iMac G5 Porn Roundup 530
boredMDer writes "Apparently someone who has already recieved their iMac G5 has decided to take it apart. Stupid if only for the fact that he's just voided his warranty."
pjcreath writes "Apple has posted official pages listing the components that are 'easy' to install (including the LCD!) and describing how to troubleshoot hardware problems using diagnostic LEDs inside the case. For the very curious, you can download the high-resolution TIFF (10MB) of the iMac's innards from Apple."
Great news for Bearded Terminal Hackers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Didn't void the warranty (Score:5, Interesting)
Now keeping this in mind i have seen many a screwless case come and go from both dell and gateway, and i would have preferred that they had screws as the mechanisms they used were so crappy it would have been easier to repair.
iMac Pr0n and loss of cooling of sweaty feet. (Score:2, Interesting)
Very nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting but somewhat oblique story (Score:2, Interesting)
Fella I know is an exporter in China. One time, they were exporting sunglasses. My friend wants to know, do these have UV protective coatings? After several confused back-and-forths through the translator, the Chinese factory rep finally lights up, and says, "Yes! We have sticker!"
True story.
Re:For those not using Macs... (Score:3, Interesting)
Taking apart (Score:5, Interesting)
Easy as pie, as long as you don't strip the screws like an idiot.
Plus, the midplane isn't very heavy or awkward at all, I'm not a burly geek girl, and I could handle it all by me onesy.
Re:Another limitation (Score:3, Interesting)
I do, however agree with you on the GPU. If it were upgradeable, it would be okay, but since it's soldered to the logic board, Apple should have at least thrown in an ATI 9600XT or even a 9700/9800 Mobility if heat were an issue. I know I'm dreaming, but I keep hoping the next iMac will feature the new mini PCI-e slots ATI and NVidia are developing... As for people recommending Macs for hardcore gaming, I really don't know who you talk to. Most avid mac fans would probably say that gaming is adequate, but if you're a hardcore gamer you'd be better off buying a console or designated PC since it takes forever to get games ported.
When will we... (Score:5, Interesting)
Cruel? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not only cruel but also quite dangerous as it has just caused Slashdot to be firewalled here in my lab. Not that it would be a bad idea productivity-wise... Maybe whitelisting it wasn't so good idea after all.
Re:For those not using Macs... (Score:3, Interesting)
Flamebait my ass (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a valid point.
If money is no object and you're willing to pay extra for something that you might never see like a heatsink as a casual computer consumer, then you are purchasing a luxury item.
Please! His points were accurate. If you are HP or Gateway or Dell, then that statement is wholely true. The differences are trivial and end-cost is a hugely important factor. This is not flamebait, merely a statement of why purchasing apple is a status symbol!
Important Part of Aesthetics (Score:3, Interesting)
To me, a pretty computer ceases to be pretty when it sounds like a vacuum cleaner.
Re:Pomp and circumstance... (Score:5, Interesting)
Por ejemplo, these all-in-ones have been around for a few years. They have also universally sucked. We got a chance to demo two models (one from Omnitech now MPC and another from Gateway) back in June. Each one was nearly 40 pounds. They were *beasts*. Each was constructed mainly of plastic and felt very flimsey - the gateway model had a few little plastic panels that fell off while we were demoing it (yeah, we're gonna buy this for University students to use...). In addition, each one had a - basically - notebook cdrom drive with a tray. Ever try putting a cd in a tray that's sideways? It sucks. Apple realized this and came out with the nice slot loading concept. There were also a lot of little things wrong with them (buttons placed on the front that weren't very easy to read at a distance, ports on 3 sides left, right, front, etc).
Basically every single thing wrong with the all-in-ones we demo'd apple fixed. *Directly because of this* for the first time in forever we are going to add apple's to our public rotation of computers. Good job apple!
Re:That is fucking cool (Score:3, Interesting)
"good" and "dell" in the same sentence? What are you smoking?
I'm typing this on my work Dell Latitude (yes they put a gun to my head:( ) and let's see:
So you can understand why I laugh in the face of anyone that describes any consumer computer made by Dell as good. They're not. They are the epitome of why Wintel PCs are shit.
Re:Back in the day (Score:2, Interesting)
What's a MAC 2E?
An Apple IIe? Mac SE/30? Mac IIcx? Mac LC III?
And what's a HYPERDRIVE? Macs had what Apple called a "SuperDrive," but that was a high density 3.5" floppy. Recently the same name got applied to a DVD-R drive.
I charge plenty of PC owners $100/hr to fix their Windows crap.
I have to wonder about clients who think they are saving $300 on a cheaper no name PC from Costco, only to spend a couple years on a crappy machine that runs poorly, has flakey software bundled with it, and requires expensive repair time when users plug it into their DSL, fire up IE and saturate their machine with viruses and malware.
If they bought a Mac, they could pay me to teach them useful things like learning Photoshop or AppleScripting their workflow instead of bailing out their Windows problems.
