Steve jobs r.i.p

The basic format of the 'Tower' hasn't changed since its inception, though.
Twenty years old, or more?

Like I said in an earlier post, the thinking behind certain Apple products isn't forward-thinking enough, imo - They could develop a basic physical architecture for the professional desktop computer to last the next 15 years or more, I think.
Take out the SATA backplanes, PCI interfaces, CPUs and Memory Risers and what are you left with?
Your 'Mk1' shell.
CD & DVD drives have had the exact same form factor for decades. So have Hard Drives. Yet if you take an early Mac Pro (which looks outward identical and internally very, very similar to the latest one) and attempt to install the latest CPU & RAM, it won't work. It won't even fit, at all.
I take the point that Apple want to keep the quality of the user experience high, and maintain a good reliability rate - I would even welcome Apple-sanctioned-only Pro upgrades - but the fact is that now they are still building machines with a really short shelf-life.
Like I said, all the trees in the world aren't going to get those wasted machining hours back.

 

The Mk1 Scirocco was pretty poor compared to the golf, in terms of rust protection, but that's around the time when the volume car industry was only just learning how to do rustproofing. VW was probably the first manufacturer to master it, and Karmann took a few more years to get up to speed (See the Karmann Ghia, the Porsche 914, Early Mk1 Cabby Golfs for more evidence of that) The Mk2 Scirocco is just as good or maybe even slightly better rust-wise than the Mk2 golf.

On the other hand, how many Fords, Vauxhalls, Fiats, Peugeots or other volume manufacturers, do you see left over from the late 70s / Early 80s. Nothing like as many as you'll see of golfs. Not just GTIs but the cooking models as well.

 

I'm not sure if that's really viable. I don't know enough about the technical architecture of PCs. How many tower PCs do you think Apple sells though... ?

I'm not sure if 15 years is a viable aim for the lifespan of a PC. I think it was Bill Hewlett who said that the in the PC market, every 10 years you need 10x the capacity, 10x the performance, for 1/3 of the price.

If your 15 year PC had a 'compatible' hard drive connector, you'd be annoyed to fast forward 15 years and find that everyone is using solid state memory, because the capacity and price has improved so much that the hard drive is obsolete, with its unreliable moving parts, slow start up, and high power consumption.

In fact, fast forward a couple of years and I don't think there'll be many high end laptops using old skool hard drives. Instant power up and 12 hour battery life will be the upside of that.

 

Not a good comparison really. A late 80s scirocco has an early 80s electronics level, because basically it's a late Mk1 golf.

VW tried VERY hard with the Mk1 Golf, because they knew it might be their last roll of the dice. The K70 was a flop, and they HAD to make a successful water cooled FWD car to succeed as a company.

 

Calm down, my post wasnt rude it was just my opinion of why people get annoyed with Apple and you cant argue that people arnt fed up with them. Of course VW advertise I say in my post that its just not to the same extent Apple do, also its the national media hype about all things Apple that is probably there bigest advertising tool and I doubt thats just from media interest.

 

Mike, I'm literally talking about the shell of the machine - the case.
As I said, HDD connections will change, PCI interfaces will change, Intel and co will continue to develop ever more advanced CPU sockets, Optical storage is forever changing, as is the technology inside Power Supplies.
But none of these things rely on the case for their compatibility or relevance - they're all tethered to the Motherboard - the real 'consumable' inside every Mac tower.
Ok, the new generation of SSDs are smaller than their predecessors, but that would just mean either room inside the case for more storage, or room for more cooling of a faster system.

This is professional equipment, and as such could really benefit from a more sustainable life-cycle.
Imagine if every time the big Design, Ad, and Post-Production agencies had to upgrade their Macs, they could have them upgraded in-house or locally by Apple - downtime managed by a Pro support team.
Instead, they have to write off a huge pile of 2-year-old machines, usually selling them off to employees for a hundred quid or so and creating a shedload more (largely unnecessary) manufacturing and shipping.
To me it's about defining where small physical & mechanical upgrades could be made on an existing product to accommodate new technology.

I refer back to the Hasselblad V camera. I don't expect anyone else to be familiar with this, but to me it's always been the perfect example pf a master architecture capable of massive future integration.
Here we have a camera (500ELX) manufactured in 1984. It is almost identical to the first of its kind from as far back as 1957.
The part on the back with the sync cables plugged into it is a Phase One P45+ 39-Million-Pixel Digital Back, manufactured in 2007.



