I had a need for a new external USB hard drive and rather than buy my usual Western Digital MyPassport drive I decided to spend a little more and get a Toshiba drive. Why? Instead of being made of plastic it was made of brushed aluminium which I preferred.

When I got home I discovered it needed 2 USB ports to work (Toshiba supply a special USB Y cable for just this purpose) which is less than ideal and poor engineering by Toshiba in my opinion as many other drives work just fine with one USB port.

I thought that this limitation might apply to cheaper laptops that don’t provide enough (ie to spec) power to their USB ports. They should supply 500mA but some can’t manage that. But no, according to the box the Toshiba requires 600mA which is more than the USB specification.

As I didn’t want to use up both of my USB ports I thought I’d cross my fingers and hope that my MacBook Pro would provide enough juice to run the drive from one port. Optimistic I know..
So I plugged the drive into the left hand USB port and the (stupidly massive) LED light on the front of the drive lit up. “Great” I thought! But no, the Mac was not seeing the drive, as far as it was concerned there was nothing connected. So I tried plugging the drive into the right hand side USB port and again it lit up, but this time it mounted on the desktop. Hmm… I unplugged it and tried the left hand side port again but the drive wouldn’t work.

As the drive requires 600mA according to Toshiba and the USB spec is supposed to be able to provide 500mA it would seem to me that my MacBook Pro (one of the first Core 2 Duo models) can provide 500mA to the left hand port, but it capable of providing more (how much more I don’t know) to the right hand port. My Western Digital drives work equally well in both ports, they say they require 500mA so I know the left hand port is providing that (ie is to spec) but it looks like the right hand port has that little extra…

Just in case my laptop was unusual I did some checking via Google and it seems that some manufacturers say their equipment must be used in the right hand port on the MacBook Pro, although they don’t say why. Apple claim both ports are the same but my experience and that of a few others on the Apple Discussion forums suggests the right hand port is capable of providing more power than the USB spec requires. Which is handy!

(I took the Toshiba drive back, the Western Digital drives work in either port, cost less and don’t have a cheap looking oversized LED light on the front)

What’s the difference between a Mac User and a Mac Person?

1) You dread having to use a Windows PC
You intentionally chose a Mac over the more common Windows platform because you were probably fed up with the problems and generally frustrating experience of trying to coax a Windows box into doing what you want. Having to use a Windows PC now for any reason (perhaps to try and fix a problem for a friend) results in a lot of cursing and head banging and is a great reminder as to why you decided to “think different”.

2) You evangelize the Mac platform to others
As far as you’re concerned using a Mac is much less frustrating and much more satisfying, why would anyone subject themselves to the horror of using a Windows box? Whenever a friend is considering buying a new computer or expresses discontent with their Windows computer you dive straight into a long list of reasons why they should make the switch and try and coax them into doing so. Do we do this for Apples benefit? No. We do it because we know the Mac experience is so much better and we want our friends to be happy.

3) You start to find fault with other products and wish Apple made one you could buy
Prior to the launch of the iPhone a lot of Apple users, including myself, got incredibly frustrated with our mobile phones especially when the features they promised didn’t live up to our expectations, web browsing being a great example. Normal phones, smart phones, 3G phones, no matter what we tried browsing the web was hopeless and unless you had a Blackberry, email support was also a joke. Syncing your contacts and calendars between your computer and your phone was often a hit and miss affair too… We prayed for an Apple phone as we just knew it would work infinitely better. Our prayers were answered and we got something probably beyond our expectations. Some people sarcastically suggest that Apple people would buy any product that Apple put their logo on. You bet we would, but not for the reasons they think, we’d buy it because we could actually use all the features the device promised.

4) You look forward to Keynote speeches by Steve
Steve Jobs is a great showman, there’s no question of that. But his job is made easier by great products, it’s easier to sell something that works well and looks good. Apple have long been a company that innovates but having said that, they may not be the first out of the gates with a certain product type (the mp3 player and mobile phones are great example) but you can bet your bottom dollar that the item will work well and revolutionise the way you use that product category. Watching a Keynote speech by Steve is watching tech history in the making. When he announced the iPhone the audience went wild with applause and cheers and you could feel the hairs on the back of your neck lift as you knew you were seeing a significant moment in tech history.

