Posts by christech81 6 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2010
Agree with the reviewer, all of my laptops have been high end and generate a lot of heat. At least with the Apple products there are plenty of risers specifically build for the Mac with nice soft leg friendly cushioning (try getting a nice riser to fit a large 17" Sony or Dell Precision !).
Agree with post from MN for years I've had Dell Precision Workstations (like the M90 or equivalent) which costs thousands of pounds, the build quality and components are comparable to Apple but the products have been more expensive than those from Apple. True observation from MN, after two years my Dells were worth a fraction of the cost.
The Apple PC's quite often have superlative displays, keyboards, track pads, comparing the CPU or how many USB's against a cheap PC is irrelevant.
The Apple is about design too, form and function, in that respect PC manufacturers are catching up but again you find the rival manufacturers price their machines the same or higher (think HP Envy, High end Sony, Ferrari / Lamborghini range).
Great review and it was nice to see someone actually pointing out that comparing the headline specification of a MBP against another machine then calling it "expensive" is unjust.
Quite often the average user will look at CPU, memory or hard disk size rather than the fact that the machine comes with infra red (compatible with Apple remotes from way back), decent web cam, very good gesture based trackpad etc. As the review points out most importantly the Apple has decent chipsets so that there are normally very good to excellent controllers (for wifi, SATA etc).
Of course there is a price premium for the Apple design - every manufacturer needs a markup - but normally worth the extra cost given the build quality.
Have one being delivered Friday and looking forward to it as performance is very good.
Thought I'd catch up with this thread to see if there have been any other posts.
Interesting comments, I've used products from QNAP, Thecus, Synology and this has to rank as the best for disk performance / data transfer, ease of use, setup, hardware design. Other manufacturers use proprietry file systems too (the concept behind Netgear's X-RAID is good).
I don't use the software raid; prefering to back up all my important files on external drive(s). Even it the machine had raid I'd stick to using raid 0 for performance or raid 1 for safety. Has anyone ever had to rebuild a raid 5 machine with dedicated hardware - it's painful !
Overall I'd agree with Anonymous Coward Great bit of kit #
The server is extremely quiet and can be situated in a living room (mine is).
The server is powerful unlike most NAS which use underpowered atom or custom processors.
The data exchange rate is very good, expansion capabilites are excellent.
The supplied software is very good and on the whole easy to configure, documentation is good too. The iPhone app is a bit slow and in some circumstances some extra tweaking of the configuration will help to keep it more stable.
Internet access is easily achieved by signing up to a dynamic DNS provider (HP have some pre-set TLD names to choose from).
Product has been around for a while and there is a more powerful specification available in the UK, the X510.
Overall this is an excellent product and recommended.
Which came first the software to sell the platform or the success of the underlying platform ?
Microsoft won the desktop battle due to
* Backing from IBM and other vendors wanting to be compatible with IBM
* No viable alternative for small scale computers
* Backwards compatibility (key to keep consumers previous investment in software and hardware)
This was way before Bulmer made an appeal to developers (developers, developers).
Software should be quality not quantity, if I want an internet radio streaming package I'll buy just one (the best one for my requirement), same goes for video editing, word processing etc etc. The best package could be the first to market, it could be the last, the size of the market for the product makes no real difference.
Microsoft don't understand mobile operating systems, you can't downsize a desktop operating system to a phone. The hardware that runs the Microsoft Windows Mobiles have tended to be underpowered and resource hungry, who wants a portable device that almost entirely runs off the mains ?
Andriod, possibly viable to iPhone but no standards across the hardware manufacturers, surely the market will fragment.
iPhone has been successful because it is a good design, packages hardware and software to make it easily accessible to the Jo Bloggs user.
Who cares who takes first place in the market; continued development and choice for the consumer are paramount.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
