Apple Not Ready Ditch Optical Drives
From Patrick:
Hi,
I've just finished reading your article on the lack of Mac product line
refreshes.
While it's quite interesting to see how long Apple's waited this
time around, particularly in the fading Mac mini department, I believe that
a small amount of speculation on this topic is misplaced. Especially
the subject of the elimination of built-in optical drives.
Looking back on Internet rumours from the past, I'm sure you'll
agree that a lot of silliness went on; predictions that not only did
not, but could not have, come to fruition.
Looking specifically at the notion that Apple would remove optical
drives from not only it's regular laptop line, but also desktops, I
really think there's nothing to worry about there.
The MacBook Air doesn't have an optical drive because it's designed
to be a second, complementary Mac - designed for people who probably
also have - you guessed it - a desktop with an optical drive. Look at
the remote install technologies. They're there for a reason, and one
reason only.
If iMac, Mac mini and/or Mac Pro lose their optical drives, they
will no longer appeal to regular users. And Apple being the company
they are will undoubtedly recognise this. It would be the biggest, most
blunderous move they've ever made if they were to remove such a staple
of home computing.
MacBook Pro will not lose its optical drive due to its professional
workhorse nature; MacBook is highly unlikely to do so, as it's cheap
enough as-is, and needs to appeal to the broadest market of any Apple
laptop(imagine how it would look in the press, being the only
mainstream consumer notebook with no provision for CD/DVDs?).
I believe you're looking in all the wrong places for this
"transition".
MacBook Air has its place, optical drives have their place.
This is nothing at all like the elimination of floppy disks; those
were a stale, near-death technology to start with. I think what we'll
see is Blu-Ray players, and eventually burners, as the only changes to
these products' drives.
Kind regards,
Patrick
Patrick,
I can't see Apple adding Blu-ray drives across the
board. Dell charges a $200 premium over the price of a DVD burner for
Blu-Ray, and you can't expect Apple to include it without upping
selling prices by $200. Well, maybe on the Mac Pro, but it's too
expensive an item to make standard on consumer models.
Apple is moving in new directions. Thanks to broadband
Internet, it's now feasible to buy your music, video, ebooks, and
software online. Just as Apple TV doesn't need a DVD drive (although
many of us think it should have one), a regular home computer doesn't
need a DVD drive. Yes, a lot of people want them, but what if Apple
could trim $100 from retail by making them a $100 option?
I'm not saying that it's going to happen, only that it
could. Look at the iPhone and iPod touch - incredible little computers
that don't even have an optical drive option. The world is
changing.
Some once believed that nobody would buy a computer
without a built-in floppy drive, but the iMac became a best seller.
Making optical drives an optional accessory wouldn't surprise me at
all.
Dan
The Summerlong Mac Drought
From David Walker:
Dan:
I too have trouble remembering a 4 month stretch without any Mac
introductions, but we are now in the era of Apple Inc., not Apple
Computer Inc. The usual introduction of new models in the late spring
to entice school boards and individual back-to-school sales seems to
have been replaced by the free iPod promotion for college kids. I don't
like it, because it unnecessarily delays the introduction of the
Montevina platform and is going to make observant buyers sick when
their brand new Macs are replaced by something better just days after
the of start class.
I worked for a retail Apple specialist for a few years, and I got it
in both ears every January after Macworld when angry buyers tried to
return 3-week-old products because their kids told them they were
already obsolete. I therefore find it hard to believe that Apple
continues to not only get away with such crap, but are able to expand
the strategy to the second biggest retail event of the year:
back-to-school. It boggles my mind that they're growing so quickly when
their numbers are based on hawking outdated hardware at inflated prices
and then rubbing people's noses in it by introducing new models just as
the bills are coming in.
I want to be a good person, teach my kids good ethics, and not close
my eyes to the suffering of others, but in this case I have to push
that all aside and be downright selfish and greedy. I will play along
with Apple and profit from the suffering of others by buying AAPL, and
I will beat Apple's seasonal fleecing of its devoted flock by only
buying products that are one month old. Why one month? Because a
machine that new is still worth it's sticker price, but someone else
has already found all the bugs, incompatibilities, and initial quality
problems for me.