5) You take any negative press about Apple personally
The media love to cover Apple, it guarantees them page hits or viewer eyeballs. The best way of pulling people in is to say something controversial about Apple. Watch the page hits rise and the advertising dollars roll in. You get used to that after a while but what really grates with you is when they say stuff that you just know is, well, wrong. When industry analysts misunderstand Apple and present their bonehead opinion as fact you hold your head in your hands. A great one is the topic of Apples market share. Wall Street types love to concentrate on market share, they consider it one of the most important metrics on which to judge a company. Naturally Apples market share is not as high as say Dell and this causes them great concern. Of course, you might argue that Apples profitability is a much more important metric and is an area where they trounce their competition, and as a future guide, their sales growth is also impressive in a market (computers) that is largely flat for others. You have to wonder if Wall Street and company executives paid closer attention to profits than market share things might be in better shape out there today…

6) You care about Apple, if they do something that seems stupid you worry
When Apple do something you consider stupid, such as removing firewire on the latest MacBooks or adding Windows support to the iPod you worry (hands up who thought that was a bad idea and would give people less reason to switch to the Mac. Yup, me too). Why do you worry? Well, let’s say they make a very costly mistake in the direction they take the company and as such Apple suffers big time and goes under (highly unlikely but still). What are you going to do when you need to buy a new computer? If there’s no Mac to buy you’d have to buy a Dell or something, and that would mean leaving OSX and having to use Windows. That’s a thought that can keep a Mac user awake at night. So you worry about bad decisions as they will have a negative impact on *your* life.

7) You’ll stand in line to buy from the Apple Store
When Apple launch a new must have product, for example the iPhone, queues tend to form days in advance. This fact tends to puzzle those who either view their gadgets as tools (eg the internet is not a big part of their life) or who view one item as being the same as the next (often they consider all technology equally bewildering and unsatisfying). Sometimes another retailer may have some stock of the same product, with shorter lines. But you choose to queue to buy yours at the Apple Store, even though you have to wait in line longer. Thing is, it’s something of a social event as you’re basically hanging out with folks who clearly share a common interest…

8) The aesthetics of your desk/office and peripherals are now an important issue
You don’t want to put your shiny new iMac on any old desk, it must be something befitting such a beautifully designed product. So you might choose a nice glass or white table and some nice gloss white peripherals. Then you buy a new aluminium Mac. Time for some new peripherals and maybe a new desk…

9) You buy Apple branded merchandise
By now you’re really a Mac person and you don’t care who knows it, in fact you’re proud of the fact. So coffee mugs, pens, t-shirts and anything else you can get your hands on that re-inforce that message to others are welcomed. If you can’t get a certain item with an Apple logo on it, you’ll slap one of those little stickers on it that Apple so thoughtfully include with every product…

10) When on vacation it affects your itinerary
Wherever you go in the world you feel the need to visit the local Apple Store whether you need anything or not. When taking a vacation to California, you consider it necessary to stop off at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino. Apple’s headquarters. The “mothership”.

It’s not a cult.

Honestly…

For some other humorous insights into what it’s like being a Mac person in a PC user world I highly recommend Scott Kelby’s book “Macintosh – The Naked Truth”

Now, bear in mind that I only had a few hours to play with this machine so my testing was very limited in scope.

Apple iLife 08
I tried out the latest versions of iTunes and iPhoto and they both appeared to work flawlessly. I didn’t have the time to test out iMovie, iDVD, iWeb and Garageband, sorry.

Apple iWork 08
I *briefly* played with Pages and Keynote and I didn’t notice any obvious problems.

Adobe Photoshop CS3
Surprisingly Photoshop, arguably the heavyweight of the applications I tried, seemed perfectly happy on Snow Leopard. My testing was of course fairly limited, but I did edit a high megapixel digital photo with about 40 layers on it, running through various filters and other retouching operations.

Dreamweaver CS3
Dreamweaver CS3 seemed perfectly happy under Snow Leopard.

Epson Scan
I tried using an Epson V200 scanner using the current version of the Epson Scan software but it would simply quit itself every time I tried to run the software.

