Linked List: February 28, 2006

Tuesday, 28 February 2006

Tim Bray on “audiophile” quality:

It seems fantastically dubious that something 43 cm wide, with a listed bass floor of 53 Hz (the bottom string on a bass is 42 Hz), weighing 6.6 kg, and costing $349, could actually produce “audiophile” sound. But you know, it’s not impossible; if they design for truth and accuracy as opposed to fake-bass thump and scary volume, it could turn out to be pretty useful. In which case, it’d be a complete waste to play your average iTunes-store-sourced lo-rez lossy-compressed MP3 through it. But you can get audiophile sound out of your iPod, and for quite a bit less than $349.

Original iPod Announcement Thread at MacRumors ★

Jason Fried pulls some choice quotes from the MacRumors forum in the wake of Apple’s special event to announce the original iPod. Just in case you’re tempted to trash the iPod Hi-Fi.

Bill Bumgarner on Mac Mini Video ★

Bill Bumgarner has a look at the new Mac Mini specs and concludes:

Clearly, the Mac Mini is not intended to deliver 3D gaming performance comparable to the iMac or MacBook Pro.

It is, however, designed to deliver absolutely smokin’ video playback to displays more traditionally found in the home; TVs, home theaters, etc…

Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X ★

Apple Developer Connection article on getting started with Rails development on Mac OS X. (Via Scott Stevenson, who points out that it makes even more glaring the lack of attention Apple has shined on WebObjects in recent years.)

Apple, Circa 2005, on ‘Integrated Intel Graphics’ Chips ★

From the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine cache of Apple’s Mac Mini Graphics page from March 5, 2005:

Go ahead, just try to play Halo on a budget PC. Most say they’re good for 2D games only. That’s because an “integrated Intel graphics” chip steals power from the CPU and siphons off memory from system-level RAM. You’d have to buy an extra card to get the graphics performance of Mac mini, and some cheaper PCs don’t even have an open slot to let you add one.

What a difference a year makes: the new Minis use an “integrated Intel graphics” chip that siphons memory from system-level RAM and doesn’t have a slot for another video card.

(Thanks to Jesper for the link.)

New Intel Mac Minis Use Shared Memory for Video ★

Footnote 4 on the new Mac Mini features page:

Memory available to Mac OS X may vary depending on graphics needs. Minimum graphics memory usage is 80MB, resulting in 432MB of system memory available.

These machines are using very different — and decidedly inferior — graphic cards than the MacBook Pros and iMacs. Instead of a separate pool of video RAM, the video card uses regular RAM. 512 MB was barely tolerable on the old Minis — it’s probably not even close to enough memory on the new ones. I figure if the minimum graphics memory usage is 80 MB, then it’ll probably use at least 128 MB in real-world use, leaving only 384 MB for the system and applications.

Apple Event: Intel Mac Minis, ‘iPod Hi-Fi’ Boombox ★

Base price of the Minis jumps from $499 to $599, but performance jumps around 3× by Apple’s (suspect) benchmarks. The Minis also now have IR ports for the Apple Remote and come with a new version of Front Row that can stream music, photos, and video from other machines via Bonjour.

The iPod Hi-Fi boombox supposedly offers “audiofile” quality sound and costs $350. They also introduced $99 leather iPod sleeves. If there are going to be billions of dollars spent on iPod accessories, Apple wants in on the party.