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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."
FP
Ok, two thing for RIAA to attend to:
"watching DVD movies to burning your own music CDs"
A portable DVD, i.e. you could end up watching region one DVDs in region two. BAD!
CD burner, aught to be illegal, makes rich artists starve. BAD!
Pick your favorite punchline for this article:
o Macs are already speedbumps.. in my driveway!!
o Wow, i'll have to pick one up...and then drop it.
o If you were to take an array of cats...and train them all to meow really really fast, and synchronize their meowing with the other cats near them in the array, and then fed them amphetamines..consider the possibilities. Suppose the cats were to all meow at or near the speed of light. If you were to place a cowboy in the middle of the array, would the cats explode if he attempted to herd them?
o Congratulations, Apple! Welcome to 1998!
o (Insert punchline here)
Bowie J. Poag
Anyone ever noticed how much mundane Apple news gets posted on Slashdot? A minor speed increase on laptops doesn't seem to warrant a full story.
And, if you look in the categories for stories, there are tons of Apple specific categories for no real reason:
Apple Wireless
Apple Hardware
Apple Software
Apple Desktops
iMac
Apple Media
Apple Networking
OS 9
OS X
Apple Utilities
Look, we're in the "Apple Laptop" category for the love of god, what is the deal?
Apple should run OS X directly from the ATI graphics card and use their PowerPC CPU as a dedicated "punch the monkey and win" co-processor.
Guys. Just buy a Mac already and stop fawning. Then in a few years time you can get screwed over like all the other Apple customers have been over the years and wake up to reality. The sooner you have your epiphany the earlier we can bury Apple the better it is for us all alike. Thanks.
fuck you and your little story about the history of microprocessors - i was making a joke. clearly you are an idiot.
answer me this, fuckface: will the new apple laptop make the "punch the monkey and win" experience better?
I don't see why they tote the iBooks as perfect for your backpack, etc. At the start of this school year, I did some heavy research into these systems. Not only are they much more expensive than their PC counterparts (even with the slight offset of the educational discount), but the performance of OS X lagged considerably on these machines. I bought an iBook back in August, and was so disgusted with it, that I returned it within the week. I replaced it with a Sony Vaio, running BSD, with a copy of VMWare for Windows applications. With my current system, I'm not wrapped up in the endless quagmire of apple hype. Sure, I've used OS X at work for the better part of this year, but I still get a lot more bang for the buck out of a standard, high performance PC notebook running BSD. Why should I pay a premium to use something with BSD 3.2 hacked in, running on non-native, proprietary hardware?
Besides that, it sickens me to see the average slashdotter drool over 'pretty' [fruity] OS X, and banter about the fact that their "M$ free". All while using MS Office, IE, and Outlook on their Macs. Apple is owned by Microsoft anyways. DON'T BUY INTO THE HYPE.
Slashdot should not be an advertising forum!
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need, not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.
Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.
Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.
There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 12 years. I expect that trend to continue. (Also note that my Apple contact indicated that Macs would never ship with a 3-button mouse, even though Apple intended to port almost all X-window software and deliver it either on a CD/DVD or installed directly on each Mac's hard drive. How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X programs that often require 3 buttons?)
Apple has now lost two opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.