Apples to Apples? Dell Makes Direct Comparisons With MacBook Pros On Its Site

t's no secret to those who follow tech that Macs tend to offer lesser specs Sony VGP-BPS8 Battery than its competitors, and for more money. That hasn't slowed Apple's momentum in the laptop market, though, especially among college students. As the back to school season kicks off, Dell has posted a direct comparison between its Studio 15 and 17 laptops and the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro.

Dell's argument is a familiar one: it lists the VGP-BPS9/B specs side by side, showing that two similarly sized machines with Core i7 processors, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drives, and discrete graphics have a ,249 price difference in both screen sizes. It also points out that its discrete graphics-enabled machines have 1GB of video memory to the Macs' 512MB.

Interestingly, though, Dell's chart doesn't add much to the so-called "Apple Tax" debate other than regurgitating the price difference. If I were Dell, I would have pointed out that Dell offers a full year of free phone support, whereas Apple's default is 90 days (then again, Apple's tech support is superior, and Dell's Sony VGP-BPS9A/B Battery is experiencing some minor embarrassment, but I digress).

It's also interesting that Dell chose to compare Windows Live Essentials to Apple iLife. They do similar things, of course, but iLife comes installed in Mac OS X out of the box, whereas you have to download Live Essentials. iLife is also a richer suite, allowing not just for rich photo, video, and audio editing, but website creation. It's the inclusion of software like this (not to mention features such as Time Machine) that make many Macheads insist they are, in fact, getting their bang for their buck. I would have avoided this comparison altogether.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about the Apple Tax, lest I get called a fanboy from either camp. (Plus, we've covered this issue before.) But what do you guys think? Was it smart of Dell to make this comparison? Does it have a point?

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Apple eMac PowerPC G4 1.25 GHz 2005


Image by Mac Users Guide
For more vintage Macintosh visit Mac Users Guide Photo Gallery. In 2002 the eMac debuted as the low-cost alternative to the new LCD iMac G4 "snowball". It was initially release exclusively for educational institutions, hence the "e" designation. As demand grew it was decided to make it available for the general public. The 2005 Apple eMac G4 features a 1.25 GHz PowerPC processor with 515k and a level 2 cache. This particular model has 512 MB installed RAM, SuperDrive and a ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card.

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Someone brought in 10 eMacs today. That’s over 800 pounds of computers.

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Question by Bret M: Can’t start ProTools on an iMac: “Digidesign Hardware is in use by another application”?
Yes, this is a LEGAL version. I can’t start ProTools on my Intel iMac because I get the above message. I’m not using any other Digidesign software OR hardware! Can someone tell me what’s going on?

Best answer:

Answer by michael p
Open a terminal window. it is in applications->utilities.
stretch the window out to your screen size

At the prompt type in ‘ps -aux’ minus the quotes

This will show you everything that is running. see if you can find something that says protools.

You can also do ‘ps -aux | grep protools’
if the process is named that, it will appear, and not some huge list. if that brings you nothing you will have to manually look at the results. of ps -aux

Now if you find the process you will see something like this

p 225 0.2 0.1 27724 780 p1 S 11:20AM 0:00.01 -bash

the second column (225) is the pid.

Now type this sudo kill -9 pid
where pid is the number you saw in the second column. That willl kill it and you can do anything you want then.

Add your own answer in the comments!

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