A teenager may break one of the cheapo ones, some of them are pretty flimsy, a more substantial one would probably last longer.

But not as perfect as a netbook or smaller laptop which costs 30% the amount and has roughly 3x the power. And can be upgraded, can easily plug into monitors, TVs and so on.
Its a useless hybrid between a phone and a computer. Its too big and cant do phone tasks, too underpowered and overpriced to do computer tasks. And thats before apples anti-competitive software restrictions cut in.

Its an IT toy for people that are absolutely clueless about computers. But then again that's apple's core market - it relies on PR and advertising and fooling people without a clue into thinking the products are actually good.



Its a toy - it cant do tasks computers can do, its 3x the cost and it cant do tasks phones can do. It has no market or reason for existing.

Android based tablets have more potential due to open OS and no restriction on software and importantly hardware that can run underneath them but even then its a niche at most.

Clearly it does.

So, let me get this right in my head. The reason it's sold well is purely on advertising? Right o. And anyone that uses Apple doesn't have a clue. Right o.

I think we've covered this before...

Erm...

My mate is a computer programmer here, he is surrounded by cheap PC's but uses mac. He reckons the ipad is a dream, don't know if he uses it full time but he rates it.

Hardly anyone serious about computers, coding or development would suffer the restrictive regime the apple force on users. It just makes no sense to spend more money on something with less power that massively and artificially restricts what you can use or do on it.

You are on a wind up now aren't you?

I worked for a multi million pound company (which shall remain nameless) right opposite the IT dept. The company that serviced them, which essentially looked after every office in the country and their servers, only used Macs. But what the *fupp* do they know?! Incidentally, the dinosaurs that worked in the IT dept would never help with any issues to do with the Windows server leaving us to sort it out ourselves, naturally, made easy on a Mac.

So in your opinion, is 12 core massively under powered? http://www.apple.com/macpro/

I've got a mac, beige it is with dubious stains on the front

Strings will have better stains and be more beigerererer

I work for one of the biggest software development companies in the UK. Basically the Mac does not exist in our world. We've put a lot of effort into Windows due to our partnership with MS and do most of our business on Unix (Linux, HPUX, Solaris and AIX). Then again our market isn't really fart apps. Somebody who uses a Mac on the server must have an incredible amount of money to throw around and a comparable lack of good sense. It has absolutely no server features to put it above (or even on par with) normal Unix servers. Linux allows me to set up access control lists on a inode by inode basis. Solaris offers, among other things, an actual server class FS (HFS+ is an awful filesystem that makes NTFS look well designed and envisioned) and a top class runtime tracing system. AIX has the benefit of running on hardware that looks like old mainframes so I can port legacy code over. The Mac does not have a killer advantage in this area. It doesn't even set up user isolation properly by default.

The Mac Pro isn't under powered. It is massively overpriced. A comparable PC would cost about half as much. In fact one podcast I listen to did a section on building a Hackintosh with similar specs and it come to just under half the price.

The biggest reason it isn't used though is third class support for the tools that matter. None of its APIs have proper C++ support which counts it out of the general application market (all the companies that are involved can afford to deal with the mess that is Obj-C++). It doesn't support C# or Java properly which counts it out of 99% of the business market. It does as good a job as the rest of the market with Ruby, Perl, PHP and Python (which is because there are no good tools for these anywhere) which means it has a decent market share among web programmers. Not that anyone who doesn't know what mmap does can be counted as a real programmer.

If I did your job, and had your knowledge then I probably wouldn't bother with a Mac. But, like a lot of Mac users they don't have that knowledge or aren't interested and want their PC's to work and last. Of course you could build an equivalent PC for less, but does everyone want or need too? You could also build your own car if you wanted for half the price but not everyone has the skills to do so.

You can actually pick up an equivalent machine if you go to the right place. No need to build yourself. Still much cheaper than the Mac Pro.

Do you have a link? I did have a look but couldn't find one. Admittedly, I'm not on the pulse when it comes to Windows based products.

You can pick up a blade server in all sorts of places. Dell even sells 8/16 core machines.

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/produ ... cs=ukbsdt1

Interesting. Forgive my ignorance, but how does this compare to a 12 core Desktop you can walk in off the the street, buy, take home and be set up in minutes.