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TheZookie007

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #60 on: April 28, 2009, 01:36:55 AM »
I intended to get a Mac mini for my birthday but I decided to carpe diem...so I'm getting one TOMORROW

The spec for this particular Mac mini is 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo with 1 GB RAM (2x512 MB, expandable to 2 GB RAM), 80GB HDD, DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, Airport, Bluetooth, Remote and running Apple MacOS X 10.5. Installed software: Apple QuickTime, Apple Hardware Test, Apple Mac OS X Mail, Apple iCal, Apple DVD Player, Apple Address Book, Apple Safari, Apple iChat AV, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive, Apple Dashboard, Apple Spotlight, Apple XCode Developer Tools, iWork (30 days trial), Apple iLife '08, Apple Spaces, Apple Quick Look, Apple Time Machine. All for around $450 (it's a closeout model). I'm getting it, as I've said before, mainly for iPhone development purposes (and to finally get myself familiar with the Way of Mac). I already have a monitor laying around but I'm going to pick up a Mac keyboard and mouse, and I'm trying to spend as little money as I can while doing so.

Questions:

1) Will 1 GB RAM be enough, or will I eventually need to bump it up to 2 GB?

2) Can I plug in my external HP DVD-RW drive (bought for a PC) and use it to supplement the built-in CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive? It has a USB connection.

3) Maybe one day, I would like to upgrade the 80 GB HDD. Is it possible, and if so, how easy/expensive would it be to do so?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.
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gonZo

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #61 on: April 28, 2009, 07:53:41 AM »
RAM and HD are both upgradeable.  There are probably better upgrade guides on the web, but this'll give you a rough idea of the level of difficulty...
http://www.applefritter.com/Mac_Mini_Take_Apart_Guide

1GB is going to be sufficient for iPhone dev purposes, but if you ever need to open the box, go ahead and drop in an extra gig.

There's a decent chance that the DVD-RW will just plug and play.  You can check the specific model here (a lack of search results won't mean anything)...
http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/search.drivedb.lasso

Added by Palomine who hopes/assumes gonZo won't mind giving me this brief piggyback ride :

First, that seems like a decent price and frankly, I'm jealous!

I too would suggest bumping the RAM to 2GB... while it will generally run fine with 1GB (I used 3/4GB for well over 5 years on mine) having the extra RAM will just make things easier if you use Firefox (with it's well-known gluttony for memory) or some other RAM-hungry app. I don't know from personal experience exactly what format HD is in the Mini (I'm guessing a 2.5" unit) but whatever it is, it can be swapped out later for a higher-capacity unit of the same type. However, given how much more you pay per GB for tiny drives (compared to 3.5" ones) you're probably much better off using an external drive for expansion space when the time comes. At least a couple of manufacturers make cute little external drive housings (I prefer Firewire to USB for this purpose by the way) that look exactly like the Mini itself, so the PC and the drive make a nice little stack.

BTW, I'm sure there are entire forums/communities dedicated to the subject of iPhone software development, but if you feel like sharing your impressions of what you learn as you go along on that path, I for one would be interested in reading about it here.

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TheZookie007

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #62 on: April 28, 2009, 01:16:38 PM »
Thanks gonZo & Palomine, for your feedback. I will try and get them to add another gigabyte of RAM on purchase, but if not, I will definitely go to Other World Computing and pick up some RAM there. I hope my external HP DVD writer will work with the mini, but if not I can always get one that does from OWC too. If I get the closeout Mac mini which includes 120 GB HDD and SuperDrive, it's about $50 more...arrrghh, decisions!

And I will be glad to keep you all informed of my descent into the maelstrom of iPhone development

Edit by Pal: IMO, $50 is worth it for the bigger HD and burner... if it'll save you some time/effort now or down the road... as it's only a bit more $ than the cost difference of the components themselves. The place where you're getting it can't bump the RAM for a fair price?  
ACB, BK, CT, NG, SA: FU. FUATH. 100x.

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theproject

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #63 on: April 28, 2009, 08:52:31 PM »
Hi,  Isn't it possible to develop for the iphone without a mac?? Don't they release the toolchain?
Please don't take this as apple bashing, it is an honest question.

Cya

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Bonecracker

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #64 on: April 29, 2009, 10:21:06 AM »
If you want to develop applications for either the iPhone or the MacOSX, you merely need the SDK and basic skillz (of course, the better the skillz, the better the appz).

SDK (softare Developer Kit) available from Apple.  Just go to http://www.apple.com and search for "SDK"

Bone...


WARNING:
This post may contain items including, but not limited to, sarcasm, irony, hyperbole intended to bring humor to this discussion. Those of you without a sense of humor, best ignore my posts.
There's a lot of internet out there, be sure to look around!

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TheZookie007

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #65 on: April 30, 2009, 09:14:28 AM »
Sure, you can merely download the SDK and sure you can develop for the iPhone using the simulator on a PC...but it's much easier to develop for the iPhone on a Mac, and it makes more sense to get a real iPhone (or, even cheaper, an iPod Touch) to plug into the Mac and develop natively on that.
ACB, BK, CT, NG, SA: FU. FUATH. 100x.

