The one time I recall having a massive package upgrade snaffoo was during a dist-upgrade in Ubuntu Server. I don't remember exactly what caused the process to halt and fail, but I do remember that the system was working fine even though the upgrade was only partially completed. Then I made the huge mistake of rebooting..... Of course now it wouldn't boot so I had to break out a Live Flash Drive, chroot, and do my fixing there.

Jesus christ if they dropped a family pack version to $100 I'd buy it in a heartbeat! I've got three personal machines running Windows and I haven't bought a single license because Home Premium is $200. Never mind that I occasionally use something like XP Mode so having Ultimate was helpful. Actually right now a new Win7 HP license on Newegg is $100, presumably due a price drop in the wake of Win8. On the other hand, Win7 HP upgrade (from Vista or XP) is still $120.

Funny you name Asus and Acer as the producers of shoddy pieces of crap. Personally I've always preferred their hardware over the other big names for quality reasons. The absolute worst in my experience has been Lenovo. I've had to support a number of Thinkpad t410s that are total trash when it comes to reliability.

I don't usually start my own threads but I just want this comment to stand alone....

Who the fuck cares who invented email?!! This guy is pretty obviously a nut. I mean come on how full of yourself do you actually have to be to register inventorofemail.com

This is what I'm saying, their innards aren't all that standard. Their motherboards are extremely exotic and a major update would require a radically different tracing layout. The internal case design has also changed twice (at least?) since the original G5 PowerMac layout. The current models are even more over engineered than the old G5s.

This. The talk I've been hearing at work (Apple retailer) says this is the last Mac Pro refresh. I'm told they don't sell well enough to justify the huge design and engineering costs needed for each major refresh. As someone who has serviced many different models of Mac Pro, this doesn't surprise me at all. Internally they are incredibly overengineered, with daughterboards and slide-out compartments for all the major components. They're even practically cable-less, with all the component connections and power rails routed through the motherboard!

Furthermore, the continued lack of Thunderbolt doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Mac Pros already have PCIe slots to serve their high-speed bus needs. It's not like Apple to allow overlapping functionality in their products.

Actually, Apple doesn't really market to video editors, graphic designers, etc anymore. The 17" MacBook Pro was bought pretty much exclusively by the three groups you mentioned (I happen to be a developer and I love my 17" MBP) and now they've axed it. The mac-based pro services retailer and consultant business I work at has also heard rumors that this will probably be the last Mac Pro refresh. Anyway the Retina display does NOT provide more screen real-estate. The sole purpose of it is to increase the visual quality of text and graphics rendered onscreen by quadrupling the DPI.

Apple has always been about selling the average joe's computer, right back to the Apple II and the Macintosh. They haven't always done this successfully, notably when Jobs was ousted and Scully nearly drove Apple into the ground by effectively commoditizing Macs. Now they're back on track, what with the success of iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Apple has also refined their portable offerings and made them even more attractive to American middle class students. I personally know six or seven college students that bought a MacBook Pro (most of them 13") from their school because they're hip and they got an education discount.

If anyone's comment is useless, it's your own. I doubt any of us here have any real knowledge on the cost breakdown of the new Pros. (I can, however, tell you that 3rd party Apple retailers have a very very small profit margin on actual Mac hardware. We're forced to make our money on peripherals and upgrades.) So anyone's comments on the pricing of these models are opinions. I happen to agree with GP's opinion on the starting price. You, on the other hand, have no factual basis on which to say that they should probably be $3000+.

As far as building 3 desktops for that money... Personally I've always looked at comparing DIY build prices for PC to notebooks in general to be apples and oranges. Notebook components are more expensive as a rule. Moreover, high-end desktops are significantly cheaper to build than to buy as-is simply because of the way the market works. I happen to have built a fairly well-spec'd Hackintosh for my at-home desktop computing. Not that I don't consider say an iMac to be worth it's price, I just felt I didn't have a need for the design features that make them comparatively expensive (all-in-one form factor, aluminum casing, large screen, etc). On the other hand, I'm quite happy with my decision to buy a 17" MacBook Pro a few years ago. I've gotten a great deal of heavy use out of it and it goes without saying that it's been much more reliable than my Hackintosh.

According to the specs with both the onboard Intel HD chipset and the discrete graphics, the retina MBPs can drive both the main display @ 2880x1800 and two external displays at 2560x1600 at the same time. Since I suspect most Mac games are not HiDPI-aware, they'll still be rendering for 1440x900 and Mac OS X will scale it up to 2880x1800. What I'm curious about is how Windows will handle this.

That's a silly excuse. The main issue is that this secureEFI requirement is cumbersome and will create problems for some people.

There were locks on the cases and the BIOS was secured but CD booting was not disabled.

You are so immensely full of shit...
To prove that you CAN edit files in /etc using the TextWrangler downloaded from the Mac App Store I have recorded a video of me doing JUST THAT! I even opened TextWrangler using sudo to show that I can write to a config file.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWAKQjJWJvk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvULnO52RY0
I suspect that you didn't notice the Enable: All TextWrangler Documents drop down menu. Don't ask me why that's necessary, but changing it to everything made all the .conf files selectable. So yeah, you're full of shit and yet you've been modded +5 insightful...

That's a serious problem. The requirement of explaining to people running all kinds of different hardware with all kinds of different UEFI setup screens is adding a massive hurdle to Linux adoption.

My CompSci teacher in high school routinely set up Linux dual-boots on the basic Windows machines so he could actually teach his class. Of course he routinely butted heads with the district's asinine IT department. The BIOSes on the school machines are always password locked and they head administrator refused to give him access. If those machines were replaced with systems running UEFI secure boot, I can guarantee he wouldn't be able to run Linux anymore. He wouldn't even be able to boot the systems every morning with a LiveCD like he did for an entire year when he was forbidden to install anything to the hard drives.

By that logic, it's inevitable that in every industry one business will eradicate all other competition and become a de-facto monopoly. A business like that most certainly has absolute power in the ability to grossly inflate prices. Without external control there is what can best be described as a competitive business entropy.

You don't need to use brute force to deprive people of their freedoms. In the "Walmart town" the Evil Big Business(TM) is using economic force in the form of predatory pricing to destroy local competition.

I'm slightly confused as well. In my high school AP calculus-based physics class we did projectile motion with air resistance and gravity at the beginning of the year. In fact, my teacher used that particular topic to "weed out" the students that probably wouldn't be able to handle the remainder of the course. He taught the material way above the actual AP requirement and make the topic exam so hard that a few kids switched into the lower-level physics course afterward.