Show 0.7
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Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a near daily podcast
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discussing what's new and interesting in iOS, Apple, and related technologies. I'm your host,
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David Smith. I'm an independent iOS developer based in Heron, Virginia. This is show 0.7,
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and today is July 21st. It's a Thursday. The format of Developing Perspective is that I'll
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cover a handful of links, articles, things that I found interesting in roughly the last 24 hours,
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and then I'll have a more general discussion towards the end.
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The show will never be longer than 15 minutes.
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Without further ado, let's get started.
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First a bit of follow-up from yesterday's show, where I mentioned that Xcode 4.1 is
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now available as a free download in the Mac App Store.
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I got a little bit of interesting perspective on that from Jeff LaMarche on Twitter, where
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he described that the primary reason why they're doing that, which I had missed from WWDC,
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is that it will allow them to do diff updates for you for downloads.
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So when the next version comes out in gold master, which will probably be 4.2, the current
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iOS 5 version, that will be distributed through the Mac App Store, and because the Mac App
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Store is handling the download process, they can send only the delta, only what's changed
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between 4.1 and 4.2, which will lead to a dramatic reduction in file size.
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So rather than having to download a 4GB file, you should only have to download a few hundred
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Definitely worthwhile.
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All right, let's get started.
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First link I have is there's a post over on the Cultured Code blog talking about their
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Cloud Sync Beta for Things.
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A little bit of background, Things is a to-do list manager for iOS and Mac.
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And it's kind of been an ongoing saga about they're building their own sync system, they
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apparently have done tremendous engineering to make this happen.
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But it's kind of been taking forever and it's been going through beta.
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And with iCloud and the related things happening there where Apple is essentially providing
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a sync service free for all developers to use, there was some speculation about whether
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they would continue to do that.
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And basically their blog post says that's not for them.
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They're going to continue using their own system.
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And specifically it seems they have a concern of only being able to support Lion and iOS
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which is a fairly legitimate concern given the size of their install base, but also I
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get the impression that they just enjoy what they've built and would like to continue using
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it and have it be a way to differentiate themselves against their competitors.
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Just an interesting thing to take a look at.
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Next I was going to recommend you looking at there's a page Apple put up about iOS line
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So this is how you, because the OS image was distributed
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through the Mac App Store, it's a bit more complicated
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to recover a system than previously.
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Before you would just install the DVD that came
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with your computer, run it, and it would handle the process.
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Now the process has become a little bit more complicated
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because there is no longer a DVD
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that comes with your computer.
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It sounds like you'll be able to purchase a thumb drive
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with the OS image on it.
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However, if that's the only way to get it,
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not everyone's gonna have them.
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And so Apple has done some pretty clever things.
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The first thing they do is they create a small partition
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on your hard drive.
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It's a bootable partition that'll be used for recovery.
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So essentially, rather than shipping you a DVD,
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they took a DVD image and burned it onto the computer.
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I get the impression this isn't exactly the same,
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it's much smaller than what you would get
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on a full install image,
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It allows you enough to get back to the Mac App Store probably and then download the image
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or something along those lines.
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But perhaps most interesting from a technological perspective is their ability to recover the
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computer remotely over a network connection.
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And this is essentially a nice thing that looks like they're doing in probably the BIOS
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or something along those lines, where it is actually downloading and installing the recovery
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image from Apple's servers directly.
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So if you take a new laptop that had Lion on it, take the hard drive out, destroy it,
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put a completely blank one in, it will still be able to recover it as long as you have
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an active network connection.
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So that's pretty cool.
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Next, there's an interesting article that I was reading over on the Red Sweater blog
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talking about Allianz Hold Disk Encryption.
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Hold Disk Encryption is just a new thing they're doing where rather than having it be file
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system encryption being done sort of at the software level, whereby I think previously
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it would just store your home directory in an encrypted disk image.
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Now in Allianz, they do it at the sort of way down deep in the OS level.
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So most applications will have no idea that it's even happening.
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And the interesting thing there that he's talking about is he walks through how to do
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that encryption on non-main drives.
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So it's a way that you can access that capability if you have two partitions or if you have
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two separate drives that you'd like encrypted, you can now do that using the instructions
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that he puts in his article.
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Our last thing today is over from the Backlaze blog.
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Backlaze, if you're not familiar with them, is a company that does online backup.
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I use them for all of my systems.
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Basically you pay $5 a month or something like that and you get basically unlimited
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storage of your data on their system and lets you back it up and easily recover it later
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if you should you have any problems.
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And this is a follow-up to an article they wrote, I think it was about a year or two
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ago, where they talked about how it is that they are able to provide unlimited storage
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for a relatively low cost.
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And the primary way they get around that is rather than doing any off-the-shelf storage
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solution, so buying a big data array or using Amazon S3 or something like that, which is,
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for example, Dropbox does, they build their own system,
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and this allowed them to be much, much more cost effective.
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And in their latest discussion, they
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talk about how they build these storage pods that
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are 135 terabytes, and it costs $7,384,
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which is a rather absurd ratio of cost per terabyte.
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And it's just a fascinating thing
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to read through how they did it, how they engineered it,
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how they build all this custom stuff.
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And one note that I thought that was especially interesting
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is that they described that all the parts inside of it
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are two years warranty.
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So the hard drives, et cetera,
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have a two year warranty on them.
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And so whenever they build one,
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it's cost to them is just that initial 7,300 bucks
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because after that, all the replacements
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would be hindered under warranty,
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which is pretty interesting.
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Let's see, and then this was one other note that I had
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that I thought was especially interesting,
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was that they were talking about how
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the hard drive failure rates between different drives
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and things don't vary in the ways
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that you would necessarily expect.
