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Apple Releases New PowerBook and the eMac
Martin Kallisti writes "Apple has released new PowerBook models whose improvements include faster processors (up to 800MHz), better resolution, 1MB of L3 cache and 32MB of video memory. Also, a new computer looking much like the old iMacs, called the eMac, has seen the light of day. It's primarily targeted at the education market, and boasts a 700MHz G4 processor and a flat 17" monitor. " As Troc pointed out in another submission, the eMac will be available only to profs/teachers, students and higher education institutions.
The point is that it's a machine designed specifically for education. It has some features and options that consumers don't really want.
One case in point is the CD-ROM only option. Schools like this for security reasons, but who wants to buy a CD-ROM only machine for personal use?
When he introduced the new iMac, Jobs said that they had listened to consumers top 3 requests - Flat Screen, G3 and Superdrive.
The thing about the flat screen is a bit of a killer in education for two reasons - primarly cost, and secondly durability. Schools want the G4 power, but not the extra hassle of the LCD iMac . I'm an admin for a school, and we're certainly leery of the potential for the arm getting busted.
I think the point of edu-only is to give schools what they want and need, without complicating the product line for the general public. I mean, how do explain the differences between the eMac and the basic iMac?
1280 x 854 is the new resolution, as compared to 1152 x 768 before. One major addition for me as sound engineer is the adition of a Audio Line in, which until now was missing from the Tibooks.
--[Nothing important]--
The eMac logotype font is Adrian Frutiger's namesake font, Frutiger. It's very elegant looking for a sans-serif cut, a good choice for the logo.
The eMac being targeted at educational markets, I guess they wanted also the logo to reflect the fresh new design. Apple's Garamond is, after all, almost straight out of Claude Garamond's wood type and hundreds of years old.
You are confusing your iBooks with your PowerBooks ;)
The iBook is still around 1200 as before and the PowerBook is still around 2200 as before but the PowerBook is now a bit faster (and has better graphics etc etc....)
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
You see Apple has large Education Dept & university/tech/college contracts.
This is for them.
But once supplies get into gear, & the price for that spec starts to decrease, they'll open sales for them to the general public, you watch.
The way it will work is that large contracts with Education Dept & universities/techs/colleges will get 1st go.
Then Education staff will be able to by them from the collage Apple shop or through college book & supply shops.
Then it will be anyone with a student card buying from the collage Apple shop or through college book & supply shops.
Then they'l be sold in public stores but only to Education institions, education staff & people with student cards.
Finally when they have gone through all this routine over about 6 months & if supplies stock up a bit, then they'll be released for general sale.
That's the way its occured here where I am, in the past when Apple has released 'education only' products.
No the font is Myriad, which is similar to Frutiger but different. I tried both fonts and Myriad is the exact match!
Adobe also seems to love this font...
Apple sales and profits are picking up.. Last Quarter Apple beat Gateway in units sold and beat gateway in profits.
Apple had a profit, Gateway did not.
The fact that good ANSI C rigorous comp sci benchmarks (such as ByteMark 2.2 source code) perform about 2 times faster on PowerPCs than AMD mean that this 700 Mhz box is like a 1.4 Mhz AMD.
And their dual 1Ghz box (only $2999 with dvd-ram recorder and dual monotor support) is like having a dual AMD 2000+MP
I am glad to see apple doing well, despite many large institutional work offices only using Windows and MS office alone on their dektops.
But those do not represent a lot of the uncompressed video editing market. That market is still on the mac heavily (120 MegaBYTES per second is needed for the most exotic large rez editing).
Apple dropped its 35 millimeter non-linear film editing system addon to only 1000 dollars on their web site.
You probably want their 1900 pixel wide 23 inch ultr bright monitor.
Pretty cool. Now anyone can edit Star Wars negatives. (Well not that movie its 70mm, but you get the idea) cheap cheap cheap robotic-film-cutting file output from a prosumer software package.
2002 is a strange revolutionary year.
Actually (from the Apple website)...
Five screen resolutions:
640 by 480 pixels at 138 Hz
800 by 600 pixels at 112 Hz
1024 by 768 pixels at 89 Hz
1152 by 864 pixels at 80 Hz
1280 by 960 pixels at 72 Hz
The eMac has a 17 inch display. Who the hell is going to run that thing at 1280x960!?! I'm sure your eyes would be just fine running at the recommended resolution of 1024x768 @89 Hz.
