Mokka mit Schlag » Mac

Apple has a well deserved reputation for overcharging for simple things: $500 for a set of wheels, another $500 for a height adjustable stand for the Studio Display, $79 for an iPad cover, $1200 to upgrade a MacBook Pro to a 4TB SSD. Some of this added cost is because Apple doesn’t sell crap, or really anything less than the top of the line. The Mac Studio $1200 4TB SSD is several times faster than the $200 4TB SSD you picked up in the bargain bin at MicroCenter. The Apple $79 iPad case actually holds up an iPad, unlike the $20 knockoffs on AliExpress. The Apple Pencil lasts more than a month, unlike the $27 Vistaike I stupidly bought from Amazon.

Nowhere is Apple excoriated for overpricing more than in RAM upgrades on Macs. But when you compare Apples to, well, not Apples, then it rapidly becomes apparent that Apple’s RAM isn’t just more expensive. It is a *lot* better than third party alternatives on PCs and Linux computers in ways that really matter. And when you look at why that’s so, getting anywhere near RAM that performs as well as Apple’s does will cost you more than buying a Mac, and you still don’t get as much.

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No, this isn’t yet another LLM generated, SEO-optimized “Best 10 Refrigerators/Electric Cars/Laptops” listicle of badly written English designed to collect affiliate revenues. This was written by an actual human being with a real opinion, and contains no affiliate links. If you want to buy one of the monitors I mention here, you know how to use Google, right?

I decided to write this because the answer is actually relatively simple (unlike for PCs). There simply aren’t many choices, and it’s fairly straight-forward to pick the one that fits your needs, not that you’d know that if you just went to Amazon or Best Buy and started browsing.

I’ll order them from least to most expensive, which not coincidentally is also worst to best quality.
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My circa 2010 Mac Pro tower has been dying for a month. More specifically the video was failing, and I could only boot into safe mode. I swapped out the stock ATI Radeon for a Sapphire HD 7950 which appears to have fixed it. I’d rather have a new computer, but after all these years there’s still nothing else that will do the job this model does unless I build a Hackintosh; and that’s more effort than I want to spend right now.
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Yesterday morning I had to hard reboot my Mac Pro when it wouldn’t unlock from the screensaver. When it came back up there were a few question marks in the task bar, some surprising warnings about full disk space from an extension I thought I’d turned off years ago, and unexpected software update messages. I eventually realized that my 480GB OWC Excelsior SSD had died, or at least was not being recognized. This is my primary boot drive, but instead my Mac had booted off another system disk with an older group of apps and Mac OS X 10.6.

Not a disaster; my data is backed up and my home directory never lived on this drive in the first place. I sent a message to OWC support (27+ hours and still no response, by the way) and then fired up Disk Utility. Disk Utility could not see the missing drive.

Next I launched TechTool Pro. Completely worthless. It found a few corrupt files on other drives but had no idea that the SSD drive even existed. And then it occurred to me that this is a common pattern. Although I have about one personal hard drive failure a year, I have never been able to use TechTool, DiskWarrior, Norton (back in the day) or any other such repair utility to fix anything ever.
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I’m trying out Dragon Dictate 3 for the Mac. Is it ready for primetime? You tell me:

One of the most impressive features of brains – especially human brains — is the flexibility to learn almost any kind of task that comes its way. Given apprentice the desire to impress his master and a chicken-16 past, and his brain devotes its massive resources to distinguishing males from females. Given unemployed aviation enthusiast a chance to be a national hero, and his brain learns to distinguish enemy aircraft from local fly boys. This flexibility in learning accounts for a large part of what we consider human intelligence. All many animals are properly called intelligent, humans distinguish themselves and they are so flexibly intelligent, fastening the neural circuits to match the task at hand. It is for this reason that we can colonize every region on the planet, learn the local language were born into, and master skills as diverse as playing the violin, high-jumping and operating spatial cockpits.

–David Eagleman, Incognito, p. 71, as heard by Dragon Dictate 3.0

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Better-than-expected, in fact. I’m dictating this entire thing with dictation and Mac OS X mountain line.Compared to the various versions of Dragon dictate that I’ve used, it seems to work pretty well. I greatly accuracy about on par with Nuance naturally speaking 11.On the other hand, user interface leave something to be desired. In particular, I can’t just dictate continuously. I have to keep pressing the function key for each sentence I want to dictate and then click done.That’s probably because the recognition doesn’t happen directly on my own computer.Instead, it sent to Apple for recognition on Apple servers.
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