EyeTV 3
Runs but couldn’t find my EyeTV Hybrid USB TV Tuner dongle…

Firefox
I tried running Firefox 3, a basic installation with no plugins and again, it seems just fine.

Flip4Mac
The basic, free, Flip4Mac codecs for Quicktime seemed to work just fine, playing WMV movies with no problem.

GarageSale
The latest version of this popular eBay auction management software seemed to run just fine.

Google Earth
The latest version of Google Earth seems to run just fine under Snow Leopard.

Google Sketchup
No problems to report here either.

Handbrake
I didn’t have access to any DVDs to rip but the app at least launches. I will see if I can get access to Snow Leopard again so that I can test encoding times.

Opera
The latest version of the Opera browser seems to work fine, I only played with this briefly.

Super Duper
I had a problem with this in that it said it couldn’t take ownership of the OS drive when I tried to clone it.

Skype
No problems to report with the latest version of Skype.

Transmit
This popular FTP package seemed to run with no problems, I made a few successful uploads and downloads.

Twitterific
Seems to work fine.

VLC
No problem playing back several AVI movies

So overall most stuff I tried seemed to work just fine out of the box, although a few apps may need updating.

Now, bear in mind that this is only the first developer preview release. It is by no means complete and you have to expect some bugs and/or performance issues here and there, after all, it’s not finished yet and probably won’t be for the best part of a year!

Some people are prepared to say good riddance, complaining that the Mini hasn’t ben updated in a long time and thus represents poor value, especially compared to PC equivalents (ah that old chestnut!).

So I decided to price up a Mini and its closest competitor. The problem with most mini PC’s is that they’re not especially “mini” in size and they certainly have no class. But Dell seems to have woken up to the concept of design and has a really lovely Mac Mini-like computer called the Studio Hybrid. It’s available in several nice colours, including a very nice bamboo finish (an expensive option but the one I’d have).

So I priced up the base spec DELL but upgraded to Vista Ultimate (Apple don’t cut down their OS’s and include iLife so I figured Vista Ultimate is a fair comparison as it adds features including BitLocker which is the Windows equivalent of OSX File Vault, a standard Mac feature).

The base Dell system includes:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz processor
1GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM
160GB SATA HDD
Integrated Intel Graphic Media Accelerator 3100
DVD Rewriter
1 Year Warranty
No keyboard, mouse or display
The cheapest case finish option

£569.01 inc VAT and delivery

Then I priced up a Mac Mini to match:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz processor
1GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM
160GB SATA HDD
Integrated Intel Graphic Media Accelerator 950
DVD Rewriter
1 Year Warranty
No keyboard, mouse or display

£529 inc VAT and shipping

This a great comparison.
Both machines are similar in size, they’re stylish and the hardware spec is virtually identical.

And still the Mini comes in £40 cheaper…

So it doesn’t represent poor value even though the price and specification hasn’t changed in over a year (so much for that “Apple Tax” huh? If it’s still good value now it must’ve been amazing value a year ago).

So let’s hope Apple doesn’t kill it off. The Mini has been the first tentative step into Mac ownership for many of my friends who either can’t or won’t spend the extra on an iMac. Hopefully Apple will simply introduce a new even more competitive Mini. Perhaps that’s what they hinted at last quarter when they mentioned a product transition that would result in reduced margins?

This is the preview version that Apple handed out to developers back in June so of course it’s incomplete, stuff will change in the 12 months before its released, particularly drivers and general compatibility. But for fun I downloaded a copy of the XBench benchmarking utility and ran it on the same system, booting Snow Leopard off an external drive and booting “regular” Leopard off the internal drive. No apps were running and I waited for all disk activity to stop before I started the benchmarks.

