Thursday, March 31, 2005

Cool new toys

Face it, everyone likes cool new toys. One of the things is that when it comes to cool new toys (CNTs) everyone likes to show theirs off to get an 'ooooh' or 'aaaah' from the person listening. Problem is that its embaressing (yes it's also embaressing I cannot spell this word :) for the listener if its not cool or new.



It's like your mom telling her ladies meeting that she got a funny email attachment. Then everyone there is delighted that she has email and they start to twitter over 'new technology'.



Well in many ways Americans have access to cool toys we don't have. Blackberry is one and probably tivo. Generally speaking their toys involve adding batteries and lots of other expensive gizmo infrastructure in the background.



We get many toys here they don't have which don't involve the two. Let's start with this. Back in the OLD days (more than 10 years ago) I worked fast food here (for all of three days until I quit because preparing massive amounts of peppers gave me a rash and made my hands bleed). When I was working fast food they already had these covers.



Then I wondered why I never got one for my PC at home...ooooh maybe because a keyboard here costs around RM 20 for a disposable one and RM 50 for a better one (approx RM4=1USD). Then I saw it was a Mac. I guess people who will pay for overpriced crap ......ooops said wrong word. Let's look here for data on the Imac. The site asks how fast do you want to go today. Possibly you need to ask when you can't give a person all the speed they could want and then some.



Comparisons here are against my RM2000/USD500 AMD (non-overclocked) machine. Since its unfair to compare it against a notebook I chose the desktop edition here. Okey, the top of the line monster they got here is come's in at USD 2,999. Wow, I could get a lot of bananas for the difference in price. Heck I could have 3 PCs for the price of that baby.



First of all, we can forget the actual processor since most bottlenecks now occur at 3 strategic points (1) storage IO, (2) memory and (3) graphics card.



Heh, comes standard with 512MB RAM. Look at the bottom of the page. Someone is advertising a 2 gig kit for USD 300++. Ermmmmm that's the cost of my machine without the monitor. sorry babe, I came with standard 2 gig dual channel.



Graphics card? ATI Radeon 9600XT. Look here for a video card comparison...I use a FX 5700 but that's after I disabled the on board video. Ok, it's not the ultra and I did spend around RM 700 (USD175) on it. Incidentally if you need more graphics rendering mojo then you can stick a second card in there.



2 hard drive bays and 1 cd rom bay? gimme a break people. 1 CD rom, 1 CD burner (standard cost), 3 hard drives (1 SATA inherited from other machine). You don't even have room for what I am using in my cheap dinky machine.



I have the nework card they have and I raise by having an MDI-X type port for the network card. Apple should put these in their machines. Most of their users are clueless so straight cable and cross cable would be meaningless terms leading some long haired, body pierced hippy to go 'huh?'. I like it mainly because I have tons of cables lying around after a data centre job I did for a friend. Never been organised enough to bother about marking the cables.



I will grant that the firewire ports they have are better than the one piddly firewire port I have but then again its not really something you miss all that much anyway. Since no monitor is listed I am going to assume thats the price without monitor. My price includes a monitor (which I replaced since I don't have enough desk real estate).



Overpriced and sucks badly. Ok, granted they have pretty casings but check out the casings for PCs these days....Speaking of which I should probably go get new power supply.