The Wide, Wide World of Apple

[Barrister]

Beeb will be happy to know my ipad 2's arrived.

[Ed Anger]

But don't get too excited. The Mac faggitry will be contained. There will be no Mac computers in my house ( not counting the g3's I got for the kids. 50 bucks and the colors get their attention? One button mouse? sold!)

[derspiess]

But don't get too excited. The Mac faggitry will be contained. There will be no Mac computers in my house ( not counting the g3's I got for the kids. 50 bucks and the colors get their attention? One button mouse? sold!)

Cover the Apple logo & all will be forgiven

[Tonitrus]

Perhaps then, it would be more accurate to say, that SD seems to be where the cheaper, mass-consumer oriented DSLRs are going. 

Even S's new Rebel is CF.  Oh, and Kat, the good news is that the USB CF readers have gotten way, way, way more common- S managed to get hers in a 5-minute Best Buy run, and we know how much they love stocking esoteric equipment.

The newest mass-consumer model, the Rebel T3i, is SD.

[Liep]

Going to buy an iMac and this is the specs I've been looking at.

27" screen
3.1GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB
1TB Serial ATA Drive
AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1GB GDDR5

Is it worth it to get Solid State Drive?
Also, anyone know the difference between Core i7 and i5? I suspect I'm not going to be able to tell the difference.

[derspiess]

Going to buy an iMac and this is the specs I've been looking at.

27" screen
3.1GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB
1TB Serial ATA Drive
AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1GB GDDR5

Is it worth it to get Solid State Drive?
Also, anyone know the difference between Core i7 and i5? I suspect I'm not going to be able to tell the difference.

IMO i7 is overkill for a large majority of people.  I know I wouldn't see any difference for my day-to-day use.

[DontSayBanana]

IMO i7 is overkill for a large majority of people.  I know I wouldn't see any difference for my day-to-day use.

This.  Unless you're planning on rendering films in Maya or something, you're not gonna need that kind of power under the hood.

[Liep]

256GB SSD is about $600, seems a bit ridiculous so I'm avoiding that.

[DontSayBanana]

256GB SSD is about $600, seems a bit ridiculous so I'm avoiding that.

Yeah, full-size SSDs are still pretty ridiculous; aside from preserving battery in some computers (like the CR-46), they're usually used in dual-drive setups, with around a 64GB drive being used to speed up OS access times.

[Liep]

And a last question, AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1GB GDDR5 or should I go with 2GB?

[katmai]

2gb

[katmai]

Future proofing you mooks regarding the i7

[derspiess]

Future proofing you mooks regarding the i7

Future-proofing for when?  2030??

[DontSayBanana]

Future proofing you mooks regarding the i7

If you're not following stuff like Crysis, nowadays, that's even overkill for future-proofing.  The algorithms behind the games' structural design don't change much- they'll run full-speed in most situations; it's the rendering engines that are getting more and more sophisticated, and those are now relying almost exclusively on the GPU's built-in processors (which are higher-performance than the die on the mobo).

[ulmont]

256GB SSD is about $600, seems a bit ridiculous so I'm avoiding that.

Also, they fail like crazy.

He purchased eight SSDs over the last two years ... and all of them failed. The tale of the tape is frankly a little terrifying:

    Super Talent 32 GB SSD, failed after 137 days
    OCZ Vertex 1 250 GB SSD, failed after 512 days
    G.Skill 64 GB SSD, failed after 251 days
    G.Skill 64 GB SSD, failed after 276 days
    Crucial 64 GB SSD, failed after 350 days
    OCZ Agility 60 GB SSD, failed after 72 days
    Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 15 days
    Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD, failed after 206 days

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html