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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."
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.
I wonder when they iBook is gonna be given the dignity of a G4 processor. The life of the G3 has been remarkable but I can't help thinking that it has been stretched out not by virtue of the chip itself but rather because Apple is having trouble getting better and faster chips from Moto (hence the IBM PPC rumors recently).
This is pretty cool, especially for the TiBook. I'm sure video houses will appreciate the superdive to let them make rough cuts on the road and share them.
Now, sadly, my TiBook is no longer state-of-the-art. I can tell its feelings were hurt: this morning it ask me if it looked fat.
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.
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.
Note: I am not bashing Apple here. I have owned Macs.
How far can you really get with OS X and the 128MB these Powerbooks ship with? OS X is great, but the prevailing opinion is that it's more memory hungry than Windows. (It's quite possible that this is a myth. Reviewers love to say dumb things like "I highly recommend that you upgrade to 512MB if you plan on doing more than simple word processing.")
I'll add, of course, that 128MB uses less power than 256MB, which is important for laptops.
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!
So why not buy a cheaper PC (yes, even with Windows thrown in) and install OsX over the top?
and then fly around on your anti-grav jetbike.
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.
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Anyone else see the name on the DVD the next to the laptop on apple.com? it read: "Winter in Whistler". I sense a swipe at Windows XP!
Crystal Meth: Would you ingest somthing made from a poisonous gas and an explosive metal? You do it every day -- Salt!
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.
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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
I've never had a machine that I liked using as much.
The thing that makes a big difference for me is that the internationalization is seamless; right now, I'm converting a PHP app from English to Japanese. Using my iBook I can open the files from the Linux server using samba and easily convert the strings in the text editor that comes with Os X. If I have to do other editing to the code, I prefer vi, which comes standard. SSH is right there for me. My shell works the way I need it to, without installing Cygwin.
I have 4 computers on my desk - Redhat/Japanese Windows dualboot IBM Thinkpad, 2 NT Workstations (Eng. & Jp.) and my iBook. I could use any of them that I wanted, but the iBook is what works best for me. (The RedHat box comes close, but I've tweaked the hell out of it to get it just right - it would take weeks to set up another box the same way, whereas I could pick up another iBook and replace this one instantly.)
The suite of "iApps" (iCal, iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iEtc...) are a joy to use, better than anything you can get for Windows. Really. Mail filters out spam perfectly for me out of the box. Viruses? Not even an issue.
Plus, every app looks great. I stare at the computer all day at work, it might as well look good. Let's face it, Windows is tired-looking, even XP, which to me looks cartoonish and pathetic.
As for games, I wouldn't know - I haven't got time for them.
After a while, you get to the point where you'll be happy to pay a bit more for a machine that actually works.
Oh, yeah, BATTERY LIFE. Sweet.
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
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.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
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?
Well, I seemed to have lucked out with my first Apple purchase. One of the first e-mails I looked at this morning:
Yup, that's right. My bad luck, I just ordered an iBook last week. This is a *very* cool move by Apple... they simply canceled my old order (for the low end model) and swapped in a new order (for the low end model). I'm saving $200 + tax on this, and getting a faster model.
Quick note for those who recommend gobs of RAM... that's done and done. Same day I ordered the iBook, I placed an order with Coast To Coast Memory for an addition 512 MB. $95 after tax and shipping, and it's already here.
That's the downside... I wanted the laptop this week. At least they had a good excuse for not getting it to me. :)
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.
I made my iBook my main home machine about 3 months ago and it was relatively painless. Getting used to not pressing Ctrl was the hardest task.
Without knowing exactly what you do, the best answer is 'it depends'. Your main expense may well be replacing software that you have used on the PC - which could work out VERY expensive. If you have a lot of PC software you might want to think about getting a Windows emulator to help you continue working as you replace software with Mac applications.
Microsoft are offering good deals on Office X right now which eases the pain of buying what for many of us is an essential product.
Remember, OSX has a very nice little mail program thrown in for standard, AppleWorks is a perfectly competent office application if you don't need all the features of Office and naturally you have a browser included. There is a DVD player, the very lovely iTunes, iPhoto, iCal and iChat and a CD burner. For many people this will be all the productivity software they ever need. (Assuming that you consider that DVD player to constitute 'productivity' :) )
Best wishes,
Mike.
I've avoided Apple computers all my life. I have worked with all flavors of Unix (except HP-UX), Windows, DOS, and OS/390 in my short career (I'm 24). However lately I noticed that more and more people have iBooks and tiBooks at meetings, conferences, and generally everywhere I go. I work for a largish university (PSU) and am involved in several consortiums like internet2, Educause, etc.
:) So yeah, I never took apple seriously until about a year ago, but now I'm pretty impressed with them and see them making a comeback (if nowhere else, certainly in higher education).
Lately I gave in and started inquiring what all the fuss was about and learned about OS X and started following apple a little closer. Well, to make a long story short, I'm typing this slashdot comment on a flat panel iMac
I still use the other operating systems for servers and whatnot, but I will probably end up using OS X as my primary desktop once it gets a little more polished (as cool as it is, it still has a ways to go, but I have no doubt it will get there)
Finkployd
Not only did they release the new upgrades -- they contacted those of us that have placed orders which have not shipped yet and offered us an upgrade. Granted -- the upgrade offered was "at no additional cost" even though the new system cost $400 LESS! I pointed that out and they made the necessary adjustments :)
WAY TO GO APPLE!