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Chestnuts

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #66 on: April 30, 2009, 10:30:37 PM »
 I have a 1st generation intel mini and bought it with 2 gigs of ram. Whatever the limit of ram is for the mini, load it up. I never get extra ram from Apple, they want way too much; OWC is definitely where to go.

I believe OWC will give you a great deal on putting in a larger HD, and could put more ram in for cheap at the same time. Just ship your mini to them, they'll take care of it. The mini's are no fun to open and tinker with.
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TheZookie007

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #67 on: September 01, 2009, 09:54:30 PM »
Mac OS X Snow Leopard is out, and is definitely worth getting (especially since at 30 bucks or so, it's pretty cheap), but the "it saves you space" claim is sort of deceptive:

Quote
WIRED: "Faster, Bigger, Longer: How Snow Leopard Will Improve Your Hardware"

Bigger Hard Drive
Apple makes much of the reclamation of hard drive space when you install Snow Leopard, unusual in an OS upgrade on any platform. This is achieved by both installing less (printer drivers are downloaded on demand instead of loading gigabytes of them up front) and by optimizing and compressing code. But this alone can’t explain some people’s claims of 20 GB or more being freed up.

In fact, plug in any drive, not just the boot drive, and it will be bigger. How? Because Snow Leopard now reads drive sizes the way humans do, as chunks of 1000 kilobytes. Computers usually define a megabyte as 1024 kilobytes. Not much with a small drive, but when you get up to the terabyte drives we have today, that discrepancy rises to 10 percent, or 100 GB, as big as some whole drives.

Of course, your 500-GB drive is now listed as having 500 GB, but just because 10.6 reports sizes in base 10 instead of in base two doesn’t mean your drive has grown — it just looks like it has.
That's cheating! After all:

1 gigabyte (GB) = 10243 bytes = 230 bytes = exactly 1,073,741,824 bytes

but since it's close enough to a billion bytes, that's become the standard. Everyone knows that when you refer to a gigabyte as a billion bytes, you're approximating. But now, with this move from Apple, they are making use of the abbreviation GB for gigabyte, when they actually should be using GiB, for gibibyte. Argh.
ACB, BK, CT, NG, SA: FU. FUATH. 100x.

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SwitcherX

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #68 on: September 02, 2009, 12:04:57 AM »
don' the HD makers all use 1000 instead of 1024 already?
Switcher X
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TheZookie007

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #69 on: September 06, 2009, 10:55:13 PM »
don' the HD makers all use 1000 instead of 1024 already?
Good question, will have to check. Just got an external hard drive that's rated at 1 terabyte -- don't know yet if the pre-formatted capacity's 10244 bytes (= 1,099,511,627,776 bytes) or 1012 bytes (= 1 trillion bytes) :)
ACB, BK, CT, NG, SA: FU. FUATH. 100x.

Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #70 on: September 07, 2009, 12:25:44 PM »
Good question, will have to check. Just got an external hard drive that's rated at 1 terabyte -- don't know yet if the pre-formatted capacity's 10244 bytes (= 1,099,511,627,776 bytes) or 1012 bytes (= 1 trillion bytes) :)

If my computer's telling me the truth, one decimal terabyte is equal to 931 binary gigabytes.  (I put in a terabyte drive as a secondary on my desktop, and it says it's a 931GB drive.)

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MaxBigfoot

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #71 on: September 07, 2009, 02:38:29 PM »
If my computer's telling me the truth, one decimal terabyte is equal to 931 binary gigabytes.  (I put in a terabyte drive as a secondary on my desktop, and it says it's a 931GB drive.)

I have both an internal and external 1 tB HD.  Both are shown as being 931 gB after formatting.  But the problem is, I believe there's some size loss just due to way they're formatted.
There's probably at least a few more professional IT guys who can explain it better.  Anyway, afaik, after formatting there's no way a 1 tB drive would show 1 tB on your OS.

MaxBigfoot


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Palomine

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #72 on: September 07, 2009, 03:49:35 PM »
I have both an internal and external 1 tB HD.  Both are shown as being 931 gB after formatting.  But the problem is, I believe there's some size loss just due to way they're formatted.
There's probably at least a few more professional IT guys who can explain it better.  Anyway, afaik, after formatting there's no way a 1 tB drive would show 1 tB on your OS.

Yes, I'm sure someone can explain it better, but since my first 5 megabyte hard disk back in the early '80s, ALL drives 'lose' capacity due to formatting... the bigger the drive, the bigger the loss (as it's proportional/a percentage). Nothing shady about this.

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TheZookie007

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #73 on: October 20, 2009, 02:55:44 PM »
Hey, Apple has just refreshed the iMac line.

San Francisco Chronicle"Apple introduces new iMacs, MacBook and Mac Mini"

TUAW: "First Look: New iMacs announced, and they're incredible!"
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BacE

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Re: getting a Mac
« Reply #74 on: October 20, 2009, 06:32:15 PM »
well here it goes. hard disc manufacturers label their drives in MiB, GiB and TiB. so 1 TiB =1,000,000,000,000 Bytes. However computers use 1024 for every increasing step, so 1 kB=1024B,  1GB=1024MB=1024x1024kB=1024x1024x1024B

so 1,000,000,000,000/(1024^3)=931GB
B"if I'd gotten a euro for everytime..."acE
Size doesn't matter, as long as it's HUGE!!