Philoking.com

So the cat is out of the bag. I have been telling the wifey to get ready for some plastic burn the day they drop new iMacs on us. I am ready to buy a new one “as soon as they announce quad-core iMacs” I said. So today the new iMacs are out and guess what, Apple has managed to close the gap between iMacs and the Mac Pro for sure, but they did it by making the Mac Pro much less appealing and by making only minor changes to the iMac. Let’s look at what they announced today:

Now, obviously I am out of luck on the Quad-Core iMac. That leaves me very little reason to upgrade my 2.13Ghz 24” iMac now doesn’t it.

It also makes me VERY happy that I bought my Mac Pro a few months ago. I purchased the $2,799 Dual 2.8Ghz Quad-Core Xeon model with 2GB of Ram and 320GB hard disk. Today, that leaves me quite a bit short on the new 8-Core model. If I drop $300 and go to the new base model, I lose a quad core CPU, some speed and 24GB of RAM capacity. WHOA! That’s quite a big drop!

So now the gap between the a $2,199 24” iMac and a $2,499 Mac Pro and if you cancel out the upgrade slots, upgrading for $300 gets you a better processor, 1GB LESS Ram and you lose a 24” Monitor. That’s not a very compelling upgrade story if you ask me.

Now I realize that Mac Pros and iMacs have completely different audiences, or do they? I have both. I have the big Mac Pro for all of my recording studio needs, but my daily driver is a 24” iMac. Was it really beneficial to water down the Mac Pro line instead of giving the iMac enough power to be a contender with games and graphics apps?

The last and biggest complaint with all of the Apple offerings is that they really seem to have no clue what a current video card is. The nVidia GeForce GT 120 is the rebranded 9500GT which retail for around $50-60 and the nVidia GeForce GT 130 is the rebranded 9600 GSO that bring around $80-100 retail. Of course we all know that Apple would never pay retail, so let’s say that on the far end that they pay 80% of retail (which is VERY high) then that $2,499 computer is sporting a video card that’s probably worth $40. Sheesh. And this is considered a GRAPHICS WORKSTATION right? $2,500 gets me a bargain video card?

The iMac suffers from the same thing, but I consider it a bit worse. The unfortunate Apple customer that really is into gaming, get’s the top of the Apple consumer line get’s at best a $65 graphics card for their $2,200.

Where oh where is the “Mac,” the Quad-core capable mid-sized desktop with moderate expansion. Give us a single PCI-X slot, max it at 4-8GB of Ram, 500GB or so of stock hard drive with a single bay for expansion, and a full compliment of FireWire and USB2. Price it starting around $999 with a dual-core CPU and max it around $1,999 with with a Quad, a hefty helping of RAM and a smoking video card. You still get your glorious profit margin. Something is telling me that if HP is selling a 2.6Ghz Core 2 Quad with 4GB of RAM, a 750GB HD and a 768MB nVidia GeForce 9600GS for $1,159, Apple could squeeze out something similar for $1,999.

Apple has got great design skills, they are sharp at making operating systems, they just seem to really be sliding lately on choosing the actual components that make up their PCs.

It’s not very obvious, but if you look at the new iMac photos, they stubby wireless keyboard that so many people dislike, is actually WIRED!

I hope that isn’t the case, I have one of the little wireless keyboards and I dislike it quite a bit. I sure don’t want this little mini thing to be my every day keyboard.

So very much to blog about, it’s been a very busy few days for me from a tech perspective. I will start with my adventures with running Vista on a Mac and then get to the mobile phone and gadget stuff.

So I joined a team at work. I am a Microsoft Vista Champion. So my new goal is helping promote usage of Windows Vista from a few different perspectives. I expect the "digital lifestyle" angle to be the most common but productivity will probably creep in from time to time. So with that I decided it was time I get Vista running on my Macbook Pro.

My initial idea was to go pick up a 250GB Hard Disk, perform major laptop surgery, Bootcamp Vista with OS X and call it a day. After getting laptop destruction fear, I decided to stick with the 120GB, remove parallels, install it in Bootcamp on a 20GB partition and use VMWare Fusion to share stuff between the two. So here is part one of my adventure…

Kill Me Now…
So, the first was removing my Parallels install, creating a Bootcamp partition and installing Vista. I selected 20GB from the Bootcamp Setup Assistant and off to the races I went, for a minute. That’s when OS X notified me that some files on my machine could not be moved and I had to back up my entire hard disk (over USB no less) wipe the entire thing, restore it, then run the Bootcamp assistant again. Sounds pretty simple, but the entire process took about four hours. After that Vista installed in a snap and I began installing all of the Bootcamp drivers. The installer bombed part of the way through and the trouble began.

Vista was acting really strange. For some reason the video drivers didn’t install properly, and something about the OS was hosed meaning I couldn’t get a Windows Experience Index, so I couldn’t permanently enable Aero. After getting it all set up and ready to go, I booted back into OS X to install VMWare Fusion. The install was painless, an update ran, and I saw something startling. Windows Vista Ultimate was taking up 14GB of my 20GB partition with absolutely no software installed. OUCH! That would never do.

The trouble with that is, there isn’t a way to dynamically resize the partitions. My only option is to remove the Bootcamp, resize it, and reinstall. In hindsight I could have backed it up, deleted it and restored it after I created a new one but with only 120GB to spare, I decided that OS creep could become a huge problem so I decided to just install it in VMWare and run it virtually only.

It’s a Virtual World Baby
Despite not having Aero eye candy, I am quite impressed with VMWare Fusion. I am typing this blog in Windows Vista running in a VMWare Virtual Vista Ultimate environment as we speak. I won’t dive into bench marks, but based on pure perception VMWare is faster. It certainly resumes a paused VM much faster than parallels. It also doesn’t suffer from the "I know your vm is restored but it’s going to stay locked up for a minute or so before you can use it" syndrome that Parallels does.

All in all, it’s up running and working quite well at the moment. It’s a drag that I can’t run Aero or play slick 3d games on it, but I probably wouldn’t do that anyway so it’s ok.

The VM is assigned 2 GB of Ram and seems to perform very well with it. The OS is snappy and I love being able to run it full screen on a spaces pane. That works exceptionally well. I am looking forward to getting my new office set up and I can visualize a 20" iMac with a 20" Cinema display running OS X on one screen and Vista on the other.

I will add a category for Vista Champs, stay tuned as I dive deeper into it and try to provide the best tips on getting the most out of Vista, even if you use a Mac