I’m an Apple fan. Great useable software. Nice design. But they’ve always been guilty of overcharging for hardware. And the iMacs and other lower end Apple products have always been guilty of that to a greater degree. Remember those first candy colored desktop things that were obsolete almost as fast as they came out. Ha. I’m also annoyed when Apple takes away features like mic inputs and headphone jacks and USB ports and dvd drives. That’s another reason I still have a 2012 laptop and a iPhone 6. But to this day. In 20 years as a Mac user, still not a single virus. Just had to get that in there. Lol
3 Likes
Now that I think of it, the only serious problems I had with macs were hard drives dying. Disc drives too. Oh an this crazy thing with the battery expanding over time. Fortunately that was a cheap replacement… but to the point some are making, the newer products are being made so that sort of replacement is nearly impossible for a consumer to do. It’s pretty annoying that I can’t just buy a new battery for my iPhone and insert it into a slot like every other brand of phone or digital camera.
2 Likes
Too far off subject to say you don’t burn anthracite in a steam engine?
You burn steam coal which has more volatile material that is released from the hot coal and burns in the space above the fuel which makes it more effective at delivering heat to the boiler. To deliver as much heat in the same time as steam coal you have to burn an equivalent amount of anthracite on a much larger grate.
So you can build an anthracite-fuelled locomotive, but it isn’t as good as one fuelled by steam coal - and (perhaps most importantly) they look weird.
And in exchange for making you sit through perhaps the most nit-picky posting of the day, I reward you with a link to a site that will consume your life - the Museum of Retrotechnology:
http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/camelback/camelbk.htm (like I said, they look weird).
4 Likes
The last mac I bought was a 2002 Powerbook, IIRC. The hard drive was burried so deeply in there that there was no practical way to replace it. I was so happy when we got rid of it.
There were some that could be worked on, but I still remember my brother asking for help with a mac mini upgrade.
And to put this in perspective, I replace parts on laptops and cell phones regularly without issue.
1 Like
I was totally confused about what you are talking about, until I realize you must be referring to the car talk above my comment.
Welcome to boingboing, btw.
1 Like
Me, too, and also with eyes wide open. Here’s the thing: Apple products LAST. My Macbook Pro is the same vintage as yours and survived a malicious toss off a 5’ table onto hardwood floors. The phones just won’t die. The laptops are not just running but usable after a decade or more. Try that with other hardware, much less software. I’m not sure I’d class the hardware as overpriced when it’s still going after 3 replacements of Windows equivalents (5 for Dell).
2 Likes
I love my offhand geology joke has been a springboard to share what actual types of coal were used in steam engines.
OK - while we are sharing facts - coal dealers used to color their coal as a branding device to sell to people. Blue Coal was actually colored blue, and it was the main sponsor of The Shadow radio show for many years.
1 Like
I’m typing this on a 2011 Dell laptop. Apple fan’s statements of reliability are often colored by what they perceive. I recommend any Apple fan watch Louis Rossman’s channel to see just how bad it is.
3 Likes
It isn’t a direct quality metric(except in the sense that basically nobody ever bothered with 10(the ‘Velociraptor’ line excepted: it was fairly blatantly just a rebranded 10k 2.5in/12.5mm height drive sold with a different sticker and bolted to enough heatsink to make it mechanically a 3.5in drive; but it was a 10k drive sold with an SATA interface and to enthusiasts) or 15k RPM consumer drives so those speeds imply server grade stuff); but it is directly relevant to performance; and 5.4k is about as slow as can still bring purchased.
It matters less than it used to now that an even adequate SSD pumps out IOPS such that all the mechanical options from barrel scraping 5.4ks to spendy 15k arrays blur into an indistinguishable smudge of pathetic just above the X axis; but when comparing between mechanicals the difference is nontrivial.
(edit: In one sense the advent of SSDs has actually rehabilitated the 5.4k HDDs of the world: they tend to be slightly cheaper and run cooler and quieter than 7.2ks; and much cheaper, cooler; and quieter than 10 and 15ks; and since anything that actually needs IOPS is best done on an SSD there’s a lot to be said for 5.4ks as an option for providing the cheap bulk storage that SSDs are too expensive for and which isn’t terribly latency sensitive(also, thanks to modern platter densities, you don’t need high rotational speeds for nice linear reads and writes to be pretty damn fast, a lot of bits pass under the read/write head per second even at 5.4k RPM; it’s just random I/O and seek where things go to hell). 7.2ks carry a very modest premium in cost, noise; and heat; so they are unlikely to become extinct, though aren’t obviously needed in a lot of cases; but justifying 10 and 15ks is way harder than it used to be. Back in the day, when SSDs either weren’t a thing or were terrifyingly expensive, those were just what you used if you wanted your server/NAS/SAN to not totally suck at I/O. Now they are just markedly more expensive than lower RPM drives, even the fancy ‘nearline SATA’ ones; while still literally orders of magnitude slower than SSDs that are no longer impractically costly; or even more costly at all.
