Horribly overpriced.

Let me preface this piece by saying that I own the previous generation MacMini with the Core2Duo CPU. It does service as a movie file server and has attached to it, using USB, 10 tB of HDDs containing movies. It’s small, quiet and fits in easily with the other electronics required for decent pictures and sound with a modern TV, though the poorly engineered slot loading DVD drive needs constant cleaning. However, as a stock computer for photo processing I can’t think of a worse choice. (OK, I can, but this writer does not use Windows).

This piece was prompted by a friend who asked whether the MacMini is a good choice for photo and video processing. The short answer? Not remotely.

The Mini fails on many fronts. The heat management is awful. The very last thing I would ever do with mine is use it to rip DVDs or compress movies using Handbrake for the iPad, having tried it just once. Try it on a Mini or any iMac, for that matter. Fire up the (free) Temperature Monitor from Bresink Software, invoke the history chart window and watch the CPU temperature go ballistic from some 105F (ambient) to 160F+ when ripping or compressing. That’s very close to the temperature limit of the CPU used. Even to get the ambient down to 105F I use a fan utility to spool up the pathetic single fan – there’s no room in the box for more – over the inadequately low stock setting.

Try and add more memory (easier in the latest Mini) or a larger HDD, and I have done both, and you have to be pretty smart with tools not to damage something when you crack the case open. It’s obviously the last thing Apple wants you to do given their default ‘form over function’ design philosophy.

The latest Mini addresses only the ease of RAM replacement (now easy, through a cover in the base) and use with SDHC cards. It has a reader, albeit inaccessibly placed in the rear. It now uses an Intel Core i5 (or i7 for another $100) CPU but both are significantly detuned, likely owing to heat management problems. The Mini’s i5 runs at 2.5gHz (3.3gHz is stock if you buy the CPU in a box) and the i7 manages a poor 2.7gHz (3.6gHz stock). The stock, boxed CPUs can be overclocked to 3.6gHz and 3.8gHz without voiding the warranty, if you buy the ‘K’ unlocked models for a $20 premium.

Not that you even need to overclock the i5/i7 if you make a Hackintosh. The i3 built for me by buddy FU Steve runs as fast as the i5 in the Mini.

Short of buying a MacPro ($$$$$) your only choice for robustness, ease of maintenance, proper cooling and reliability is a DIY Hackintosh. The iMac is not an alternative. It comes with a glossy screen which cannot be properly profiled for photographic use, owing to the restricted gamut. Both features help the machine pop when displayed in the Apple Store but neither does anything for photo processing veracity. Further, the iMac is every bit as heat challenged as the Mini (I have lost three iMacs from overheated GPUs so it’s not like I am making this up). But unless your time is worth so much that you don’t care (in which case you should buy a MacPro) just compare prices.

Here’s the Mini with 8gB of RAM and a 500gB HDD. You need the external DVD drive as the new Mini has none – go figure. You need the DVI adapter to actually make a regular monitor work.

That’s a whopping $1,105 and you still have to add a mouse.

Now compare that to my HP10 Hackintosh. This runs an i3 CPU (as fast as the de-clocked i5 in the Mini), comes with a way superior dual-DVI Nvidia 430 graphics card (compared with the poor integrated one used in the Mini which shares its space and heat output with the CPU with which it is integrated) and has enough cooling for a small block V8:

• Intel i3 CPU – $124
• Coolermaster 212 Plus CPU cooler – $28
• Gigabyte H67M-D2-B3 motherboard – $100
• 8gB Corsair 1333mHz DDR3 RAM (same spec as the Mini) – $60
• EVGA Nvidia GT430 graphics card with discrete fan – $64
• Coolermaster 371 case with case fan – $40
• Thermaltake 430 watt power supply – $41
• Kensington wired keyboard – $38
• 500gB 7200rpm 6gb/s HDD – $40
• Sony DVD reader/writer – $40 (two @ $20)
• IOGear Bluetooth dongle – $12
• Broadcomm wireless card and PCIe-MiniPCIe adapter – $40
• OS Pussy, err Lion – $30
• SDHC card reader – free with many SDHC cards -$0

Total for that little lot? $657.