I hope that when they do upgrade the mini, assuming they even plan
to keep the model in the lineup, that they jump over the current lineup
and go straight to a low-end Montevina board with X4500 graphics. It
just makes sense to use the same basic logic board in as many different
models as possible.
David
David,
The concept of "obsolete" flies in the face of the Low
End Mac philosophy. Everyone buys a computer knowing that faster models
might be just months - or even weeks - away. It's the nature of the
industry, and it doesn't make the discontinued models obsolete. They
still do all they did when they were introduced.
Apple's problem may be a lack of consistency. Some
models may see three upgrades within a year, others may go a year
between updates. And when Apple does that, the performance difference
between the new model and the old one does make the consumer feel
fleeced. That's part of the reason we don't understand the one-year
update cycle for the Mac mini, which is already behind the times when
Apple does finally get around to improving it.
The Mac mini doesn't even have Penryn and Santa Rosa
yet. I would be shocked to see Apple adopt Montevina, no matter how
sensible that might seem.
As far as buying goes, my preference is to pick up
refurbished Macs after their replacement has been announced or find a
nice used Mac. I haven't bought a new-in-box Mac since 2001.
Dan
Purposeful Acquisition
From Luke Rademacher:
Dan
I remember in 2000 when I purposely acquired a used rev. 2 mobo
B&W G3 because I
knew was going to upgrade it. I had about $500 to spend. I lucked out
and got a very basic rev. 2 B&W G3 from a friend who essentially
gave it to me for $50. He had upgraded to a brand new Mac and did not
want his older G3.
I had many pieces of hardware that I had collected from my previous
PowerCenter Tower and Power Mac 7600. With what I could
cannibalize from those two computers, I upgraded the B&W G3 with a
500MHz G4 1MB processor, 4 sticks of 256 MB PC100 RAM, a 40 GB hard
drive, a 4x DVD burner, an external 100MB Zip drive, and Mac OS 9.1. I
was doing a lot of video/audio work and Photoshop image editing, and the Mac
worked pretty well. It served me well until 2003, when I had a better
job and decided to buy the MDD Dual G4 brand new.
At the time I figured like most of the other G4 Macs, various third
party companies would have processor upgrades and whatnot for the MDD
after a year. But by 2004 it seemed everything was gung ho on the
G5.
Then came Intel. A move I never thought would happen.
Peace,
Luke Rademacher
Luke,
I'm a firm believer in purposeful acquisition. My
first Mac, a Plus, was
slowly upgraded with more RAM, a second floppy, a hard drive, and a 16
MHz CPU upgrade. My second, a Centris 610, started with a VRAM
upgrade, followed by some RAM upgrades and one or two bigger hard
drives. My SuperMac clones went
through many rounds of upgrades, as did my PowerBook G4, the only Mac I
ever bought that was brand new on the market. All of my eMacs were
upgraded, and my 1 GHz dual
MDD has had almost everything upgraded but the CPU and video
card.
One step at a time, upgrading as necessary, is the
most economical way to go, as RAM and hard drives get cheaper as time
goes by. It's a shame there are almost no CPU upgrades for the MDD
models, as they had the fastest system bus of any G4 Macs.
Dan
Leopard on a Blue & White G3
From Jeff Koenig:
Hi Dan,
Wanted to send in another report of Leopard 10.5.4 running on my
B&W G3 with a G4 upgrade. And it's all thanks to your site and
James Little's posts, Leopard on a Blue & White G3: Success with
CoreImage and Hacking Leopard
for G3 Power Macs.
Here are a few observations, after using James' method:
The Install
- My parents have an iMac G5, so I bought an IDE to USB cable to
connect my hard drive to their iMac. At first, I tried to install
10.5.1 to my hard drive using Pacifist, but when it was still running
24 hours later, I canceled it.
- Instead I booted from the Leopard DVD and installed from there.
Oddly enough, Archive & Install was my only option, so I chose
that. The install took about a half an hour, and it actually told me
that it had failed, but I figured that was just because it couldn't
automatically reboot upon completion.
- I restarted and logged back into the iMac and ran the 10.5.4 combo
update, then logged in as root to copy over the kexts.
- I took my hard drive back home and put it back in my B&W. On
the first attempt, I got the "no drivers for this platform" error
again. I figured that the permissions must not be right, even though I
copied the kexts over as root, so I logged back into Tiger, used
Batchmod, and removed those Cache files James had mentioned.
- I ran the Sonnet Cache Enabler (needed for my Zif upgrade to work
correctly), rebooted into Leopard, and it's running great!
Issues
- My built-in USB ports are not working. I noticed this right away,
because I use these two ports for my keyboard and mouse, and both were
unresponsive until I plugged them into slots on my PCI USB 2.0 card.
I'd really like to get to the bottom of why these weren't working,
because I need the USB 2.0 slots for other things.
- No FireWire was found. As expected. I will try to experiment with
an older FireWire kext to see what I can come up with.
- Built-in ethernet is not working. I'm not surprised about this,
because when I installed WWDC '06 a while back, this was an issue. I
ended up getting gigabit PCI ethernet adapter, which Leopard currently
thinks is the built-in ethernet.
- Time Machine. It looks great! I just wish I could use it. It
acts like it's about to start a backup, then tells me that "the backup
volume could not be found." I Googled a number of different solutions
for this last night, but nothing seems to work so far.
Highlights
- Front Row works. I have an Apple remote & a Keyspan USB IR
receiver which are tons of fun to play with.
- DVD Player works. I've read where a lot of people reported DVD
player not working with their unsupported Leopard install, so I was
very glad to see this was working without a hitch.
Next Steps
- Try to resolve the issues with USB, FireWire, & ethernet.
- Try to get Time Machine working as it should.
- I want to test to see if I can run Automatic Updates without
anything breaking. I had an automatic update waiting to run with a
Quicktime, iTunes, Front Row, and a Security Update ready to install,
so I'll be especially interested to see how the Security Update
goes.
- Run a couple of benchmarks, like Xbench, and OpenGL tests
Thanks again for everything you do with the site! It looks like my
9-year-old Mac is going to keep on ticking for a few more years!
Thanks,
Jeff Koenig
Jeff,
Thanks for sharing your success in getting Leopard
installed and working with most of the features of your 1999 Power Mac
G3. Keep us posted as you learn more!
Dan
Problem with Quadra 700 Video and Flat Panel
Display
From Eric Russell Balch:
I've been having this sporadic problem that now seems to be
permanent where the only video resolution available on my old Quadra 700 is 640 x 480 - it doesn't
matter what color depth I select the only rez available is 640 x 480 @
67Hz(?).
I used to be able to select from a wide range of video modes, but
sometimes it seemed that only the 640 x 480 mode was available. Then
through some magic of restarts it would end up in the correct mode with
all modes available. I'm perplexed.
My system reports 8 MB RAM. I've just recently updated to Mac OS
7.6.1. There seems to be some amount of upgraded VRAM - all slots are
filled - but I'm not sure how to get a report of how much.
To make things more interesting, this system came with a Radius
video card installed that also works but only offers up different
display choices in the resolution selection window.
Anyway, any ideas that you have would be much appreciated - 640 x
480 sucks on a 20" flat-panel!
-Eric
Eric,
Macs use sense pins to tell the computer what
resolution(s) a monitor supports, as follows (for pins 10-7-4):
- 640 x 480: 1-1-0
- 512 x 384: 0-1-0
- 640 x 870 b&w: 0-0-1
- 640 x 870 color: 1-0-1
- 1152 x 870 b&w: 0-1-1
- 1152 x 870 color: 0-0-0
In addition to that, Apple also uses "extended sense
codes" where two pins are tied together (for pins 4-10/10-7/7-4 - 0
means the pins should be tied together):
- VGA/SVGA: 1/0/1
- 832 x 624: 0/1/1
- 1024 x 768: 1/1/0
There have been a lot of different Macintosh
DB15-to-VGA adapters made over the past 20 years so old Macs can work
with non-Mac monitors. Some support only a single resolution or a
single monitor, but most have dials or DIP switches that can be used to
change the settings to match some or all of those listed above.
If you adapter isn't adjustable, I recommend the
Griffin Mac
PnP Adapter, which supports all of the Mac resolutions from 512 x
384 to 1152 x 870. It's available from Amazon.com
for US$12.99.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
