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Apple Announces Faster G4s, Upgraded Powerbooks
yuriwho writes, "Apple has announced several upgrades: an extra 50 MHz clockspeed for G4's, as well as an upgraded powerbook with extra MHz, firewire, RAM space and airport compatibility (tech specs/marketing here). There's also an iBook special edition. Check out hotnews for the info on the various product lines. Several minor improvements added together may make quite a bit of difference especially in the mobile market - unfortunately nothing stunning. "
FireWire has some nice features, but in the end, it's still a lot slower than SCSI and more expensive than the IDE stuff.
Now, I agree that USB is inappropriate for lots of things it's used for (esp. scanners and drives). And maybe firewire will succeed.
But, I'm not holding my breath.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I use Linux (Red Hat 5.2, 6.1, 6.2 and COL) at home and I use OS X Server at work on a couple of boxes, and I agree - it's going to be OS X that puts a *NIX on my three Macs, my mothers iMac, my cousins iMac, G4 and iBook. It's going to be OS X that puts a *NIX on the desk of my grandmother...not Red Hat. It's going to be OS X that puts a *NIX on the desk of my boss...not SUSE that he ditched.
I screwed around with Yellow Dog PPC Linux this summer...but just wanted my old Mac OS functionality back. Now OS 9 on my five boxes is pretty danged stable...I have a couple of issues with Adobe products...but otherwise it just works. I can't wait for OS X.
I'm sure we're gonna get flames for this...but hey.
It seems to me that a year or so ago, apple suggested that the same binaries .
.
would run on MacOs X and on ppc mac. I don't know if they meant it,
or if they still due, but it would suggest that there's at least
a possibility . .
Then again, if I can run standard X applications at the same time,
I just may ask for a Mac wherever I land next fall . .
But there's no way I'm giving up LyX . . .
Actually, Dell will sell you the Lucent version for $140.
The Apple card is also nice because it uses the laptop's built in antenna, so you don't have an ugly attena sticking out of your pcmcia card. That's got to be an easy thing to break.
sigs are a waste of space
Yeah, but for $170 you still have an external attenna to worry about.
sigs are a waste of space
Maybe it's not so much that they're focused on case design now as that they were ignoring it before (and most still are). Making computers in your living room as natural as your TV takes more than higher clock-speeds and better operating systems - although that's part of it.
Apple's not breaking ground as quickly as it could be, but they need to be able to pay for all that R&D. If millions of iMacs being sold subsidizes work done on OSX, I'm all for it.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Yes, I know it shouldn't matter on a properly written foundation (which I admit OS9 doesn't really have), but I'd look toward your room-mate. A properly configured Mac can have well over a month or two of solid uptime (in my case, as a dedicated soft-router and occasional work machine).
Windows (not so much NT, but 9X), on the other hand, just kind of falls apart in my experience. On the Mac you may get crashes, but they're extremely easy to isolate and fix.
I'm hoping that, plus a halfway modern foundation, will come along with OSX. We'll see I guess.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Buy an upgrade. Pop a new G3 or G4 in there, and there you go.
What do you have?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
---
Looks like a nice bunch from Apple again. Hopefully they can deflate Steve's ego enough to get him out the door..
---
Why? Apple would be dead right now without him in charge.
Hell, just yesterday, the stock price topped out at its highest level ever, and they're rumored to be splitting Real Soon Now.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Heh, you don't have to tell me. I've got a PBG3 'Lombard' here in front of me and I wouldn't trade it for anything (except, maybe, one of those 500 Mhz ones just announced).
But I will agree, most of the Mac bashing is done:
1. By those who rarely use them.
2. By those who use very poorly treated Macs.
It's not the highlight in stability, but it beats the hell out of the alternative in other ways.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
I assume he was dragging and dropping icons in the Finder in order to open up a document. The same should have been accomplished by using the 'Open' menu item under the File menu.
