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Apple Updates at MacWorld
fishboy writes "There are updates to apple's product line and, most significantly, a significant update to OS X-- 10.1 that features improved performance, dvd support and a seamless client for windows-based networking." Here is coverage
of the keynote from
macnn.com and info about OSX.1
on apple's site (quicktime required to read much beyond the homepage). Looks like wireless setup might be fixed up (hazah!) but mainly those speed improvements are needed.
What do you need quicktime for beyond looking at the QuickTime-3d models and the GUI animations? Specifically, what do you need QuickTime for to read or navigate?
I mean, yes, ooo, evil non-Linux-supporting proprietary software and everything, but gratuitous shots like that just encourage the mob mentality mentioned in CmdrTaco's previous article.
Ok, blow by blow:
;)
;)
#2: The fastest Mac is NOT slower then the fastest Wintel. Perhaps you need to go back and watch the keynote. A sub-GHz G4 spanks a P4 1.7+ GHz machine. Also, please let them stabalize OS X before they start messing with the hardware
#3: They have the longest battery life. Even with an active TFT screen. iBook or TiBook will score you 5+ hours in life. My PC notebook is lucky to make 2. Don't even talk about a nonlit screen, that would be one of the worst blunders Apple could make.
#4: The Newton will return....
-1, stupid mac zealot. PCs are faster -- they dont perform in photoshop because of altivec but know this -- they are faster. by a wide margin.
Seems to me Apple would reach a wider market if they kept up a wider range of machines. Freedom of choice hasn't exactly hurt the Intel world.
Try opening a 5k by 4k pixel image in Gimp. And another. And another. These are the base images. Now start adding other, equivalently sized layers and images. You'll quickly discover that Gimp memory usage/allocation stragegies are based on much smaller images. (Typically web graphics are much smaller than graphics for print publication.)
This, before we even talk about color separation ability on a wide variety of imagesetters, is a major problem.
2. The 733 model is not a new model, and what makes you think the 3-4 week ship time for the new models is wrong? It takes no more than a couple hours for a desktop box to go through the assembly and testing process prior to shipping. If the quoted time is 3-4 weeks, that doesn't mean they haven't built one yet, it means that they are waiting on parts orders to be fulfilled. It's most likely that availability of the new CPUs is poor to due low yields - something that's typically encountered at the introduction of a new processor.
3. I suggest you take a look at these benchmarks. On average, a 500MHz G4 performs like a 700MHz Athlon or 800MHz PIII. In benchmarks that take advantage of Altivec, it performs on the level of a 1GHz Athlon or 1.2GHz PIII. In some certain cases, it performs 2-4 times better at the same clock speed, but in other certain cases, it performs worse at the same clock speed. To me, that means an 867 with the 2 MB backside cache is probably still a little behind a 1.2 GHz Athlon in overall performance and is only faster at a small set of Altivec enabled Photoshop filters and not much else. The fact is that MHz is still the best indicator of performance within any given processor family.
Oh come on. OSX 10.0.x sucks ass; it's not even really useful to more than a handful of people. It's a beta release, despite the name. I've been playing with it off and on (treating it as a beta) and it's got a lot of potential, and I'm fairly confident that the real 1.0 release (which Apple calls 10.1) will be a good enough product that I will finally be able to use it as my primary OS. Until that time, I'm stuck with Mac OS 9.1 (or 9.2 if they'll release it, please please please).
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I've been wondering about Athlons too... probably because Intel is a much more well-known brand. I haven't see any Athlons that are as much faster than an equivalently-clocked Pentium than the G4 is (30-100%), so it wouldn't change the outcome of the contest.
OS X isn't optimized for any video cards right now. Quartz is based on Display Postscript and uses lots of bezier curves and alpha blending, which current 2D cards do not accelerate. Only dragging windows uses the hardware at all, and only for the opaque part of the window.
Ummm. Why don't you just buy an iBook then? If you're in college you'd have a portable computer that can do everything the iMac can for only a few hundred dollars more... albeit with a really tiny hard drive, but hey, that's what firewire is for right?
Classic shouldn't go away, Classic should be around for a long time. People should be able to run their old Mac software on a current machine. What should go away is the *need* to run Classic for common tasks. All current Mac developers should Carbonize or, even better, rebuild as Cocoa all their apps. But there's lots of software that people use that won't get Carbonized and the users shouldn't be penalized for that.
Split-adjusted, The share price got to ~$75, and is now around $20.
Of course, split-adjusted, M$ bought that stock for about $5-7. Everyone likes a 300% profit.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
I think you're being a little unfair to Apple. If you compare the cheapest Intel machine against the cheapest Apple then, yes, the Mac is more expensive (albeit significantly better engineered).
If you compare like-with-like Apple comes out much better. I'm seriously tempted to buy an iBook as there's nothing at the price that comes close (IMHO).
That depends a lot. Does "ripping" include encoding as mp3 or ogg/vorbis? Is a fast encoder, or a super high quality VBR encoder? Oh, and does your actual reading program just suck data off the drive once, or does it do it multiple times (like CD paranoia) to make sure there are no skips (or to get a good shot at correcting them at least)?
Oh, and how many CD readers do you have?
Make sure you use the same version of gcc. For example the OSX version will use pre-compiled headers (possibly slowing it down the first time you run it on something with a lot of headers...or maybe speeding it up as the system headers are precompiled). The mainline gcc hasn't picked these changes up for various reasons (the large one being it only works for C and Objective C, not C++, not Java, nor...)
There is a Cocoa (or maybe Carbon) version sort of limping along. There doesn't seem to be much info on it though, which is too bad because while I don't really need the GIMP I have written some GTK+ apps that I would like to port to OSX... and if the GIMP was ported by re-targeting the GTK+ toolkit (which seems reasonable) then that would help me a whole whole lot...
You do know that there are professionals that couldn't give a squat about print work, don't you? Some people do web work, even now after the Great Crash. Some people do video work (well, they would be mad to use the gimp frame by frame, but...).
There are even professionals that don't do color balancing for their prints, they may take and touch up someone's picture, but then they send it out for printing just like they did for wet prints. Go look at the digital photographers forums if you doubt me, many are saying it is more economical to let a regular color lab do that part of the work (granted, that is a item of perpetual debate, much like vi vs. emacs is for Unix programmers...)
Actually I find the GIMP much better to use then Adobe's PhotoDelux. The only thing PhotoDelux has that GIMP lacks is a usable smart selection (auto trace) tool. GIMP has one, but last time I tried to use it it didn't work very well. There are several touch up jobs I have done almost identical work on similar pictures under each tool, and the GIMP was much better, in part because GIMP has multiple levels of undo while Adobe saves that feature for the professional products.
I will admit that GIMP lacks any of the "guided tour" items like the step-by-step "trick perspective" or "make a lame-o frame" items that PhotoDelux has, but all the real features are there.
Plus I can tell you 100% for sure, GIMP is way easier to use then doing the equivalent tricks in a wet lab. It really sucks to not only have no undo, but for it to take 4 to 10 minutes per try at dodging, plus costing you $0.50 of paper each time you try (or more for good fiber prints...).
I doubt GIMP can stand up to PhotoShop Elements let alone the full-strength PhotoShop though.
Are we sure the bigger form factor is easier to manufacture? I mean you will have to do some styling, which will eat up some of the savings of not having hinges. Also bigger is more material, not less. You might be able to save a little by using less rugged plastic/rubber bits.
But you get custom motherboard engineering anyway, it is a Mac after all, it's not like they can call 15 shops in Asia and ask to see completed designs (granted that is Steve's fault for killing the clones).
How is the video cheaper? Or the sound? Or the network? I thought they were the same between the iMac and iBook (actually better speakers on the iMac). I know the network is the same (built in 10/100, and 56K modem, both have a slot for the 802.11, and an antenna for the 802.11, but neither have a 802.11 in the base cost).
So I don't see $299 of savings. Unless the battery itself costs almost $200! Plus I really think if you bring out a iMac with a LCD about the same size as the iBook it it has to cost a lot lot less because the iBook will be so much more tempting... (same expendability on both systems, same smallish screen, why not go for the one that can play movies on the airplane?)
[blockquote]Sounds promising. Which reminds me, how is the BSD Ports conversion going? that would be very nice to have done, but an awful lot of those items are not exactly high priority consumer items.[/blockquote]
Like this:
http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/ports/
I have exactly the same model Mac, and while no speed demon compared to top-of-the-line hardware it feels (subjective, I know) dramatically faster than the two 500 Mhz Dell PIII's I use at work (one running NT, the other running a 2.4 kernel) for the "everyday" tasks: browsing, text editing, light graphics work, etc.
How much RAM do you have in it? Taking my iMac from 128 MB to 384 MB about doubled its subjective performance in OS X.
Wall mounts? Meh. That's alright for some, but what I'd really want would be a gitanic concave screen, since ultimately people tend to pivot around a particular spot, and would want the same image, corrected for distortion. The Starfire demo had one of those, and is nowhere near to having accurately predicted much at all. ;)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Define "supported". FreeBSD now has Boris Popov's smbfs in the CVS tree, for example; it looks as if it's been MFC'ed, so it's at least in -stable.
There's also an SMB client and server available for MacOS Classic from Thursby Software.
No, it hasn't. Heck, I think that one of the earliest SMB clients servers was an SMB implementation for Xenix (yeah, the version of UNIX that those people did, a long time ago) from Intel, called OpenNet or something such as that, and, as already indicated, there already exist SMB file system clients (i.e., transparent clients, not FTP-like clients) for FreeBSD and MacOS classic.
You're talking about two separate issues here.
Mac OS X 10.1 will include Apple's DVD Player. Steve did a demo in the keynote (tho it crashed once). When it ships in September, G4 systems running OS X will be able to play DVDs. The new iMacs, however, won't.
The reason they have "no way to playback DVDs" has nothing to do with Mac OS X, gdb, Apple's software engineering failures, or anything along these lines. There's one reason, and one reason alone, why they can't do it:
They don't ship with a DVD drive. Simple, huh?
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Breakfast served all day!
This was inevitable, given Apple's move to Unix. It was just a matter of time before they ported smbmount to Darwin--or recreated it--and tied it into their network volume mounting UI.
Which means likely death to Thursby, makers of DAVE, the most popular SMB/CIFS client for MacOS. Maybe their Mac OS X port--now in open beta--will ship with some features or performance advantages that will keep it in some niche. Say, Active Directory integration or much better filetype mapping. Not likely though. I'm surprised they didn't see this coming. I guess nobody at Thursby has used a Unix-family OS that can run smbmount. If they had, they might have cashed out the company and gone into EOL support mode while they found something else to do.