Expandability – any number of internal SSDs or HDDs can be added in minutes. The i5 or i7 CPU is a drop in replacement for the i3 used. The graphics card supports two DVI-D single link or dual link monitors (meaning you can use two 27″ or 30″ whoppers with any dual-link DVI cable). Heat rise when ripping or compressing a DVD? From 84F ambient to 115F – compare that to the 160F+ in a Mini or iMac.

Assembly time – 1 hour. 2 hours if this is your first Hackintosh. Lion installation – 1-2 hrs with the free modern tools now broadly available and easy to use. And this will not only last you, if anything breaks a replacement is 24hrs away by mail order, with no part costing over $124.

Impossible to cool properly under stress. The latest MacMini, dismantled by iFixit.

Here, by contrast, is a CPU temperature chart from my i3 Hackintosh, ripping and compressing a full length DVD – a real stress test:

Stress test – Coolermaster 212+ CPU radiator used.

If you want to save $28 and use the stock Intel CPU fan shipped with the i3 CPU, your CPU temperature will rise to 149F, which has to be a false economy. $28 for the large and efficient Coolermaster 212+ radiator to keep it really cool? I can’t think of a better way to buy reliability and longevity.

The Mini is the worst possible choice for a hard working photographer who stresses his gear. Buy a MacPro or build your own. And if you need to do heavy movie compression, this is the machine for the job. Yes, the Hackintosh comes in a big box, enough to hold many Minis, but why would you care? Do you want looks or function?

If you really want to try and spend as much as Apple will charge you for its compromised MacMini, you will end up with a rig sporting an overclocked i7 CPU, a better motherboard (the one I use above does not support overclocking), a sexier box and performance 50% better. But you will fail on the spending front as you will still have $200 left over. Hey, it’s your money.

What is your time worth? The true comparison is between the $657 Hackintosh here and a like-spec’d MacPro which runs $2,973. Assuming it takes four hours to build the Hackintosh for a saving of $2,316, that figures to $579/hr, or an annual income of $1.2mm. So if you are making $1.2mm or more annually from your labor after tax, buy a MacPro as your time is worth too much to waste it on computer building. And congratulations – you are in the top 1% of US plutocrats who control 50% of the country’s wealth – a statistic last reached in 1929 ….

What use is the Mini? For light processing, web surfing and the like, it’s fine. None of these stress the Mini’s poor thermal dynamics. For use as a movie server or for accessing services like Amazon VOD which are not available on the AppleTV, it’s fine, especially as the latest model adds an HDMI socket, making connection to a big screen TV easy. But as a desktop, even for light use, it’s a poor choice. By the time you add a half decent display and a DVD player to the $600 base model you are getting close to the $1,000 base iMac in price, with inferior performance.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Good times.

The competence and performance of the desktop Mac – or Hackintosh in my case – has never been better. The price, it seems to me, cannot go much lower, with even Macs being more than price competitive with comparably equipped PCs.

My two year old Hackster, HP1, marches on unperturbed regardless of what I throw at it.

Play. HP1 with three Dell 2209W 1680 x 1050 IPS displays shows our son in LR3 and PS CS5.
The red phone is a hot line to the gutless wonder at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.
Garish Dell logos on monitor bezels blacked out with a marking pen.

If there’s a grumble it’s that Dell – or anyone else for that matter – is clueless about making display stands tall enough for the preferred operating height, which means the display top should be more or less at eye level. iMacs are quite the worst in this regard. Hence the three reams of paper in the picture. HP1′s technology may be dated – Core2Quad overclocked, Nvidia 9800GTX+ 512mB graphics – but I can asssure you it lacks nothing in performance or reliability.

FU Steve’s latest ‘build’ for me is the HP10, using the latest i3 Sandybridge Intel CPU and a tremendous EVGA GT430 dual DVI-D graphics card with 1024mB of memory. No sooner was FU’s back turned than I clandestinely opened the case, dropped in another 4gB of RAM in the one open memory slot and saw Geekbench performance soar 6% past that of HP1! Never one to miss an opportunity to tinker, I invested another $130 in a cheap Acer display and $15 for a wall mount, and before you could say ‘iMacs suck’ the GT430 HP10 was happily driving two displays.

If there’s anything remarkable about HP10, other than the blistering performance, it is the incredibly low cost. Cheap displays are used here as color fidelity is not exactly paramount in the money management business, as long as you can distinguish red from green!