Even the MacOS has some interface quirks, though. Someone who has never used a computer, or even worse one who is used to another kind, has to (re)train for some things...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
I was never a fan of the iBox colours
I have to agree. Although I like the iMac's sleek and colorful design, it just doesn't seem sexy with the iBooks. Just the opposite, they look like something that, upon opening, will reveal colorful stickers of Big Bird or Barney, or might play barnyard sounds. Maybe it's just the bright colors, but they look too much like my kids' toys. The graphite SE, though, looks like something I might could carry. (I guess I'm just not a colorful guy; when I bought my Dell Inspiron 3700 last year, I chose the boring gray over the cheesy blue. YMMV)
--Jim
The multiple suites of design, illustration, photo-manipulation, layout and print management are all Mac-based, and the people who use them are all mac users. I previously worked at a company where the vunderkin new-hire in the design department was a PC guy, and he needed a new fully loaded PC instead of the standard Design Mac that everyone else with his role had. $16,000 later, his machine was ready, and he went to work....
Was his computer made of solid gold? I just set up a digital video editing suite, including expensive DVMaster w/hardware codec and software for $6K. $16K? this sounds little too anecdotal to be truth. Show me the parts list!
I know for a fact, that he kept having to hand projects back to the Mac people, because his machine couldn't match the work that they produced, and in many cases, tools existed on the Mac that had no counterparts on the PC platform.
Yet another anecdote form the big pile of Mac FUD. What tools are these that don't perform as well on PC as do on Mac? What are these tools that don't exist on the PC. Names, please, and manufacturers.
I have used Macs as firewalls,
How did you multi-home with the mac? That's a task that I've needed to accomplish on several occasions.
Please respond with no malice, otherwise you'll be ignored.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Show me a PC that can handle 3 different size monitors of different resolutions and refresh rates for an illustration who uses a mouse, tablet, and trackball...
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
The Lombard (Bronze Keyboard) 333 and 400s also had dual display with video mirroring. I've used it several times, like the time I hooked it up to the 56" TV in the dorm at my friend's school.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
was looking at the powerbook specs, and i found something interesting:
:) if it's among the "hottest" graphics chips ever invented, i really don't see why they'd be putting it in a laptop, do you?? Who wrote that description and what were they thinking..?
One of the hottest graphics chips ever invented, the ATI RAGE Mobility 128 graphics controller has an advanced architecture that delivers spectacular 3D graphics performance in millions of colors.
Whoa!!! now is that the best way they could have possibly worded it??
somebody in Apple Engineering, quick, go over to Apple Marketing and PR and explain to them what heat is, and why it isn't a good thing in laptops, and why computers have fans in them.. -_-
btw, while you're over there, can you go and beat the shit out of whoever it was who designed the imac keyboard that came with my G4..? thanks.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This would be the case no matter what you buy. If you're posting on Slashdot, one would hope you have a clue about how the industry works. Two words: Moore's Law. Same for PC or Mac. Quit complaining about it.
Reality has a liberal bias
We've been waiting for this for more than 2 years now.
Canada finally has its own Apple Store. Yippee!!!!!
http://store.apple.com /1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/canadastore
Reality has a liberal bias
Um... what do you want to see, then?
Apple pushed USB to the forefront by not including a floppy and adding the USB port to their iMacs.
Was this only a year ago? Two years? Before then, good luck finding USB peripherals, I don't know that it was such a big thing on PCs. and only *now* are Compaq(iPaq), IBM(EON devices), etc. pushing USB and dropping a bunch of the older legacy devices.
Think the same, but now insert FireWire. A year from now, I expect FireWire to be everywhere for the high speed devices.
And look at what they're doing with IEEE 802.11, aka AirPort, WaveLan, whatever.
You question how Apple is producing products which define personal computing; the answer is that with wireless, our portables are truly portable while being connected to the network. With USB and FireWire, our devices gain the PnP capabilities that is traditionally associated with SCSI, but without such a price or complexity hit since both are serial standards(less complex cabling, IDs, connectors, and chaining).
What else is Apple going to do that will redefine personal computing? Adopting BSD/NeXT in MacOS X, giving the common man the power and reliablitity of Un*x, with the svelte and suave dress of the Mac UI.
I actually can't think of many other companies trying to do similar. Sony, for one, with their Memory Sticks, FireWire, camcorders, etc.
Palm, perhaps, with their PDAs and stuff.