Despite being a rabid Mac fan (see my other posts), I have to concede this one. The lack of DVD playback is especially odd considering how much time Steve devoted to iDVD (which indeed looks like a very cool application).
They did bump up the memory, but considering how cheap RAM is nowadays, that's hardly even a consideration.
Apple isn't going away even if this one move doesn't work out. Apple's making their real money on notebooks and G4 desktops anyway. They have enough cash so they should be able to survive this round of product updates, but I think in September they'll really need to make some good announcements.
Like I said in a prevous message, it's not like Mac users have any particularly appealing options in the other camp, unless it's a SGI Octane on eBay. Pity I couldn't afford the software licenses.
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I would think the dual 800mhz system would fix the performance deficit you're struggling with quite nicely, albiet expensively.
I really love being able to use my MacOS X system to do geeky Unix stuff and mainstream graphics stuff, so that keeps me a pretty much committed Mac user; where else is there to go that has so much potential?
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I thought MacGimp was an X-Windows application, not cocoa.
However, you must recognize that the learning curve for most graphics software is a vertical cliff, so when totally different graphics apps come up, they are not as rapidly taken in by the biz as one might hope.
Also, remember that once you've bought Photoshop, you can get $200 updates, and that's not too significant a sum for people making major bucks with it. Heck, these are the people who buy the 500mhz Titanium G4 notebooks ($3,500) and the dual 800mhz G4 towers ($3,500).
I've found that as I grow older and richer, I find myself more and more ready to pay money to the nice folks at Apple and Adobe for their stuff. It's not free, true, but it's been refined over a long period of time by professionals who really know what they're doing.
Please bear with me; I don't mean that as insulting to the Gimp team, who have done a fantastic job. But Photoshop encompass decades (literally!) of graphic arts experience, and has been refined through decades of use. It's difficult for someone without similar advantages to create a product that will be accepted by the graphic arts community.
There are also a lot of issues surrounding the Gimp's use of RGB colour, although they don't affect me specifically. Few people who do professional prepress work could do anything with the Gimp.
Hope that aids in understanding.
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It's really too bad today's business world is so much about "rush, rush, rush". The Steve Jobs ethic is very much "futz with it until you finally get it right". It may be annoying now, but September is only about a month and a half away. If you consider how long we've been waiting for this, I'd say we can hang on a couple more months.
:-).
:-).
And Puma certainly looks awesome from what I could see. So chill out. I know it would have been nice to see 300ghz G7s unexpectedly introduced, but think how lousy that would make you feel about your current Mac
I just hope September brings with it cool new hardware. But I suppose since there's no new hardware of significance this month, it's time to buy the Cinema Display I've always wanted
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Not quite. The first time they sold dual CPU models, they introduced the dual 450 and dual 500 at the usual $2,500 and $3,500 price points. What you were probably seeing is the previous model 500 going up against the current 450 (which is the machine I own).
:-(. A little corner of me resents it; another corner of me says it's how Apple survives and thrives in tough times, get over it, etc.
Before today, they sold the dual 533 at a price point below the single 733, most likely because MacOS 9 made the 733 work more consistently for all Mac software, while the dual 533 was better for MacOS X users and Photoshop/Final Cut Pro addicts. It was still ironic then to see the fastest machine in many applications $1,000 cheaper than the top-line system.
Today, because of the gathering acceptance of MacOS X, we see more logical pricing. You're probably right about the dual 800s versus the single 866 - but in that case, I sure wish the dual 800s weren't $1,000 more expensive than the 866. True, you get 128mb more RAM, but that's something like $20 on the open market nowadays.
I'm afraid Apple milks the pocketbooks of the people with giant egos who want the latest, greatest and fastest, with products like the Titanium PowerBook 500 ($1,000 more expensive than the only slightly slower 400) and the G4 dual 800 ($1,000 more expensive than the 866). Unfortunately, people like me with big egos are all too likely to succumb
D
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I attended the keynote by proxy - I was at the Glendale Apple Store at 6:00am for the keynote broadcast. (Well, I was ten minutes late, actually, but got most of it).
:-(.
..." it's always tomorrow.
... or ... um ... or ... cough. And that's the problem, isn't it? It's not like we're going to switch to Windows or Linux, is it? (Well, I have a Linux machine or two as well - but you get the idea) :-(
The good news is that the Puma upgrade to MacOS X looks like it will be awesome, with the speed gremlins totally vanquished.
More good news is that it looks like most of the vital vendors are fully on target to release OSX applications. We had demos from Adobe, Quark, a few game people Microsoft, and so on. (I must confess that the Microsoft Office demo was surprisingly cool). There will be no lack of software for OSX.
Except Photoshop, which was conspicuous by its absence in the Adobe demo. Looks like Adobe is coming out with the first upgrades for software in markets with genuine competition (Illustrator has Freehand, InDesign has Quark, and GoLive has a few million competitors). Photoshop, well, is Photoshop. Nuff said
The iMacs were all but unchanged. The adventures in plastic moulding are all gone; Indigo, Snow and Graphite return. There was a decent speed bump and CD R/W throughout the line, but nothing that would really thrill as far as I could see.
The new PowerMacs were significant improvements over the old ones, but nothing to make me run over to the store and replace my dual G4/450 straight away. The 733 is now at the bottom of the line, which is a nice bump from the older 466-odd models. The 867 is also nice but less than one would hope. But what's with dual 800s? Why not dual 867s? Surely availability can't be a major problem with the 867s in the mainstream of the line.
All in all, it looked like most of the great stuff was in the future. It's time to go back to bed, snore and dream of September and MacOS 10.1. Then, we Mac fans should have something to rave about.
"The sun comes out, tomorrow
Come September, we'd better see some changes or
D
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Microsoft bought $150 million of nonvoting shares. Hardly significant, esphecially since they've probably sold it by now.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
You should look into installing a DNS server, at least that way anyone, no matter what their OS can access the network. You shoul take a look at OS X server as that is definetly a server OS for a hetrogenious environment.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I supposes the big difference is that no one has been bitching about Win2000 release 1. Also since MacOS X lives on top of a Unix base and is user friendly, any improvements are a target for Linux users and developers to aim for and beat.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Maybe Apple should have Steve cryogenicly frozen while they're still doing well. They could stay out of trouble but still have him around if they get into a jam again.
Note: nothing against Apple here. Before I was shown the Free Software Way, I owned all sorts of their products;all of the ][s at one time or another, a Powerbook, even a Lisa(!).
Thursby recently released an free, unsupported, beta of DAVE to access Windows networks.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
upgrade. So far the build I have is stable, but i would like to see some speed tweaks now .
Now we need Apple to get into the enterprise market, port to Intel, and undercut MS so bad that billy squeals like the pig he is.
photosMy Photostream
Apple posts a $61 million profit this quarter (when other high-tech companies are having huge layoffs), has $4 billion in the bank, and releases several new, wildly successful products this year and Wall Street still doesn't like them.
Of course, you forgot to mention that Apple reported a net profit of $200 million in this same quarter last year. So Apple did post a $61 million profit, but their profits are down 70%. And now Steve Jobs is stoked to unveil his expensive, unproven retail stores. Unfortunately, Wall Street is not nearly as stoked on Apple retail stores..
Source: Apple Juiced on Earnings
cpeterso
I have 2 mac clones.. I'm very happy with them. My next machine will be a mac.
I've been very happy with my machines. They've been painless in terms of both OS and hardware (I've upgraded the CPU and memory added 2nd video card... all easy). It seems a lot of thought was put into the machines. I had a quantum harddrive I added fail (twice actually, the one covered under warrenty failed too...), but the original IBM drive is still ticking 5+ years later.
The machines aren't cheap, but they last a long time, and save me lots of time and hassle, and after working with computers all day (HPUX) and fixing some friends windows pc's they work great.
OS-Xs unix underpinnings make the decision easier (I can perl and grep!!!)
The old machines make good LinuxPPC servers too!
Wing Commander III for the Macintosh doesn't NEED no stinkin' speech accessory pack. WC3 was the first of the "Interactive Movie" WC games, with like real actors and stuff. (well, if you count Mark Hamill...)
WC4 Mac was also pretty damn cool. Just wish I could have talked Origin into letting me keep the Power Mac 9500 I was testing it on...darnit.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Do you know what's the going price for x86 equivalent of the apple MB ( all 64bit pci,quality pcb, etc etc )... about $500-600... same goes for the casing and other components.
So, whenever you compare, at least compare it to similar things... like the SGI x86 workstations or High end HP and Dell workstations.
You will actually see that macs are cheaper.
Am really sick and tired of people comparing apple hardware with e-machine type pc's, WHICH ARE NOT on the same league.
If you want to accuse apple of something, accuse them of not making low end hardware, but don't attack their prices, when you don't compare them to the ACTUAL X86 EQUIVALENT.
heh
First of all, I'm a Mac fan, have been using Mac since 1993. Now, I'm not critisizing Slashdot either, but is it really stuff that matters?
This thing is not going to ship before Sept and this is just an update.
Jesus, there is NO news at MacWorld at all. It does not mean the Mac is dead. So don't post something up there to feel better about the future of the Mac platform, thanks.
We should post something about Win2000 SP2 no??
I didn't want to sound flamebait, sorry
but raising the entry bar like that is going to get them slaughtered in the market. Especially the education market. Where's the incentive to keep buying iMacs if the price keeps going up?
Um I think you should have read the news.com article
"However, Apple Vice President Phil Schiller told CNET News.com that the company is keeping a $799 entry-level iMac for the education market, an acknowledgment that price is the key factor for many schools.
http://Lenny.com
Look at it other ways. Speed isn't everything to every user. I like Mac's because the things I use most are tightly integrated into their systems. Video editing is one. iDVD and iTunes are other examples. Very few, if any, companies have pulled of the same quality integration. OSX is getting better. It is now at the point that I can use it 80% (other 20% spent in OS 9 native) of the time.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Yeah, if you can spare approx $300, you can order G4 towers with the geforce 3. BTW, the GeForce 2's in the Mac's are MX's, so they are memory crippled and somewhat disappointing when it comes to performance expectations...
Quartz is based on Display Postscript
No, it's based on Display PDF - big difference actually.
Not only that, but Apple stole the damn slogan "The Center of Your Digital World" from Intel. My digital world only has one center, thank you very much.
For more information, click here.
ROFL!
in addition you can take the Mac/Apple referrences and change them to Linux/Linus when new kernels are announced.
funniest
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
taking a cue from VW's new Beetle S (Sport Edition), the iMac is getting beefed up suspension, a more agressive aerodynamic kit and an additional 20 horsepower.
it will be available with manual or automatic transmission and come in paisely, plaid or courderoy.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
How fast does each machine compile the same program using gcc? (Mac OS X and pretty much all distro's of Linux ship with it, so it is an easy test to run).