The only real reason that a 5.4k is a bit of a kick in the head here is that iMacs aren’t…exactly…swimming in drive bays or priced in a way that excuses nickel and diming. Under those constraints not providing an SSD as the primary storage device is just tacky.
In systems where you’ve got more room for internal storage floating around 5.4s are a perfectly reasonable thing to at least offer: NVMe boot + big huge mechanical storage pool is a totally viable combination; and if you need more storage mechanicals remain much more cost effective in areas where random I/O isn’t critical. When 1TB SSDs are $120 not having one for a computer that costs as much as an iMac is obnoxious; but 10TB HDDs start at $280, so if you are putting the ‘mass’ in ‘mass storage’ going all-flash is still a rather stiff committment.)
2 Likes
The last time I bought a hard drive (just a few years ago) I sought out 5400rpm over 7200rpm because I cared more about minimizing noise and power consumption than I cared about data read/write speed. I’ve got a few Western Digital “green” 5400rpm drives chugging away in my desktop PC, which is mostly used for web browsing and storing (and cloud backup of) family photos. They were cheap, have been very reliable, and are quiet and suck very little power.
1 Like
Congratulations on the survival of your ancient Dell. I’ve had dozens of them over the years for work. They typically last about as long a roll of toilet paper.
When I get home, I’ll fire up my 1998 iMac and say “Hi!”
2 Likes
Excellent explanation. My own, considerably less technical, experience is with an older HP PC that initially had a 1TB Seagate HDD (7200rpm). I replaced it with a WD Velociraptor (10000rpm) and the performance increase was significant. I agree that it’s quite noisy, but wasn’t aware of the higher power usage. As this is my main PC I might be better off to switch to SSD if the power saving would be significant (Australia has among the most expensive electricity in the world).
I’ll see your iMac and raise you a PowerBook 1400c. Upgraded the RAM, the HD, the CPU module to a G3.
I do need to refresh the battery, though. (If I ever get time.)
1 Like
When playing high bit rate audio files, mechanical hard disks have a warm tone and broad soundstage that solid state disks just can’t replicate. The depth of the “digital black” has a much finer grain. You wouldn’t understand because your ears aren’t accustomed to the experience.
3 Likes
I like it. But can you send email from it that isn’t from @compuserve.com?
I’ve got one of these bad boys stuffed away in a closet somewhere. Last I recall I had just updated it to Solaris 8 but can’t remember root password.
I also had one of these too. Compaq LTE Elite 486 DX2 50mhz 8mb RAM and 340mb HD with optional docking station. Has the trackball in the lid with the mouse buttons on the top. Originally ran Windows 3.11 (for workgroups!) and I upgraded it to Windows 95. Later on I bootstrapped Redhat 5 to it just to see if I could. Fun little machine. Got me thru college.
4 Likes
And I’ll fire up my Toshiba Satellite 205CDs that I bought new for $1700 in 1996 and reply. Perhaps you should take better care of your work machines?? 
2 Likes
I think the spinning hard drives Apple uses are built in obsolescence. Every iMac I have spec’d for work that still used a spinning hard drive in the last 10 years has failed on its hard drive far before it should have failed.
Of course, not needing a lot of space for work desktops, I have been spec’ing the 256GB SSD options for quite some time. But no store stocks these models. We have to order them custom and wait.
Apple lately has me really puzzled. Some stuff is so great, like the 5k screens. And then you get the shittiest hard drives, the shittiest keyboards. Well, the mice have always been crap. You used to be able to get a server in a desktop in the form of the MacPro. Now, you get a lowend laptop in a desktop.
2 Likes
I think the bigger issue is that it’s a spinning harddrive at all, as opposed to an SSD. It’s literally unthinkable to me to call any computer without an SSD high end. And the fact that it’s the slowest spinning harddrive available just makes it extra hilarious. And the fact that it’s so hard to upgrade really puts it over the top. Poor Apple (not literally of course).
2 Likes
- Ew, Compuserve.
- I just need to find my PCMCIA wifi thingy, and connect to lensman, the older of the two wifi points here, and I can probably use Eudora.
- Wow, remember Eudora?
That’s cool. Looks a lot less heavy than that Indy I had to lug about in the 90s for a while there.
For college, mine was a Toshiba T1000SE. Mushy keyboard, but a great little machine. Floppy drive, DOS 3.3 in ROM, barely any RAM. Went through a lot of batteries, though, and back before I knew how to furbish them.
1 Like
