Apple Ditches Nvidia, Goes ATI-only for Desktops

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[citation][nom]L0tus[/nom]Apple customers must be chumps.21-inch LCDi3-5404GB RAM500GB HDD$1200 Apple Mac$600 Windows PC (max)Even with the free shipping on the Apple option, this is an utter joke.Please tell me why this company is still posting profits.[/citation]

I love it, you obviously don't own an Apple product... My macbook pro's DVD stopped working, I toasted a few coasters and after 10 minute call to Apple, they said either we'll fedex you a box to send it back for free repairs, or take it into an Apple store, and they'll repair it - for free... 5 minutes to make a Genius bar appointment - I went in at my leisure and in total spent 30 minutes to have the guy take my powerbook and replace the drive and give it back the next day... NO cost - I WOULD LOOOOOVE to see you have Dell or HP or almost any manufacturer do that... All the ranting about Apple being expensive, I would pay $$ to get that kind of service.... I do IT consulting and I have to deal with Dell and HP tech support where they can barely speak English and it takes an eternity to be escalated to a Tier 3 person who actually knows what he/she's doing instead of reading a teleprompter. I
 
[citation][nom]sundragon[/nom]I love it, you obviously don't own an Apple product... My macbook pro's DVD stopped working, I toasted a few coasters and after 10 minute call to Apple, they said either we'll fedex you a box to send it back for free repairs, or take it into an Apple store, and they'll repair it - for free... 5 minutes to make a Genius bar appointment - I went in at my leisure and in total spent 30 minutes to have the guy take my powerbook and replace the drive and give it back the next day... NO cost - I WOULD LOOOOOVE to see you have Dell or HP or almost any manufacturer do that... All the ranting about Apple being expensive, I would pay $$ to get that kind of service.... I do IT consulting and I have to deal with Dell and HP tech support where they can barely speak English and it takes an eternity to be escalated to a Tier 3 person who actually knows what he/she's doing instead of reading a teleprompter. I[/citation]


*powerbook = Macbook pro - my bad :)
 
[citation][nom]L0tus[/nom]Apple customers must be chumps.21-inch LCDi3-5404GB RAM500GB HDD$1200 Apple Mac$600 Windows PC (max)Even with the free shipping on the Apple option, this is an utter joke.Please tell me why this company is still posting profits.[/citation]

because if the profit margin for the PC is 5%, and the mac's is 50%, they only have to sell 1/10th the numbers, so as long as 1/10th the market are n00bs / crazy apple fanboys, they're set!
 
The problem is simple. The high-end Quadro 6000 is 5000$, while the high-end FirePro is 1500$. It really easy to understand why everyone will soon switch from Quadro to FirePro.
 
Apple will likely switch to AMD in the next 2-3 years. The only thing holding them back now are the weak offerings from AMD in workstation-class Processors. Hopefully Fusion will change all of this. I'd expect to see some of AMD's features to start showing up in the core software of OS X 10.7
 
[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]You can't possibly mean that ? Currently I'm using 10.5 and in that version all OpenGL games crash on startup. For the time being, I'm using an older opengl driver from 9.10 to play that stuff.The only graphics driver I've never had problems with is from Matrox, and they don't do performance parts anymore.[/citation]
I have an ATI Radeon 4770 graphics card. I've used Catalyst 10.5 under both 64-bit Vista w/SP 2 and 64-bit Window 7. It's been the most stable graphics driver I've ever used and I've had zero problems running OpenGL games. I have my monitor connected by HDMI to my PC through my home theater receiver and with Catalyst 10.6 and 10.7 every time I turn my monitor off and on all of the 3D and Video settings get reset to factory default settings. This did not happen with Catalyst 10.5 and earlier.

If you're having trouble running any games you may want to read the Tom's Hardware article that mentions using the hidden Update option in the ATI installer instead of the Install option.
 
Apple has got more than a few things cooking right now. From a developer perspective, Objective C is looking very pretty. For instance, Grand Central Dispatch offloads a lot of the guesswork involved in thread creation from the developer and into a structure where the machine can determine the best resources to use to process code.

