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Apple Gives Laptops Speed Bumps
sockit2me9000 writes "Apple released their new PowerBook today. They include faster processors across the board (up to 1GHz), Radeon 9000 GPUs, and the top-of-the-line model will include a slot-loading SuperDrive. Price points remain about the same. New iBook was released as well."
A USB to Serial converter works great in Linux, but I've yet had the chance to use it with OS X.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
All laptops are now $200(USD) cheaper than before.
You can return them. Apple has a 10 day return policy (if they're opened though, you'll have to pay a restock fee).
Hey, Pudge, where I live, speed bumps are used to slow people down. I couldn't figure out why in the hell Apple would want to slow their laptops down.
Mayhaps you were looking for "speed boost" or "speed increase"?
Be advised that Apple (well, the Apple Store) has a "no return" policy if you change any configuration, such as adding more memory or a bigger hard drive.
I know this because I wanted to exchange my 15" iMac for a 17" iMac. They didn't want to do it because I had ordered my iMac with extra memory. I had to talk to a manager who not only accepted the exchange, but waived the stocking fee. Their staff was courteous and professional, but persistence pays.
Actually...
MacRumors.com accurately reported on these updates: Powerbook/iBook Specs Roundup.
Very Likely
Powerbook 800Mhz-1GHz with Superdrive
iBook G3 up to 800MHz
Probable
November 5th, 2002 Release Date
Possible
Bluetooth
Uncertain
13" iBook Screens
Radeon Mobility 9000
Overall, they do a pretty good job collecting and sifting through the rumors.
MOSR has been irrelevant in the rumors "industry" (in my opinion) since they completely missed the boat on the iMac all those years ago. Their "rumors" tend to come from pie-eyed "what-if" scenarios snarfed form IRC these days.
There's much better Mac rumor sites out there - MacRumors and Macslash being two of them.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Well not quite. They still have the original iMac for $799. So the iBook can be thought of as the most expensive G3 they sell.
No they don't, the iBooks are $200 cheaper across the range. As I mentioned in my submitted Slashdot story. Which was rejected. Not that I'm bitter.
I'm convinced, anyway; the midrange iBook looks very compelling to me. All the OSS stuff I need plus Powerpoint without rebooting. I'll hopefully be ordering one later.
You win again, gravity!
IMHO a 1Ghz G4 is about the same as a 4Ghz P4 in speed.
lol
come on now, that's just silly and you know it. the length of pipeline does not a processor make (or some stupid thing like that)
IMHO I am the sexiest man alive. But, in reality, it seems that most (all?) women don't agree.
Casual Games/Downloads
"So why not buy a cheaper PC (yes, even with Windows thrown in) and install OsX over the top?"
because that would be impossible?
That was classic intercourse!
Yes.. you can easily watch a dvd on one charge.. I've done it many times, and I usually have about 30-40% left over afterwards. This is on a TiBook 400mhz. I think they actually have improved the batteries themselves since then..
Considering a quick look at Dell and Gateway reveal only one laptop from Dell that's $899, I think $999, the most affordable iBook Apple has, as being well within the reach of anyone who is considering getting a laptop and can budget it.
Or is 100 dollars that much an issue?
If nothing else, Apple is improving hteir price points gradually.
Kalen D'arrie
yeh, not to mention that the bottom of the range laptop costs $999 in the US and £849 in the UK (more than US$1300).
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
It's a troll because if you don't want to see any stories about Apple, you can go into your preferences and disable them. Click off all the categories that the person took the time to list, but not to check off.
Where are the stories about Dell, Sony, Toshiba, etc. releasing new laptops?
Check ZDNet or Cnet.
You haven't done it, have you? Easy as pie. Pop off the keyboard. On the TiBook, you will see the 2 slots. On the iBook, you need to remove the Airport card (if installed), and 2 small screws to remove the cover over the memory slot. Even if you don't know what you are doing, it doesn't take more than 10 minutes.
In fact, I think there is a diagram on the bottom of the keyboard to help you. There are definitely directions in the owners manual.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
Actually, while normally outrageously expensive, apple memory happens to be pretty cheap right now. You can double the ram in any system for $40. Bumping the TiBook from 512MB of RAM to a gig of RAM for $40 sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. Bumping the 256MB iBook to 512MB for $40 doesn't sound bad either.
Actually, apple has had always had good stuff like this, everybody just sees the price and doesn't bother to check the specs
Also Mac's do have a longer life then most other computers Iv worked w/
I once read a quote that said a mac has a useful life of 8-10 years, at that I laughed my head off, until I realized I wuz reading it on my PPC from 95(only thing that's gone out in that time is the monitor...)
Don't save your orgasms for Heaven; Heaven knows we need them here.
Tested recently by a friend:
you can watch two DVDs ("The Sopranos" were used for the test) on the iBook's battery, and still have 20% of charge after that.
A portable DVD, i.e. you could end up watching region one DVDs in region two. BAD!
