$20, 000 for an Apple?

[gogoblender 3,068]

http://store.apple.com/ca/buy-mac/mac-pro?product=MD878LL/A&step=config

 

Reallyl?

 

 

gogo

[Spock 271]

Yes, but that's only if you select each and every one of the most expensive options. I looked at this the other day and configured a very nice system for only a little over $10,000.00.

[wolfie2kX 528]

Yep. Typical Apple pricing...

[SX255 630]

4000$ machine + 16000$ "status symbol"

[gogoblender 3,068]

It comes in nice packaging

 

 

gogo

[gogoblender 3,068]

Yes, but that's only if you select each and every one of the most expensive options. I looked at this the other day and configured a very nice system for only a little over $10,000.00.

Only... really?

 

 

gogo

[chattius 2,520]

Well. is it so much different from ordering a Mini with all extras and reaching the price of a Porsche ?

[Schot 407]

Un-freaking believable... I can not, CAN NOT, understand how this apple phenomenon continues to blight the market. Whenever I hear someone say they are going to buy something apple I start to freak out like some sorta Tasmanian devil, lol. I feel like I'm some crazy person that just learned it's actually the whole world that's crazy but because everyone is crazy I have to play along... I need to lie down

[gogoblender 3,068]

it says it's for professionals

right on the page

 

gogo

[SX255 630]

Un-freaking believable... I can not, CAN NOT, understand how this apple phenomenon continues to blight the market. Whenever I hear someone say they are going to buy something apple I start to freak out like some sorta Tasmanian devil, lol. I feel like I'm some crazy person that just learned it's actually the whole world that's crazy but because everyone is crazy I have to play along... I need to lie down

You and me both. I still don't understand how Rolex havent gone bust with the digital smartphone age.

[SX255 630]

it says it's for professionals

right on the page

 

gogo

Profesional what? There are only so few jobs you can do with an Apple product before runing into another paywall. I can't even think of a single profesion that will spend 20000$ on a work computer and not go through budget cuts the next month.

[chattius 2,520]

I often noticed that the most expensive computers are at the bureaus of the managers and not at the places which would need fast and powerful computers. They are sort of a status symbol.

[gogoblender 3,068]

+1 yes apple on the status symbol

 

 

gogo

[wolfie2kX 528]

Un-freaking believable... I can not, CAN NOT, understand how this apple phenomenon continues to blight the market. Whenever I hear someone say they are going to buy something apple I start to freak out like some sorta Tasmanian devil, lol. I feel like I'm some crazy person that just learned it's actually the whole world that's crazy but because everyone is crazy I have to play along... I need to lie down

 

I'm with you on this, 1000%... Gotta wonder just WTH everyone who buys these things is smokin'... It's not just that they're extremely overpriced - especially if you know some of the things about OSX that I do.

 

Like the fact that Apple really would rather not have your business. Yes. That's right. They make it very, very difficult to move your data from a PC environment into their proprietary systems.

 

About a year ago, I had a client call me and tell me he wanted to move his business that's been working on the PC environment for at least 17 years to a Mac only environment. Why? Because he got sick of getting viruses every other week. Mind you, he's been using Windows XP which has quite a few security holes that later version of Windows have done away with for the most part.

 

He even found himself a contact manager that's built on OSX.

 

There was just one big hitch. He could move his fixed field contact info along just fine. But the non-fixed field data - I.e. notes, email, and other things with a text blob (much like these reply windows) were NOT transferable. You see, the import function of the program in question ONLY supports the CSV (Comma Separated Values) format as a source. This makes importing data like notes pretty much impossible. The whole notion of text blobs is that they are a variable length field. One note might be 10 characters long. The next could include an epic like War and Peace.

 

So I called the makers of this program up and asked them WTH was up with this? Turns out they are merely piggybacking onto the SQL database that Apple includes with OSX. And that is a version of Postgres SQL. And the Apple version does NOT support imports of anything other than - you guessed it - CSV files.

 

Meanwhile... Microsoft makes it EXTREMELY easy to move data around from one database format to another. It's a thing bundled into every copy of Windows since I can recall - Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC). All you need is the proper connector for ODBC (and Microsoft provides those) and a set of instructions to tell the import routine where to put the data - Name to Name, Address to Address, etc...

 

With ODBC, you can move your data from dBase IV to any flavor of SQL you can think of and move it back - without much of any problems...

 

So he had the choice of losing 17 years worth of customer info or sticking with Windows. Guess which one he chose.

[chattius 2,520]

You speak about the same Windows which some years back had an office which crashed if you typed a german Umlaut into a database? Since the german word for street has a sharp-s (ß) you wonder how this bug could have survived testing. Not only that the non english country versions had frequent crashes because of special characters, the foreign country versions were at 1500$ while the english ones were at 1000$. So they charged 500$ more for just a change of the handbook and translated menus?

I bet you can find something really stupid at every computer solution.

The computer which had the best productivity rate for me was the Commodore Amiga, it could run TeX, Metafont, and other free math software at a time decades back when the PC's failed. Did my diploma and most of my doctor work on the beast. The reason was quite simple, you could easily recompile programs from UNIX you had at university to the Amiga.

I am still quicker using TeX to type formulas than in any other text-system I know.

[Ryanrocker 200]

I bet you can find something really stupid at every computer solution.

As a CS major, this is something I've learned over the last few years

[wolfie2kX 528]

You speak about the same Windows which some years back had an office which crashed if you typed a german Umlaut into a database? Since the german word for street has a sharp-s (ß) you wonder how this bug could have survived testing. Not only that the non english country versions had frequent crashes because of special characters, the foreign country versions were at 1500$ while the english ones were at 1000$. So they charged 500$ more for just a change of the handbook and translated menus?

I bet you can find something really stupid at every computer solution.

The computer which had the best productivity rate for me was the Commodore Amiga, it could run TeX, Metafont, and other free math software at a time decades back when the PC's failed. Did my diploma and most of my doctor work on the beast. The reason was quite simple, you could easily recompile programs from UNIX you had at university to the Amiga.

I am still quicker using TeX to type formulas than in any other text-system I know.

 

I never said Windows was perfect... All I said was Apple was NOT friendly to migrating your data. And that Microsoft better understood the needs of business users better than Apple. Of course, that's not difficult to do. Apple only thinks computers should be fancy graphics processing platforms. They likely think you'd be better off getting a rolodex for keeping track of your contact information.