lazyweb, lazyweb, bake me a cake: MacOSX and Dell 24" Widescreen Monitors

[rwx]

Dear Lazyweb,

I'm trying to find out what macintoshes can drive a Dell 24" widescreen monitor. I'm wondering about my powerbook incidentally, but I'm actually looking into this for someone who's thinking of buying a mini or a small powerbook/ibook.

my powerbook's a 1.5ghz PowerBook with a GeForce FX Go5200 64MB video card. I think this is the current spec for a 12" pb video card if this helps.

Comments

[mediavore.livejournal.com]

my powerbook's a PowerBook

You don't say.

[ziptie.livejournal.com]

What's the point of a $1000 montior on a $500 machine? Media station?

I expect this table will help:
http://www.apple.com/displays/specs.html

[ziptie.livejournal.com]

Which is to say, at the same native res (1920x1200) the 23" Apple display claims to require a tower or modern PowerBook, with no mention of the Mini or iBook.

However, the Mini graphics page claims it can drive a 23".
http://www.apple.com/macmini/graphics.html

The iBoook claims no such thing, and I believe it has VGA out, not DVI, so prolly not.

[rwx.livejournal.com]

I think the mac mini is a modern powerbook in a crazy box.

[ziptie.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

[rwx.livejournal.com]

Programming and graphic design mostly, I believe.

[ziptie.livejournal.com]

Hrm. Seems the extra $$ for a proper tower (even used) goes a LONG way in that situation.

[rwx.livejournal.com]

Not really imho. I don't know about graphic design, but a lot of the problem with systems for programming is that you need to be able to see enough of the context at once to make good decisions. Big screens help with that a lot, incremental processor speed improvements not as much as you might think. Memory is a problem for these smaller systems, though; that has to be managed carefully but I can run a fairly serious application engine and development environment on my pbook without even having to mess around too much as long as I don't run a lot of office/backend stuff at the same time.

If there was a plug-and-play installation for tomcat or some other servlet engine on the mac, it would be the bestest. As it is, I'm using crippletomcat and doing a lot of good low-level webdev.

[ziptie.livejournal.com]

Ah, see, when I hear programming I still think of the old days of compiler-intensive stuff, where CPU and RAM were always the critical limiting factors.

I'm not (would never) saying that a larger screen is unjustified, just that I'd probably spec more power to drive it for what I consider higher-end tasks.

[tongodeon.livejournal.com]

The point of a $744 monitor on a $500 machine is that you can swap the $500 machine out for anything you want. I'm still using the same $700 monitor that I bought many years ago when its first state-of-the-art CPU was a Pentium Pro 200.

[ziptie.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. As above, more screen is always appropriate.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Interesting tag.

[rwx.livejournal.com]

It's certainly... unique.

It's a reference into my metadata system. This particular one corresponds to 'Computers -- Hardware'

[frosch.livejournal.com]

My MDD G4 has a dual-port Radeon 9000. One port is ADC, the other DVI. It came with a DVI-VGA adapter dongle. MacOS supports dual-head operation in this configuration; YDL does not.

The external display connector on my PowerBook (aluminum, 12") is some sort of weirdass beast I've never seen for it. I have two dongles that fit it: one terminates in an ADC, the other in VGA.

Wikipedia says that ADC has DVI signals in it, if you can find a dongle to break them out.