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Luca
ಠ_ರೃ
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2005-10-18, 13:55

Quote:
Originally Posted by curiousuburb
faster drives also drain battery faster...
From what I've heard, that's not true. At least, the difference is negligable. The only reason not to use 7200 RPM hard drives is high price. A 60 GB, 7200 RPM notebook drive costs $150+, while a 5400 RPM one with the same capacity costs under $100. Capacities aren't as limited as they were six months ago, with 7200 RPM drives topping out at 100 GB and 5400 RPM drives reaching as high as 120 GB. Six months ago, those numbers were 60 and 100 GB, respectively.

VRAM is the one area that puzzles me. VRAM is nearly free and it doesn't add any heat or size/weight to any machine in which it is installed. At least if you're moving from 32 MB to 64 MB, they could just use higher density chips so they're using the same two VRAM chips. Adding VRAM to the machines that currently have 32 MB would improve graphics performance by a tremendous amount, while costing literally a few pennies per unit. There's no reason Macs can't all ship with double the amount of VRAM they currently include. Why not include more than necessary instead of less? It's one of the dumbest ways of holding back the performance of otherwise-capable Macs.

I know for a fact that lack of VRAM is to blame for poor Quake 3 performance on my Mac mini. This is Quake 3, folks. It's going on six years old. Shouldn't the mini be able to handle it at its max settings? Truth is, it would be able to, if they just used 64 MB of VRAM instead of 32 MB. If you doubt my assertion that VRAM is virtually free, just check video card prices on NewEgg. There's hardly ever a difference in price between two video cards with different amounts of VRAM, all other things being equal. In some cases, a 128 MB video card may cost more than the 256 MB version of the same card! And this is for a 128 MB difference in VRAM... a 32 MB difference won't noticeably affect costs, even when multiplied on a grand scale.

I agree that Apple should strive to make their notebooks as sleek and thin as possible. This is why they're still using a Mobility Radeon 9700 instead of a newer, faster GPU. And that's fine. It's things like not including more VRAM that truly baffle me.

The only reason I can attribute to them constantly using old, outdated components in all their machines is a supply issue. Old components don't cost less than new ones; in many cases, they cost more because they've been discontinued. But what I think happens is that Apple orders a million of something, pays for all of it, and then just keeps using it until they run out. Even if a newer, better version comes out two months after the latest PowerBook update, they won't update the PowerBooks because then they'd have to order a million more new components and let all the old ones go to waste.
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