That's not a good comparison, unless most of what you do is compile. IIRC, compiling for RISC processors (i.e., the G4) is more work than compiling for CISC processors (x86). In other words, even though you're compiling the same program, the Mac has a harder task. Try copying a CD track to AIFF or WAV on your hard drive, then time ripping from that. That gives you a good measure of HD speed, general IO, memory speed, and processor speed. Of course, make sure your Mac has a ripper optimized for AltiVec (and a similarly optimized version on the PC).
Good work. Except you're obviously not a Mac loyalist -- you were way too easy on Apple.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
They were all tech glitches which is to be expected from pre-release software: MacOS X 10.1 isn't shipping till September. They've got 6 weeks to take care of these relatively minor issues.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Apple is a company trying to make money.
...
... yea a Ferrari 355 will blow the doors off of a Honda S2000, but you can get five or six S2000s for the price of one 355. COME ON! The Honda stimulates my need just as much as the Ferrari, and I can get one for my friend too.
;-)
Oh dear gods imagine that: a company fufilling its fiduciary obligation to its shareholders.
Seems kind of communist to me
I think you meant fascist, especially since you accused apple of being capitalists above.
The MacOS 9.x and previous interfaces were quite limiting (not very customizable)
UI not customizable under MacOS 9.x? http://kaleidoscope.net/
UI not customizable under MacOS X?
http://www.ResExcellence.com/themes/
A price comparison if you will
You remind me of those guys that take a cheap Honda hatchback, trick it out, drop in a bigger engine and put a big tailpipe on it. Course it'll run fast, but it's still a cheap Honda hatchback at its core. Me... I'd rather buy a Mercedes. Sure, it may not run as fast as your Honda or be as affordable---but it's built a good bit better and doesn't sound like a chainsaw.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
I'm not refering to add on customizations. Look at the built in software packages. Microsoft's OS package includes the ability to manipulate the UI and even has a load of themes, with more to download from their website. Apple started to, but then dropped the whole thing.
Yes, and some people have reverse engineered that same API and are developing their own themes. Isn't this a good thing? It's not as though Apple pulled the functionality out---they simply didn't bother fully implementing. True it would have been better if Apple had documented that API, but they didn't.
The themes resource I pointed out for MacOS X requires zero add-on software to MacOS X. Kaleidoscope, though, is in the same vein as something like Stardock---a 3rd party themeing add-on for Windows.
And yes, I belive you are correct - I ment fascist. Apple is much like a dictatorship. Why would anyone fund that when they have so many better choices?
You already said it: If you don't like what Apple does, don't buy from Apple. But that doesn't explain why a lot of people (24 million or so, last quarter) chose to buy Macs over an x86 box. A lot of us buy Macs because, for the job, it's the better machine. Forget about Apple's Photoshop tests: a G4/733 outpaces an Intellistation 1.1 GHZ P3 in nearly every Photoshop operation you can throw at it, including ones that aren't Altivec optimized (example: mode conversions aren't optimized for Altivec, but run faster on a G4)
Though not everyone may understand it, some people do place form over function---iMac buyers, Cube buyers, etc. It does become a valid consideration when total experience is factored in. if you think an iMac looks nicer sitting on your desk than a Dell, and does what you need, great---buy the iMac if you want to pay the premium for form.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
The new iMacs all just have a CD-RW drive...no DVD or combo drive in ANY model. Bit of a disappointment there.
A review I've read indicates that OS X system response is less than stellar on a 400 MHz G3. Maybe OS X.1 will fix that (I'm guessing that that's what people are referring to as "speed gremlins"), but meanwhile I'll wait until it comes out and find out for myself.
Incidentally, the Yellow Dog Linux review posted earlier on /. has some more real-world performance metrics than Apple marketing's Photoshop tests and show that the lower real-world system performance may be endemic to the G3/4 processors slower clock speeds. The summary is that a 500 MHz G4 is roughly equivalent to an 800 MHz Pentium III.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Even so, the architecture of the G3 didn't change AFAIK, so you would only figure a 20% decrease in latency. Maybe that's enough to go from terribly laggy to not so laggy, but I think I would want to wait until OS X.1 actually comes out and try it on an iBook before dropping lots of money on one.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Slashdot: News for Numerically-Challenged Nerds. Some Stuff that Matters.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Profit doesn't drive stock prices. Success doesn't drive stock prices. Expectations drive stock prices, and when profit and success do not meet expectations, then the stock price will fall. Expectations are usually based on a company's predictions for that quarter, so in this case, Apple probably fell on its own sword.
On a side note, I would love an G4 Powerbook or iBook with MacOS X if a) the price weren't so high, or b) the hardware requirements didn't make the price so high. A pretty box and a pretty interface don't matter if you can't afford either. That is why, IMHO, Apple has not been able to penetrate the market.
Apple's cease-and-desist tactics have also made them less than endearing to me. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
You sound like those hippies saying "You promised us a drug free America and I want my free drugs now."
Best Slashdot Co
If you take any of the apple laptops today and turn the screen brightness to off, any sufficient external light source still allows you to see it. Working outside on a sunny day, you might as well turn it off, since the backlighting provides almost no benefit.
Probably the LCDs are not designed to capture and reflect light as well as the gameboy, but if you want to save battery and have the lighting for it, just turn your display 'off'. I do it all the time (500MHz Pismo).
11223 said:
>Well, since Samba is open source,
>it works just fine on OS X as it is now.
See the subject, it says _client_.
If you've ported smbfs to work with Darwin so that SMB shares can be mounted _now_ in Mac OS X without Dave or Sharity, well, people wanna know.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
But they don't mention whether or no these mounted shares are available to Classic apps.... they're not now, which severely limits their utility.
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
>Put linux on both and compile a kernel and lets see who is faster.
Well, now! There's a *real world* benchmark!
Compilation and linking tends to be disk-bound.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What the heck is going on with Apple's stock? They announce new products and a profit this quarter and their stock promptly drops 4 points. That is not even close to the other weird thing: the drop was linked to Steve Jobs's keynote.
If you take a look at the intraday chart for that day, you can see that the stock started dropping right at the start of the keynote (9:30 AM ET) and stopped dropping about an hour later (I can assume this is when he stopped talking.) The stock pretty much stayed level the rest of the day.
I will never understand the craziness of the stock market.
To whit:
:)
1. Right. A wall-mount is useless when you're sitting in your bed with a keyboard in your lap unless the screen is at least 36". 56", if you, y'know, code or do something with text. How many people spend the majority of their day with their face less than five feet from a wall, anyway? If you think the cinema display is pricey, well, try forking over the cost of a 56" plasma screen.
2. I can't contest that, because I haven't done the reading. My boss uses an Athlon gigahertz with 768 megs of RAM. I have a G4 733 with 256 of RAM. He boots faster. I beat him to a bloody, oozing, wimpering PULP in photoshop and video rendering. Oh, and stability. I rebooted my G4 sometime last week, and he went down about seven times today.
3. My Pismo batteries last four hours, and I can hold two. My friend's Dell laptop (PIII 600 or close) goes maybe two and a half. The power PC chip runs a hell of a lot cooler than the x86 could ever hope to- Apple already has the lead here, and removing the backlight is going to please one person- you. You obviously haven't used a gameboy under conditions other than optimal, have you?
4. I laugh. You think that 15" iMac monitor is too small? A single 15" touchscreen goes for about 1,200$ these days, if you want it to pull 1024x768. Compare to 100$ for a keyboard and mouse, and 200$ for a half-decent, mid-sized monitor. Touchscreens are practically worthless for anything other than kiosks- ever try to right click? Click and drag? Set up file permissions or networking? And name me one person that can talk intelligibly faster than he can type legibly.... (no, not SPELL correctly, just get the point across).
This is ridiculous- flamebate trying to struggle into the ill-fitting suit of a well-founded argument.
See three comments up on the main story page. 9.2 is out.
Although güd Mr Jobs didn't announce it, OS 9.2 has been (somewhat) released. You can't download it yet, but OS 9.2 is running on the fancy new G4s at the Apple booth at Macworld. (They're running OS X 10.0.4 as the current OS, but 9.2 starts up for Classic applications.) Classic launched about twice as fast on the dual 800 that I was using as compared to my Pismo 400 powerbook. Don't know how much of that is 9.2 being good and how much is the machine. I'm guessing more of the latter. Anyway, it should be available soon.
Another good speculation I heard was that licencing issues relating to DVD software forced Apple to reduce the possibility of reverse-engineering the DVD playback software somehow, since MacOS X software is more hackable than earlier versions, since any program can be executed within gdb.
I'm not really sure why real-time kernel issues would factor into the performance, since they managed to port Quicktime over (though, granted, it's slower than it was in OS9).
I've been working with Puma for a while now (NDAed, of course), and there are a few issues that Apple apparently considered show-stoppers that other companies would ship with and fix later (M$ service packs, anyone?)
As a Mac developer for a company that has a very close relationship with Apple, I like getting bleeding edge OS builds usually only hours after they are done. As an Apple/Mac user since the very beginning, I like knowing that when they do ship, it's working product.
--
"We're an apex predator with the fecundity of a base level herbivore... We're a virus with shoes..." RazorJAK
The new iMacs are faster and more saner looking, not to mention more RAM and more HD space. Price increase is expected.
Let's see, how about we introduce a slightly faster iMac with NO way to play DVDs (so much for the Digital Hub concept) and make it $100 more then the previous low-end model. WTF?
I don't necessarily need or want a flat-panel iMac, but raising the entry bar like that is going to get them slaughtered in the market. Especially the education market. Where's the incentive to keep buying iMacs if the price keeps going up?
A lot of speculation has it that the price increase is to prepare people for the costs of the eventual flat-panel model, so that Apple can say "See? It's the same price as our previous ones!" Well, that's great, but I think I'd be happier with cheaper models now to ensure a steady revenue stream so that there'll be a flat-panel iMac later....
--
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
You may reconsider your wall mount desire once you see it done. With the typical desk size, a wall mounted screen will be twice as far from your eyes as now, and look 75% smaller.
Try backing away 2 feet from your screen and see if you like working that way. I wouldn't.
there wasn't a new iMac with a flat panel. The 15" LCD is down to $499 tho.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
Another issue with touch-screen and voice activated computers... what about deaf users?