So perhaps Apple isn't as exciting(to you), but they haven't stopped 'innovating'.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
isn't the revamped Powerbook or the notched up iBook, its the great support of the Japanese language by the Mac OS. Before, you apparantly would've had to spend $10,000 per machine for software that would provide the same functionality.
As this expo is in Tokyo, you can see why it would be a big deal.
IE is a notorious RAM and resource hog. That's why i never run it except to check my HTML coding to make sure it works. :)
I hate to see what 5.0 will do. More MS propaganda: they claim it runs in 5 Megs of RAM, yet it will automagically suck up any free RAM it can find while running. When will people learn?
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
If I got a PowerBook and put LinuxPPC on it (I'll never use MacOS, so that's out), could I do some cool wireless networking tricks?
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Your point is moot And don't even bother responding if unless you read the artical
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
No, dude. The difference between Premiere and iMovie is like the difference between emacs and your average word processor. iMovie is so that I can make a movie using an iMac and a video camera and it'll look halfway decent, maybe even pretty good if the lighting was good. Premiere is so someone with artistic vision, a lot of patience, and a lot of experience with Premiere can make something really beautiful. Premiere has a lot of capability, and it is really powerful, and it has a learning curve like you can't believe. In order to use Premiere to actually end up with a nice finished product, you have to know what you're doing. iMovie is like Premiere for the rest of us.
itachi
Here are the amended links for Hot News and the one for Marketing speak one.
--
May contain traces of nut.
Now, I haven't looked specifically, but I bet some enterprising individual has hacked together a Mac driver for the GeForce. And you're forgetting Voodoo3 (which is supposed to be damn good). Now, as for the only real use of AltiVec being games... well, Photoshop, for example, uses vector processing heavily. So do the video-editing tools that ship with the iMac DV. Apple is just trying to bring the sort of power that's traditionally been in the hands of professional video editors to the general public. This is a Good Thing.
Plus, this is maybe going to sound like flamebait, but I, personally, wouldn't be caught dead running Windows, and I'm not yet comfortable running exclusively Linux. Maybe things will change, maybe not. But the point is, some people are willing to pay the premium for an OS that just feels really slick. Count me among them!
--
There are probably a lot of mutterings among the market that Macs "aren't as fast" as PCs, given the staggering rise in MHz lately in the PC market (AMD and Intel are both shipping 800+ MHz versions, and planning to ship faster in the near future). Crusoe is going to debut at 700 MHz in the mobile market, isn't it? If so, then yes, I'd say that the speed is a factor here.
Let's just put this into perspective: the average computer user (I'm not talking about the average slashdot reader, here) doesn't know where the line can be drawn when it comes to MHz. The media preys on these people; "bigger is better" is what they tout, otherwise they wouldn't bother advertising the MHz number like they do (with phrases like "This system features a super-fast 750MHz Intel Pentium III processor"). They're hoping to catch people in the craze of buying the latest and greatest.
So, Apple raising the performance (and speed) bar on their chips will certainly help them say "Look, we can compete with their super-fast chips, by using our New Super-Duper-Fast Chips ". A lot of would-be Mac buyers will listen to this.
meisenst
Green's Law of Debate: Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
http://www.apple.com/powerboo k/pdf/PowerBook_DS-a.pdf
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
> Clock for clock An Athlon is 15-30%+ faster then a pIII as well.
And consumes 5x the power, and requires a die 4x the size. And the 15-30% premium of a G4 doesn't count AltiVec. Checked RC5 lately for processor benchmarks?
>Of course, a Mac with a 500mhz g4 costs $3,499 on the apple store, whereas pricewatch lists the cheapest 500mhz Athlon at $599. that's $2900 less. (800mhz costs $1300).
Compare equal boxes, dude:
128Mb vs. 32Mb RAM
27Gb vs. 4.2Gb HD
16Mb ATI Rage PRO vs. 4Mb no-name card
A better case than a PC can dream of (check out the door)!
The components overall are of higher quality. Checked the DOA rate of those dirt-cheap PCs lately?
Throw in economies of scale, Apple's R&D cost, plus the 'fastest of the fastest' premium (checked the price/Mhz of the most EXPENSIVE Athlon?) and of COURSE it's triple the price.