The results for regular 10.5.5 Leopard are below, with the figures for Snow Leopard in brackets:

Xbench Version: 1.3

System Version: 10.5.5 (10.6.0 Preview)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz
Physical RAM: 3072 MB
Model: MacBookPro 2,2

CPU Test: 125.48 (164.77)
GCD Loop: 14.40 Mops/sec (14.21 Mops/sec)
Floating Point Basic: 3.11 Gflop/sec (3.15 Gflop/sec)
vecLib FFT: 2.42 Gflop/sec (3.57 Gflop/sec)
Floating Point Library: 25.09 Mops/sec (45.86 Mops/sec)

Thread Test: 222.32 (164.14)
Computation: 4.20 Mops/sec, 4 threads (3.29 Mops/sec, 4 threads)
Lock Contention: 10.30 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads (7.14 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads)

Memory Test: 129.37 (133.09)
System: 147.08 (153.70)
Allocate: 641.45 Kalloc/sec (870.88 Kalloc/sec)
Fill: 6455.31 MB/sec (6420.38 MB/sec)
Copy: 2893.01 MB/sec (2672.64 MB/sec)
Stream: 115.46 (117.35)
Copy: 2169.49 MB/sec (2233.39 MB/sec)
Scale: 2249.41 MB/sec (2269.80 MB/sec)
Add: 2664.32 MB/sec (2706.84 MB/sec)
Triad: 2692.86 MB/sec (2719.38 MB/sec)

Quartz Graphics Test: 177.48 (175.15)
Line: 10.68 Klines/sec (10.33 Klines/sec)
Rectangle: 64.55 Krects/sec (60.87 Krects/sec)
Circle: 14.17 Kcircles/sec (13.88 Kcircles/sec)
Bezier: 4.33 Kbeziers/sec (4.52 Kbeziers/sec)
Text: 10.91 Kchars/sec (10.90 Kchars/sec)

OpenGL Graphics Test: 227.39 (238.99)
Spinning Squares: 288.46 frames/sec (303.17 frames/sec)

User Interface Test: 255.54 (288.25)
Elements: 1.17 Krefresh/sec (1.32 Krefresh/sec)

Overall Score: 175.73 (181.61)

Any figures within a couple of percent of each other can be assumed to be the same really, but there were a couple of eyebrow raising results…

1. CPU Floating Point Tests
vecLib FFT: 2.42 Gflop/sec (3.57 Gflop/sec)
Floating Point Library: 25.09 Mops/sec (45.86 Mops/sec)

That’s a MASSIVE difference with Snow Leopard showing a 48% and 83% increase respectively.
I’m not sure what to make of that, answers on a postcard please…

2. Thread Tests
Computation: 4.20 Mops/sec, 4 threads (3.29 Mops/sec, 4 threads)
Lock Contention: 10.30 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads (7.14 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads)

Here Snow Leopard lags behind quite significantly…

3. Memory Tests
System Allocate: 641.45 Kalloc/sec (870.88 Kalloc/sec)

That’s quite a hefty increase in speed from Snow Leopard.

On the graphics tests it’s a little up and down but that’s probably down to drivers as much as anything else but on the user interface test Snow Leopard was basically about 12% faster.

It’s too soon to read much into this, in terms of the overall XBench score Snow Leopard barely managed to show a 4% increase in speed but there are some unusual results in there for sure…

UPDATE: PART 2 now posted.

Apple announced a new MacBook this week so I decided to take a look at the high end model (where presumably Apple make the highest profit margin) and up the spec here and there, for example increasing the RAM to the full 4GB. Now for the purposes of this comparison I let Apple do the upgrade at the factory but in reality I would do myself as it always works out cheaper to buy the RAM from Crucial, fit it yourself and sell off the old RAM on eBay…

So what do you get for your money?

13″ LCD backlit display
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
320GB SATA HDD @ 5400 rpm
NVidia GeForce 9400M 256MB DDR3 RAM
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Backlit Keyboard
Wireless N, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.1
OS X Leopard
1 Year Warranty

£1,319.01 inc VAT and delivery

Now lets see what DELL can offer in a 13″ package:

XPS M1330
13″ LED backlit display
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM <- Slower RAM
320GB SATA HDD @ 5400 rpm
NVidia GeForce 8400M 128MB DDR3 RAM <- Slower card
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Wireless N, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.0
Windows Vista Home Ultimate
1 Year Warranty

£1,209 inc VAT and delivery

Now, in this case the DELL is a whisker over £100 cheaper than the Apple system, a reversal of what we saw yesterday with the Macbook Pro and its closest competitor. But as with the MacBook Pro comparison, the DELL is once again using a slower graphics card and slower main RAM. Plus it’s made of plastic not billet aluminium, it doesn’t have the backlit keyboard, it doesn’t have the sudden motion hard drive protection, it doesn’t have the magsafe power connector and it doesn’t include anything comparable to iLife.