That's one of the major reasons why I've never been terribly excited over the idea of being able to talk to my computer or have it talk to me -- what good is that going to do me? It's fine as an extra option, I suppose, but since mouse and keyboard are the best option I have for interfacing with a computer, I'd rather not see those tossed anytime soon. :)
WTF? I am shocked that Steve didn't introduce COM that Microsoft has had for years! And why didn't the PowerMac G4 come in a decahydron shape instead of these fucking, gay toys for Macfags. Clearly Apple is never going to provide the leading Infiniband technology because they are so far out of touch with computerphile. Instead they spend all their time cracking down on macworld.com and writing crap like Quicktime that I'll never use. Aw, fuck it, I'll switch to WinXP. That will show those suits in Cupertino. Just as soon as it supports Aqua and has a better user interface than Mac OS X. Watch out, Steve, you're going to lose a 11 year Apple loyalist!
Someone you trust is one of us.
> Using Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro! That is
> the only reason that the G4 was faster than
> the Intel 1.8Ghz machine. Put linux on both and
> compile a kernel and lets see who is faster.
The G4 is kicking the P4's ass in modern computing tasks like encryption, encoding, graphics, music and audio, and video. Software MPEG-2 encoding is at 1x on the Mac platform now. That is all you need to know.
Note that the Mac that won the tests today was only the middle model of the PowerMac line. There is a faster one than that as well.
Which is faster: a 500MHz Alpha or a 1000MHz PIII? The Alpha is 10x the chip of a PIII. Comparing MHz alone is useless. Apple is shipping machines that are very, very fast. There are a lot of people out there who are very happy with the work that these fast Macs are enabling them to do. iDVD 2.0 does the MPEG-2 software encoding in the background while you set up your DVD's menus. This is powerful stuff.
> The new iMacs all just have a CD-RW drive...
... you can record DVD's as well. I have one and they work great. Takes 20 minutes to put 4.5GB of data on a $10 disc. Making a video DVD is actually possible, and even easy, with the included iDVD software. The $2499 model with SuperDrive is a great value ... you get an awful lot included, especially given that SuperDrives go for $800-$1000 alone.
> no DVD or combo drive in ANY model. Bit of a
> disappointment there.
You are talking about iMacs, but the original poster was talking about PowerMacs. The PowerMac models, go CD-RW, DVD-RW/CD-RW, DVD-RW/CD-RW. These aren't "combo" drives, but "SuperDrives"
The blue PowerMac G3 came out in January, 1999, six months or so after the iMac shipped, so it's been about two and a half years.
Mac CPU's run an average of 7 watts. Even G4's. The 733-867 MHz G4's take more power, but the two 800's in the top-end Mac COMBINED require less than 30 watts. A 1GHz Athlon needs 60 watts, and the P4 needs 70 watts. Those are different requirements, and I'm sure computer designers look at that. The one fan in the box (which is already seen as a bug by most Mac users) is probably enough when your CPU runs that cool ... it even turns off when the machine sleeps. I've never heard of anybody selling chassis fans to Mac users.
... you just open it up and everything seems to be right where you'd want it to be without any peering or reaching or searching. Working on the front drive bays is sort of a drag, but not moreso than any other case. Your hard drives go in the bottom, anyway, and that's what you end up messing with, along with the RAM and PCI. You can fit four hard drives in, and they are all still easy to get at. How many removable drive bays do you need when the machine comes with a DVD-RW/CD-RW? The second one will stay empty unless you are forced to use Zip disks or similar. The handles are nice, too. It's a solid box.
Lots of Macs out there in music and audio, and in video, with all their slots loaded, and multiple FireWire and USB devices attached as well. Now that I think of it, the power supply in my PowerMac is also powering the Cinema Display. Must be adequate for the task.
It is a nice enclosure. It never feels like you're opening up the machine to "service" it
I would like to see all manufacturers take such signature looks with their hardware. SGI, IBM, and Apple do a good job of this. You can recognize their stuff quite easily from a distance. You have to put your glasses on to tell most other stuff apart. I mean, you are going to make a lot of boxes anyway, so take a chance on making something new and beautiful.
Sometimes these updates are also available with magazines.
I think it's hard to complain about paying $129 for OS X part I and $20 for OS X part II. Software almost always goes alpha, beta, point-zero, point-one. The point-zero can be thought of as "beta for the users" if you like. It is necessary to get the software out into the real world in order to get feedback from users so you can include that feedback in point-one.
Once again... not a fair comparison. Gcc is heavily optimized for Intel, and the optimization for PPC are only in their infancy going into gcc 3.1. It is really hard to compare the two platforms in any real way unless you start to be very specific about what you are doing, ie transactions on a specific database, Photoshop, etc...
MacSlash will be updating throughout the expo. Check us out and discuss your thoughts.
I guess getting smbfs to work on other unixs and mac os is pretty hard, because it's been this way for a while.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
nothing new or revolutionary...
lets see, 10 of the most popular mac programs are now ported to run natively on OSX.
"All three Power Mac G4 models feature 256K L2 cache per processor, running at full processor speed (you can imagine how well this plays out with the dual 800MHz Power Mac G4). In addition, the 867MHz system has 2MB of L3 backside cache running at one-fourth the processor speed and the dual 800MHz Power Mac G4 has hefty 2MB backside L3 cache per processor, for a total of 4MB."
and, OSX.1 was delayed 2 months, NOT OSX. OSX has been out, as has OSX Server.
oh, and they still posted a profit, albeit a smaller one, while many of their competitors are losing hefty amounts of money in this erstwhile economy.
yea, nothing special.
the comment on the leader in the storyuu is completely erroneous.
quicktime is not required to get much past the homepage on apple's site.
why the bias? because quicktime hasn't been ported to platform x for god knows what finanical reasons? sure, if you want to see spinning pictures of the new g4 or their recent ads you'll need the plug-in and quicktime. but you'll need that for any rich content.
slashdot has something truly uncomfortable up its ass and i think that the coverage of items would be significantly improved if it were removed.
The iBook is 500MHz.
The primary problem with depending so heavily on touchscreens is the "gorilla arm" phenomenon. Basically, if you interact mostly by waving your arm at the screen, your arm tends to get fatigued. For short-term interactions with a computer this isn't so bad, but for long term interaction it becomes a serious liability.
And, of course, combined with your suggestion of hanging the display on the wall, this is a pretty bad idea. From where I'm sitting, my wall is about 4 feet away. Not terribly convenient.
Networking is also more compatible: Mac OS X version 10.1 now includes the ability to connect to AFP servers over AppleTalk making it easier to integrate Mac OS X into legacy networks with older AppleShare servers and Windows NT servers. We've also added support to natively connect to Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Unix-based SAMBA file servers with the built-in SMB client. These servers appear right in the Finder like any other file server. This makes Mac OS X fluent in all of today's network languages.
Now I can connect to my company's Windows network without extra software! This will be very important for those wanting to move from Windows to the Mac without buying extra software.
------
James Hromadka
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
I am not asking much in the Mhz arena. I just want a 1Ghz Mac. 1Ghz x86 machines have been out for over a year (At least). Shouldn't take this long for Motorola and Apple to catch up. Unless you are using Photoshop or Media Cleaner Pro, the Mac speed advantage just isn't there. Compare a 1.5Ghz PC ripping Mp3s off a CD vs. a 733Mhz G4.
I hope, like you, that Sept cures my frustration with Apple. I just really think Jobs dropped the ball at this MacWorld.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Weren't Mac Users supposed to get the GeForce3 cards by now? Even with a GeForce2, Macs are getting smoked by the video card offerings available to our mortal enemies, x86 users.:) My rant was more about the quality of optimization of software for x86 vs. G4. The OS X Quake 3 lags behind in quality versus the Windows/Linux x86 versions.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Using Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro! That is the only reason that the G4 was faster than the Intel 1.8Ghz machine. Put linux on both and compile a kernel and lets see who is faster. Another good example is Quake 3. Think the top of the line Mac is going to have better FPS than a top of the line Intel-based box? Don't think so. Like I said, I love Apple but this Mhz doesn't matter propaganda is really tiring. I want machines that beat Intels at almost all tasks not just applying filters in Photoshop.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
1)Like I said, there are no new apps out that are not crash test dummy betas. You backed up my point, thanks. Preview releases and promises of future releases don't cut it after MacWorld SF. Jobs said, "MWNYC will be the Mac OS X app show". Well if you count Betas as release software, I guess you have a point
2) Try to go to the Apple Store, order a new PowerMac G4 and have it delivered this month. Ain't gonna happen. As for iMacs, Apple is shooting itself in the foot for bumping the price up. One expects a speed bumped machine to be the same price as last year's model. That has been the model since the first iMac.
3) As much as I would like to think the short pipeline in my Dual 500 G4 makes my machine fast, outside of Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro, I do not feel like I am driving a HotRod compared to a 1Ghz+ x86 box.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Also check the old standby Macintouch for coverage and some interesting bits.
</karmawhore>
Guvegrra?
Those G4s come with nVidia GeForce2 cards, BTW.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Of course, the only problem was that Microsoft had to hold onto the stock for 5 years. Apple popped up over $150, but then plummeted again to their current level of around $20. Still, I think MS bought when the share price was $11-14, and I think Apple even had a stock split since then, so MS still would have made out like bandits (well, assuming that Apple doesn't tank by next year).
Geez, how many news sources do you need to tell you that it was a boring keynote?
Umm, whatever happened to the superdisk, dvd/cd recorder/player? Whats that Steve, Hilary said no?* ****
********************************************
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
the success of a company should never be judged by its current stock price.
Congratulations, youve single handedly determined what it is that allows people to make money on the stock market. Give yourself a hand.
Actually, Apple will never sell a $499 PC purely because that would be too cheap. Jobs wants Apple to remain a "premium" brand, like Sony. Therefore, no budget models.
After using OSX on my TiBook for two months I had to ditch the OS and switch to Linux to get descent performance and a desktop where I could do my work (KDE2). Linux is everything OS X isn't, but let's give it some time. I really hope OS X will make it.
I have just recently upgraded my memory and wanted to give OSX a try again, but I'll wait for the 10.1 upgrade now (can't wait to get DVD playback). And why the hell do I have to pay for the upgrade? I don't mind paying for software, but I've already paid (way to much if you ask me!) for the broken version of the OS.
Some good PC- cost:$1500 value_to_me:$5000
Some good Mac-cost:$2000 value_to_me:$8000
Obviously, the Mac gives me a better profit, so I get that. People tend to undervalue additional quality. As you can see, since the amount that i'm actually willing to pay is so much higher, the difference in prices is not a big deal.
Where price does matter much more is when you're buying boxes en masse. But for your personal box, don't be afraid to spend and get what is right for you.
Interestingly, the powerbook and ibook are much more competitive than PC laptops, if you're looking at just raw speed and price. But there's far more speed and price...
