4x DVD - only with the crappy friction feed... and frankly - IT'S BETTER MADE!!! At least, better made from the point of view of someone who opens these things up and actually starts pulling on things... or even freakier - swapping out parts himself.
But again, Apples are not for people who KNOW or CARE about hardware - never have been. They are consumer level products for the non-technical saavy. The type of thing you get your grandmother or art-{censored} college student.
Richard Hunter said:
I personally haven't found a Mac that, even when underclocked, is slower than I am. So... I'll take the pleasing auditory experience thank you over every last drop of power at the expense of comfort.
Actually, I've never really had that problem with the my desktop PC unless I'm gaming, and as a rule don't recommend overclocking anything... I get a laugh out of the people who sink >$500 in water cooling to run their $48 celeron and $80 Ge6200 at the speeds of a $300 P4 and a $200 Ge6800 Ultra.
Only reason I've overclocked the old G3 and G4 Macs is despite all the hype about their 'being superior per clock' to an equivalen intel, a 333mhz G3 just isn't all that useful for much of anything anymore - Especitally if you try putting OS X on them. Besides, I hate letting working hardware sit on a shelf gathering dust.
Richard Hunter said:
However, I can understand if you don't feel that way. The way many people are about their computers (extracting every last bit of power from them noise bedamned) is how I am with Cars.
I haven't had an actual muffler on any car I've owned in the last 10 years. I use custom made, 3" silencers in a mandrel bent custom exhaust. I always have the fastest car... and unfortunately the loudest. My friends / etc. are always asking me why my car is so loud, and can't I make it quieter... and I always respond that sure I can make it quieter... but then I lose HP.
I can get behind that type of thinking - although the engineer in me on both subjects does have that nasty "noise = wasted energy" thing echoing about in my head.... But given out level of technology the simple fact is physics theory and applied mechanics don't always line up in the real world.