Work. HP10 with cheap Hyundai and Acer 1920 x 1080 displays,
which show the crooked game that is America’s capital markets.

Either rig is a photographer’s dream machine, and you really do not need more performance. Only heavy duty gamers need faster CPUs or more GPU performance.

A note on DVI single ink and dual link display connectors:

A single link DVI connector supports a resolution up to 1920×1200, and a dual link can support up to 2560×1600. The latter is generally found on 27″ and 30″ computer displays.

A reader Comment to FU Steve’s recent piece on the state-of-the-art in today’s Hackintosh suggests a few words are in order regarding connectors for modern LCD computer displays.

When FU spec’d the machine, he purposefully chose the EVGA GT430 display card which comes with two DVI dual link and one mini-HDMI socket. DVI dual link is the standard used by large 27″ and 30″ monitors to drive their huge pixel counts. It does not mean that you need two connectors on your graphics card. It does mean you need a DVI dual link graphics card and cable, not a DVI single link version of either. Most modern graphics cards support DVI dual link and you can immediately see the difference in the pin pattern on the connectors:

Single and dual link DVI connectors compared.

In practice, you may as well buy dual link DVI cables for all your connector needs as they can be used down the road if you get a 27″ or 30″ display. The premium over single link is negligible. A dual link DVI cable will fit either a single or dual link DVI graphics card or DVI monitor. For example, in the case of HP10 which uses two inexpensive 21.5″ 1920 x 1080 widescreen single link DVI monitors, one is connected to the GT430 card using a DVI dual link cable (which I had to buy) and the other is connected with a DVI single link cable because it came included with the monitor. The first cable will work fine with a 27″ or 30″ display, whereas the second is useless and would have to be replaced.

So, bottom line, the GT430 used in FU’s state-of-the-art Hackintosh (and in HP10) can support two 27″ or 30″ displays so long as a dual link DVI connecting cable is used for each. One cable per monitor, one socket on the GT430 per monitor. Two 30″ displays …. Hmmm!

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

The end of the desktop era.

The latest changes to my Hackintosh, which now see it once more delivering performance comparable to the best top-of-the-line Macs at no additional cost, raise the question of what the future holds.

The original design brief for the Hackintosh, which FU Steve built for me, was reliability, with a primary focus on proper cooling of components. Secondary requirements were speed and expandability. At the time of construction, two years ago, I anticipated the HackPro might enjoy a five year useful life. I am now inclined to think that was an underestimate.

If you compare the specs of Intel’s current i3/i5/i7 CPUs, which succeeded the Core2Duo and Core2Quad design (still made and still popular in PCs) the main difference is not in speed but in power consumption. The latest graphics cards barely improve on the Nvidia 9800GTX+. Intel is bowing to the trend which favors mobile computing, meaning laptops, where battery power use is important. Low power consumption CPUs with integrated GPUs add more value than greater speed. And adding more cores is futile. Absent some exotic statistical math applications, plus super speed weather/military computers and the like, multi-core CPUs are wasted on what we photographers use daily. For that matter, four cores are largely wasted, poor application programming failing to make effective use of the available parallel processing potential. Don’t believe me – run Lightroom on a 2 core then a 4 core CPU. Notice any difference?

Since the HackPro was built, iOS and Android, cell and tablet operating systems, have taken the world by storm. While nowhere near as fast as desktop/laptop OSs, they add a whole range of capabilities – fast AppStore downloads, huge app selections, touch interfaces, great UIs – which are quickly migrating the desktop and laptop to the category of mature technologies. The return on incremental investment in these latter technologies falls daily, as Mobile is where the money is. Four years ago Apple introduced the iPhone. Today the iPhone and iPad account for three quarters of the company’s sales! The consequences of this trend are that desktop development will slow to a crawl and prices will cease falling as sales volumes fall. Sure, there will always be demand from artists, scientists, cinematographers and photographers for heavy duty iron but that population is minuscule.

Desptop/laptop OSs have also peaked. Windows 7 (I have not used it so this is apocryphal) is reported to be reliable (a twenty year miracle in the making) and speedy, and OS Lion may well be the last major version of OS X, though after using Lion for a while it’s clear that the changes are very minor ones in UI cosmetics and add little benefit for the working stiff. You aren’t going to make your machine any faster by installing Lion, that much is certain, though users ought to be grateful for an absence of code bloat and forced hardware updates, for the most part.