That's not too large an issue; it's a market division, not a geographical division. (I wager that the PXes on USAF bases in Japan sell Region 1 disks and Region 1 players.)
CD burner, aught to be illegal, makes rich artists starve. BAD!
Oddly enough, CD-burners are the least of the RIAA's new technology worries. Backing up your shiney "we will not replace this disk" CD is a justification for RIAA not offering to replace "broken licensed CDs." Mixing CDs of music you've got--especially if they're lesser quality due to the analog hole--is another thing that RIAA is probably all too happy to let you do.
Well, maybe not "happy", but "forced to allow due to the courts" sounds about right...
So as not to be a complete ass, the first link from that article as a statement that a P4 overclocked to 3.9GHz (wow--he used liquid nitrogen) was only able to do 4.9 Gigaflops. A dual-G4 1GHz did 15 Gigaflops...
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
US version
$2299 867mhz
$2799 cdrw
$2999 superdrive
European version
2988 867mhz
3682 cdrw
3945 superdrive
IF you can get a flight for less than $1000 you're saving money.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
You realize off course that you are supposed to pay import taxes and VAT when you bring it back. These easily run far over 10%. You can probably get out of the VAT taxes though if you make a good case to the customs officer you need it for educational purposes or just not tell anybody you bought it in your trip, which actually would be illegal.
The lower classes need something affordable, dependable, and proven, and for this reason we will continue to stick with PC manufacturers such as GateWay 2000 and DELL. I hope Apple figures this out soon.
(Gateway dropped the "2000" bit three years ago.)
The lowest priced iBook is $999. Dell's lowest priced model is $899, and Gateway's lowest priced model is $999. They've hardly got Apple beat on the "value laptop" end.
And, like a different poster said... if you're sturggling along doing dock work, what do you need a shiney new laptop for?
Yes. Also, if you download something like DVDBackup and use it to copy the DVD to your hard drive before your trip, the Apple DVD player can play it from there, which will probably consume less power than spinning the DVD drive would.
Lamentably, games are indeed one of the big areas of lag. Even so, there are plenty of games out there for the Mac - far more than any normal person could find time to play. How many games do you need? The delay associated with some games (not all - there are some simultaneous releases, and even a tiny number of Mac-firsts) can be a drag at times, but it also has silver linings - sometimes our first release of a game is of the "gold edition" with extra maps and whatnot, so people who buy the game right away still get all the extra trimmings without paying extra or rebuying the game down the road; also, sometimes the initial PC releases are deeply bug-ridden, but by the time they make it to us the bugs have been squashed. Neither of these is a reason to game on the Mac, to be sure, but they do at least illustrate it's not all bad. For what it's worth, I can personally attest that the Mac gaming scene is substantial enough to be satisfying. Others do disagree, but I think the worst problem with the Mac gaming scene is that certain specific genres of games (like sports games, which I don't play but I'm aware many love) are sorely underrepresented. Unless you're into a type of game that isn't well-represented on the Mac, though, I think you can find your gaming fix here.
As for other software, pretty much every kind of thing you'd want to do with a computer can be done on a Mac, and frequently with the same software you'd use on a Wintel machine. There are even lots of Mac-only releases, and there are plenty of general tasks that are almost certainly easier on the Mac than on any PC (DVD authoring, for example).
Well, it's certainly true that despite Apple's best efforts there is a price delta between Macs and PCs, and one can usually get a PC for less money than a Mac of identical or near-identical specs, but that gap is probably narrower than one would think, and many of us feel it's justified by the ease-of-use alone, not to mention other arguments I'll mention at the end of this post. You also mention tech support; for what it's worth, some would argue Apple's support beats Dell's, and most other vendors' for that matter.
Ok, here are a few of those other reasons I mentioned earlier:
- it's not Windows, and one can be as free of M$ as one wants on a Mac (yet at the same time, one can use lots of M$ apps if one really wants to, for some ungodly reason)
- the most games of any non-M$ platform
- software and hardware integration, ease-of-use, and intuitiveness that (arguably) surpasses all other platforms
- minimal DRM issues (so far, anyway - cross those fingers ;)
- friendly to average Joes and hardcore geeks alike
- yes, you said it... style
- strength / dominance in certain notable computing applications & markets (graphics & media, biotech, education)
- arguably the most enjoyable platform-specific trade shows in the industry ;) (Ok, reaching here, but I thought I'd mention it :)
- longevity / resale value of old hardware (less of a consideration than it used to be, it seems, but still notable)
There are more factors, I think, but I believe that should be enough to start with.
I hope this helps! :)
Some of them definitely work - the question comes up on the darwin-developers list regularly. There's a /dev entry for serial devices & also the XServe has a fully-working serial port on the back of the machine. So yeah, MacOS X natively supports serial ....
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
The current iBooks use the new IBM 750fx "G3" CPU's. What's holding them back is *marketing* - the 750fx goes up to 1GHz (25% faster) with 200MHz (100% faster) bus, but Apple's too afraid of eating into (more profitable) TiBook sales to ship faster iBooks.
