LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited January 2005
Ah, great thread.
I don't think I could buy a Mac...or any computer for that matter that is out of a box. If I could buy the components separately and build the sucker, then I might consider it. I, and some of the others here at the forums were considered heretics after we built our first Intel machines!
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Geeky1University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
edited January 2005
Prime, aww come on... you don't have to take it all the way apart, but you've gotta at least take the back panel off... I mean you've gotta do that to upgrade the RAM anyhow... and when that happens, I'd LOVE to see pics of it.
Leo: wanna build a Mac? There are all sorts of stores that sell apple parts, including logic boards, cpus, memory, etc., and there's also always ebay. I'm building myself one right now actually. I bought the logic board, CPU and video card off <a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5153534621">ebay</a> the other day, and it should be here in a few days (I'm hoping by Saturday ).
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LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited January 2005
What, like building a car where the parts have to ordered from the original manufacturer? Perhaps I'm ignorant on the subject, but don't you have to select from only a narrow spectrum of all-Apple parts, save the memory, video card, and hard drive?
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Geeky1University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
edited January 2005
Yes and no. It depends on the age of the computer and the part in question. Unless you buy a mac clone, your only motherboard brand is obviously going to be Apple (and I'm not sure if the clones didn't use Apple boards either). You can pick up a used Apple cpu on ebay or a mac surplus site, or you can get a CPU upgrade from a company like Sonnet. You can use a number of graphics cards on systems that don't have integrated graphics... the G4 I bought will take cards from a Rage 128 all the way up to a Radeon 9800 Pro. You can even use some PC graphics cards if you flash them to a Mac video BIOS.
Optical drive choice is limited to what the OS supports natively or what you can find 3rd party drivers for; my understanding is that they'll run any IDE drive (although older macs suffer from the same 137gb limitation that older PCs do, and I suspect the really old ones don't like drives bigger than 8GB either).
So no, it's not quite that limited. There isn't as wide of a selection as there is for PC parts, but it's not too bad...
Incidentally, when I applied for a job on campus, what they really snatched on to was the fact that I'd worked on Macs before in a sort of technical way. Despite the fact that I know tons more about Windows, I was the only choice for being the Mac guy. From that and this thread it really seems like Mac help might be in short supply. Therefore it's a wise choice to learn the Apple stuff well.
Macs are not nearly as proprietary any more as they were 3-4 years ago. You can open up a G5 tower and see the following: a motherboard, two processors, a handful of 64bit PCI-X slots, an AGP slot, some SATA drives, a normal AGP video card (albeit with a Mac bios, but anybody can re-flash a video card), and a normal optical drive.
You can get third party everything except for the motherboard (apple calls them logic boards).... You can upgrade the ram, video card, hard drives, optical drives, add SCSI raid, add network cards, USB cards, anything that will fit in a PCI slot and you can find drivers for.
Prime, you have to face it, some of us still think that the Mac Idea just sucks!
Seriously though, I can see why you decided to go with the Mac for your office, if for no other reason than to help troubleshoot Mac and OSX problems on your client's machines. Good business decision, I think.
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LeonardoWake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, AlaskaIcrontian
edited January 2005
Alright Geeky, thanks for your rundown. Sorry, just not appealing. To me, building from those limited options would be like ordering OEM parts for my Blazer - just not a custom truck. OK for my truck - I don't care; but not what I have in mind when I plan the architecture of a new computer and think through countless different performance parameters and research a multitude of manufacturers and vendors.
Absolutely nothing wrong with what you and Prime are doing - just not for me. Prime, I think your argument of being able to understand your Mac customers better is valid. Apart from that, you would just be blowing a big chunk of money.
Even if that weren't the case, I still like OS X better than windows. I'll be very interested to see the headless imac that they will be coming out with next week...... That changes the whole "mac is too expensive" equation in a big way...
I have a friend who is a serious Mac head (he collects older Macs) and I'm curious to see if he's going to buy the cheapo Mac. I bet he will, if the price is around $500.
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BlackHawkBible music connoisseurThere's no place like 127.0.0.1Icrontian
looks like a nice idea geeky.... so you could take your graphics card, hard drives and dvd rw etc and use them in a mac??? obviously modding each to get it to work....
[18:41:08] Protein: p1281_A21ext_d13_99phi
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[18:41:08] Extra AltiVec boost OK.
