December 7, 2008
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Apple: Harmony of pure genius and sheer stupidity.
Apple never ceases to amaze me with their coolness. They just announced the new 24″ LED display, a gorgeous piece of equipment indeed. (I happen to like glossy displays…)
They have marketed it towards macbook pro owners actually, and (here’s the pure genius) …they ship the new LED monitor with a built-in display adapter for all new mac laptops, a built-in USB cable and hub, built-in speakers on the monitor, (in addition to the usual compliment of webcam / mic) …And, of course, a laptop power cable capable of charging any of the new mac laptops.
NICE.
Ready for the part where you want to slap Steve Jobs across the face?
…You absolutely cannot use this display with ANYTHING ELSE other than the NEW macbooks, macbook pros, and airs. That’s right, STILL no LED displays available for your mac pro tower. When you use apple.com to configure a mac pro, the 24″ display isn’t even an option anymore; only the 20″ and 30″ displays are options now. Both are LCD of course. Wow. Seriously, Steve? I’ve never seen pure genius and sheer stupidity in such harmony…
The perfectly good standard mini-DVI port wasn’t good enough? Any documented benefits of this new “mini-DisplayPort” anti-standard? I could almost understand making a display that is designed specifically as a desktop station for your laptop, even though it is still a stupid idea to NOT think up a way to allow people to also connect this display to a mac pro tower or as a 2nd display for an iMac. …But then lastly, locking out EVERY laptop even ONE generation older than the latest line, well that’s just downright idiotic.
Yet again, an Apple product I love but absolutely cannot spend money on it because of sheer stupidity on their part.
Our only hope is that eventually they’ll come out with adapters and/or new standards for the rest of their products. Sure, at MacWorld next year they’ll probably switch all their displays to LED. They’ll probably add But it is no secret that Apple likes to intentionally lock old equipment out of an upgrade path. I doubt they’ll ever fully resolve the flagrant errors that are inherent in the concept of this particular product…
It is really ironic how close I am to buying any one of Apple’s products, yet just cannot bring myself to do so out of principle.
Right now I guess I’m closest to buying a 24″ iMac; for $2350 I can get a 3.06 GHZ dual-core, 4 gigs of RAM, NVIDIA 8800 GS 512 DDR3 graphics, a 500 gig 7200 HD, USB 2.0 ports, FW 400 *AND* FW 800 ports.
But I just know that for that much money, I could build a kick-ass and fully upgrade-able PC desktop. The crazy thing is, that $2350 iMac I described is the most bang-for-buck Apple offers. For the $4500+ that a quad-core, 8 gig RAM, etc. etc. mac pro costs, I could maintain a cutting edge PC system for over a decade or two…
Yet again, I postpone upgrading my computer system because of “fatal flaws” in Apples otherwise awesome system, plus my habitual in-decision in general, and the money factor. Oh well, maybe my macbook will completely die on me and cost more to fix than I originally paid for it; that would sure force me to pony up…
=Matt=
Comments (3)
I noticed that immediately when they announced the display in October. Maybe they will offer a Display Port to DVI adapter for a ridiculous price?
I also don’t like how they don’t offer the option of matte instead of glossy. Glossy isn’t as color accurate as matte even though it may look better on screen (better contrast, etc.). We’ve even dialed down the brightness on the 20″ Cinema Displays in our graphics/photography lab at school and disabled the side buttons from changing the brightness so other students can’t wreck the calibration. Matte is better for getting closer to print-accurate colors, which is important when your printing photos and especially important for graphic and print designers. At least give us the option of matte.
Ya’ but I could get my dream Mac Pro with 4TB HDD space, 32GB RAM & NVIDIA QuadroFX 5600 GPU + a 30″ monitor… For just $11k…
Of course, then I’d have to get 5 more 30″ers so I could have the coolest set up EVER.
@Av8tqr - $1100? No thanks, I’d rather go on a couple trips to New Zealand with that kind of money…
=Matt=