IBM did a *really* nice job designing the 750fx CPU. Back in May/June (when Apple introduced it in the iBook) one of the Apple hardware sites did some G3(750fx) vs. G4(Moto) comparison benchmarks. Bottom line: for anything that wasn't written to use AltiVec, the IBM G3 was just as fast as the Moto G4 (at same MHz).
Weak video systems really slowed older iBooks down in (eye-candy-full) OSX. It's far less a problem in the new iBooks.
Understand what you'll be using it for and do your homework BEFORE spending the $$$ to get a G4.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
The shells of the iBooks are translucent plastic painted on one side (inside I think). You can strip the paint with some chemicals and refinish it with your own translucent paint of any color.
Search slashdot for mac mod, or use google. Should get a few links in the comments section.
Apple has said several times at shareholder meeting that they will not adopt USB 2.0. Generally speaking, Apple feels that it alone is responsible for the success of USB 1.0 in the first place, and therefore is pissed that Intel would target their FireWire technology with USB 2.0. Essentially, Apple feels as if Intel is backstabbing them.
All that said, I don't see FireWire going anywhere. I do see it redefining its niche to be purely high-bandwidth applications such as video cameras and very fast external drives. Do remember, however, that FireWire 2 is due very soon and will literally double the bandwidth. Could change things considerably.
The PowerBooks are pretty easy to work on. I've upgraded the Harddrive, memory, and recently even swapped the g3/400 processor card for a g4/500 card in my Bronze Powerbook. The processor upgrade took 15 minutes which included the time required to watch the quicktime video that stepped through the process..
Actually, if you're a student in the US, you can get a high-end TiBook for $2400! You just need to pay for a 1 year membership as a student developer ($99), and then you can order through their ADC Hardware Purchase Program.
Details:
Student Developer Membership
Student Hardware Purchase Program
TiBook in the Hardware Purchase Program
IBM makes the G3 chips Apple uses and Mot makes Apple's G4s. AltiVec is something by and from Mot only. Apparently the G5/PPC970 will implement something very much like it, a clone, at this point IBM doesn't have the rights to AltiVec.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Firewire also offers things like isosynchronous transfers, and a more flexible chaining topology.
Back in the day when G3's came out, G3's were legitimately beating PII chips at the same clock at virtually every benchmark. The G3-500Mhz could squarely trounce a PIII-650Mhz in non-Photoshop benchmarks. It was a good time to be a mac users ;) *remenisce*
I think a 400 Mhz indigo imac is a little more than a year old, but a lack of ram can account for a significant performance bottleneck. If that things running 9.1 and has 64MB or less, it's going to run like a cow. OS 9.1 will easily use 40 MB of ram for itself, or around 23 if you have virtual memory turned on. If your library can cough up $20 for another 128 MB, that iMac will be much happier. Of course, apple shipped a bunch of machines with 32-64 MB ram, and OS9, which meant you pretty much needed an instant RAM upgrade.. but I digress. My father has a 400Mhz iMac, which had only 64 MB, and every operation was unbearably slow, since the computer was constantly swapping data in and out of vram. He was about to chuck it out the window 'till I upgraded it with an additional 128. Now, everything's dandy.
IIRC, Win98 will run relatively fine with 64 MB ram, so a PII233 w/ 64MB will trounce a 400Mhz iMac w/ 64, but I think at 128 MB, their performance should be equal for most tasks, with computationally intensive tasks going to the iMac.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
...Firewire's life is and will be driven by DV cameras not external disks. As long as the cam manufacturers continue to use Firewire (and Sony is going to, rest assured), then USB will not kill Firewire.
Besides, recent test results have shown that USB may not be the Firewire killer it's touted to be in real-world situations.
- I am made of meat.
I ran my 700MHz ibook against my 700MHz athlon thunderbird and the AMD completed the same seti block in about half the time it took the ibook! You should make sure you have both machines processing the same data block.
for integer type stuff, the ibook is 15% faster, but floating point is another story.
I run a 700mhz ibook with the radeon w/16mb vram. Jaguar is certainly not as fast as windows is on my desktop, but it is still a load faster than 10.1.5 . I do in fact have Quartz Extreme as well.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
USB 2.0 has a PEAK transfer of 480 mbps, whilst firewire has a SUSTAINED transfer of 400 mbps. As the other poster at my level also stated, firewire also chains better, is more consistent in its speed and generally is better for high bandwidth purposes. USB 2, while it has gained some support in external hard drives and CD-Rs, is still an inferior product that was created more for political reasons.
USB belongs on the low bandwidth end (mice, webcams, keyboards) whilst higher transfer devices should be firewire (digital camcorders, iPod, hard drives).
Heh, I don't even own a Mac and I'm praising firewire, lol!
The short answer is most drives can't send much more than 66mbit right now anyway.
The long answer is thats damn fast for a notebook, and if they put a higher rpm on there the spinup would cost twice as much battery.
I live in a giant bucket.