Pricing is overrated. Unless you're an impoverished student, you should probably just get whatever computer you like the best.
Hmm... makes me think that this cpu is hungry enough for an off-the-shelf DDR solution instead of their obsolete 133 SDRAM and expensive '219 mhz' L3 cache combo.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
I'm also pretty sure this is the reason behind the delay of the software DVD player for Mac OS X. It must have been physically painful for the Mac OS engineers to cripple Quartz so that other programs besides the DVD player can't access the screen content... Software-based DVD playback is a nice area! There are even some companies that boast that their software-based DVD players haven't been hacked.
Anyway, this is a pretty ugly mess. Companies still have to pay license fees to the friendly people at LMI for an encryption scheme that has been broken and still have to implement useless security mechanims to protect the content.
To be fair - The IBM guy was trying to get his voice recognised over a loud quicktime movie. It would be pretty hard for the software to separate out his command from all that noise. Let's give him a break on that one.
I am a business user. I rely on my Macintosh to do my job every single day. Without it, my work would be substantially harder and I would need five or six computers on my desk to take its place... and eventually I'd need access to a mac anyway, at least part time.
MacOS X solved some otherwise insoluble problems I was having trying to get my work done. Just as I was realizing what the problems were, OS X got released, and within a day of installing it these problems had gone away. Windoze, Linux, or Solaris would not have taken care of my needs. OS X did.
Presently, OS X is absolutely essential to my daily work. Is it slow? Yes, it's painfully slow sometimes. Is it irritating? Yes, it's irritating. Would I give it up? Not for the moon on a silver platter.
So, go ahead and complain about it all you like. If you don't like dealing with OS X, that's fine - switch back to OS 9. I use OS 9 at home, and for most purposes it's just fine. But remember that for me, having to live with the problems is more than made up for by the fact that I can actually get my work done, and $20 is nothing compared to the cost of an hour of my time to deal with downloading it.
http://www.fgnonline.com/pc/news/19284.html
Basically Warcraft III will be released simultaneously for PC & Mac. Taht's a step up from previous efforts, which means there's at least one company is taking the Mac more seriously than previously, and I'm sure others will follow the example...
Peace,
Amit
ICQ 77863057
[o]_O
Continue waiting. This update doesn't exist yet. My Wallstreet is still as sluggish today as it was yesterday. I can't run product announcements on it...I need 10.1 to be released. My machine is as upgraded as it can possibly get, and it still has barely enough horsepower to read e-mail and browse the web....it's pathetic. I think the stock price jump was completely justified. Apple has essentially killed off all sales until September with these announcements...that can't be great for this quarter's profitability. I was all set to buy a TiBook or iBook this week...but what's the point now...I'd only be able to run the horribly slow 10.0.4 on it. I may as well sit on my money and wait some more.
As you may have guessed, I'm not happy.
I was one of the early adopters of OS X. I bought it on the first day, put up with the bugs and crappy performance, downloaded the updates and provided the feedback. I was cut at the bleeding edge.
So, to get a version that does what it should, we're going to have to pay to get the update CD. (Basically, $20 for you US guys, dunno what it'll be for us brits, probably 15ukp).
I don't see this as a 'thank you' for putting up with the stunted functionality. I still can't print, and my CD RW drive isn't fully supported yet. I'm still rebooting into 9.1 to get what I need done. It's still an incomplete OS.
I just feel this is a slightly Micro$oftesque trick. I know $20 isn't much, but when you paid the full whack for the product in the first place (before they installed it for nothing on all subsequent machines from about June-ish onwards), it feels like a slap in the face.
M.
Although I wonder how many of thos apps are main strem items vs noname smalltime utilities.
The poll was of developers attending WWDC. Those tend to be the more serious commercial developers for the most part.
Lick my plate, you dog dick
Yes, but you need QuickTime -- MacWorld NY 2001 Keynote.
One thing that you'll see in the video that isn't mentioned that often in the text reports is Steve Jobs' little fiasco with the digital camera while at the computer.
Steve: Just got to turn your camera on. [pause]
Steve: Alright. [stares at the camera]
[Someone in the front row says something.]
Yeah, I need some help out here, it's technical. My camera's not turning on.
[Same guy.]
Steve: What's that? I did slide it in like that. It's not turning on. Here. [throws the camera offstage at the guy]
[Crowd goes ooh - some applause, some laughter, bit of nervous tension.]
Steve: We'll let an expert see if he can turn it on. Hopefully he can. Shall I show you, uh... Got it on?
[Guy says something about batteries.]
Steve: Batteries have to go back in from me throwing it. Sorry.
Don't hear much about it, eh? Apple has been quitely licensing Quicktime to companies for use in DV devices. Apple is hoping it will be a bit like FireWire - get it in all the consumer gadgets early, and the herd will migrate that way. USB2 is a bit stillborn because FW is already in all the DV camcorders. One win for Apple, but how many losses? The keynote was sure a yawner.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
The other I noticed happened during IBM's presentation... the guy demonstrating it couldn't get the "Double Size" command to work while playing a quicktime movie.
Did anyone else catch any others?
Question #4 is easy to answer. Macintosh Common LISP (MCL) is, IMHO, one of the best LISP implementations out there.
This is a big let down. Nothing really revolutionary here and OS X is delayed another 2 months. So much for all the flat panel iMac predictions.
streaming quicktime rebroadcast of the stream can be seen here. enjoy
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
the camera wouldn't turn on so he threw it at one of his helpers
I belive said helper is now flipping burgers at a Cupertino McDonalds...
I think that you will find that a DDR will not nett very much more than a 30%(max) performance gain over PC133 SDRAM.
:) it needs the extra/faster memory (L3.)
The reason that the G4 has both the L3 and L2 cache the way that it does currently is becuase it is very much a RISC CPU from start to finish, taking more instrucitons to get the same job done.
So that this does not/will not inconvenience you by starving the processor for work to do (2x800 Mhz G4, DAMN! That would improve my RC5 rate
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
Put linux on both and compile a kernel and lets see who is faster
Actually that is not really a fair comparison. Why? Well when generating code for a PPC chip the compiler has to do a sh*t load more work than for an x86 chip.
Comparing Photoshop filters is fair when you consider how often they are used &tc during the day at a work place, and with the Linux kernel i doubt anyone other than developers is going to be compiling more than 5x a month (5x allows for screwing options up &tc).
I personally would love to see a list of *fair* comparisons for both machines, ie:
* Photoshop filters (grapics pros do make up a lot of apples market)
* RC5 rate, (Faster Key Rates DAMN IT
* MP3/Lame/Ogg Encoding (same bit rate, similar codec, **same quality**
* Generation of XLS spread sheet
You get the idea, a comprehensive test that covers all aspects that would be important in day to day use.
How every version of MICROS~1 Windows(TM) comes to exist.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
1: Wall mounted systems. Everyone's dreamt of reclaiming desk space by hanging their monitor on the wall like a painting. Flatscreens can make that possible, so why doesn't anybody use them that way? It would add $0.00 to their cost and make them infinitely more useful. Especially the iMacs, if they ever go flat.
I don't think most people want their monitor that far away. My desk is 36" deep. My 21" monitor's glass is about 18" from the front edge. I am not going to be able to use my display at 1600x1200 if it is twice as far away. I'd have to reduce the resolution, and that ain't gonna happen!
The entry model iBook is $1299. That's not too bad. Seems to compare well to Wintel laptops.
I HAVE a 400MHz G3 laptop, and I'd agree that the performance is "less than stellar." It's only GUI operations though -- disk access, networking, number crunching -- all very fast.
The story is that the Finder itself in OSX is some non-native kludge, and when it is rewritten from the ground up the perceived speed of the OS should shoot up. But we'll see.
There's also a lot of talk that OSX isn't optimized for any but the most recent video cards, so everyone with those ATI Rage chips is suffering without ANY video acceleration at ALL.
But yeah, it does feel slow.
You can also download DAVE 3 for free today which will let you connect to shared Windows volumes. http://www.thursby.com/support/dave3x.html This should hold everyone over until Apple integrates the feature into their OS ;-)
Here's the link for an article describing the ports project to Darwin. You can also find more info here.
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$tar -xvf
In fact, the iBook is such a good value, it makes me wonder if there is anybody left who would be better off with the iMac.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
When the actual announcement happens, the wild speculation ends and prices fall back down to Earth.
Therefore, if you choose to ignore the previous price hikes, it always looks like a company's value tanked right after an announcement. The truth is that ownership of shares just transfered back from speculators to investors.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I don't think I am going very far out on a limb when I predict that the CD-R in the new line of iMacs will probably be replaced by DVD/CD-R "combo" drives, like the one in some iBooks, by January (at least as an option).
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Ripping CD's has more to do with media speed than the CPU. The standard CD drives that ship in Apple's are otnay ootay astfay, compared to the better after-market players.
For a more fair comparison, try something like this:
How fast does each machine compile the same program using gcc? (Mac OS X and pretty much all distro's of Linux ship with it, so it is an easy test to run).
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I'll tell you what, I will gladly trade you my 1.2 GHz PC for your Dual 500 G4. Then you can feel like you are "driving a HotRod", and we will both be happy.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
There's also a non-streamed version available, but AFAIK, only Apple resellers get it.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Although I wonder how many of thos apps are main strem items vs noname smalltime utilities.
Sounds promising. Which reminds me, how is the BSD Ports conversion going? that would be very nice to have done, but an awful lot of those items are not exactly high priority consumer items.
Then there is this item that gives me mixed feelings:
Kevin Browne from Microsoft [...] took the stage to talk about Microsoft Office for Mac OS X. He said the OS X version of Excel is the best version of the software Microsoft has shipped for any platform.
But then, it is not a perfect world.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'll recite the old cliché. You get what you pay for.
I'm an avid mac user... hopefully not a zealot but that's for others to decide. Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and BBEdit are my life's blood. I know that there are Windows versions/equivalents of the same software, but Illustrator and Photoshop under Windows is just nightmarish compared to under MacOS. Maybe it's the PPC chip, maybe it's OS9.x. I don't know why it is this way, but I do know that since I make my livelihood off of graphics apps, I'd rather pay for a machine that costs more and is going to have a long and fruitful life rather than get some cheapo Intel commodity box with a shoddy OS running it.
I've owned 5 mac's so far and only one of them has died... my venerable MacPlus. Even my 7200/75 still lives on as a rudimentary http and ftp server. So, no, I'm not aggravated with Apple. I'd love it if the prices would come down, but I really have no other professional option at this point other than to purchase their hardware.
---------------------------
Pooty tweet
I guess so ... I've mostly recovered from the days of my Powerbook 5300 (shudder).
sulli
RTFJ.