Don't get me wrong - Athlons are great processors - IMO they are the x86 equals to G4s, and when I buy a PC it will be an Athlon. Just don't let all the other considerations skew your opinions.
First, Apple had the Apple II. With Visicalc, they had a product to kill for.
Ok, the Lisa was a bit of an expensive turkey, but in the Macintosh, they produced a product to kill for.
Now they have a box with a number of components which wouldn't be out of place in your PC. They have a proprietary OS which is nothing out of the ordinary. And they have monitor cases to kill for (if you shop at IKEA).
Somehow, I feel slightly underwhelmed. Instead of producing products which define what personal computing is about, they are making machines which don't break any ground, but will match your interior decor.
I really hope they return to form soon, and produce something more innovative and exciting than a patented case design.
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
Wasn't this promised (and even available for ordering) several months ago?
Actually...
The iBookSE is the only Graphite one, the Blueberry and Tangerine are still out. But the SE is the 366MHz one. They all come with 64MB of RAM now and they all come with 6BG HDs...but the old ones only had a 3.2.
I think it's pretty sweet that every Macintosh model now has Airport capability, and 3 out of 4 models have Firewire.
Of course you could add an Airport compatible card to the PCMCIA slot of the old Powerbook...but it was $299 where the Airport card is $99 and you still have your PCMICA slots free since it goes under the keyboard.
---
Apple still keeping thier hardware specs to themselves? Well, I won't be buying a mac anytime soon then.
---
Hrm.
http://www.publicsource.apple.com/
http://www.totalimpact.com/
http://www.linuxppc.com/
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/
http://www.suse.com/ppc/
http://www.mklinux.org/
...perhaps you forgot the previous links? Note that in some of these cases, Apple has commited actual developers to producing open-sourced code.
Also note that Mac hardware has moved towards industry standard parts (NuBus to PCI, ADB to USB, etc), and has worked to detangle their OS from the hardware (ROM in RAM architecture, etc).
Then again, you probably weren't going to buy a Mac anyhow - this was just a good place to troll. Perhaps you were even drinking a little Be kool-aid...?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
The newer iBook:
I have to admit it is nice. It has a nice new graphite color and some internal improvements. I wonder if they have fixed that flimsy-feely keyboard. It made me think my hands weigh 10 pounds each. Very delicate hardware, and somewhat tiny keys. They doubled the ram and hdd which is of course a good thing.
It is interesting to note that it is one of the more expandable laptops I've seen recently, with a maximum 320 megs of ram. 366 is a decent speed for a portable device, especially when combined with RISC hardware. Unfortunately, you probably won't see much of an improvement until you run OSX client to take advantage of the chipset.
The G4:
I suppose Motorola caught up. Still upgrading the processor to 500mhz doesn't help much in a world full of 800 mhz PIIIs and Athlons. Should add a boost for professional video and photoshop folks out there.
The powerbook:
Late again. This was expected last month, but at least they put some polish on it. A 500mhz laptop is something to look at twice, regardless of the operating system it runs. Couple that with a max 512mb of RAM, and you have a nice little lapwarmer. I was fully expecting a G4 in this puppy, but I suppose I'll need to wait. 1 meg of backside cache is also a bonus. Oh yeah, it also has firewire ports. Nifty. One more thing: it only comes in one color. Thank the goddes for that one.
Looks like a nice bunch from Apple again. Hopefully they can deflate Steve's ego enough to get him out the door..
Lowmag.net
I like the black and white colour scheme, it would
be great to run Linux on it - the colours are
Tux-like! I wonder if you could put a yellow
beak on it or something to make it even more like
a Tux?
Substance: the shape of the case is such that if you drop it, the shock is spread out over the rest of the polycarbonate shell, instead of being concentrated on a corner and shattering it.
Style: integral handle
Substance: keeps you from dropping it. The handle looks very flimsy - it's not. try it out sometime; it will easily support a few times the iBook's weight.
Style: colored case
Substance: indifferent. for one thing, I'm not so insecure as to be embarrassed to be carrying a candy toilet seat. what do I have to prove? besides, it's not like they had to neuter the processor to make it candy-colored. There's still a dope machine inside.