There's a simple line where the mechanics stop, and the digital tech starts.
I think Apple could define this in their Pro machines and create something truly revolutionary.

 

Battery's gone in my FiLs iPhone, it's less than 2 years old, contacts nearly up. What should he do Apple people?

 

Marc, the normal thing to do would be report it stolen, claim on the insurance and let every other fecker chip in on their increased insurance premiums to cover the cost of the replacement. Then whack the old one on ebay to some other punter.

 

That takes me back RJ! I rarely post on here these days, mainly as I don't own any VW's anymore, but couldn't resist when I saw that screenshot.

My Amiga 500+ (1MB RAM as standard don't you know!) came with a later version of Workbench than that, would it be v2.0? I used to have, still do actually, it's all up in the loft, a floppy to boot from which would make it run the older version for compatibility of some games and programs, I think that was v1.3 or something like that?

I loved the Amiga, absolutely superb back in it's day and got me really interested in computers in my teens after spending earlier years with Vic20's, Commodore 64's, Sinclairs, ZX81's and all that stuff... which again, I'm sure are still up in the loft...

For what it's worth as far as the topic of this thread goes. I'm a fairly recent convert to Apple machines for home use and love them, but I have worked as a systems engineer on mainly Windows stuff for over a decade and still do daily. This means I like a computer at home that just boots up quickly, does what I want to with minimal fuss, shuts down in a second and doesn't need drivers, configuration, modifying, re-installing, troubleshooting, tweaking and all the stuff I do at work everyday to be any use. In this area, I find Apple machines are excellent. If you want to tinker with them, take them to bits, swap things around and all that stuff, perhaps less so but it's horses for courses really.

For what it's worth, I have an Android phone and really like it, but don't think it'd be anything like as good (or probably even exist) without the iPhone setting the benchmark. I think competition in the market can only improve the technology available really, and though I don't like the 'if you don't have an iPhone....' adverts myself, they certainly don't make me think Apple are trying to brainwash me into thinking my life is worthless without a particular mobile phone

 

Problem is, we're honest, so wouldn't do that sort of thing. I was after a technical solution really...

 

I realise that, I suspect however that the "normal" proportion of society would not.

Out of interest, does anyone know if the product end of life thing been addressed yet? I thought a few years back that manufacturers (of all products) were going to be made responsible for the recycling of their products come the end of the working life of the item.

I recall seeing some hellish footage of cargo ships full of used electronic items being shipped and dumped in "lesser civilisations", and the locals just spent their days un-soldering the valuable components off the circuit boards as they burnt the unwanted plastic casings on the river bank. Thus poisoning the river with bad chemicals. Seem to recall a lot of the workers had horrendous health from breathing in the associated fumes from the work.
No doubt a similar scenario to cocaine users, that have the money to purchase the drug, but little concern for the chaos it causes in it's manufacturer.
"Materialism and Consumerism" because I am worth it and better than every other fecker.....

 

I thought they wanted to couple those costs back to the consumer, not the manufacturer. ie add a recycling tax to goods.

 

Phone up and ask how much for a replacement battery. Probably a lot less than he could sell it for when the contract's up. I assume he doesn't have extended warranty - never bother with it myself.

 

Interesting idea. I don't know enough about it to know why these changes happen to comment. Not sure if it's an Apple driven standard, or driven by the manufacturers of the components. Are these things built to an set of standards, or a single one that moves over time. I expect lot of hardware changes are driven by things like miniaturisation, costdown, performance upgrades, power consumption. I'm not sure which of those would be driving the change of connectors - costs money to retool for a new design.

 

Any big company with a PR department writes copy for the media - press releases, interesting stories.... I expect they tend to publish the stuff that sells more papers / gets more viewers. There's a whole media industry based around Apple... sites like AppleInsider, MacRumors and many many more, and you regularly see camera crews outside the Apple Stores. Why would the company pay for what it can get for free?

 

How about a de-badged phone? Seemed to be popular on VWs at one point.

 

I was so envious of my cousins A500 because he had one of these:



Think it was a 40mb, and made the 12 disks of Monkey Island 2 more manageable But then I trumped him by getting this bad-boy first:



They really were the days.

 

The AR was the best thing i bought, the things you could do with it were limitless (well quite limited really, but good fun).