Think about it this way...you can run an application on a MacBook, and it will spawn 4 threads to complete its task, and maybe offload some of the work through the GPU through OpenCL where available. But then you take that exact same code and execute it on a 16 core Mac Pro and it spawns 30 threads and executes in a tenth of the time it took for the MacBook. In a Windows environment, a developer has to guess at how much multithreading they have to build into a program in order for it to work efficiently, while the Mac developer just drops in lines of code that tells GCD [Lots of processing here, so spawn as many threads you think you need to get it done]. This is the future that I can see with Apple development.

With ATI/AMD in Apple's pocket, and their commitment to OpenCL as a computing standard. NVidia is still committed to CUDA becoming the GPGPU standard, though the syntax is so out of date...don't even get me started about having to work with it. OpenCL is a breeze to use in comparison.
 
Apple markets the new AMD desktop lineup as quieter, more efficient, and
eco-friendly, raises price, or takes 100-200 off tag. Hell, if they do go for AMD CPUs, people will start to think AMD stands for Apple Market Desktop or something stupid.
 
I just did the same thing myself. Between Nvidia's tool of a CEO and the quality (Or lack there-of) of their products post 8800 GTX, it was a good move. HD 5970s finally tipped the scales for me.

I had purchased Nvidia exclusively since the 90s without exception, until now.
 
Apple May Go For ATI, now. But, I believe It also has to do with nVidias poor OSX drivers. Those Drivers, are no where near the quality of ATI's drivers for OSX. So Without Good Drivers, you dont have a good Card. And I feel With Apple constantly trying to be 'green' with all that advertising, using a fermi based card would be defining the purpose of being green. Just My Thought, Though I am a HUGELY Supporting nVidia, the tides are beginning to turn.
 
[citation][nom]Wittermark[/nom]i don't understand why there still so many people out there thinking AMD is POS, at my company, which we use workstations for 3d modelling/design, I currently sport a x6 1090T and its heaps faster than our i7's for graphic renderings. the i7 930 pulled 1min30secs rendering a scene while my 1090T did it under a minuite. so i'd say yes, good move on the AMD switch[/citation]

lots of people take other websites stats into consideration rather than thier own, did you know no onw here knows that a Phenom II X 4 965 is actually faster than the Core i7 920 by quite a margin in some games
 
[citation][nom]DjEaZy[/nom]... it may be, but there is one more thing... nobody counts in the software package and high quality materials the iMac is build from... the osx is equal, may be better than Win7... i talk about optimization for the hardware... so the hardware is about 500 + Win7Ultimate 272 + antivirus + customer care, if there is one for pc... when you build your own, it's cheaper... but when you optimize and give it a high finish... it's just a bit cheeper...http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6832116718[/citation]
You'd really think people would buy the Ultimate version just for the extra language packs? There's people who build stronger, faster, and cheaper systems WITH watercooling without even touching the $2k mark.
 
[citation][nom]lashton[/nom]lots of people take other websites stats into consideration rather than thier own, did you know no onw here knows that a Phenom II X 4 965 is actually faster than the Core i7 920 by quite a margin in some games[/citation]
I'm pretty sure they do, as not only Tom's, but numerous review sites have compared the PII 965 to the i7 920/930. The only problem to your statement is that many people build these kinds of systems not just to game, but to do other stuff like Photoshop or video editing, programming, where the i7 will obviously be the better option.
 
[citation][nom]amoghthegamer[/nom]Apple is making a mistake, people buy Macs to do video editing and Intel i7's are teh best for em.[/citation]
If Apple added something even remotely similar to the i7 920/930, they would definitely add another $1000 to the current total.
 
Eyefinity for those rich people who can afford those overpriced macs. Since their consumers are probably already clueless to building their own PC, so apple probably reasoned maybe the Eyefinity would appeal more to their consumers than the Nvidia's fermi chip, which is just a chip to their consumers; Just my prediction.
 
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