WTF? I am shocked that Steve didn't introduce _________ [new feature] that _________ [big OS vendor] has had for years! And why didn't the _________ [model] come in a _________ [weird-ass design] instead of these _________ [abusive term 1], _________ [abusive term 2] toys for _________ [derisive term for Mac users]. Clearly Apple is never going to provide the leading _________ [OS, PC, 802.11 hub, video standard, etc.] because they are so far out of touch with _________ [broadly written user type that includes ME]. Instead they spend all their time cracking down on _________ [favorite Mac rumor site] and writing crap like _________ [crappy consumer utility] I'll never use.
Aw, fuck it, I'll switch to _________ [Yellow Dog / LinuxPPC / WinXP]. That will show those _________ [derisive term for corporate types] in Cupertino. Just as soon as it supports _________ [fancy Mac feature that nobody uses] and has a better user interface than Mac OS _________ [6, 7, 8, 9, X]. Watch out, Steve, you're going to lose a _________ [number > 10] year Apple loyalist!
sulli
RTFJ.
Apple is reporting a $19.95 upgrade price for OSX.
MacNN is reporting a free upgrade.
42
With the clones eliminated, Apple has returned to their price gouging ways.
Additionally, since Motorola can't deliver dramatically faster G4s, Apple is now crippling the low end to avoid making the high end look bad. The new iBook, for example, is a nice computer. It contains the same video hardware as the TiBook. But Apple has crippled the video on the iBook, so it won't do anything higher than 1024 x 768 on an external display, and also can't do dual displays. Of course, the TiBook can - for $2500.
Apple's price/performance ratio is now so terrible that you can buy a NICE PC laptop for the price of the cheapest G4 tower.
For a while, they were telling us a G4 was as fast as a Pentium III at twice the clockspeed. Fair enough. Are they now going to start saying they're 3 times as fast? That's what they'd have to claim to make the computer look competitive.
The cheapo iMac is not for me. No expandability, I need PCI slots, and I already have a nice monitor. What computer does Apple have for me? The entry level G4 tower is $1700, featuring their slowest G4, a pokey hard drive and bus, and not enough memory to run OSX effectively. Want a video card upgrade? The GeForce3 is a $300 UPGRADE (note: not outright, that's the UPGRADE price), a total joke.
Do any other Mac fans feel completely frustrated with Apple right now?
The cost difference Apple is paying between cdrom drives and cdrw drives can't be more than $20. Where does the rest of the difference come from?
And worst, the video on the machine is CRIPPLED. It's the same ATI video hardware used in the $2500 TiBook. Should be great, right? Wrong. Apple INTENTIONALLY disabled dual display, and also limited the video out to external displays to a measly 1024 x 768. (The card can do 1600 x 1200, no problem). This is totally lame.
Compare the iBook to the Dell Inspiron 4000... it doesn't do well. And the iBook is probably the MOST price competitive computer that Apple has, the other lines are all much worse! The G4 tower pricing is a cruel joke.
Flat LCD panels are $349 at Fry's. A huge OEM like Apple must be able to get those for about $200!
I don't really care about the iMac and it's screen anyway. What I want is the iMac, add 3 PCI slots, subtract the monitor and put it in a tower case. They could sell it for $800. Why won't they? They'd rather have the entry level G4 be $1699!
I guess "the rest of us" now means people who earn $70k a year.
Sony is a premium brand, but they also deliver a good value. My boss just bought an awesome Sony laptop - $1400. Pentium III 800, huge drive, 14" screen, DVD, etc. Extremely competitive, and it still says "sony" on it.
The Dell Inspiron 8000 mentioned above IS available with the GeForce2Go (you can choose ATI OR Nvidia) - in fact, it is the only Dell that is available with the nvidia card. Go back and read it again.
Apple will never sell a computer for $500 in order to gain marketshare. That would make too much sense.
I don't care if the G4 is twice as fast as a P3 or Athlon at the same clock rate ... it costs more than twice as much. And so what if the case is "pretty", that's not what I'm looking at. I care about what's on the screen. The MacOS 9.x and previous interfaces were quite limiting (not very customizable), where-as the Windows interface (95 through 2000 and XP) and any of the UNIX window managers are super customizable. Apple's point of view is that you will have it their way and no other. Seems kind of communist to me ...
A price comparison if you will ... yea a Ferrari 355 will blow the doors off of a Honda S2000, but you can get five or six S2000s for the price of one 355. COME ON! The Honda stimulates my need just as much as the Ferrari, and I can get one for my friend too. Same with x86 vs PowerPC. I can build my own LAN party for the price of a G4 (:
I'm not saying that I won't ever own an Apple. I'd actually like to have a phat PowerMac all decked out with the latest and greatest, but I'm going to have a BAD ASS x86 machine first.
More for the money, baby.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Apple's previous low-end mac had a CD-ROM only. This one is a bit faster and adds a CD-RW. That's the cost increase.
I guess you're not always right. ;-)
Then why is there a real, licensed DVD player for QNX?
While everyone's looking forward to X.1 or complaining about how late it is, there's been absolutely no mentioning of 9.2/9.5...given how bloated the current version of OS9.1 is, Apple promised 9.2 to be slightly slimer and much better integerated with OSX. Last I check, it went GM a week ago, but nothing since...are they holding it back 'til X.1? *sigh* and there's also 9.5, the last none-X OS...suppose to be a stripped down version of 9.1 with possibly some kind of shell for protected memory...That's the OS I'd like to be running in the forseeable future instead of this X crap with few application support and sluggish performance thus far...
((( Compare the iBook to the Dell Inspiron 4000... it doesn't do well. )))
ok, here's a comparison for you... i went to the apple store and looked up the specs for a stock dvd-rom ibook, and then i went to the dell site and configured a similarly-featured inspiron 4000 here are the specs:
both laptops have 128mb of ram (apple only uses a single dimm for the ram, so i configured the dell with a single dimm as well)... both have 10gb hard drives, dvd-rom, ati rage mobility 128, usb (apple has two ports, dell has one), 56k modem and 1-year warranty
the ibook has built-in 100-base-T and firewire ports, so i added those options to the inspiron, taking up both of its card slots... since the ibook battery lasts for 5 hours, i opted for the more expensive dell battery, which delivers a maximum of 4 hours
irreconcilable differences: the ibook has a 12.1" screen, while the dell has a 14.1" screen, both at 1024x768... the ibook uses a 500mhz g3 with 256k L2 cache, while the dell comes with an 800mhz celeron with 128k L2 cache (i'm pretty sure that the g3 beats the celeron bloody, but i'm no benchmark whiz)... for the next three months, you get a free lexmark printer with an ibook purchase... the dell comes standard with a "floppy drive," whatever that is
the prices? the apple ibook = $1499, the dell inspiron 4000 = $1741
basically, the extra $242 that you'd spend on the dell machine buys you a larger screen, and the aforementioned "floppy drive" thingy, but no printer... although a larger screen would be nice, the idea of running os-x, appleworks, imovie and itunes beats the living hell out of being stuck with windows me, microsoft works, dell movie studio software and microsoft media player (now with phone-quality mp3 playback!)
i thought, therefore i was...
Yeah, that'd be about right, maybe a little low. I have a 400MHz G3 and it feels like a 700-750MHz PIII.
It also encodes with BladeEnc almost exactly 6 times as quickly as my P133 box.
However, I'm running OS 9.1. Although an ex of mine also has a 400MHz G3, and is very happy with her OS X. But she's got 192MB of RAM, which may be a factor.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Simply put, Apple's decision to release the iBook before MWNY can only mean one thing now that we know they didn't have something "totally innovative and sexy" around the corner:
;) Just goes to show, though, Apple has a much different core audience than your typical, say, Linux distribution.
Apple needed the money from the new iBooks to show up on last quarter's ledger more than they wanted to wait and have an expo with punch.
Maybe the LCD iMac and metal enclosure PowerMac are just over the horizon, but when the biggest "new" thing Jobs has is that old apps now work on OS X and work at acceptable speeds on the not quite yet released OS X 10.1, it's a pretty sad day in Cupertino.
And if you want to mod me for funny, here's a quote from the link above (goes to Mac OS Rumours):
As our reporters on the scene left the keynote, they reported almost being in tears over the remarks people were making all around them: "why the hell did I waste my time coming all the way out here and shelling out the cash for a pass just to see this?!" and "well, that was two hours of my life wasted...." In a couple of cases, people actually started making a loud fuss, swearing and stomping, promising loudly to demand their money back - or in one case, even running up to the Apple folks tearing down the keynote equipment and angrily demanding to talk to Steve! Now that's one we haven't seen before.
lol -- All this because the case that holds the processors didn't change enough.
Ruffin Bailey
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
2: DDR motherboards. The fastest Mac is slower than the fastest Wintel. Macs COULD be much faster, but to get faster, they have to use Altivec, and to use Altivec, they need more memory bandwidth. DDR can probably provide that bandwidth, so why doesn't Apple put DDR in their G4 systems?
What does Dance Dance Revolution have to do with system speed?
----
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Who ARE Apple's competitors? We always talk about "their competition" -- and there's plenty of O/S competition, hardware competition, et al, but no one offers what they do in one compete package -- so I guess there's no business competition :)
The only ones I can think of would be these guys. Even used to make their own custom hardware to go with their "digital media" operating system, if anyone else remembers that.
--saint----
"Toupsie" seems to have taken the (correct) viewpoint that "MHz isn't everything," and twisted it into "MHz isn't *anything*." You might be interested in knowing that the P4, for all its shortcomings (really high price comes to mind) still outperforms the fastest Athlons. Because of clock speed. And the Athlons, using their brute force approach to cpu design, still outperform the best Apple has to offer.
Clever design is good, but fast design is better. Most users don't care whether their fast chip was achieved through smart design, heroic process engineering, or simple brute force (a million transistors coming at ya!) The best product for the best price will win wherever there is a choice.
Good design always helps, especially in places where heat and power consumption are problems, but don't fool yourself into thinking the more efficient chip will always win. Oh, and one last note: AMD's Athlon cpus are very well designed (EV6 bus, large number of functional units, etc.) I only used them as an example of brute force because they still support the x86 ISA and sports huge numbers of transistors, compared to G3/G4 et al..
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
How come Apple is still the only company in the world who makes a well-designed tower case? Hasn't it been like 4 years now since the turquoise G3 (same case as g4) came out? I wonder how many years it will be before anyone else can come up with notebooks which are halfway as cool as Titanium and iBook.
With how small Apple makes machines these days, I'd think that an Imac with a flat panel would be about the same as an Ibook... Maybe it's just me thought.
Bah!
There are a lot of daytraders that affect these short term price swings these days.
