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Topic: Are Apple products really worth it?

Sean McKinnon
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1712
From: Peabody Massachusetts
Registered: Sep 2000

posted 07-30-2013 01:05 PM

There's a great (free) product called "logmein" that I use to monitor and troubleshoot the computers at my office from my iPad or iPhone. I can log in and run programs, print, restart, shutdown, basically do anything remotely. It is very cool!

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Monte L Fullmer
Film God

Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004

posted 07-31-2013 03:35 AM

My friend just came back from a visit to mainland China and took a lot of digital videos on this trip.

He transferred this videos to his 13" MacBook Air so all can see the videos.

He recorded the videos in Hi Def with his camera, which uses quite a bit of storage and needs good speed for playback.

Thus with the the playback, especially with moderate moving panning shots, the images had aliasing lines pretty bad where one can tell the extracting of data from the SSD inside just wasn't fast enough where a standard 7200 spin HD would win this playback hands down.

But, overall, quite an impressive little machine.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 07-31-2013 08:38 AM

A solid state hard disc, such as the ones installed in certain Mac Book Air/Pro notebooks, shouldn't have a problem with HD playback.

If HD video playback in the Mac Book Air was looking choppy I would suspect other culprits -like a very under-powered CPU and graphics chipset configured for saving battery life rather than performance. Was the notebook attached to a wall outlet at the time or running off the battery? Some notebooks with true graphics cards will switch over to a motherboard embedded, lower power chipset when the system is running off the battery. IIRC, a Mac Book Air notebook has nothing near 1080p HD resolution in its display, maybe 720p. I wonder if the notebook was doing any extra work downsampling HD video footage to fit the pixel dimensions of its display.

quote: Sean McKinnon
There's a great (free) product called "logmein" that I use to monitor and troubleshoot the computers at my office from my iPad or iPhone.

Log Me In is available for Windows PCs. We have used it to troubleshoot the computers of customers using electronic variable message centers and their respective software control programs. I think Log Me In works better than Cisco's WebEx. Teamviewer is popular.

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Randy Stankey
Film God

Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99

posted 07-31-2013 09:21 AM

quote: Bobby Henderson
Was the notebook attached to a wall outlet at the time or running off the battery? Some notebooks with true graphics cards will switch over to a motherboard embedded, lower power chipset when the system is running off the battery.

Yes, I bet this is what is contributing to the problem if not the outright cause.

As I remember all the Mac laptops do this. The solution is to either plug the computer in to the power supply or to change the settings in the "System Settings."
I vote for simply plugging it in.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 07-31-2013 04:03 PM

For what it's worth Jen has both a Mac Book Pro and a Mac Book Air, both were new and fairly recent. I haven't really taken an interest in either, but she likes the Air much better and says the Pro is much too slow.

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Monte L Fullmer
Film God

Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004

posted 08-02-2013 03:09 AM

It was the latter - using battery power for the presentations, but heard that transfer speed from SSD's are slower than from a standard mechanical HD, why I came up with this result...and not at all familiar with APPLE products outside where the old AMIGA looked like they picked up some pointers from APPLE for their unit's operations-including using the same Motorola 68000 series processor.

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Mike Heenan
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1896
From: Scottsdale, AZ, USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 08-02-2013 02:10 PM

Transfer speeds are slower from an SSD than a HDD? That's not true at all. SSD smokes HDD transfer rates.

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Terry Lynn-Stevens
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1081
From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Dec 2012

posted 01-09-2014 05:35 PM

My better half got an iPad Mini with retina display for Christmas. It is a nice product but $399 is a lot of a money. So far, the display looks great and the battery lasts a really, really long time. It is also very fast.

So far I am on the fence if it really is worth the high price.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 01-09-2014 06:14 PM

quote: Mike Heenan
SSD smokes HDD transfer rates.

Unless that SSD is a Compact Flash drive hooked to the computer via USB.

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Terry Lynn-Stevens
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1081
From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Dec 2012

posted 01-09-2014 06:31 PM

quote: Joe Redifer
Unless that SSD is a Compact Flash drive hooked to the computer via USB

Can the average person tell the difference?

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 01-09-2014 09:24 PM

USB 2.0 has a maximum speed of 480 megabits per second, which is pretty slow compared to what SATA connections can do. USB 3.0 can push data as fast (or maybe even faster) than eSATA. Thunderbolt is even faster, but not widely supported yet.

