[X4U] Negligible speed bumps...

[Ed Gould]

Neil:

I tried replying to you earlier but the APPLE mail.app crashed on me:(
On Mar 8, 2009, at 1:30 PM, Neil wrote:

>
> On Mar 8, 2009, at 10:37 AM, Wayne Clodfelter wrote:
>
>> I presently have a 2002ed (2001 w/2002mobo) Quicksilver with a  
>> dual 1.8GHz processor and lots of HD storage inside and out. I  
>> don't like iMacs and don't need the Mac Pro, so what I'd like to  
>> see is a Less-Mini that offers more expansion.
>
> I can see why Apple doesn't offer much internal expansion in their  
> consumer Macs.  Very few people actually ever open their  
> computers.  So, extra RAM slots, PCI slots, and drive bays go  
> unused and they end up being a waste of space and money.

I am not sure I agree with you on this point. Mac seems to (me  
anyway) ship their computers with minimal (at best) memory. It might  
have worked in pre OS X days but now, IMO you can't throw enough  
memory at the system. Also MEMORY is CHEAP, it is one thing to cheap  
out in some areas but items like memory there is no excuse for.
As to FW-800 I use it strictly to back up from internal drives. I  
personally think its slow and either the bus is too slow or something  
else is making it slow. Mac needs a faster PIPE, IMO. Even having a  
RAID device out there does not speed up the internal drives (IME).  
MAC needs to get their act together and speed up bus and or anything  
else that reduces throughput.
>
> On the other hand, I don't see why Apple compromises so much to  
> make the Mini so small.  Why is it so critical that they not add  
> another inch or so in each dimension?  That would allow cheap, fast  
> standard desktop components instead of the slow, expensive notebook  
> versions.
>
>> What surprises and disappoints me about the latest Mini is the  
>> FW800 instead of eSATA. Seems kind of late in the game to provide  
>> FW800 when eSATA is in and FireWire appears to be on the way out.  
>> eSATA has it all over FW800 in terms of data transfer speed.

To me MAC is sending out mixed signals at best. They sell machines  
with less than optimal memory and less than good DISK I/O and or  
channel speed. I know little about the MAC architecture  (other than  
it seems demonstrably slow) but along with CPU speed they need to do  
I/O faster.

Ed

>
>