Monthly Archives: June 2019

Apple. Stupid.

Mac Pro

Greed redefined.

You can get a top quality BenQ 27″ monitor, with stand for $600:


The 27″ calibrated BenQ monitor.

Apple however Thinks Different and has determined that not only will its new monitor sell for $5000 (likely using a regular LG panel) but wants you to pony up an extra $1000 for the stand ….


The $1000 stand for the $5000 monitor.

Either Apple has concluded that their professional customers base is, you know, stoopid, or they need a new CEO. Heck, they have needed a new CEO, someone who occasionally has an original idea, since Steve passed.

As for myself, I use a 30″ Apple LCD monitor in its elegant aluminum case which I bought used 5 years ago for $400. It calibrates nicely using a puck and is a joy to behold. And yes, it came with a stand included.


The elegant 30″ Apple LCD monitor.

Mac Pro 2019

Mac Pro

Function over form returns.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.


Meet the new Mac Pro, same as the old Mac Pro.

Solidly aiming at their right foot, Apple managed to disenfranchise a huge chunk of its professional user base with the idiotic ‘form over function’ Mac Pro 2013 which looked like a trash can. Designed to show off your fingerprints and collect dust and detritus in its open cylindrical center, the ads showed this wonder unconnected to any peripherals, devoid of the clutter of wires that so spoils the work aesthetic of the modern hipster. Of course once you added the required external storage and so on, the thing started looking like the mess it was:


2012 vs. 2013.

The result of this design disaster saw two results. AV and music pros started abandoning the Mac Pro for competent HP workstations running newly reliable versions of Windows. Those trying to stick with the Mac Pro applied a variety of upgrades to this wonderful modular chassis. These included faster CPUs, more and faster memory, fast SSD boot and system drives, and tons of storage, the latter easily accommodated inside the Mac Pro’s big box. The truly masochistic even upgraded wi-fi from 802.11b to 802.11n, masochism being the required mindset in securing those minuscule antenna wires. I have done many and the 50th is no easier than the first. The results were fine, the machine newly speedy and every bit as bog reliable. And in the event something failed, a rare occurrence, the bad part was easily replaced in minutes. The massive 980 watt power supply saw to it that there was always ample current available for all those internals and the truly enormous CPU heatsinks made for the most reliable computing platform ever.

So Apple determined they should throw away their base and the attendant goodwill in place of the joke that is the Trash Can Mac Pro. Of course there was always the overpriced MacBook Pro for ‘power users’, the only problem being that when real computing power was required the notebook would throttle back its CPUs lest they melt under the strain. The MacBook’s cooling was never its forte compared with the myriad fans in the big Mac Pro.

Now, after a 6 year hiatus with an offering that was never updated and had already obsolete graphics when it came to market, Apple has realized the error of its ways and introduced a large, modular Mac Pro chassis. Or is that ‘reintroduced’, for sticking with the original box with later CPUs and memory would have been trivial to do, and that large base of power user advocates would not have been largely lost?

You get faster CPUs with more cores and lots of options, faster memory and vast capacity, and a bill for some $10,000 if you max it out.

But, for heaven’s sake, why did they make that grate so ugly?

Everything that is wrong with America

Photography

In one chart.


Who makes the money off the taxpayer.

This startling chart graphically illustrates one of the greatest crimes in public education in the United States. It shows the highest paid public employees by occupation for every state. It does not require a sharp eyed observer to spot that ‘Football Coach’ outnumbers ‘College Dean’ by a huge margin.

And when you see the truly offensive compensation these geniuses of education earn, you had better not just have ingested a large meal:


Obscenity, redefined.

By contrast, the highest paid professor in the U.S. is Dean Takahashi, who is Adjunct Professor in the Practice of Finance at the Yale School of Management, and Senior Director of Investments at Yale University. He earns a paltry $2.6mm annually.

Takahashi creates wealth every time he steps in front of a whiteboard. His sports equivalent at a public college makes Takahashi’s income in just 4 months and creates future Alzheimer’s cases as all the battered brains he has so cruelly exploited become basket cases in their early 30s. And while he is pulling down $8 million annually his charges earn precisely nothing and have an infinitesimal chance of making big money in pro sports before their brains explode. Yet each one of these morons on a sports scholarship is denying a space to an aspiring scientist or artist and denying that individual a decent education.

And the biggest crime is that almost all of these sports coaches work at public colleges, meaning it’s the taxpayer who is footing the bill.

Karl Marx postulated that capitalism will hang itself using a rope of its own making. That process is well advanced in higher public education in the U.S. I always thought you attended college to improve your brain, yet the highest paid at public colleges are in the business of destroying brains.