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Jeff Kane
Film Handler

Posts: 74
From: corpus christi, tx
Registered: Jun 2011

posted 01-12-2014 09:32 PM

The average person can easily tell the difference. Last few notebooks I've gotten; instead of paying through the nose for an SSD, I've bought the SSD separately and replaced the HDD myself. Notebook disassembly isn't for the faint of heart but in this case it's very much worth it. SSDs are much much faster.

As for the video tearing and such, that's not the HDD transfer at all. If it were a transfer rate issue you'd see pausing or stuttering. What's happening is the GPU being throttled to save power. Easing up the power saving settings would fix that.

Oh, and Joe? My bet is the Macbook Pro doesn't have an SSD in it? Stuff some more RAM in it and get a 256 or 512gb SSD. Easy to replace on that machine and they're quite inexpensive now. The machine will fly.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 01-13-2014 02:26 PM

I don't know I don't pay attention to laptops. The few times I had to use my fiance's laptop I was not having a good time. There's no way a touchpad can be as fast or as precise as a mouse. Also I do not like that laptops are less powerful. By the way I'm typing this on a computer from 2006. Go figure. [Smile]

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Claude S. Ayakawa
Film God

Posts: 2738
From: Waipahu, Hawaii, USA
Registered: Aug 2002

posted 01-13-2014 04:54 PM

The first computer I bought was a PC in the early eighties and hated it and promptly started to work with Mac computers. After four Apple desktop and now on my 2nd pro MacBook laptop machine, I just love it! All of my professional images some of you had seen on my Facebook page were prepared with Apple computers and Photoshop software and what a joy it was creating the final images with such fantastic hardware.

I also have a iPad 3 and a iPhone5 and love them both as well.

-Claude

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 01-13-2014 08:47 PM

I remember 10 or so years ago I still had the attitude that I would never buy a notebook/laptop computer. They were too expensive, not powerful enough, very limited in RAM and hard disc capacity and the screens were pitifully low in resolution.

The situation got better in the mid 2000's. The aspects I didn't like about notebook computers improved enough that they become attractive.

I also got very tired of feeling like my leg was chained to a computer desk for too much of the day. I haven't minded it at my day job. But I felt this growing aggravation of having to sit at yet another computer desk at home to do any work or play on a PC. And I have a really nice AnthroCart desk that cost nearly $700. I wanted to be able to sit in the living room and be able to watch TV while using the computer. Or be able to take the computer somewhere outside of home.

Notebook computers aren't quite as powerful or durable as a desktop computer. But portability is a big advantage.

I'm still not sold on tablets. They have more shortcomings than the notebook computers I used to hate (paltry RAM, lack of storage capacity, connectivity issues, etc.). And I can't run my graphics programs on them.

quote: Joe Redifer
The few times I had to use my fiance's laptop I was not having a good time. There's no way a touchpad can be as fast or as precise as a mouse.

I can't stand touchpads. I almost always have a laser mouse or my Wacom tablet hooked up to my notebook computer.

quote: Claude S. Ayakawa
All of my professional images some of you had seen on my Facebook page were prepared with Apple computers and Photoshop software and what a joy it was creating the final images with such fantastic hardware.

It's often more difficult to configure a Windows-based PC just the way you want it unless you build your own system. For a long time we've bought Dell systems at my workplace, but lately Dell has really gotten flat out terrible in terms of pricing and available options for notebooks and desktops.

My boss at my day job wanted a new notebook to replace his 7+ year old desktop PC that was suddenly acting up. I tried finding a suitable notebook at Dell's website, but the options just sucked. Some of the pricing was even higher than that of Apple. Their new XPS notebook has a 3200 X 1800 pixel display, but once you get it configured how you want it the device could cost more than a Retina Display Mac Book Pro. I looked around further and found a much better deal at Toshiba's web site. For under $1500 I ordered a very well equipped 17" notebook with Win 8.1 Pro and MS Office pre-loaded as well as decent warranty coverage. The same thing would have cost well over $2000 at Dell.
[Roll Eyes]

Provided you're working with a properly configured computer it doesn't matter if you're using Adobe software on a Mac or PC. The feature set is all the same.

I have mixed feelings about Adobe's Creative Cloud software subscription model. But one advantage it has is you can load it on 2 machines and they don't have to be on the same platform. If you use a PC at work and a Mac at home it will load fine. Adobe would not let anyone do this with their traditional boxed software. They would charge an upgrade fee if you wanted to switch platforms.

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