I'm to lazy to elaborate on the six-hour battery life (from my experience, not a sales brochure), integrated Airport antenna, the finest trackpad I've used, integrated modem/Ethernet, fast battery charger, and any of the other things that you won't understand unless you use the machine before you mock it. Imagine that.
Silly troll.
Ok, I'll bite.
Uh. Hmm. I'd agree that the iMacs and iBooks aren't for everyone. But can you really call that Powerbook a toy? Does Sony's Vaio have a Rage 128 chip in it? I mean, I'd take one if given to me, but can it even do 3D? Is it interesting to anyone else how a toy company can affect so much of the industry? Besides the color thing, there's USB adoption, Firewire, and Mac OS X around the corner. I don't see Fisher Price supporting opensource projects like Darwin, do you? Man, buy the thing and throw LinuxPPC 2000 on it, if you want. Apple is far from perfect. I've had to work with them, so believe me, I know. But it's just amazing to me how old, unfounded grudges don't die.
Ah well.
-doenermord
Don't blame the games. It takes a village to screw up a child.
Nice to see the iBook in the Graphite though - I was never a fan of the iBoox colours - they seemed to suit the iMac more than theiBook.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
A lot of PC users snicker at the Mac as a toy and say that it can't do any real work. Well, get off your high horse and face reality... I am a tech-consultant / system technician, and my area of expertise is the Mac, over a decade of use and 6 years of the techical side.
I've worked with just about everything out there, SGI, Alpha, Data General, *nix, Linux, BeOS, Amigia... you name it, I've been called on to fix it, and by far, I prefer the Mac. Admittedly, the PC market has the larger footprint in the business world, but look at the markets where Macintosh is the de-facto standard. Graphic Design and Print Production are where the Mac's rule, and they rule with an iron fist.
I'm presently working at Putnam Financial Investments, and we have an enclave here of 140 Mac users... the only ones in the entire company, and they are here to stay. Periodically, someone in management makes some noise about standardizing on the PC's for the entire company and switching out the Macs here.
They talk about standardizing, repurposing assets and other PHB-speak, but they get squashed like a bug when word gets out to the people who manage and work the design department.
The multiple suites of design, illustration, photo-manipulation, layout and print management are all Mac-based, and the people who use them are all mac users. I previously worked at a company where the vunderkin new-hire in the design department was a PC guy, and he needed a new fully loaded PC instead of the standard Design Mac that everyone else with his role had. $16,000 later, his machine was ready, and he went to work....
I know for a fact, that he kept having to hand projects back to the Mac people, because his machine couldn't match the work that they produced, and in many cases, tools existed on the Mac that had no counterparts on the PC platform. All that work, and non-recoverably investment, was hampered by the fact that he was trying to mimic the Mac's capabilities, a sobering thought when you consider that when he leaves, his machine will be given to the CFO's assistant because none of the other designers want to touch the damn thing.
Admitedly, I'm ranting about a specialized segement of the computer-using population, but understand this. The Macintosh has not survived this long, and kept it's integrity as a cutting edge machine for creative and design work, by being second best. The Mac you see on the market today is the product of selective breeding, the machine that has evolved to fill the needs of people in high-production environments and creative positons.
The Mac was not built as and Enterprise server.
It was not made as a thin-client.
It was not made to be a gaming platform (yet!)
And people still insist on pushing it into those roles and judging it's performance against systems that are built for those tasks. I have used Macs as firewalls, servers, kiosks, data-aquisition clients, and remote access terminals. I have found the most efficient ways to use the Mac in these roles, and dealt with the issues that arise. The Macinosh isn't perfect. But don't compare Apples to Oranges and then ridicule the Mac when it isn't all things to all people... Compare the Apple to the competitors that want to take it's market share. Show me a PC that can fill the shoes of a Design Mac in a high-flow Advertising Agency. Show me a PC that can handle 3 different size monitors of different resolutions and refresh rates for an illustration who uses a mouse, tablet, and trackball. Show me a PC that matches my Mac, and I'll be impressed. but untill I see designers with Intel Inside on their desks, I'm going to keep my Mac...
"If I can't take my Mac with me to heaven when I die, I'm not going."
- Anonymous Mac-Marine
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse