Well I say that the 15" MacBook Pro is a high end 15" laptop. You could not call it a low end 15" laptop could you?

The MacBook Air is high end for the 13" ultra portable category too.

The 17" MacBook Pro is high end in most stores. Out of all 17" laptops sold it must be in the top 10% surely?


I think that I have said all I want to on this now. I have yet to see evidence of significant numbers of computers in shops that make the Pro stuff form Apple look "mid range at best". There may be the odd esoteric machine out there that is faster but these are usually cutting edge machines built to order. They are not the sort of thing I would see in most retail outlets.

Edit

Out of the 102 17" laptops sold on Amazon uk the MacBook Pro is the fastest.

I rest my case.

All you are basing your judgement on is the retail outlets you frequent and Amazon ! That would be like saying, I don't believe BMW have released the M6 as I have not seen one in my town. Furthermore saying that the Mac Pro is high end because its higher than all the machines you see on Amazon or in PC World would be like saying Tag watches are High end because they don't have anything better in Elizabeth Duke at Argos or in H. Samuels. Rolex, Panerai, Tudor, Bvlgari, AP etc all make Tag look like the tack they are...yet you don't see these watches about much....the same with 'High End' laptops, just because you don't find them in your local store, what kind of logic are you applying to say because you don't see them, the next segment down becomes high end. I have to call a stop to this conversation Church Cat as you are just being silly, borderline Trolling also, and this is coming from (me) a Mac user too, who usually lap up Mac user silliness.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to agree there.

CC, try and be a little more objective when commenting on hardware issues.

That is just a little insulting. I have done my best to check your assertion.

Where are these mythical machines that make the MacBook Pro range look "mid range at best"? I have looked at hundreds of machines. I can't find any.

Remember this was a thread about Apple making a profit. They seem to me to do so by selling machines at the high end of any given range. I still can't see any evidence that my belief is incorrect.

So what should I base it on?

What would you have me do CC, list every single piece of hardware that Apple make, and then list higher spec alternatives? I've done it for the 17" Macbook pro you originally quoted. I commented that I didn't think Apple was high-end hardware, and a lot of people here agree. I listed the specs on the XSL8-Q9550, which ARE high end, and by comparison the specs for the Macbook pro are decidedly "mid range". If the thought of you owning mid range hardware upsets you that much then I apologise for bringing it to your attention. If it does what you want then don't worry about it, but disputing it is just silly, the facts are there for you.

You seem to be of the opinion that if you take a collection of mid-range components and fit them into any piece of hardware that ends up running OSX it suddenly becomes high end. I will concede the PRICE is high-end CC, but that doesn't equate to high-end hardware I'm sorry to say.

If you want to find higher spec machines then you only have to look (a little further than amazon perhaps). That's what I meant about trying to be a little more objective with your hardware.

I'm not posting in this thread again CC because we're just going round in circles.

*edit* You do seem to contradict my theory on why you may see Apple hardware as "high-end" here.





So, if it isn't the hardware that makes Apple products high-end, and (in your opinion) it isn't the price, then what exactly is it?

If you want to narrow your definition of high end to a handful of specialist machines then fine. We will just have to agree to differ.

Now this I found interesting and slightly surprising, so as it was being a typically rainy bank holiday Monday I decided to knuckle down and look at the Intel site for documentation.

That Skulltrail story is from October 2008 and it suggested that a Nehalem replacement was due in early 2009. The only Skulltrailish board on the Intel's site at the moment is the S5520SC. This board doesn't use the X58 IOH but instead uses a 5520 IOH. Alert to the possibility that it's entirely possible the X58 and 5520 could, in fact, be the exact same thing (Intel has certainly been guilty of rebranding identical parts in the past), I looked for some info on what the specs were. It turns out that they're are three Socket 1366 chipset part numbers, and the specs are slightly different; the X58 (TDP 24.1W, 36 PCI-E lanes); the 5500 (TDP 27.1, 24 lanes) and the 5520 (TDP 27.1W, 36 lanes). The higher TDP of the two other chipsets over the X58 suggested to me that they probably have more transistors on them and possibly some increased functionality.

The datasheets for these chipsets can be downloaded (the X58 from here and the 5500/5520 from here) These show the chip's pinouts (or ballouts, I suppose!) and it's clear that whilst the 5500 and 5520 have connections for a QPI 0 and a QPI 1, the X58 only has QPI 0 connections - all QPI 1 pins from the 5500/5520 are shown as not connected.

I pretty sure, therefore, that Apple must be using either a single 5520 (although the mystery of the 40 PCI-E 2.0 lanes versus the 36 on the chipset remains) or two 5500s. I still like one to have a play with though!

I did say earlier on, this :



If you look at one of Intel's own X58 'desktop' based board (rather than Workstation), the
Intel X58 Extreme DX58SO, there are two QPI's,one is used, the other one just sits there doing nothing, when used with Core i7. If you use them with Xeon's, and of course just one xeon on this single socket board, the QPI's are daisychained for the single reason that Xeons, unlike normal Core i7 have a full-speed QPI controller, but this is of no use until you are in a dual socket setup. Single Core i& cpu's operate at 6.4GB/s but two Xeon's used together (Nehalem ones of course) yield 25.6GB/s purely by having a full speed qpi controller. However even though a single Xeon has a full speed QPI controller, it still only offer 6.4GB/s in single format it just initiated the daisy chaining in the QPI on single socket X58 boards.