--
Jon - TheSpork
I pointed out here on /. back in March that the lack of DVD playback in the original Mac OS X release was very curious given the Apple DVD marketing push, since if the operating system was up to DVD playback, it should require little more than a utility program to provide it. I speculated that this implied a deeper system problem which would take significantly longer to fix, possibly something related to non-real-time process scheduling. This suggestion was greeted with a mixture of disbelief and exasperation.
At this point, it looks like my speculation has been validated. The reason DVD playback is not yet available for Mac OS X is not simply because the program wasn't finished in time, but because it has proven difficult to implement on the Darwin kernel.
The remaining questions, given that it is being reported that DVD playback was still flaky during today's demo, are whether the new, extra-slipped September ship date for the feature is realistic, and whether the fix for the problem is robust enough to deal with new applications that will require steady high-bandwidth real-time data delivery.
Tim
I agree that it wasn't quite as spectacular a keynote as it could have been. But it's not quite as dismal as you suggest. First of all, two of the three new PowerMacs are available right now, not in a month like you said. And they are faster than their predecessors. The iMacs are also faster. Additionally, it's quite true that "Mhx doesn't matter" -- at least when it comes to comparing Intel to the PowerPC. Apples and oranges (no pun intended). The keynote demoed a 867mhz PowerMac next to a 1.7 ghz Intel box. Guess who won?
Then he said that even though they are slower than PC's, they are really faster
Doublespeak. You should go into politics. Mhz does not always translate into speed. As a Linux geek you should know that. FUD.
Then he said that Mac OS 10.1 will fix many of the things that makes Mac OS 10 blatantly unusable for most people.
No he didn't. What he might have said is that the best consumer operating system is getting better. OS X is so mind-boggling superior to Linux from a usability standpoint it makes Linux look like a broken toy.
Still, unless I had a really compelling need for some of that closed source software, I would be a chump for buying one.
OS X now supports a staggering amount of open source software. Darwin, Apache, PHP, MySQL, SSL, etc., etc., etc. Did I mention the Gimp? It's a posix system, for crying out loud! Besides which, a great number of 'closed source' applications happen to do things much better than any open source software could ever hope to.
You need to read Taco's earlier post about attitude my friend.
Additional keynote coverage can be found here. Also, there's a synopsis of the upcoming OS X 10.1 on Apple's website. Note that 10.1 won't be available until September. But you gotta love it! Now if I could only afford that 22" cinima display.
At News.Com you can get the movies from MacWorld in WM or RealMedia for you UNIX people. I personly like the new G4 with the SuperDrive, I just wish I had the cash to buy it rather than stick with my Power Macintosh 6100/60. BTW, this info is from the News.Com Movies.
If you care as well as Mac OS X.I Apple also had new iMacs from 500-700MHz all with CD-RWs and 128-256MB of RAM, starting at $999US. Thankfully they ditched the "Flower Power" stuff and went with Indigo, Snow and Graphite.
There is a new case for the G4s, QuickSilver it looks like it matchs the Titanium PowerBook better. And they go upto 2x 800MHz G4s, doing 12 gigaflops. And they are cheaper too, unless you're a high school student, $1,699US for the 733MHz G4.
--Volrath50
MacCentral:
Keynote
Mac OS X.I
iDVD 2
New iMacs
New G4s
New Apple Stores
The Register:
Hardware
Software
News.Com
Macintouch
Low End Mac
And lastly:
Apple's Official News
--Volrath50
Apple DID give us a new iMac. It's faster. it comes in the same colors. it also comes with a cdrw. they also did give us DVD playback, even if a little buggy. the only catch, is it comes out in september.
Apple also also gave us the droolworthy dual 800MHz g4, even if it is a bit disipointing. But did you realy expect anything new? given the almost total lack of leaks? there were no leaks, because there was nothing to leak. MacWorld i think, has moved from apple's one place to anounce new hard/software, to just yet another event.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
I sympathize with all of the people who were disappointed with Steve's keynote this morning. I too was expecting a new iMac. I too was expecting DVD playback for OS X. I too was expecting... well, something interesting and new. The lack of any major announcements is understandable, though.
Remember folks, the economy has crapped out. Consumer spending is down. Corporate spending is way down. People just aren't spending the money to get the latest toys anymore. Just look at SUV sales recently. In a weak macroeconomic environment new product releases are a major risk. They have to do R&D, marketing, retool their manufacturing, etc., all of which cost big money.
Frankly, I'm amazed that Apple has managed to turn a profit over the last two quarters. They've already released several major new products this year (Ti Powerbook, iBook, OS X). They've also just launched their massive retail initiative. Apple has a lot on its' plate right now, and I think that their CFO wants to sit tight and not rock the boat anymore than they have to. When the economy picks up and people have the cash to go get the latest greatest flat-panel iMac (or whatever), then we'll see some big announcements from Apple.
Meanwhile, I'll be content with continued refinements on a kick-ass product line. The SteveNote wasn't so bad. Warcraft III on a dual 800 G4 running a superfast OS X seems pretty darn cool to me.
This
DDR also means double data rate, a kind of RAM.
4 things I wanted to see at MWNY:
1: Wall mounted systems. Everyone's dreamt of reclaiming desk space by hanging their monitor on the wall like a painting. Flatscreens can make that possible, so why doesn't anybody use them that way? It would add $0.00 to their cost and make them infinitely more useful. Especially the iMacs, if they ever go flat.
2: DDR motherboards. The fastest Mac is slower than the fastest Wintel. Macs COULD be much faster, but to get faster, they have to use Altivec, and to use Altivec, they need more memory bandwidth. DDR can probably provide that bandwidth, so why doesn't Apple put DDR in their G4 systems?
3: Longer batty life. Most notebook systems run twice as long with their backlight removed. If Apple combined a non-backlit (Game Boy style) screen with their already energy-efficient PowerPC chips, they could have the longest lasting laptops on the market. Since some people don't like reflective screens, Apple should start by selling 1/3 of their iBooks and Powerbooks with reflective screens, and the rest with backlit.
4: Touchscreens. One of Apple's Prime Directives is to make the worlds most intuitive and ergonomic electronics. They could do so by ditching the keyboard and mouse, make the screen touch sensitive and make the OS more voice sensitive. That would probably make their whole product line slightly less expensive and much more fun and easy to use.
Nope. MS wasn't that smart. Though they could have made a bunch of money, take a gander at this quote from Wired.
(Three years later, Maffei also admitted to me that although Microsoft had bought $150 million in Apple shares as part of the deal - "We invested in the company when people had lost faith," Gates would boast - he had hedged Microsoft's bet by simultaneously shorting the stock.)
Well, the G4 (or the G4e, if i want sound leet and technical) beat out the P4 in MediaCleaner and Photoshop tests, which _are_ relevent to most G4 users... I still wouldn't say the G4 had completely 'Spanked' the Intel. I'm sure there's _something_ the 20 stage thing is good at :).
:)
I wonder why the athlon is never discussed
it's my own fault. I got all excited about stuff I was reading about in rumor reports and then got let down by reality. Is it Apple's fault? No, they never came out and said "we'll have flat panel iMacs and a whole new case enclosure for the G4's". Oh well, these kinda goodies could come about at MWSF in January.
I will say I was impressed by the demo of OS X 10.1. It looks like they have put a lot of work into speeding up the system. Hats off to Apple, OS X is starting to look slick. I think I can wait until September to put OS X onto my G4 and my 8500.
Mister Black
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
ports are coming along fine!
http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/ports/
.cig
Wing Commander 3??? I loved that game! I just wonder if the mac verson will have that cool speech accessory pack.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
I was being sort of sarcastic in my previous posts, I actually lost my interest in WC as soon as Mark Hamill became part of it. I wanted to be the hero, not that bastard. I suppose my original interest was that the first two were so ground breaking. WC 1 was simply the coolest game one could play on a 286.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
It'd be cool to see a new Imac with a flat panel.
True, but considering what a 15 inch LCD costs, I don't think it was possible to do that and keep the computer in a similar price-range. OTOH, the LCD prices are dropping, so maybe in December.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
so, IANACT (i am not a conspiracy theorist), but i think the announcement today was suposed to be much bigger. the faithful among us will have noticed the absence of the "one more thing" tag that steve has traditionally saved till the end, for whatever really big announcement he has this time around. not so compelling, i admit.
but if you watched the keynote (or catch the rebroadcast), you'll notice that things started to slow pretty hard during the iDVD demo, in particular. my money says steve was waiting for someone to show up, and he got the signal to stall for time from someone offstage. so, there's the demo, then the return to the digital camera (come on...like anyone at macworld doesn't know how it works...), then re-running the old commercials, along with one new one...my guess is he used that time to run offstage and find out what the deal was.
he essentially came back onstage right after the commercials, did a tiny bit more, re-hashed, and asked for a round of applause. that was it after he came back onstage from the commercial break.
so i think something went seriously wrong (a box didn't arrive, or a person maybe); steve stalled for time, hoping to make the announcement, but then found out when he went offstage that it was going to be impossible today. you could see he was disappointed when he came back onstage there at the end.
next guess: watch the next media event. i'm betting whatever wanted to be shown off today finds its way to that. hopefully on time.
this is, of course, pure conjecture.
every good
Is there video avalable from the Keynote address instead of one text highlights?
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
I love Macintosh computers more than most people, even age old Mac Groupies, but I have to tell you that honestly you should just bite the bullet and go with a piece of crap PC. Get one of the new Pentium's for like $1500 and two years from now get another one. When you graduate, go back to Mac, and be happy. The reasons for this are many, here are some of mine:
... there is no 6
1) Everyone else will have a PC - want free software from your buddies? Better have a PC.
2) Your roomate's scanner won't work on your Mac - sharing hardware in college - especially when you're strapped for cash - is commonplace and let's face it, lots of things just don't work on the Mac.
3) The school is going to have old software for your Mac - it really, really sucks but they are generally 3 years behind on the software titles they offer for academic use with the Macs, and usually the network support for Macs is terrible (probably because Macs don't need much support.)
4) Your projects will require obscure applications built for PC's only - how many 8086 simulators are out there for the Mac? How about a LISP compiler, or a FPGA writer.... not many
5) When the rest of the hall is battling it out on the latest PC game, you'll be saying "man I wish game X was ported to Mac OS!" - and that sucks
6)
That's all I can think of right now but I'm sure other readers will gladly contribute. Just trust me, take a Mac vacation and use some clunkers for a few years, then come back to the good side of the force once you graduate and don't have to worry about professorial whims.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ now you know
Well I said "get one of those new Pentiums" so I wasn't suggesting get old stuff. If you're going to do any work with hardware, you're going to need a PC. They told us our curriculum was all C++ when I was an incoming freshman (computer engineering) and I think I ended up using a couple of dozen different programming languages.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ now you know
OH, well I didn't know VPC could do that, thanks for the info. To the other dude, I'm not old, I'm an engineer. We are taught from the ground up, and yes, that means going back to 8086.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ now you know
No, the square root of -1 is imaginary. Pi is irrational.