Desktop applications are likewise mature. Adobe isn’t about to fix the execrable UI of Photoshop when it has a static audience which will dutifully upgrade every 18 months for minor improvements at the margin, using corporate money. And they can’t add too many of PS’s features to the far friendlier Lightroom for fear of cannibalizing their cash cow. But I am happy to wager that they are working like stink on mobile versions of their apps. Sure, some apps like Pixelmator will capture amateur users who (rightly) balk at CS5′s ridiculous price, but the design pro has zero incentive to save his employer money or to risk his career on an unknown quantity, no matter how good.

Dinosaurs. The HackPro and its patrician brother.

The biggest benefits to desktop users in recent years have come from flash storage Solid State Drives and improving broadband, both technologies being pushed to improve by burgeoning demand for mobile devices. Intel’s Light Peak data transfer technology (Apple calls it Thunderbolt) will increase wired data transfer rates ten fold while cutting the number of connecting cables. LCD monitor technology has reached price-quality equilibrium. Who needs higher definition or larger screens than what those already afforded at reasonable cost today? What the world needs is faster broadband and better batteries, not faster CPUs or better displays.

I look at our 9 year old son. I would far rather he learned the iPad, maybe with the eventual addition of a keyboard, than an iMac. If he wants a big screen display it’s there at the touch of an icon, no wires needed. Wikipedia has obsoleted space gobbling encyclopedias and access is instantaneous. His music is accessible anywhere, he can print anywhere (if he even cares what a printer actually is) and even he can lug around the modest weight of a tablet all day. He has access to millions of books and thousands of newspapers at no weight or storage cost and his tools for learning math and spelling are all there at a touch. If he gets serious about taking pictures, all the processing power he will ever need will be on his tablet in a year or two and the camera will likely be a part of that tablet too. And I will be making sure that one of the developed world’s worst educational systems – it’s called US schooling – will not stand in his way.

So why force him to learn yesterday’s technology?

Those magnificent dinosaurs, the desktop computers of our time, will soldier on in dwindling numbers for a generation yet, after which time they will be so much landfill.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Well blow me down.

As one originally trained in the discipline of mechanical engineering you would expect me to display many of the characteristics of that genre and you might well be right. These characteristics include:

• Attention to detail
• Refusal to let well enough alone
• A binary approach to problem solving – right or wrong, no grey
• A general conviction that I am right and it’s up to you to prove otherwise
• A fundamental belief in the empirical over the theoretical
• Horrible working in ‘teams’ or whatever the management-speak BS of the day is for shucking responsibility for your actions
• When something sucks, I will make it a point of telling you to your face

Now the desire not to retire as a ward of the state saw many of these tendencies moderated over the past years as I had to act the sycophantic fool to all and sundry in the process of relieving them of their capital and making it mine. And while I had some modest success in doing that I can’t say it was much fun. Now I’m a retired old fart I can happily default to the above traits and feel better for it.

Anyone who has done any serious work with machines, meaning building or repairing them, knows better than to skimp on tools, hard, soft or liquid. When it comes to the vast range of chemicals and related materials involved in cars, motorcycles and machines of all guises, the wise man pays a little more and buys 3M products. Whether adhesives, abrasives, solvents, tapes, coverings, you name it, the products from Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing remain the standard to judge by. Just recall the last time you chintzed and bought aftermarket Post-It sticky notes, only to find they stuck to nothing. Or refused to let go. That’s 3M for you. The standard.

Long time readers of this journal know that one of my areas of ceaseless pursuit is that of a good computer mouse for the Hackpro desktop. I much prefer a mouse over a tablet for Photoshop outlining tasks, for example, so a good mouse is a key tool. I have written of several here and am now happier than ever (maybe that should be ‘least unhappy’?) with the Logitech MX900 recommended by a fellow photographer (thank you, Roy!), allied with SteerMouse software. Having tracked down two of these, used, I am happy as can be. Or at least I was until a while back when the cursor of the one at the HackPro started jumping about like a crazy thing. I tried all sorts of settings on SteerMouse for sensitivity and speed, but no. Nothing worked. The jumpiness seemed random and not related to CPU activity or the presence of other devices which I cycled to see if there was any cause and effect to be found.

Then it occurred to me that I had not followed my own rule and had bought a chintzy mouse pad. Well, $6.88 later and Amazon delivered the 3M Precise Mousing Surface and it’s night and day. Very thin, with Post-It style repositionable adhesive backing, hard with no ‘give’, it has a lightly textured surface and simply takes away any erratic cursor behavior.

Further the (very) fine print on the packaging makes the odd claim that the surface improves battery life for a wireless laser mouse up to 75%. My engineer’s reaction was to discount this as something written at 1 Infinite Loop, the gold standard for BS.

Here it is, greatly enlarged:

That’s pretty detailed, naming names.

3M rarely lies, in my many years experience with many of its products. Follow their instructions and the product delivers what is promised. But as I share St. Thomas’s most laudable characteristic, his engineer’s side, meaning one of extreme skepticism, I cannot let that go unchallenged. As the Logitech MX900 reliably starts blinking its battery light after 5 days resting on the old mouse pad, it will be simple to prove. So revisit here in a few days and all will be revealed.

Meanwhile, even if the battery bit is untrue, get yourself one of these and, like me, stop complaining. At least for now.

Update after much use: The battery life claim is pure BS. But it’s still a great mousepad.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!

Another consumer unfriendly move from the fruit company.

I wrote of the clear evidence that the new iMacs continue to have cooling problems here.

Now yet another reason has surfaced to avoid these machines. You cannot change or add internal hard disk drives yourself!

While accessing the drives in an iMac has never been easy, the post-white aluminum shell models with the ghastly glossy screens are easier to dismantle than their white predecessors. The glass screen is removed with a couple of small suction cups, the glass being retained by magnets. (Talk of form over function). A bunch of Torx screws retaining the LCD in place is removed and the LCD carefully raised while connecting cables are detached. The drives are then easily accessed. There’s room in there for an SSD in addition to the HDD. SSDs rock and I highly recommend the use of one as a boot and application drive.

But forget about swapping the HDD for a bigger one or replacing a blown one yourself, because Apple has made jolly well sure that your replacement will not work properly. You see, the greedy fruit company has installed unique connectors in its machines and in the HDDs they use. The connecting cable to the HDD controls the cooling fan speed for the HDD. Install a regular off-the-shelf HDD and the fan will spool up to a roar at 6,000 rpm, rather than the <2,000 rpm at which it ordinarily runs. So the only way you can get an HDD exchanged is to tramp down to the local Apple Store with your whopper iMac and tramp back there weeks later when it has been fixed. And if your 'local' Apple Store is 200 miles away, well then you are going to have to move closer, right? Or would you rather drive 800 miles per round trip?

All so that they can hose you down an extra $100 for installing a replacement drive. A supremely thoughtless move by Apple, which I can only think is motivated by greed. Hard to explain it any other way.

Here's the scoop from the fine people at OWC where I buy all my hard drives:

Any hard user of a Mac should avoid the iMac like the plague. When it does overheat or blows out its HDD, you will be stuck without a machine for a considerable period of time. And if that happens after the warranty has expired you are looking at very high repair costs. Remember my old 20″ and 24″ white iMacs which fried their graphics cards? Apple wanted $900 to repair that and to this day refuses to admit fault despite widespread comment on the flaw. Ridiculous.

There has never been a better time for demanding users to build a Hackintosh, at a fraction of the cost of the overpriced MacPro. Why, you could build two – talk of redundancy – and still have over $900 to spare, not to mention superior performance. Oh! and by the way, replacing an HDD in my HackPro takes two minutes – and that’s with one hand tied behind my back with breaks to play with the resident border terrier.

Overheating issues? Get real.

Intel SSD in the HackPro. Two 1 tB Samsung HDDs to the right. Drives slide in and out on spring-retained mounting plates.
The massive cooling fan at the top cost all of $10 and is many times the size of the one in any iMac. A replacement
can be found at your local computer store.

My HackPro has 2 x 1tB HDDs and the smaller SSD for the OS and applications. Replacing the HDDs with 3 x 3tB ones would give me nearly 10 tB of storage for a total cost of $575. I just don’t need that much storage (though my movie file server is now up to 10 tB!) but it’s nice to know I can use any off-the-shelf HDD if I ever do.

For a daily snap be sure to visit my photoblog Snap!