Rackmount this (Score:3, Interesting)
If anyone at Marathon [marathoncomputer.com] is listening, I'd buy a rack kit in 2 seconds. Include a power supply to install in the iMac case and power the LCD, plus add a DVI port, and you end up with a great rackmounted Mac and a nice display to use on some other Mac.
I wonder if I can order all the parts except the case and LCD, and get the computer cheaper that way. Probably not.
Re:Geforce FX 5200 Ultra? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Geforce FX 5200 processors, while supporting the latest features, are slower than the previous generation Geforce Ti4200. Lots of people in the PC world were suckered into buying a 5200 based card in the recent doom upgrade craze, only to find out that they are amazingly slow.
I guess any comment that points out a shortcoming must automatically be a troll.....
A theory as to why it's BinHex-ed.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The file was probably made available as a
Dragging and dropping as well as right- or control-clicking are, sadly, not techniques used extensively by many people. Of course a designer is dragging and dropping all the time in e.g. Illustrator or Photoshop, but the idea that you can drag a picture from a browser window to your desktop or to a folder can be mind blowing.
So tiny, what is there to see ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:When will we... (Score:2, Interesting)
Tablet computers for drawing sound nice in principle but when you actually try to use them you realise that they are absolute POS. The reason is quite simple although hard to explain. When you draw on a format you never actually really look at what you are drawing instead you measure out how things should look: either in real life or in your minds eye and trace that image onto the format.
When you draw 90% of your time is spent looking at the object you intend to render and you only tend to look at the paper when you need to realign your pencil to the edge. You might get a dialog happing - example you could draw a cool looking wing so you might draw it from another angle (rotating it around using your minds eye). However in general thats how is works.
To illustrate - you might start by selecting a one object, say the head of a naked girl, then you lay out the rest of the drawing depending on that object, her tits may be three "heads" down and five heads from the edge to the painting etc. and after a while you master work comes out like a puzzle.
Basically the story is that you need a nice stable format with a good amount of tactile feedback - a 90c sketchbook just own's in this regard and this ain't going to charge. Personally, I know people who have trouble going from A4 to Legal sizes because their image starts to warp, leading to that tragic situation where you realise that halfway through a job you have to start over because you got the shape of one of the eye's wrong or whatever.
I have a Wacom Tablet which I use to trace out images which I have drawn and I can just about use the thing to draw directly onto the computer if I pretend that the computer monitor is a viewfinder but I would get seriously annoyed if I was forced to draw directly onto the screen, It just wouldn't work for me.
I heard a rumour on a slashdot post that Gabe who does penny-arcade uses tablets but since the guy posts dumps from his sketchbook I image he just uses them to save time like I do with my Wacom.
In short, there probally is a use for tablets outside of yuppie toys (DVD players perhaps?) but drawing directly onto the screen is not one of them in my opinion. Sorry to be harsh but people act like this is some killer feature that is going to sell tablets when it just isn't the case. I'm also getting a bit sick of this POV getting posted on almost every apple article whining that apple won't release a tablet saying that it would be cool for artist and getting modded up as interesting. Poor slashdot for showing its demographic. Seriously dude some of the colour schemes on this website are crap.
It's like me saying that speech command is a killer feature for programmers because 90% of the time they use a shell along with a editor and since using a shell is just like telling the computer what to do they will be more productive because they don't have to switch to the shell to do stuff (emacs jokes aside). Sorry but this argument is bollocks and has no connecton with reality.
Only people who think they are artist will buy tablets for work. The rest of use who can actually draw will hang onto our 90c sketchbooks.
Re:When will we... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hence, to use your vernacular - you sux, and to use my vernacular, you're still a twat.
Didn't see Shrek 2. Didn't see it in this argument, either. Try again.
Thanks! Now my wife's iMac is safe ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now when ours arrives tomorrow I'll be able to resist the urge to open it up and see what's inside.
Well, hopefully.
Re:Didn't void the warranty (Score:3, Interesting)
As means of comparison, in Sept 2000 I got a Compaq laptop at work. The POS only lasted two years before pieces of plastic started breaking off. When I turned it in March 2003 I told my boss it was unusable because it was falling apart.
At the same time, my wife bought a tangerine clamshell iBook. She's still got it, it still runs and, except for the tangerine leaf in the lid of the case all the pieces are there and the computer still runs.
New Mac User Replacable Parts? (Score:2, Interesting)
An external floppy drive at one point died on the unit (which was out of warranty). I verified that it was indeed toast and called our local Apple shop to source a replacement.
They gave me a price and we were in the middle of processing the order when the slipped in a By The Way.
"We need the old drive back"
I told them No You Don't. The machine isn't under warranty. I'm buying a replacement part - this isn't a warranty service.
They pushed the point and said that they couldn't sell me the replacement drive unless I gave them the old drive back.
At that point I hung up on them and bought the replacement drive through an online vendor.
Is Apple still as anal these days about dispensing replacement parts for out of warranty repairs?