Imaginary numbers don't exist, irrational numbers just can't be written as a fraction.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
which, to microsoft, is like me giving you back a penny and a nickel for the $0.03 you lent me 5 years ago.
--
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
Well, you know, thats just great that the update is being released in September. By the time my finder windows finish resizing and scrolling in X, the update should be out! ;-D
I think, therefore, I'm smarter than our president.
Nah, the 15" is still at $599...
I agree 100% on this... I really didn't understand the purpose of this stupid announcement. Jobs usually takes upon himself not to disclose *anything* *at all* about Apple's future... Then, he walks on stage, demonstrates this great, fast version of OS X that everybody has been dreaming about, only to say it'll only be available in 2 to 3 months!!! Notice that he didn't even set a firm date, which means it'll either be available at Seybold (Sept 24th) or be delayed again!
We've also added support to natively connect to Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Unix-based SAMBA file servers with the built-in SMB client.
I've got it running and it really sucks! ;-) :-]
Could be because I have a rather old 9600 MP and the "MP" does not work.
But it's nice to look at though I keep better working with OS 9 as it's much more usable.
I forgot, it takes 7 minutes to boot
But feel free to do a search on "ryan rempel" and "oldworld" if you got a G3 poweres old world machine or a chrp clone, there's patchy help available
Well, look at Red Hat. They're selling a free operating system, and they're making a profit, and their stock isn't doing anything special. This actually surprises me more than Apple's performance.
Once again - it is expectations, not profits that drive stocks. Traders still don't believe Red Hat is making money. Just like traders don't think Apple can escape the Tech bomb.
When nuance becomes the only objective we lose the ability to function
The keynote demoed a 867mhz PowerMac next to a 1.7 ghz Intel box. Guess who won. PowerMacs won because their is optimized for tasks like Photoshop. They are not optimized for games with MMX or 3dnow instructions. Big difference. When the processor and the program are both optimized and compared to a processor and a programmer who is not optimized to do that task, you are going to see a big difference in performance. The real way to test the processor is not doing one-sided tests but doing a more complicated, long term tasks like trying to find perfect roots for every single bit of a very large number up to something like 2^8388608(largest number representable at 1 megabyte or 8 megabits as an integer.) This task takes a very very long time to perform and that is why it is not used in compression(perfect roots compress quite well with large numbers) but it will give you a time easily comparable to both computers, as long as you used the same cpp source code and very similiar compilers.)
----
Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
That tells me only one thing: Wall Street is completely irrational.
Okay, two things: Wall Street is completely irrational and the success of a company should never be judged by its current stock price.
However, after you get over all that disappointment, you have to admit that 10.1 looks fabulous - I can't wait for September - the new G4 enclosure does look much better than the G4 sitting on my desk now, 766 Mhz G4 on the low-end is a good thing, as will be faster than real-time DVD-Video authoring with the dual 800. Sweet. Still, there's no getting around that Apple bombed out their, most significantly by not having a new iMac. The iMac was already looking long in the tooth, now it looks almost ludicrously long in the tooth, and it costs more to boot! Oh well, new iMacs and the REAL new G4 are still coming, just not on time.
--- What?
Of course, I really can't see people using a desktop computer with a 15 inch screen to play DVD's. DVD playback is much more important on portables.
I am the hub of Jack's digital lifestyle.
it's interesting that the comparison of the pipeline depths of the two processors looked like it was taken straight out of the ars technica article "The Pentium 4 and the G4e", more specifically the perils of deep pipelining
the presentation was not as technically accurate as Ars, but close enough. i am amazed anyone trying to get this technical with the general public (e.g. a non-geek-audience).
But with every complaint we make about the lackluster showing at the Expo, we ought to be thinking hard about all the pre-Steve expos, touting technologies that died or never caught on (R.I.P. OpenDoc...and the dog was cute, too), or that just never sold.
You may think that people are scratching the bottom of the barrel for good news to tout this time around, but take a look at some old MacWorld or MacUser issues and you'll see that Apple Computer and Mac users in general have a lot to be thankful for this Expo.
I would love to see flatpanel iMacs, or extra-cheap CRT ones for education, or ones with DVD drives, or a new form factor for the tower, or a Cube replacement, or any number of other things, but, heck, at least the company is still solvent.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Now If people would carefully read what I said, I never indicated that a G4 smoked every other processor. [side note, the only 2 machines I currently use at home are a 1.1 Gig K7 and a celleron 466, not a G4... that's my office machine].
What I did state [correctly I believe], was that FAR too much importance is put on MHz. When the G4 is bench'ed with apps that are used in core Apple markets, it's does spank faster processors... even P4s that are twice as fast in MHz. There are a lot of factors behind this. Now is a faster K7 or PIII or P4 going to beat a G4 in non-parallel, interger operations? Probably. They have a higher Ops/Sec than the G4.
don't turn this around and say 'you suck cuz you think MHz doesn't matter', because I've never claimed that. MHz does not matter. I want a dual 800MHz G4 instead of my dual 450 damn it! (actually I want a dual 1.5 GHz G4 but that's even less of an option for me ;-).
The point here is that MHz comparisons across different architectures (or even between different chips of the same processor family) can be VERY misleading. If you don't believe me, ask a geek which machine he wants for number crunching... a Joshua, K7, P3, P4, G4, Itanium, Alpha, UltraSparcIII, Power4.... I have a feeling that an educated choice would NOT lead to the highest clocked processor.
What do you think?
Bottom line: G4's SHOULD be faster by now, they ARE faster then significantly higher clocked x86 chips at some task, they ARE slower than x86 processors at other tasks, even at the same clock speed. And, of course, MHz is a bad indicator of overall performance, especially when you look at processors from different architectures...
Intel's 'flagship' processor is clocked at less than half of it's middle-of-the-road processor after all.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
There are no apps (unless you count the crash test dummy betas)
Um, VPC is almost ready, the preview is downloadable today (very important for me), the new Illustrator is very cool as well as the web integration of Quark totally rocks, WCIII is on shedule for simultaneous release, Word looks good. Even if these don't ship today, at least they are progressed far enough that they look very good in a presentation. I'm pretty happy with the software announcements so far.
On the hardware side, one big YAWN! Speed bumped PowerMac G4s that you can't order and receive for another month. Nothing new in the notebook area and the iMacs are getting pretty lame -- only a RAM boost and a price increase
Well, you are wrong. Plain and simple.
I'm dissapointed that UMA 2 with DDR didn't make it but the high end mac is now the lowest model, and the dual 800MHz model is a huge jump over a single 733MHz at the top of the line.
Not shipping? Um, did you watch the same keynote? 733 and 867 ship today... dual 800's in a couple weeks (august).
Now as for you claim of increased prices (the bit you are truely wrong about), I told the boss to hold off on buying 4 Macs till the conference. For $300 LESS per machine we now get 200MHz faster processor, double the memory, and a CDR/DVD drive instead of a regular DVD. We even get a free inkjet printer with every machine... And this is more expensive in what way?
The really lame part of the hardware demo was Apple's hardware guru telling us, "Mhz doesn't matter" /. ? I thought this site was for tech people.
Why do you bother reading
Since when has MHz been a good indicator of overall performance? What's faster, a 1GHz Athlon or a 1GHz PIII? What's faster, a 1.2 GHz Athlon or a 1.5 GHz P4? (in almost every benchmark the Athlon is faster). Now for different instruction sets, what's faster... a 800 MHz 21364 Alpha, a 1GHz PIII, or a 1.8 GHz Pentium IV? The Alpha's FP performance smokes the other chips. The SpecFP scores for the new Alphas are truely staggering, so much so that Intel feels the need to kill them off within the next couple years, hence the buyout of the Alpha from Compaq.
Is is so hard to believe that the G4, with Altivec and a short pipeline can't outperform a chip clocked twice as fast in A/V and compression benchmarks? Especially when the opponent is routinely smoked by other i386 chips that are 50-60% slower in clock speed? Do you deny that a 20 stage pipeline is little more than a 'trick' to push clock speeds up? Why not crank up the core voltage too and just ship them overclocked from the factory (I think they did this too... or was that AMD... might have been the failed 1.13 GHz P3... someone tried it).
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
Um, software companies can't magically have their products finish development on the same day. It just doesn't work that way. I consider a product annoucement that is within a couple weeks to be a release when it's at an event such as this.
Not wanting to spend too much time, here is what I've found in just about 2 minutes.
If they are planning release dates a month or less in the future, they are probably in Final Candidate state... they still need time to press and ship CDs after all.
I'm sure I could find more if I had more time... More vendors will make their announcements over the course of the show anyway.
2) Try to go to the Apple Store, order a new PowerMac G4 and have it delivered this month. ;-) To be fair, I did go back and try the 867 and it did list 3-4 weeks ship time. I _believe_ this to be an error since that would push it's ship time back to the same frame as the Dual 800. Jobs made a point to indicate that the low and middle would ship now, and the dual in August.
I actually did. The ship date for the 733 model is 2 days! Not too bad if you ask me. That would be this month by the way.
I wouldn't be suprised if those ship times are based on how long it actually takes to ships a product. Since the 733 has been shipping, it would have an accurate figure (e.g. SAP queries the order database to make an estimate on the last weeks orders and posts that to the Apple Store page...). Since the 867 was just announced, there can't be an accurate ship time since they haven't shipped one yet. I would _guess_ that the ship time on the middle model will change drasticly within a week. Call Apple and ask if you need to know for sure.
3) As much as I would like to think the short pipeline in my Dual 500 G4 makes my machine fast, outside of Photoshop and Media Cleaner Pro, I do not feel like I am driving a HotRod compared to a 1Ghz+ x86 box.
This probably has something to do with the slow Aqua interface (poor finder performance). OSX 10.1 should fix this... this is a software issue, not a hardware issue. The fact that these machines DO routinely trounce much higher clocked x86 machines in A/V benchmarks, and in apache benchmarks (for Darwin running Apache, not for OSX) goes to show that the claims of Apple, though skewed tword Apple's core customers tasks, are valid. (wow, nice run on sentence huh?). You original assertion was that the "MHz doesn't matter" thing was dumb. I still claim that it is an important point, supported by many different platforms (Alpha's are good examples, though I don't consider the G4 an Alpha killer by any means).
I'm not feeling witty so bite me