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They found that hot drives don't fail faster.
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They did, however, find that drives fail mostly
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in their first couple of weeks of use,
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and so it sounds like what they actually do
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is whenever they create a pod of hard drives, install it,
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it doesn't actually go live for a while,
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and it just sounds like they just run,
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sort of testing load data onto it,
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so they're just probably just throwing random data onto it,
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then reading it off, throwing data onto it,
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and reading it off, sort of exercising the drive.
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And if it's gonna fail,
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they found that it almost certainly will fail
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in the initial period rather than later on,
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which is interesting.
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All right, so today I'm gonna be talking
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for our more general discussion period
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about the developer machine landscape.
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And there's a blog post that goes along with this
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over on my blog if you're interested
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in sort of all the nitty gritty.
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But yesterday Apple announced two new model revisions.
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This was the MacBook Air line and the Mac Mini line.
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Both of these were updated to the Sandy Bridge architecture
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as well as being updated with Thunderbolt.
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And specifically what I was interested after they made those announcements is I was trying
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to then decide what is now the best developer machine.
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And by best, I'm defining that mostly in terms of best value rather than necessarily best.
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Clearly, if you want the fastest machine, you should go get a Mac Pro, get two Thunderbolt
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displays and totally trip it out.
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That will clearly be the best machine.
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And if your goal is to find that nice sweet spot between cost and performance, and specifically
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there your ability to upgrade it on a regular basis, then this is probably an interesting
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place to follow along.
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And so what I then did is I went through all of the currently available models and had
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two basic rules associated with what I was putting together.
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I wanted the cheapest version of that machine that was available with an Intel i7 processor.
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In my experience, the i7 is exactly what most developers need these days, specifically because
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it supports hyper-threading, which allows you to have more and more visible cores, which
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things like compilation and development is very important.
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I then upgraded each of those machines to 8GB of RAM, which I think about as a pretty
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standard amount of RAM for most developers, specifically looking at max sales to do that,
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just because it's a little bit cheaper there.
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The Mac errors obviously are deadoned.
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That doesn't apply to them because they're only maxed out at four gigabytes.
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And basically, I then went through and put that together and I definitely recommend looking
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through the blog post in the show notes if you're interested.
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But the thing that's fascinating from that is it appears that the Mac Mini is probably
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now the best value developer machine out there.
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You can buy a Mac Mini with a 24-inch sort of run-of-the-mill machine from Amazon – monitor
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for Amazon for about – let's see, about $1200, which is pretty inexpensive considering
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what you're getting.
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You're getting a nice, big, fancy processor.
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I think it's a 2 gigahertz quad-core i7, which is probably more than most people need.
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You have 8 gigabytes of RAM, easily upgradable.
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You pair that with a nice HD display, and that's a pretty low cost of entry.
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It's almost as cheap as you can spend period.
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The cheapest machine period would be to get a MacBook... actually, it is the cheapest
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machine that you can get, even with a monitor, with the next cheapest being a MacBook Air,
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which would run you about $1,350.
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So definitely an interesting thing there that I was a bit surprised by when I did the analysis.
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Previously I'd always recommended that you get the 15-inch MacBook Pro in matte, which
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is currently runs right around $2,000.
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So it's interesting that you'd be able to, for almost half the cost, get almost identical
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performance out of it, and you have a lot of other benefits.
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For example, a Mac Mini has the advantage of having two drives in it natively, which
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which is a nice thing, and also because the actual computer is cheap relative to buying
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the whole system, so you're not buying a display built into the machine.
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If say in a year a new Mac Mini comes out, you can upgrade to that, and then at that
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point you would have only spent about as much as you would have if you bought a MacBook
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Pro to start with.
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Whereas with the MacBook Pro, you're buying the display in as part of the cost of the
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Whereas with the Mac Mini, if you have existing monitors or even if you just buy a couple
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of $180 or $200 displays to go with it, those stay, those keep working, and you can just
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keep replacing the machine out from under it.
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In many ways, I think that's just going to be the way forward.
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We'll have to see what happens when the new Mac Pros come out.
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I think the expectation is sometime later this year based on Intel's roadmap.
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But at least for now, that's what I would recommend.
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An interesting note, if you absolutely need portability, is that, so previously I'd said,
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well, the best bet is probably to get a 15-inch MacBook Pro.
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The difference between that cost of a 15-inch MacBook Pro and Mac and getting a Mac Mini
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with a run-of-the-mill 24-inch display is about $736, so about 58% more.
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And interestingly, you can pick up a refurbished
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late model 11 inch MacBook Air for $749.
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So basically for the same cost as a 15 inch MacBook Pro,
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you could pick up a Mac Mini, a display, and a MacBook Air,
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which I think I would say is generally speaking
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a much better setup and a much more powerful
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and upgradable going forward setup.
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Lastly, I just note, if you are in the market
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to get some of these things,
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I would definitely recommend you upgrade it to have an SSD.
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Advantage of both the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro
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is it's very straightforward to do this.
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If you've got an iMac of any kind,
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it's almost impossible to do this yourself.
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Taking off the glass with suction cups
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and all those types of things is just not feasible.
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So definitely look into that,
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and those are running only about $200
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for 115, 120 gigabytes these days,
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which is probably enough to get going
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for a developer machine.
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All right, that's it.
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Hope you enjoyed today's show.
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I'll see you tomorrow.
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I'm probably looking forward to things to look forward to today.
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Looks like all the 5x5 shows are getting back in action to probably discuss lion and related
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So definitely check those out.
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Otherwise happy coding and see you tomorrow.