Think this is right anyway. Not sure what actual Xeon the Mac Pro's are using but it will be the cheapest setup they can get away with, board wise.

Apple make high end cases, excellent design, well put together, but they then fill them with mid-range hardware (putting a Citizen movement in a Bulgari case). The problem is, most people don't give a fig about the case, they are interested in value-for-money of the internals.

For Apple, the selling points are, for the notebooks, the unibody casing and OS X. The hardware itself is nothing special. If you don't need OS X or an incredibly sturdy and well built case, you will never see Apple as value for money. People who prefer OS X to Windows will never be sold on the value for money equation, because they have bought into the OS X eco-system. That means switching to Windows is expensive, because they have to replace all their software, although many seem to ignore the same costs going the other way (not picking on anybody on these forums BTW).

Interestingly, c't magazine ran a group test of 8 core workstations based on the new Nehalem architecture. The Apple Mac Pro was, by far, the slowest Nehalem machine on test (and many of the benchmarks which are cross platform (Cinebench, for example) were run on OS X and Windows on the Mac Pro)! Its earlier release, over other competitors, thanks to Intel meant that it got headlines for being a speed king, but the rest of the workstation market seems to run rings around it. But the Mac Pro being Apple's "standard" desktop machine, means it gets a lot of coverage, whereas the Dell, IBM, HP, FJS etc. workstations are specialist high-end machines, which don't tend to get the same sort of press coverage.

This last week, they did a group review of Core i7 machines for €1,000. Case styling and cheap fans on some make them not as desirable, aesthetically, as a Mac Pro, but given they are €1,299 less than a single processor Mac Pro, you can afford to put it in a decent case or buy some decent fans. But you still won't get OS X (at least not legally).

Apple are experts in case design and marketing. Their kit looks, generally, fantastic, but what they put inside their machines is, generally, average. They use stock components, stock chips (custom motherboard layout).

Apple often tout total cost of ownership (TCO), but owning a Windows Vista machine and an OS X machine, I can't say that either requires significantly more time to look after. I would say it is more down to personal preference. I can use either just as easily, both are far superior to XP, for example, but there isn't much between them in terms of ease of use or productivity.

But, at the end of the day, if you can use Windows, you can get good value for money equipment or you can buy high end kit, if you need OS X, you pretty much have to buy from Apple, so your value for money equation has to be very different. you only have the choice of what Apple offers.

Good points D. I chose a Macbook because I have been unimpressed with the build and case materials of many laptops in the past. The Lenovo Thinkpads are very sturdy and have great keyboards but two people I know have had optical drive and trackpad issues recently so I swayed towards the Apple. Its also used out and about a lot like my Netbook.

When I showed my Macbook to some colleagues, they were greatly impressed but not at all by the price. Most of these are professional people (in Medicine) so they aren't short of a bob or too, just can't rationalise the extra money for a pretty case and OSX.

The new Pro range has lost its edge, the previous model was very competitive on price, and maybe the most competitive for an 8 core there was, but the new range is down on both spec and performance compared to rivals. Any money saved is a loss on speed. For those who want to play the 'who needs speed' card that is popular in the Apple camp, these machines aren't usually bought to make a family website on. Some of those who drank the poisoned Kool Aid believe because a machine is running OSX it will always be so much faster than one running Windows. So that ancient dual processor G4 with OSX will smoke that nasty Dell XPS with a Quad Core Extreme because that one has Vista. Apple also have a little gadget on their site to show you how much time/money you might save upgrading to a Pro.

Really? I've not met any Mac users who'd think that. I've met Mac users who are pleased they can run the modern OS X on a 6 year old machine and have it feel as snappy as the day the model shipped.

Indeed, I've just bought a G3 350MHz iMac running the latest update of 10.4, OK so it's about a year and a half old in terms of OS, but it's still pretty impressive that it runs OK on a nine year old system. I know that IBM couldn't keep up with demand (speed/heat/etc), but a PowerPC chip did seem to live a rather long time.

There are people who think that, I see their posts and comments on blogs and forums all over the net.

It's only showing one on the block diagram:




I think the units are a bit mixed up here. The QPI interlink speeds for the i7 920 & 940 is 4.8GT/s (Gigatransfers per second), whilst the 965 is 6.4GT/s. The QPI data link is 16-bits wide, has a double pumped data rate and is bi-directional, so the maximum theoretical bandwidth calculations, in Gigabytes a second, are: For the i7 920 and 940; 4.8*16*2/8 = 19.2GB/s. And for the 965; 6.4*16*2/8 = 25.6GB/s.

There are more versions of the Xeon 5500 than there are of the i7 - the ones with clock speeds of 1.86GHz to 2.13GHz have 4.8GT/s QPI links, the 2.26GHz to 2.53GHz versions 5.86GT/s, and the 2.66GHz to 3.2GHz 6.4GT/s. So the Xeons do have an QPI advantage in the midrange, but the top models of both ranges are matched.


That's a bit surprising, what sort of percentage difference were they getting in Cinebench for equally clocked machines?