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Apple Opens The Book On 17" PowerBook Specs

Posted by timothy on from the r2d2-has-a-hologram-of-this dept.

maxentius writes "Apple released detailed specs on the new Aluminum 17-inch PowerBooks, apparently intended to spur compatible hardware development. A PDF is available."

3 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great feature by Ster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    1. Cost.
    2. Number of people who use it.
    3. Apple only does it for bragging rights.

    1. I doubt that it costs more than a dollar (maybe two tops) at the volume that Apple runs.
    2. Almost everyone I know who has a machine with this capability has used it at some point or another.
    3. Nope. See (2). I've personally used it for large file transfers w/ PCs using SMB. (They don't have FireWire, so no target disk mode, and can't mount HFS+ natively anyway.) It's great for setting up appliances (i.e. Base Stations) or SSHing into a box who's GUI has locked (much less frequent of late, thankfully!).

    -Ster
  2. Re:Great feature by RzUpAnmsCwrds · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Buy the right ethernet card, and it does. MDI-X is a feature on my Gigabit card.

    When you build a PC, you get what you want.

  3. Re:an interesting idea... by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, if you follow the rumor mill, Apple did give serious consideration to putting dual processors in notebooks. They appearantly decided not to for the moment.

    It's just as well in my opinion. Dual processors wouldn't actually boost speeds that much for the kinds of applications most people run on notebooks, even high end notebooks. A bit of photoshop work is one thing and might benefit a bit, but noone runs a renderfarm of laptops or serves a big database intensive site from one. And the cost would be prohibitively high, not to mention the power supply and heat problems.

    It might be possible to build a dual processor notebook, but it would involve alot of compromises, and there wouldn't be much of a market.

    --
    "The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge