<p>I’d opt just for a nice large display. Takes up less space, cheaper in the longer term, and probably generate much less heat. </p>
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<p>No need in my case as that is a 15-20 minute procedure for me. Hard drive replacements on imacs aren’t very different from doing many laptops.</p>
<p>Then again, I am comfortable taking the motherboard(oh…“logic board”) out of the imac and accessing the heatsink/CPU if needed as it’s no different than taking apart a larger version of a laptop.</p>
<p>In some ways, it’s simpler than doing such replacements on the older White Intel Imacs.</p>
<p>Trying to get at the fan area of some HP Pavilion notebooks is much more troublesome and involved.</p>
<p>Will concede that it depends on what one’s time and possible sanity is worth. It’s simpler for me as this falls into the normal scope of my professional duties so I treat it as extra practice.</p>
<p>The 27 inch iMac is unwieldy to work with given its size and weight and dealing with the large piece of glass. I generally consider it easier to work on conventional laptops.</p>
<p>I now prefer using a laptop for most things because our imac screen is so huge I can lose the cursor more easily and have to move it further to do things. Because I use virtual desktops (Spaces), I don’t usually need the bigger screen space for more windows. I just switch between desktops. I have a few empty ones I can drag windows to so I can switch to those when needed, plus some apps bound to specific desktops.</p>
<p>I have my trackpad and mouse set at the fastest movement settings so I can move around the iMac screen pretty quickly. I also like to use reference pages and documents when I work so it’s nice to be able to see it all instead of hiding one application to look at another.</p>
<p>Something else that I like to do is to have a movie or tennis match in an external monitor. The problem with Spaces is that it’s per-desktop as opposed to per-monitor. I think that the next version of OS X will fix that.</p>
<p>A Retina MacBook Pro would provide the resolution that I’d like on one screen as both Retina MacBook Pros have higher resolution than the iMacs do. The only question is whether I’d have to get a new pair of glasses with higher magnification to see it.</p>
<p>I wanted to mention my take on Apple’s announcements now that I’ve had a day to let them sink in:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>They do it their way. Always have. Still are. One example: AirDrop. Look it up. They rejected NFC - which I think is a mediocre technology - for a home-built system for sharing. You have something to share, hit the share button and you can share it with whomever you want that’s in range by tapping on their icon on your phone. Both NFC and this wifi AirDrop seem to be essentially front ends, at least for now, for bluetooth connections for actual transfer. This is how Apple is doing it. </p></li>
<li><p>They continue to do things that are hard to imagine at scale. The Mac Pro is Stars Wars looking but the key is they’ve designed a wickedly cool triangular aluminum heat sink to be not only the core but the actual frame to which everything attaches. This kind of design coupled with manufacturing is genuinely cutting edge. And freaky cool in a nerd way. (I’ll bet they have problems with the polish process on the exterior. That has to be really hard to do right. And I’ve already heard complaints about the power button being in back.) One neat thing again: Apple is revisiting the old cube idea because the world has caught up to it. The cube was terrific but in those days you wanted internal connections, if only because internal was faster and that was what was made. Now … you can attach stuff without that big penalty. </p></li>
<li><p>And they’ve moved to make the user relationship with the cloud simpler. If this works, it will be cool. Automatic app updates in the background, including app revisions from Apple. That idea shifts us more toward the phone or tablet being more what you want now with the delays in “now” being squeezed out as the cloud infrastructure improves. </p></li>
<li><p>The new iOS seems to me to be a skeleton for the future. It is meant to be an approach that layers complexity to make it simpler. Doing that right requires a lot of thought but of course is easily copied in concept. Apple takes it to the next level, making it unique for longer, by making it seamless and adding layers of context, including the neat touches of depth added to each screen. The idea seems to flow from the feeling we get that this is now so much of our life in our hand so it should have a feeling of real depth, just like when we look over at that cute kid playing we still see the people walking past. One neat thing which flew by was the mention that they came up with a grid system for icon design. I haven’t checked but I’ll assume these are in the new API’s - colors, shapes, etc. - so we’ll see apps flowing in and fitting the system. </p></li>
<li><p>They care about the little touches. The little flip off the screen as something shared “takes off”. The flick to remove a tab from Safari. These animations are simpler than in the past, as though they’ve been reduced to the basic gestures and motions that convey meaning in context. Compare the old genie effect of the OS X dock: it was more obviously cool. These are more ways to convey meaning, as in “this was sent”, but done elegantly.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Am curious to see what impact this may have on those still using Snow Leopard because of the need for Rosetta PPC support for expensive professional graphics or other software for which they sank several hundred/grand to get before the switch to intel.</p>
<p>This is only tangential to the thread, but I see that Google has in fact bought Waze. If you don’t know, Waze is a crowd-sourced traffic and other mapping data app. I can see the fit: Google can relate your personal information and those of your friends with the methods developed by Waze. </p>
<p>Piece of interesting, to me, news is that the deal would have, it seems, gone to Facebook except Waze refused to move from Israel to California. Google has a technology center in Israel so … Another and maybe more meaninful long term item is that some of Waze’s venture money is Chinese. This is potentially a big issue. China has been mostly investing in countries for their natural resources - like mines - and for large engineering/construction projects the Chinese do well. One real advantage the US has had over China has been, to be blunt, the flow of ideas into the US from other places and notably from Israel. </p>
<p>I don’t want to take pages to go into this but a vast number of important internet and other advanced technologies are Israeli. It’s also an Intel chip design center, where IBM works on super-computing (like Watson), and so on. And Israel has the 2nd largest number of companies listed on NASDAQ after the US itself. (Country has fewer than 8 million total population.) This isn’t “policy influence” or lobbying but technological development. Apple and Microsoft also have research centers in Israel.</p>
<p>OK. As long as that stuff flows here, we’re doing better … but now China is putting money into intellectual ventures and getting a big payback out of Waze will encourage them. The great tagline “Designed by Apple in California” is meant to say something: we have the brains and talent and focus to do this. (The message is mostly aimed at Apple itself, I think, but that’s beside the point.) China knows it is really good at taking stuff and developing it further but that they are relatively weaker in creative development. If they can shift the Israeli technology pipeline toward them, they will be better off. </p>
<p>I know this may sound like a big commercial for Israel, but it’s a concern to me as an American: we take for granted that we can drive the development of the future. Attach an engine like Israel to the factory that is China and we have a problem.</p>
<p>One person on another forum cracked that you should place the new Mac Pro on the floor so if a burglar breaks in, he’ll mistake it for a trash receptacle and not steal it. :)</p>
<p>I have upgraded it on my iPhone . Well it is really pretty. A little like meego. And its notification centre is like WP. There are a few bugs in notification centre and some apps. But it is good for it is only iOS7 beta1,much better than iOS 6beta</p>
<p>I have a Samsung S3 and I am upgrading to the S4. Since I travel, I carry 4 charged batteries with me at all times.
This may seem to be a silly question. But WHY doesn’t Apple design an IPHONE with a battery that you can change? (For this reason and this reason alone I would never carry an IPHONE.)</p>
<p>You can do some design things with sealed products that you can’t where you have user-replaceable parts. There is a cottage industry of providing cases that are also extended-life battery packs for iPhones and you can charge them off of a variety of cables.</p>
<p>I have bought the Mophie for my D. It’s bulky and inefficient. I still do not understand why Apple makes it so cumbersome and complicated(or impossible) to change a battery. Much simpler to have a battery that you can just flip in and out. Just saying. I know more than one person who will not buy an IPHONE because of this.</p>
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