TMoney

Did you read that article I posted? If anything I think it gives quite a bit of confidence for those considering using the Fusion Drive. Also, even if you didn't choose the fusion option from Apple it isn't particularly difficult to turn any SSD/HDD drive into a Fusion Drive. I can't really think of any reason why you'd want to store music on an SSD other than that the drive failure rate is lower? As long as you back up regularly though, that should never be a problem.

The Lacie drives are just a pair of crappy SSDs raided IIRC. Probably not a good idea buy. That being said, what is it that you need so much SSD space for, Monkey? I have a 512GB SSD and it is total overkill. I could easily get by with 256GB As long as you are smart about what you put on there, its generally not a big deal. Either that, or use Apple's new fusion drive technology to let the OS handle it for you. This article is good reading.

Also FWIW I have one of these and find it works great with both my Mac and PC. The data transfer times are very respectable over USB3. I wouldn't use it for an app drive, but it gets the job done for media and backups. http://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/expansion-hard-drive/

^ unless its a big ol raid array.

I'm thinking of starting a build too once my PC laptop sells on eBay early next week. As much as I'd like to start right now, I think I'm going to wait for AMD and nVidia to release their 2013 lines, which should happen in the next month or two. nVidia's new GK110 looks like its going to cost a boat-load, but if it delivers 85% of the performance of a pair of SLI'ed 680s then I think it might be worth the extra scratch. http://techreport.com/news/24246/rumor-gk110-coming-in-899-geforce-titan EDIT: and for AMD: http://techreport.com/news/24012/rumor-next-gen-radeons-due-in-the-second-quarter

From what I hear, Ivy Bridge doesn't overclock all that well so its probably wise to just run it at the stock clocks. I've also heard that Haswell is going to be a different socket configuration from Ivy, which is a real bummer as we won't be able to just drop Haswell in an existing Ivy system once it releases around June.

Also, this might be worth checking out as a maximum bang for the buck build. http://techreport.com/review/24059/tr-christmas-2012-system-guide/6

Heh, don't let crappy marketing and brand image get in the way of a good product at a good value.

http://www.anandtech.com/tag/mb Love the reviews on this site if you are looking for suggestions. I'm sure you'll be able to find a highly recommended MOBO for the price range you are looking for.

Live and Dangerous is amazing. Hope you've got that one.

Looks like VMware has a trial version. I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

The rMBP work just got me replaced a dying 6-year old iMac so I just had a pretty similar upgrade. The speed improvements are really really nice and I think you'll be really happy with the 27". That being said, the new iMac screen is IMO the big upgrade you'll notice over the 6 and 7 year old models we were using. It's night and day difference vs what we had before. Enjoy! I don't know if you are a fan of touch-pads, Monkey, but if you are the touch gestures in OSX are quite handy. I'd recommend the wireless touchpad for your iMac for the touch gestures alone. The ability to quickly jump from window to window using mission control (or whatever they call it these days) on its own is worth the price of admission.

So anyone else use Parallels? I gave the trial version a shot yesterday and it's nice, but not perfect. I found it messed with some of the drivers such that booting into Windows via Bootcamp didn't work as well as it did before having Parallels installed. Given the amount of time I'll be using this computer in a Windows environment I think I'm going to ditch Parallels and just stick with doing reboots in and out of Bootcamp.

Work just bought me a new rMBP 15. Not bad... not bad at all. Now to get Parallels and Windows on this thing, pronto!

Congrats!

^ Great tracks! I was just listening to Blow by Blow the other week.

It seems like there haven't been that many big announcements this year, but this Tablet-PC convergence thing is really cool. Its the future. That, and Smartphone-PC convergence. It's nice to see Intel get their heads back in the game. While the Intel-based tablets don't match the ARM-based tablets on power consumption, they trounce them on performance. I'm sure its not the case for everyone, but I would gladly trade a few hours of battery life for 3-5x greater performance. ARM is going to have a real problem once Haswell and its successor Broadwell start hitting that 5W and below range.

Microsoft Surface Pro makes an appearance: http://gizmodo.com/5974705/microsoft-surface-pro-hands+on-this-is-what-it-should-have-been-all-along http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/9/3857076/microsoft-surface-pro-in-depth-impressions After reading the glowing impressions this is a day one buy for me. No question.

Is Tyll going to be at CES again this year scoutin' products for us? I haven't seen anything on IF.

In and accepted, thanks.

^ GREAT flick!

Got it. Done. Thanks!

I've been using 8 since the prereleases and I really don't see what all the fuss is about. If you don't like the tile interface, it just takes one click on the "desktop" button to make it go away. As for not having a start menu, the functionality is easily replaced by just hitting the windows key and typing the first few letters of what you are looking for. Is it intuitive? Not really, but if you put in a few hours to learn it its very hard to understand what the ZOMG-WIN8-IZ-TURRIBLE fuss is all about.

"T Money" (with a space) is my profile name, maybe try it again? If it says last online as of three years ago it must be someone other than me. I was playing the Walking Dead yesterday.

That one extra click to launch the desktop is just too much, eh?