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I started out my career working with then supporting Macs. At one point I was responsible for a network of several hundred mad scientists using them.
If Steve Jobs was a little more relaxed about their companies building systems to support the Mac OS twenty years ago we might have seen more around today?
I think they are great Machines. However, they do not pay the bills for me. Good luck with it Prime. See if you can find a copy of Marathon. I spent many an hour playing the network version on the studio mac... top game!
I thought the towers were well engineered, but I have to say I am VERY impressed with the level of engineering and detail that went into this machine. Every single piece is perfectly aligned, perfectly fitting, perfectly smooth.
One of my customers has a G4 iMac - the "dome" kind. I upgraded the HD in it once. It took me over an HOUR to get it apart - it was a nightmare of fitting computer parts inside of a hemispherical case, with the hard drive being at the top of the dome. It was like putting together a puzzle. For the first time, I had to make notes on the order of disassembly and size of each individual screw.
But this one? A marvel of efficiency and simplicity. There are three screws in the bottom of the machine. You lay the mac flat down on its face, and turn the three screws until they stop (they don't come out). Then, the back just lifts off the body.
Now you have what appears to be similar to a tablet pc or a very big laptop. Imagine a laptop with a full size HD.
There are thermal zones, just like the G5 tower. Each hot component gets its own fan and wind tunnel, with clearly defined intake and exhaust. There is a seperate intake for the processor which goes through a long copper HS, and then vents out the top. There is a foam lip around the exhaust port which makes an airtight seal to the exterior when the panel is secured.
Comments
I don't think I could buy a Mac...or any computer for that matter that is out of a box. If I could buy the components separately and build the sucker, then I might consider it. I, and some of the others here at the forums were considered heretics after we built our first Intel machines!
Leo: wanna build a Mac? There are all sorts of stores that sell apple parts, including logic boards, cpus, memory, etc., and there's also always ebay. I'm building myself one right now actually. I bought the logic board, CPU and video card off <a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5153534621">ebay</a> the other day, and it should be here in a few days (I'm hoping by Saturday
Optical drive choice is limited to what the OS supports natively or what you can find 3rd party drivers for; my understanding is that they'll run any IDE drive (although older macs suffer from the same 137gb limitation that older PCs do, and I suspect the really old ones don't like drives bigger than 8GB either).
So no, it's not quite that limited. There isn't as wide of a selection as there is for PC parts, but it's not too bad...
You can get third party everything except for the motherboard (apple calls them logic boards).... You can upgrade the ram, video card, hard drives, optical drives, add SCSI raid, add network cards, USB cards, anything that will fit in a PCI slot and you can find drivers for.
Seriously though, I can see why you decided to go with the Mac for your office, if for no other reason than to help troubleshoot Mac and OSX problems on your client's machines. Good business decision, I think.
Absolutely nothing wrong with what you and Prime are doing - just not for me. Prime, I think your argument of being able to understand your Mac customers better is valid. Apart from that, you would just be blowing a big chunk of money.
Because the Mac Mini is getting very tempting!
If Steve Jobs was a little more relaxed about their companies building systems to support the Mac OS twenty years ago we might have seen more around today?
I think they are great Machines. However, they do not pay the bills for me. Good luck with it Prime. See if you can find a copy of Marathon. I spent many an hour playing the network version on the studio mac... top game!
I thought the towers were well engineered, but I have to say I am VERY impressed with the level of engineering and detail that went into this machine. Every single piece is perfectly aligned, perfectly fitting, perfectly smooth.
One of my customers has a G4 iMac - the "dome" kind. I upgraded the HD in it once. It took me over an HOUR to get it apart - it was a nightmare of fitting computer parts inside of a hemispherical case, with the hard drive being at the top of the dome. It was like putting together a puzzle. For the first time, I had to make notes on the order of disassembly and size of each individual screw.
But this one? A marvel of efficiency and simplicity. There are three screws in the bottom of the machine. You lay the mac flat down on its face, and turn the three screws until they stop (they don't come out). Then, the back just lifts off the body.
There are thermal zones, just like the G5 tower. Each hot component gets its own fan and wind tunnel, with clearly defined intake and exhaust. There is a seperate intake for the processor which goes through a long copper HS, and then vents out the top. There is a foam lip around the exhaust port which makes an airtight seal to the exterior when the panel is secured.