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Dmitry... everyone is of course entitled to their opinion - but as one of the brain-washed masses I feel I need to at least reply (!). Sorry Cara...

>>> I am not happy with the direction OS X is going. Too much emphasis on eye candy and not enough on underlying technology.

Fair enough, but it does seem to be the way that most of the UIs/OSes are going. Erm, Windows 8, Unity...  

Also Apple are *constantly* innovating under the hood - albeit mainly hardware - Lightning connectors, Fusion hard-drives etc... so they are one of the few computer manufacturers actually innovating at all(!)

>>> ZFS (long ago), Xgrid and X11 have been ditched, which I find disturbing. I don't see Apple investing in computers given current revenue from that sector.  

I sort of agree with you here - but on the other hand at least it is still a Unix variant underneath and we still have Xquartz.  X11/X window is itself becoming quite an old beast and I'm pretty sure there's ever going to be an X12. Hence the probable rise and prevalence of Qt - so you can run any OS you like...

>>> Linux in a virtual machine of your choice might be a better bang for the buck. Or, Windows in a virtual machine on a Linux box for that matter.

Or, ( controversially ) a Mac running Linux and Windows in virtual boxes !?

Tony. 

Sent from my iPhone

On 23 Jan 2013, at 03:03, "Dmitry Rodionov" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

AFAIK there is no problem mixing and matching different timing RAM: system will run at the speed of the slowest module.
I don't think anybody will notice the difference with CAS latency Coot'ing and Refmac'ing.

I don't think there is much sense in having more than 4 GB of RAM per physical core on a Mac.
Majority of the Mac flock does not really care for where the RAM modules come from.
As for Mac Pro's- they use ECC RAM with proprietary heat sensors, so that's a completely different story. You can still use generic ECC RAM in a MAC PRO at the cost of the fan being stuck in hurricane mode.

The bottleneck of pretty much any modern system is the HDD. Apple-branded HDDs were known to have somewhat modified firmware, causing problems at times (mostly with AppleRAID, if not using an Apple-branded HDD)
An end user most definitely will notice an SSD VS HDD, which brings up TRIM support on OS X, which is limited to controllers sold by Apple.

Upgradeability-wise Apple is not the way to go in any case. 

DISCLAIMER:  The rest may be much more inflammatory.

Personally, I am not convinced OS X and Apple is the way to go log term (having been surrounded by MACs for the past 4-5 years)
I am not happy with the direction OS X is going. Too much emphasis on eye candy and not enough on underlying technology.
ZFS (long ago), Xgrid and X11 have been ditched, which I find disturbing. I don't see Apple investing in computers given current revenue from that sector.

Linux in a virtual machine of your choice might be a better bang for the buck. Or, Windows in a virtual machine on a Linux box for that matter.

Don't kick me,
DIR



On 2013-01-22, at 7:22 PM, Bryan Lepore <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Phil Jeffrey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I don't think that anybody has shown a significant performance difference on Apple memory vs a reasonable 3rd party supplier.  Apple may potentially have better quality controls but places like Crucial essentially have lifetime warranties on their memory.  I use Crucial at home and at work. [...]

sure, I agree with all this

the only other point I really wanted to make is to be cautious when configuring a computer on the Apple website, where they might say for memory "DDR3 ECC SDRAM" (checked this for a Mac Pro just now) but that is a non-obvious way of, from what I can tell, selling only high end memory when e.g. different CAS latency is available elsewhere - again, not obvious what their CL is (perhaps it is listed somewhere). and maybe other specs apply.