Can anyone tell if the processor is removable? (Score:3, Interesting)
If so, I wonder how long it will be before PowerLogix or Sonnet can come out with a faster CPU.
I've also wondered about the GPU (Graphics card) since the educational units have such a different graphics card - I wondered if they were making motherboards specifically for education for the new iMacs or whether the GPU was simply on a card that easy to replace.
NeXTstation still beats them all (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, my favorite part of the NeXTstation was the airflow design. Air was pulled in through a row of holes across the top of the rear of the case, flowed past the CPU heatsink, pushed out via a downward-facing fan near the front of the case, then back under the case past the power supply heatsink, and finally out the lower left rear of the case.
The NeXT keys and mouse were awesome too -- control key where it belongs, no traditional "caps lock" key. Full size power, brightness, and audio keys above the arrow keys. And the best part? The keyboard and mouse were surrounded by a thin rubber bumper to muffle any plastic "clump" sound that would otherwise be made if the mouse were to bump into the keyboard.
Oh, and the price matched the engineering!
It isn't just perception (Score:2, Interesting)
There are numbers out there about the longevity of Macs in workplaces, both in terms of their not breaking down and in terms of how long they're usable for their task. The Gartner Group has done some, I know.
The evidence isn't just anecdotal, but it is muddied by stuff like the fact that OS X has actually been getting noticably faster for older machines. (Ars technica [arstechnica.com]: "Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release -- and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.") That's not just a physical measure of the machine, it's to do with the whole set of end-to-end stuff that Apple can control in its little proprietary world. And yeah, it's a high-quality market niche, and nope, that's not just an imagined difference.
It's a choice you can still make, but it's not an illusory choice. Some people drive a Kia, some people drive a BMW, and some people drive a Subaru. Even met someone who was religious about their brand of cars because it had been so dang reliable?
Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, I've had this PowerBook for two years, and I've had to reinstall the Mac OS once and that's only because I wanted to start fresh... there was nothing wrong with it.
However, the reference-platform dual Xeon workstation that I have in my home office has had four reinstalls of Windows 2000 and XP during the same time period, due to irrecoverable failures of the OS.
With that track record, I would say that my Mac lasts for a long time, where the x86 box fails sooner.
However, if I mix in Linux on that x86 box, we're in a whole new ballpark...
Re:porn roundup (Score:4, Interesting)
I dunno, I always thought of computers and people with their covers removed as simply being 'in the nude', and it's not actually 'ponr' per se, unless of course the subject is turned on at the time.
This leads to the dubious example of situations in which the subject is likely not actually turned on, but made to appear so in order to increase the appeal of the picture.
Granted the line between nudity and porn is a thin one, and in America one might construe mere nudity as porn, but in more progressive nations actual Software EXchange has to be taking place to be classified as pornographic.
Re:Didn't void the warranty (Score:2, Interesting)
I was just reflecting on the world at large, that people see problems with more generic (commodity) laptops as the cost of doing business, while a problem with an Apple laptop is newsworthy.
Re:Didn't void the warranty (Score:3, Interesting)
To be honest, we didn't really care much. If it was obvious that someone who didn't know what they were doing had done something that violated the terms of the warranty, and it resulted in damage, then we would start asking questions...but this was actually very rare...usually the customer would admit what they did because it was so obvious (like a broken ribbon cable).
The bottom line (which most customers don't/didn't believe) was that it was always in our interest to go in favor of the customer. Apple *paid* us for warranty repairs and in our case, they paid us more than what we charged customers for the same jobs. We would really push the evelope with Apple warranties in terms of what we could get away with and what was ethical.
YMMV
Nifty (Score:3, Interesting)
Some laptops (like Dell Inspirons since it Inspiron 8000) have the video card on a seperate (but proprietary) daughter card. While it's not officially supported by Dell, you can purchase a newer / faster video card for them.
Too bad there isn't a "standard" mini-agp, or mini-pci-x video card for laptops and all-in-one units like the G5 iMac.
Re:Nifty (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Didn't void the warranty (Score:3, Interesting)
The "warranty void if removed" stickers on consumer electronics, including computers, have been tried in court and held to be legal. SEMA's position has also been tried in court over aftermarket modifications on cars and in every case its been found SEMA's position is wrong.
95% of people who argue the Magnusson-Moss relavence online seem to do so out of information they've read online from questionable sources, or in the case of car modders, wishful thinking. In the case of the car modders, I've known quite a few people to learn five-figure lessons on that one, not counting the fees they've paid to lawyers.
As an aside to your oil change example, one of the reasons free scheduled maintennance is included on so many high end cars now is it frees the dealer from most of the points around Magnusson-Moss. There have been a number of cases of engine warranty cases being denied using a 3rd party oil change as the reason, because the manufacturer pays for the required ones.
Either way, I have no intent on arguing it any more. I've had that arguement far too many times, and people who so strongly take your position tend to not want to sway their opinion anyway.
Do what you want, hopefully it won't bite you. A lot of people aren't that lucky.