The actual range of the human eye for refresh rate is somewhere around 60-72 Hz anyway. So even if you do run at that way-too-big-for-this-screen resolution, you're still at the top of the spectrum.
Unless you're some sort of X-mutated cyclopse with a high-refresh eye, you'll be fine.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
But if you look carefully on the page, you see that the price for the *old* 667MHz PowerBook was $2999 and it's $2499 for the *new* one with all the extra features. I consider this a big drop in price. It's only that the "cheap" 550MHz machine isn#t available anymore.
"Apple charge 2-3 times US prices outside the States"
That is a flat-out lie. Apple actually charge something like a 5-10% on top outside the US. An example is the iPod $399 (before tax) in the USA, £349 (279 before tax) in the UK. According to www.ft.com, that makes the before tax UK price equivalent to $406. There's a surcharge there for sure, but it's not a large one. I don't work for Apple but your post is plain misinformation and FUD.
That was classic intercourse!
15 pounds of bigger monitor and heat sink?
Mod point free since 2001
I don't have either font, but here's the links to the Adobe font pages.
Frutiger
and
Myriad MM
-Russ
Me
terminfo files can be generated, though it's kind of a pain to propogate them (check out my hint on macosxhints.com)
however, the easy way is to just fire up screen
That's a very tough problem. I wonder what you can do about it?
One idea would be to use the included DVI->VGA adaptor.
From the education store--
$999.00
700MHz
PowerPC G4
128MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-ROM drive
No Modem
$1,199.00
700MHz
PowerPC G4
128MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW)
56K internal modem
$1,456.00
700MHz
PowerPC G4
512MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
Combo drive (DVD/CD-RW)
56K internal modem
eMac Stand
This "human eye" thing is bull. Under some circumstances, I can tell the difference between 72Hz and 100Hz, and I'm pretty sure I have human eyes.
There are at least two reasons that higher is better:
1. Interference with fluorescent bulbs. Your ambient lighting might have an imperceptible variation in brightness at a frequency slightly different from your refresh rate. When that happens, it is the difference between the two frequencies that you perceive as flicker.
2. Motion blur. Things that move on a computer screen have no motion blur: they are a series of static images. (Well, some high-end video cards do motion blur I think.) Moving images with no motion blur look very strange and sometimes confusing, and appear to flicker. (An example of this is the opening battle from Gladiator, in which motion blur was reduced to enhance the impression of chaos.) One way to simulate motion blur is to have tons of frames per second. For instance, if you have 5 times more FPS than your eye can perceive, then each five frames will effectively blur together, creating a more natural-looking motion with less flicker.
I'm sure there are more effects I haven't thought of, but you get the idea: it's not just about having enough frames to fool the eye. For #1, the key is not only high frame rate, but a frame rate sufficiently different from that of your ambient lighting (and its harmonics, I guess). For #2, the higher the frame rate the better: there is no limit. Fast-moving animations will always benefit from more FPS.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Informative my fat white ass.
If you actually look at the pages, what is now the low end was the high end model before this announcement, and is now $500 cheaper. The old 550mhz G4 laptops are no longer available from the Apple Store anymore. The new options are more expensive than what used to be on there, but they're better. Materials didn't magically start costing less.
You mean the price for the older configuration has come down..
:)
667mHz was around ~3000, now its around 2500..
Depends on which way you look at it mate
Pretty cool, the 17" CRT eMac is the same depth as the 15" CRT iMac (17.1 inches), and only .8 inches taller and wider. That's pretty impressive.
http://www.apple.com/education/emac/specs.html
http://www.apple.com/imac/g3/specs.html
(For some reason in the marketing description they say it's 8mm shorter, not sure why.)
Ahh, Artemis. For those of you not in the loop with Apple's code names, this is the machine alternately known as the Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One, the AIO, the Performa G3, and the "MolarMac."
The latter name, of course, referring to it's shape - vaguely looking akin to a giant molar tooth. You can see pictures of it on Apple-History. I personally don't consider it all that unattractive - not the best design in the world, but I've seen worse from PC manufacturers.
