Why anybody sane in this world would even care? It's not like potential buyer will get confused and think they are buying a Canon. And those that do care does their lens have color ring around it and what color it is are not photographers, they are just obsessing about message their status symbols send.
I'm an engineer in the aerospace industry, so I tend to pay attention to things like quality of construction and design -- not just chip designations.
Why? They are incredibly cheap. A brand new MacBook Air is well under $2k. That's chump change for something as important as a computer.
What a pompous buttocks
Again a typical Mac user reply
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And yet with all your experience you reply like a newbie, or just don't care about things like attributions or quotes. I also go back to the same prehistoric days of computing, and my first modem had a top speed of about 110 baud, used an acoustic coupler and like most affordable modems at that time didn't have a digital (crystal controlled) clock. Every part of my first couple of computers was hand built, including the soldering of sockets on the motherboards and I had to design and construct a few wire-wrap I/O boards to get the first computer to recognize the keyboards I bought from surplus electronic stores on Canal St. (in NYC) and to program my own EPROMs for a monitor program since my computer didn't have the front panel toggle switches that other computers at that time used to toggle in a tape loader program (paper and cassette) that was used to read programs into memory. My first "terminal" was a small portable teletype (only upper case) with the usual current loop interface. That said, I think that you grossly overreacted to Buckshot's "typical mac user response
" reply because you don't know him well enough to understand that the "smiley" was genuine (I'm almost certain), indicating playful teasing rather than the way some folk use it at the end of an intentional insult. At least initially . . . You are the one that's coming across as a religious zealot. I highly doubt that Macs are strongly preferred by most of "the best and brightest engineers and scientists", although it's certainly possible that they're more often used or preferred by the subset that you work with. From another reply in this thread :
The vast majority of Mac users couldn't do this either. With your own specially designed system, maybe. Plunk you down in front of some random Mac owner's computer that had a total hard drive failure and you'd be lucky to get everything up and running the way with all programs installed if you had many hours to try. Macs are nice computers, but they're not what Mac evangelists and Mac chauvinists make them out to be. They may not even be the computers they once were according to some professionals that have up to this point relied on high end Macs. You may have an answer for all of this but others may find these links informative, and decide that where Macs are concerned, the times they are a-changin' :
initially ... but you also know my tolerance level for folks like this
http://www.acronis.com ... please
I know that Macs are not preffered by good scientists! How do I know that? I have a Mac!
Not special at all. Every Mac comes installed with Time Machine. All the user has to do is turn it on and have a second hard drive. Back ups are 100% automatic then. Every hour on the hour. Should a hard drive fail, you just connect the second drive and click Restore. Your system is back and running then (assuming you replaced the defective drive). Every single Mac can do this. It requires about 5 mins to learn how to work completely.
Looks very similar to Time Machine, which comes standard on all Macs.
Sorry, you're barking up the wrong tree. I use linux primarily.
That presupposes that Mac users actually use Time Machine. I know several Mac users that don't use it and don't have any additional hard drives that are used to back up anything at all. I know almost nothing about Macs and their OS's but know almost as much about their Macs as they do, kinda scary. At least I know enough now to not remove my memory from their Mac's USB port while Spotlight takes its hour or more to do its indexing. Time Machine alone can't be a perfect solution BTW. I've seen computer problems (not specifically with the hard drives) cause files to be corrupted, and if this is propagated to the backup drives (or tapes), you still have a problem. That's why I stopped using a Time Machine type of solution with my PCs and now do backups to multiple hard drives instead. When I was the system manager for a moderate size corporate network I made sure that backups were done daily, and a complete multiple server restore could be done for any day within the previous 4 weeks, for any month within the last year, and any quarter within the past several years. Tapes were also rotated weekly far off-site by courier to a secure location. Unfortunately, that secure location was many floors below ground level at the World Trade Center.
Acronis can be set to do automated incremental backups that allow you to restore back to any day backed up as if it was that day so you can go past the issue. You can take an external drive off-site with a boot CD and if you have universal restore you can do a bare bones restore to a new system ! Seagate puts out a product called Black Armor. It is a NAS (network attached storage device) It has a version of Acronis that comes with it for many pc’s … its an awesome product.
