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Next-Gen Apples To Include 1394b, USB 2.0
seletz writes: "According to this article on The Register, Apple will ship its next-generation PowerMacs with USB 2.0 and double FireWire.
USB 2.0 boosts data transfer up to 480Mbps, FireWire 1394b goes up to 3.2Gbps." It may seem a minor point, but the more and faster connections are built in, the less frequently the upgrade gremlins have to strike. 3.2Gbps!
[sigh] This is a borderline troll, and I probably shouldn't waste my time replying to it, but on the off-chance it's legitimate, I'll make an honest answer.
The "massive Apple layoffs" thing seems to be a massive rumor, and no more. In fact, all the legitimate news indicates that Apple is weathering the storm much better than PC makers such as Dell. If someone has information to the contrary, please let me know.
And where the hell were you pricing laptops (and if so, why were you looking at iMacs anyway?) IMO the iBook offers the absolute best price-performance ratio of any laptop on the market. Yes, the standard 64 MB RAM sucks, but you can bump that up cheaply enough. In every other way, the iBook is the best low- to mid-range laptop you'll find for your money.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Yes, it's most likely that Apples next revision of hardware will include USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394b (Firewire 2.0?). However, 3.2Gbs is not the number.
The next step for Firewire is actually 800Mbs. 1.2Gbs, 2.8Gbs and 3.2Gbs speeds are possible with this new protocol though, given the use of copper and fiber for the physical connection.
What I find more interesting, though, is that the next revision of PowerMac should sport some form of DDR SDRAM... and either the new "Apollo" G4 at around 1.2GHz or the brand new 64bit capable G5! Both Bandwidth Hungry CPUs... that should give the P4 and Palomino (?) a run for their money.
RSN
I tend to go to a lot of Apple seminars and follow the Mac world pretty well and I would be exceptionally surprised if Apple was laying off employees at this stage. They are really working hard to get OS 10.1 out the door on time and make sure it's really polished. I have certainly seen no indication that they are slowing down at all. I would say if there are any lay offs they'd be in marketing/management positions rather than the research and development areas.
I can't understand is how Apple can stay in business when their computers cost a hell of a lot more than the Intel based PCs?
There have been a large number of studies which suggest that the total cost of ownership of owning a Mac is significantly less than owning a Windows based PC. Admitedly, people and business' don't tend to notice these things, and go for the immediate lower price. Apple stay in business by actually making a profit on their systems rather than trying to continuously undercut the competition - note how many PC manufacturers are going out of business.
The number of units you ship is far less important than whether or not you make enough profit to cover your development, production, management and other costs. Apple's pricing does this, Gateway Australia's pricing didn't (hence they've gone out of business). Apple has made a profit for something like 11 out of the last 12 quarters which is better than most PC manufacturers.
Apple also has a very dedicated (fanatic) installed user base which helps a lot. Mostly though they have innovation. They put firewire and USB in their computers, they popularise wireless networking and "Apple ignited the desktop publishing revolution" (to take their marketing speel).
was pricing laptops a couple weeks ago, and for the money it would have cost me to buy a moderately loaded iMac, I could have gotten a Thinkpad for roughly half the cost, comparably equipped.
This surprises me, though it obviously depends largely on what you want from your laptop. I went out pricing laptops about 6 months ago (long time in IT I know) and found that Apple's laptops were far and away better value than the PCs. Not that they were cheaper, but they were clearly sturdier, more feature packed and most significantly had better screens and battery life. The cheap PC laptop world makes a lot of sacrifices in functionality. Either they have ridiculously small screens or poor quality screens and two or three hour battery life was normal. Then you tended to give up a CDROM to make the laptop smaller and many PC laptops (nowhere near as many these days though) don't have ethernet as standard. Then there's the lact of dual head ability (most do video mirroring) or a lack of video output options (note that the iBook does not do dual head either, which is why I type this on a Titanium PowerBook). Now, for some people these trade offs are worth the cost savings - for some people they aren't even trade offs, but just remove unwanted features. For many people (including me) these features are invaluable.
The final big advantage that I find with Apple is the OS. Mac OS X is a joy to use (I look forward to the reported responsiveness improvements of 10.1 naturally), there are rough edges and it is not perfect but the combination of UNIX and a solid, simple, clean, user friendly GUI is an absolute God send. I can happily use vim to hack away my perl scripts, test them with apache and postgresql and follow the design document which was written in Word. The lack of responsiveness that is currently in OS X is more than made up for by the fact that I don't have to reboot between Linux and MacOS anymore (for the record I don't remember the last time I booted into OS 9).
The morale: sometimes paying more in the short term is worthwhile in the long run, but it all depends on what you want to do.
I remember seeing a Compaq DeskPro with USB on the logic board in early or mid 1997.
Who had the hardware first is irrelevant. Until Windows 98 added functional USB support (Win95 OSR2 does not count because its USB support was half-assed crap), those USB ports were little more than extra holes in the backplate. And aren't DeskPros aimed at the corporate market anyway, where (since NT is the "recommended" OS) USB was unusable until Windows 2000 was released in 1999?
Even with the USB support that came with Windows 98, Wintel users still hung on to those serial and parallel port devices for their dear little lives. Apple was the first company to fully support USB, which it did by producing a product that exclusively used USB to connect peripherals-- and that is what created the market for USB.
You can argue that forcing people to replace their legacy devices or buy adapters so they can continue to use them kind of sucks, but it is a tactic that is sometimes necessary. For example, to make sure people used the mouse on the first Macintosh, its keyboard had no cursor keys, so they couldn't stick with the 'old' ways. Once the mouse became accepted and it was shown that cursor keys still had a useful place on the keyboard, they were reinstated on the keyboards of subsequent Mac models.
~Philly