So you can save £100 (less than 8%) by going with the DELL although it will be a slightly slower system and not as well made. That £100 difference could probably be wiped out by buying and fitting the RAM and hard drive upgrades yourself and selling the old ones off on EBay. At the end of the day it comes down to the cost of having the latest cutting edge technology and it seems it doesn’t matter who’s name is stamped on the front, Apple or DELL, they’re typically priced within 10% of each other, sometimes in Apple’s favour, sometimes in DELL’s favour. I certainly see no evidence of the so called “Apple tax”.

EDIT: I just got a DELL leaflet on the post and it seems they’re offering £150 off that notebook until the 22nd of this month (just under a week from now). Now that’s more like what the DELL should be priced at given the slower graphics, slower ram and cheaper plastic casing.

Is that still the case?

On a like for like spec, is the MacBook Pro more expensive than a Windows based laptop?

Apple have made a big deal about the new 512MB NVidia 9600M GT in the MacBook Pro so I decided to base my comparison around that.

So I checked DELL’s website and I just couldn’t seem to find any notebooks with a 512MB NVidia card in them? And I mean *any* 512MB NVidia card.

In the end the only one I could track down was in their Alienware gaming laptops.
I was a bit wary or pricing that up as I know the Alienware stuff is high end and someone is bound to shout “fix!”, but then I figured, well, Apple stuff is high-end, that’s the whole point, and if Alienware is the only machine on DELL’s website to come with a 512MB gfx card and a 15″ screen then so be it…

I specced up the MacBook Pro I would buy today if I were upgrading, then priced up the Alienware Dell to match.

So, representing the Apple platform we have:

MacBook Pro 15″
2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6MB cache
4GB DDR3 1,066MHz RAM
320GB 7,200rpm SATA HDD
1440 x 900 LED backlit screen
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT with 512MB DDR3 RAM
iSight Camera
Backlit Keyboard
8x slot-loading SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Wireless N and 1Gbps Ethernet networking
Bluetooth 2.1
Billet aluminium casing
OS X Leopard
1 year warranty

£1,994 inc VAT and delivery

Representing Dell we have:

Alienware Area-51 m15x
2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo <- Slightly slower than MBPro
4GB DDR2 667MHz RAM <- Slower than MBPro
320GB 7,200rpm SATA HDD
1440 x 900 CFL backlit screen <- No LED option
NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX with 512MB RAM <- lower number so slower?
Web Cam
Backlit Keyboard
8x Dual Layer Writer (DVD±RW, CD-RW)
Wireless N and Bluetooth 2.0
Windows Vista Home Ultimate
Plastic Case <- So not as well made imho
1 year warranty

£2,146.73 inc VAT and delivery

So the DELL costs £150 more than the MacBook Pro, and that’s ignoring the slower processor, slower RAM, possibly slower graphics card (?), plastic casing, old fashioned CFL lit screen and no firewire…

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, on a like for like basis Apple machines cost about the same as Windows machines, and that’s if you ignore all the (useful) extra bits they normally come with (iLife, magsafe power connectors and so on).

In the UK the price has actually *risen* by £20 from £699 to £719.

The culprit? The value of the pound which has taken a battering in recent weeks falling from a lofty $2 per £1 to around $1.65 per £1…

As per the Macbook Air, the new Macbook is also lacking a firewire interface.
While most consumers probably use USB hard drives for their external storage needs, those who want to edit their home movies using iMovie will be flat out of luck…

http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html

Connections and expansion

MagSafe power port
Gigabit Ethernet port
Two USB 2.0 ports (up to 480 Mbps)
Mini DisplayPort
Audio line in
Audio line out
Kensington lock slot

Although some stuff has already gone we’ve got plenty more hard drives, ram, software & peripherals and almost all of it is Mac compatible (or even Mac specific as we’re a Mac house don’t you know?). And speaking of which, we’ll have a rather nice Macintosh system up for sale in the next couple of days.

For your convenience all our eBay auctions are listed in the side bar of this blog…