Regardless, the tools are there if the user is savvy enough to use them. No one can force someone to act in their own best interest. Time Machine may not be perfect, but none of the scenarios you describe below even remotely approach usability with regards to home use. Time Machine is as simple as it gets and you do not have to spend even $1 to get it if you own a Mac. My entire digital life is backed up by Time Machine.
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Funny that you should say this. I had a total hard drive failure two months ago and it was a Seagate Black Armor drive, not a NAS version though. I took it apart to see if there was anything I could do (I couldn't) and still have the pieces. It used a Seagate 1TB 7200 rpm drive. I'm sure their hard drives are fine, but this is the first hard drive failure I've had in over 10 years. I replaced it with a LaCie Quadra (the Seagate was also a 4 interface drive) and I prefer the LaCies and Iomega drives. They have nicer, rugged aluminum cases that run cool. The Black Armor drive was housed in a flimsier black plastic case and ran hotter. I wouldn't be surprised if the Seagate NAS drive is better built and it might even have a fan!
Even though every Mac has that potential, not every Mac user buys backup drives. And not every Mac has easily (user) replaced system drives. One of the links I posted in this thread mentioned the drive replacement problem you have with iMacs. Here's a quote from it :
http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2010/20100728_iMac--imac-macpro.html
This goes beyond the point we were all addressing. The claim was made that only a specialized Mac could recover data and get back running quickly. That is demonstrably false as every Mac ships with Time Machine. Now we are talking about the psychology of users and their failure to take measures to back up their machines. A totally different topic.
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There is no point that we were all addressing. fmaxwell was the first to make his point :
I followed that with a reply noting that he went from the specific (his own unique Mac system) to the general (all Windows PCs). To make a reasonable comparison, you either need to compare an expertly designed Mac system with an expertly designed PC system, or compare a typical user's Mac with a typical user's PC. If I compare my own PC with all of the Mac users that I know (and it's only a small number of Mac users), my conclusions would be the opposite of fmaxwell's, but I wouldn't do that because then my comparison would be as flawed as his. As buckshot noted, PC users have the ability to use Acronis. No, it doesn't come free with all PCs, but then neither do backup drives come with Macs or PCs, and Acronis is bundled with at least the Seagate Black Armor drive he wrote about. All of the large hard drives I've bought also come with presumably decent backup software, but as I already do my own backups I haven't tried any of them to see if they are similar to Acronis or Time Machine.
You're talking about something else entirely. What I disputed was the notion that what's possible on some Macs is impossible on PCs, as in "doesn't happen on Windows PCs."
As I wrote, the times they may be a changin'. At least for high end Mac users. As I said, I might consider a Mac in the future, but that's only a possibility since I assume that Macs will adopt USB 3 ports. To phase out ExpressCard/eSata in the Pro Macs long before USB 3 is available shows at least as much contempt for high end Mac users as anything Fuji has done for/to Fuji camera users. You're correct that Macs aren't a dead end for (all) serious photographers, but to be fair you need to recognize that the quote referred not to "Macs" but to "iMacs", and while some pro photographers would be able to manage using iMacs, if you read all of the articles I provided links for, you'd realize that for the highest end photographers (and videographers), the current Macs (not just iMacs) are insufficient. If future "Pro" Macs continue the trend of being underspec'd compared to previous models, that could cause many pros to migrate from Macs to Windows PCs. This isn't to say that it would be a serious problem for Apple, since they'd do more than survive if their appliance Macs do well even if they completely abandon their most powerful Macs, which sell in much smaller numbers.
Your reading is too selective here. Again you talk about Macs , when the quote was about iMacs and only a certain type of "photographers and other professionals". Read the bullet points that followed that quote and you'll see that he wasn't talking about typical photographers and other professionals, but the ones that rely on really heavy duty computer systems.
I wasn't only talking about iMacs. Here's a quote from the same article that speaks your own automotive language :
