Slashdot Mirror
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."
I have to say something that I never though I'd say: "These new Macs look great! They are relatively cheap, run *nix and have al the hardware you could wish for!"
My sincere congratulations to Apple for having swung around from being a stubborn, expensive brand to become a computer supplier that I like. I will concider an Apple next time I buy a computer!
Indeed, but for us Europeans, they have not realized that now $1 is very close to 1. I expected Apple to put roughly the same pre-tax cost on both sides of the pond. No way, it's about 10% more. To the point that it may be worth a trip to NYC to buy a fully loaded PowerBook.
A somewhat nicer model with the 800mhz G3, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive and the same 640mb of RAM lists for $1489. That gets you a very potent UN*X box with a lot of wonderful features, a lovely OS, and a massively high portability level.
All this, and an amazing attention to detail as well. Really, switching to Apple is like moving from Chevy to BMW. Sure it may not stack up on paper (horsepower per dollar, etc) but you can end up with an incredibly friendly machine that's a pure pleasure to use! Do yourself a favor and go check 'em out if you've been on the fence.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
The proliferation of categories is pretty silly, ...
but
this is a unix-focused site to some extent. And
Apple ships more unix than any other manufacturer.
So it stands to reason that we'd talk about them
here.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
The majority of the processing needed in modern pcs is in fact for all the graphics. So it makes perfect sense to have a faster GPU than CPU - that's where the horsepower is needed. Even if you're doing relatively computationally intense work (I run statistical analyses daily) the requirement still don't add up to the level required to run Aqua or WinXPs graphics.
Remember the Amigas? Positively legendary machines, and for good reason, they were designed this way. The CPU wasn't much at all by modern standards, but it was enough to do what it needed to do just fine (and, in all honesty, enough to handle the non-graphical computations done on most pcs to this day.) The Video Toaster was capable of working pretty much independant of the CPU, and it had a lot more horsepower... the end result was a machine that surpassed PCs made many years later in real functional power.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Excuse me, the reason I can afford a Mac is that I work therefore that makes me in the "working class". What you are talking about is that "Slashdot Class" -- a group of people that think its a sin to pay for anything. Which makes the best notebook for you the one found in the dumpster behind a fortune 500 company. Instead of using the Windows 2000 Pro install already on it, you fdisk the harddrive and install Gentoo Linux so you can show it off at your next meeting of the 2600 club complete with Anarchy and Calvin peeing on the Windows logo stickers.
For the rest of us in the "working class", Apple has produced some awesome notebooks at a reasonable fee. Where is the PC Notebook that burns DVDs? What Linux distro supports that?
Don't fall into the Mhz myth, the clock speeds on these things are lower, but they get more work done in a clock cycle too.
That said, they're still a little slower in terms of work done per second than the fastest Intel has, just not nearly as much so as you may think looking at the clock speeds. But it doesn't really matter all that much. CPU speed is just one factor of overall performance, and with a good design it doesn't need to be nearly as fast as it would on a poorer design. The design on the Macs really is much better, the bottlenecks aren't as bad, and they have plenty of power where it counts. Think of it as finesse vs. brawn in comparison with your typical Intel/AMD system, where the surfeit of CPU speed is used to overcome a basically less efficient design. Consider that probably over 90% of the computation done on a pc these days is concentrated in the graphics rendering, and the look at how much more efficiently the mac handles that - all the way from a GPU which is faster than the CPU to the Altivec system in the CPU, which beats the hell out of MMX/SSE and all that.
I'm typing this on a TiBook now, a 666 Mhz G4, and believe me, when I put it up against a new Intel based notebook it won't take the speed crown, by any means, but it's close enough that I don't really care. It will outperform Intel notebooks with over twice the clockspeed quite handily on most tasks, and when you look at things like the screen and the cd-rw/dvd drive... Apple was overpriced once but it's changed. You'd be very hard pressed to find an intel notebook with the same features in the same weight-class much cheaper. And OS X beats WinXP in nearly every category for my money. Easier to use, prettier, AND more powerful under the good as well... tcsh or bash beats cmd.exe any day.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Excluding my grandma who is sysadmin in a linux-only rendering farm (that's a joke), Apple is the only option consumers have to WinTel. Apple's tenacity, inventiveness, and rich *nixy-goodness is why Apple is the darling of the computing world these days, even at 6% market share.
I'm not trolling, but I'm guessing you've not yet used a recent (4 years) machine made by Apple. (My apologies if I've put my foot in my ignormaus. Apple is becoming a favorite among newly converted geeks because they produce good stuff and because they're finally starting to get it: *nix, Photoshop, Apache, SSH, MS Office. Apple's laptops have no WinTel equivalent. The interaction between the command line and Aqua is something at which to gawk.
On a less preach-to-the-choir note, is it so different than announcments for minor revisions of relatively arcane (if beloved) open source software? Not that I'm saying such posts are bad, but that it might be the nature of the Slashdot beast.
blog
This is proof that Apple still has a ways to go. If their changes were that radical, nobody would wait for "...next time I buy a computer.." and would actually do it NOW.
Radical or not, I, like most people, have to wait until I have the money to actually buy it in order to, well, buy it. I'm going to shoot for the entry iBook the next time I buy a computer because that's when I'll have the money to do it.
Besides, what moron goes out and gets a new computer when their current one works just fine? I have a PowerMac G4/450 that's over three years old and it runs 10.2 at a more than acceptable speed ("damn fast") and is no where near needing an upgrade. I'm only getting the iBook because I need an iBook. There are those people that buy things for the sake of having them and then there are those that buy when there is a need. Obviously the previous poster does not need a new computer now. The fact that he is waiting is not a statement on Apple's ability to market or make a product but a statement on the efficiency of the poster with regard to his possessions and money.
Hmm, a mature attitude towards something on Slashdot. Anyone else feel that cold draft come out of the cracks of Hell?