Nice part about the MolarMac? It was basically the full beige G3 desktop design in an all-in-one housing - meaning, if I recall correctly, it had 3 PCI slots and a ZIF slot for upgrading the processor. Bad part? 60+ pounds of computer does not lend well to portability. Don't bother security cabling it down - the sheer heft alone will keep it in place. :-)
"3D games push the graphics processing unit harder than any other application. And of these 3D games, Quake performance has come to be the benchmark against which all graphics processors are measured. So you'll be pleased to hear that when playing the Quake III Arena version 1.30, in millions of colors, at 1024x768 resolution, the 800MHz PowerBook G4 blazes away at a scorching 68 frames per second.*
* Higher frame rates indicate better performance. Tests conducted by Apple."
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
It appears that you only get the $999 price if you're shopping for your school. If you're a student or faculty and shopping for yourself (and hence click the other link) you can only get the $1249 combo drive model.
The $999 is for the CD-ROM model. The combo drive model is $1199 for schools, $50 cheaper than the identical student model.
Yes, you can set it to that res, but it will look like crap. There's a fixed number of pixels; to get a lower res you have to use anti-aliasing, pixel doubling, etc.
Don't mention that Air-port thing; no one bothered with that.
Yeah, no one but Dell, Microsoft,Compaq,
I think you get the picture...
Gotta love it when the AC trolls post drivel...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...
Hmmmm...
/usr/bin/emacs
$ uname -a
Darwin [...] 5.4 Darwin Kernel Version 5.4: Wed Apr 10 09:27:47 PDT 2002; root:xnu/xnu-201.19.3.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
$ which emacs
Seems to have it, vi is a bit more my style though (it's too bad OSX doesn't also have w3m...). Even has ssh, and ssd (and a click box to turn it on).
The ~ are normal on a blank document. They show that a line is past the EOF.
Lowmag.net
I, for one, found these results to be quite interesting, bearing in mind that the website is sort of a Macintosh-oriented one, and the fact that they have results using the dual G4-1000MHz, etc.
http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I wonder if the new Apple PowerPC's can run the POWERPC version of AIX?
No. It's a fairly different chip. The only Apples that ever ran AIX were the short-lived Apple Network Servers, which shipped with it.
--saint
If you had spent any time with the new iMacs you would know that there's no way in hell a 3 year old could break that "neck". It's just not happening.
That having been said, the eMac is nice because it boasts a larger screen, which is good for the kiddies.
That having been said, it's harder to adjust the eMac's viewing angle than it is the iMac's, so you may need to purchase some booster seats.
All in all, I think the iMac is better for kids, but that's my personal opinion. I think it suits them better. YMMV, of course.
Good luck with picking out the right one (I'd recommend going to an Apple store or another Apple reseller to play with them first).
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
the list is DOMINATED by PowerPc and Power risc.
Yep. That's correct. 64-bit Power3 and Power4 CPUs produced by IBM. Wonderful chip with 2 floating point units. No altivec units at all. Formally they are called "PowerPC", but they derive from IBM's PowerParallel architecture, not Motorola's PowerPC.
These chips are NOT used in Apple computers and they never will be (much too expensive, and they require a lot of extra cooling). There is not A SINGLE machine in the top 500 running Motorola chips (the ones used in your Mac), so please explain what this has to do with Macs?
SPEC cost 50,000 dollars and is an IO test and OS test and not a CPU alone test.
Please... don't comment on things you don't know anything about. What do you thing SPEC CPU2000 is?
(Hint: The requirement for inclusion is that more than 95% of the code is CPU-bound).
It's quite obvious why they didn't include dhrystone: All the SPEC benchmarks must be samples of production-level scientific code solving real problems, not synthetic benchmarks. In any case, you don't have any *right* to be included in SPEC - people vote on the submissions.
Now we have ByteMark2 and it compiles on anything that has ANSI C.
And what fraction of scientific number-crunching code is written in C? 1%? 2%. Hey, it might even be 5% now! The remaining 95% is Fortran.
AMD is 2 times slower than Powerpc at many things at same external clock.
Sure. If you by "PowerPC" mean the PowerParallel CPUs manufactured by IBM.
If you are talking about the slower Motorola chips used in Macs, please provide us with references to a couple of these floating-point benchmark and the results (since top500 covers floating-point).