[KDE/Mac] Another round of success

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Wednesday May 27 2015 13:16:12 Ian Wadham wrote:


>The latest MacBooks are very beautiful (and reasonably cheap), but with not

Too thin to my taste; my early 2011 MacBook Pro 13" is still the ideal design AFAIC. Not too big, not too heavy, and yet endowed with almost everything.
I think I bought it cheaper too: I took out the model with the fattest CPU (possibly one-but-fattest because of an unjustifiable premium for a 0.1Ghz win) but the fewest other options. It got 8 instead of 4Gb RAM immediately from an independent source not levying the Apple tax, and has gained another 4Gb extra plus a much larger HDD over the years. I think I still paid less than what a comparably equipped model would have cost from the Apple Store, spreading out the cost over the years too. I *could* buy an equivalent now (minus sufficient ports in the 13" range I fear) but nowadays that would really cost a lot more I have the impression ... either in one-time expenses or by obliging me to buy new hardware more often.

That really makes me wonder how long I'll be staying with Apple anymore :-/
Maybe now that Soeur Ivy Jony has been given what seems to be a mostly ceremonial position the actual design of the products will again be done with someone with a bit more of an engineer's mindset ...

All that said, the only company I know of making laptops designed for Linux (System7? System76?) has prices that are perfectly comparable to Apple's (and doesn't have a sales outlet in the EU, nor educational discount).

>many connections to the outside world, other than the Internet, and they have
>solid state drives.

>and 5 megapixel picture quality.

A fancy pancy $$$ screen would be utterly inappropriate for what will essentially be a server...

Reminds me: check eBay too. I've seen reasonable offers for Mac Mini Servers doing the rounds, with an i7 and 2 HDDs. In fact, iFixit sells a contraption that allows the installation of a second harddisk in any model from the series that are tall enough to be able to house 2 disks.
>
>But check connections against needs before buying…

I recently bought the Belkin Thunderbolt Express dock, the 1st model that still has a FW800 port, for about 160€. The new model is about double that price, and has other advantages but I was specifically looking for the one with FW800. 3 USB3 ports are a nice addition, and it also has an RJ45 port for wired ethernet which is sadly missing from too many Macs nowadays.

R