HeadphoneAddict

I ordered that in iTunes a week or two ago while sleepwalking. I probably should take a listen to it...

SWMBO had decided that I needed a MBP upgrade for a belated father's day gift, so I could pass my 3.5 year old MBP down to our son. We'll pay this off when we close on the sale of her dad's house at the end of July. She doesn't care about a new iMac for herself until the old one is a smoking ruin, but she has a birthday coming up in September so we'll see. We spent some time at the Apple Store comparing the glossy 15" vs 15" Anti-glare vs Retina model. The Std 15" glossy was the worst with all the lights hitting it from all directions, so the AG won it for me hands down on the normal MBP. The RMBP screen was very crisp but still had about half the glare of the glossy MBP screen. It seems about as sharp to my eyes as my 3rd Gen iPad, despite a lower pixel/inch. I think I could live with the mild glare to have that crisp screen. Unfortunately the configuration of RMBP that I wanted was almost $4,000 (max ram since it can't be upgraded later, and 768 GB with DVD and Apple Care). Even with an educational discount it was way more than I wanted to pay. And nobody at the Apple store could confirm if the included 256 or 512 GB SSD could be upgraded later. I like the larger storage so I can keep a large iTunes library on it, and while 512 GB is not a deal breaker the 256 GB is. They also only had the 8GB RMBP in stock, and I'm guessing that Mac OSX 10.11 Squirrel or OSX 10.12 Muskrat in 4-5 years isn't going to play well with only 8GB. A 16 GB version would take 3-4 weeks to get online, and I was tempted to just order one with 256 GB and no DVD or Applecare to get the price down, and add/upgrade those items later (only if the SSD could be upgraded later). In the end we left the store with the hi-res anti-glare 15" with 8 GB RAM/1TB drive, a standard configuration they keep in stock. I can always upgrade to 16 GB RAM later, as 8GB is plenty on my old Macbook Pro with OSX 10.7.4. Their faster 750 GB 7200 RPM drive has to be configured for online purchase, but I didn't sweat it because I have a couple of 750 GB Momentus XT Hybrid drives if I need a faster drive.

I've spent the evening comparing my glossy 15" MBP to my 20" antiglare iMac, and the kitchen lights are a distraction with the MBP, and the antiglare is still very nice and crisp and not too muted in comparison. The only thing I don't like is the silver bezel with the antiglare - I prefer black. I can always paint it Still curious what you guys think.

Both are 64 bit core2duo models, and one was bought only 4.5 years ago new (late 2007 black book) - it can still support up to 6GB RAM for the next OS. The other was bought new 5 yr 2 month ago, but I agree it's 3GB max RAM isn't gonna cut it past Lion. NEW Dilemma - glossy or anti-glare screen? Weigh in here. I'm partial to the antiglare but I've been using a Glossy MBP for 3 years and it hasn't bothered me much. But if I'm going for the 1680x1050 screen the anti-glare becomes an option.

OMG just woke up the whole house laughing my ass off !!

That's unfortunate.

I have the early HE-500 but ditched the thick stiff cable for an HE-6 braided cable, and I love them. With enough power I still prefer my HE-6, but the HE-500 are pretty damn good with most of my amps due to their improved efficiency. I use them every day in my bedroom rig.

I must be one too...

As long as I don't have to cut the grass anymore it might be worth it.

Hmm, my Tiger Direct email looks more like grawk's. (iPhone changes grawk to gawk) I'm just needing a 3Tb to back up another 3TB drive with my iTunes Library and FLAC files. But I figured I'd use the 4TB as my primary drive, and then back up onto the old 3TB. The reviews online for the bait and switch 3TB $119 drive are not that great, so I'm not sure what I want to do yet.

Well this sucks - Planned obsolescence is starting to piss me off. The following hardware models will support Mountain Lion: iMac (Mid 2007 or newer) MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer) MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer) MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer) Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer) Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer) My son's Macbook pro and our iMac are both a late 2006 model core 2 duo machines, so those just missed out working with Mountain Lion (3GB max RAM might have sucked anyway). One daughter has a late 2007 black Macbook, so it's also not going to support Mountain Lion despite supporting 4GB with a 2.2 Ghz core 2 duo and hybrid HD. At least they can run Lion and use iCloud, but with Snow Leopard they were all fast enough that we never dreamed of needing to replace them. My late 2008 Macbook Pro and a late 2008 Macbook will be fine. They have enough RAM and big hybrid HDs to last for another year or two. (More bitching - if iOS 6 will run on a 3GS, why not the 1st Gen iPad?)

This looks interesting http://www.tuaw.com/...or-audiophiles/ Plus optical digital output...

It's funny to look at stuff I was buying from Tiger Direct as far back as 2003 - cheap motherboard and case to build an Athlon PC (yuck), 1Gb SD cards that cost over $50, a portable bluetooth laser keyboard (stupid), $99 for DVD ripper software that was crap, etc...

Also, they are giving students a $100 iStore gift card in addition to the $100 off Macbook and $66 off the AppleCare, so a total savings of $266 was realized. Not bad.

My last order with TigerDirect was May 2008, and so I had to correct that error thanks to you.

That was my favorite part about meeting with the lawyers at the request of my patients - getting paid my hourly rate without argument.

happy birthday!

Apple still sucks that we can only authorize 5 macs with our shared iTunes store account. My wife won't be able to have the extra Macbook authorized if the iMac and other MacBooks are authorized. Fortunately she doesn't care a lot about that, but it would be much more convenient if we didn't have this bottleneck. The standard 13 and 15" Macbook Pro's still have optical digital output, but the retina display model doesn't. All of them can use the iPhone headset with Mic.

When I had my HE-500/DACmini and KGSS/LNS both set up at RMAF 2011, several people thought the two rigs sounded very similar. The HE-500 definitely scale up with better amplification, and my ZDT drives the HE-500 a bit better. They do like powerful amps, and something like the HM-801 portable music player can drive my HD800 decently but it's unacceptable with the HE-500.

I'm holding out (hoping) for a new iMac model to be silently introduced soon. It's been almost 400 days since the last update, and the average is like 270 days. I've been waiting until there is an update, as I'm always ending up with the previous model right before they put out a new one. That being said, even the current iMac is a great machine. We've been needing a new iMac ever since we upgraded ours to OSX Lion in order to accommodate iCloud back in January. Our current iMac is the first Core 2 Duo model that came out over 5 years ago, and with RAM limited to 3Gb it runs out of memory with Lion when two users are logged in and running iTunes and uPNP audio/video servers in the background. It's not too bad with one user logged in, but still can hit the limit when running multiple apps. On another note - the new 2.9 GHz 13" Macbook Pro is really very nice. My daughter's late 2008 Macbook was getting old, so she just got the new one for graduation, and it's pretty zippy. Because of that my wife is willing to try using my daughter's "hand me down" Macbook which is a bit faster than the iMac, although she prefers an iMac sized screen. If we don't upgrade the iMac I'd like to keep the old one running as our Twonky and iTunes home sharing machine, while SWMBO can use the Macbook anywhere around the house.

Wow, that's crazy. Thanks. I have this recorded but hadn't watched it yet.

Happy Birthday! Uh, when was it?

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