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Massive WWDC Rumor Roundup
An anonymous reader writes "MacRumors.com posted a massive rumor roundup of all the major rumors surrounding Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference which starts next week. There's been talk of 970 PowerMacs, PowerBooks and Panther... seems like the biggest uncertainty is whether or not 970 PowerMacs will ship or not."
i think the biggest doubt is weather the 15inch powerbooks will ship and not the powermacs. The rumors on the 15inch powerbook are pointing in different directions with some people saying they are boxed and ready to be shipped while other people are saying they just went into production...
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12" ibook, G3 700, 640MB RAM, 20GB HD
At least you came up with something for the "DC"... I drew a blank. :)
Its amazing how little information has got out on Mac OS X Panther (10.3). This is what Apple is claiming WWDC is about and next to no information on this new OS version has been leaked. Last year, with Jaguar (OS 10.2), there were screens on ThinkSecret and a rundown on many of the new features but with Panther there is next to nothing. All there really is is speculation on piles and even this information is highly doubtful. It seems Apple has finally blocked the rumor channels. :-(
I can't believe you were modded up for that. Apple can quite happily continue for several years taking losses, given the amount of money they have. In fact, they're a profitable company, so that isn't an issue. Their consumer and portable lines are doing well, as is the music related stuff. Talk of Apple disappearing is ridiculous. People will be disappointed, yes, but they're going to ship the 970s some time this year and most people who wantone will wait a few more months if necessary.
" they HAVE threatened legal action on quite a few rumour sites recently"
Imagine if MS or IBM was threatening web sites because of rumors they published... people would be apoletic, and rightly so.
But when you tell this to Mac people, they say "well, this is good, because expectations will be too high and it will only hurt apple".
People, this is a fundamental free speech.
But I guess the mac-kooks are more like "whatever... apple says its for the best... whatever"
2) - Dual rpocessors give a 70% speed increase at best. Few programs are optimised for them so the biggest benefit you get is when running multiple programs, so going with a 30% increase would be a tad more realistc.
3) - If you really wanted to be conservative, you should be taking the 1.4, rather than the 1.8.
4) - This gives a 'conservative' estimate of 1.4*2.25*1.3 = 4 Ghz roughly (before anyone objets that this is too high, read my next paragraph).
5) - If you think that even your 'conservative' numbers hold for every situation and that speed is limited purely by the CPU speed, then you can't make any sense of what is important about the 970. The extra speed is nice. It should put us on a par with P4s again. It's new bus architecture and better ability to further scale the speed that are going to make the real difference however. It's when you realise that we can start using faster memory, aren't starving the chips of data and can speed the chip up more than once (or twice if we're really lucky) a year that you'll see why this is important. anyone remember the fiuasco with the 500 MHz G4s? How long were we stuck with them as the top end? That, in my mind, is the turning point where we gave the speed crown to Intel and Motorola gave up.
There is a massive existing market for parallel ATA. All the computers with parallel aren't going to disappear overnight when someone starts shipping serial. It'l be a few years before the market for parallel decreases sufficiently for your worries to be relevant.
Also relevant; it seems that the Apple VP in charge of hardware is going to be headlining at the new MacWorld Expo in July.
Now, that could mean one of three things:
1. He's going to be doing an extended demo of hardware that was released at WWDC
2. He's going to announce the hardware at MW; unlikely if this is the 970s everyone's been predicting (Job's would do that), or
3. He's going to announce that the 970s demo'd at WWDC are to be released.
I choose 1.
-- james
Yes, and the Earth being destroyed tomorrow to make way for a hyperspace bypass is also possible. But look at the evidence: WWDC was moved back a month for no adequately explained reason, the G4's are apparently in short supply, Apple is hyping WWDC and showing the keynote in their stores, and Steve Jobs made unusally pointed comments about Motorola a few months ago. None of this is conclusive, but it implies a very strong probability that we'll see the 970 a week from today.
As pointed out elsewhere, their cash pile has declined by over a billion dollars, despite the company being "profitable".
Um, because they've been buying lots of companies?
Is that actually confirmed? By Apple?
Of course not. But IBM has said they'll be shipping their own 970 systems this year. Can you construct a plausible scenario where Apple doesn't? It may be a rumor, but it's a rumor backed by overwhelming circumstantial evidence.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
If for some reason Apple doesn't have a 970 machine ready or to be announced at WWDC, all hell is gonna break loose. The underground hype is ridiculous at this point. Every 4th day I see a new story posted somewhere about how Apple must be using the 970 chip. It's all vaporware until they show us a box. People are so paranoid to purchase new machines from Apple for fear of being left out in the cold. Not that Apple actively discourages this though, but at this stage in the game, what can they possibly do to stop the 970 expectation short of actually producing a box?
Just because we're interested in technology doesn't mean we all gather with the AV alum dweebs for Saturday night screenings of crappy sci-fi flicks.
Shame on Google.
The G4's bus architecture limits it to about a 70% speed increase.
The G4's biggest bottleneck is not clockspeed, but the slow bus, which prevents it from taking advantage of newer, faster memeory architectures. one big win of the PPC970 is that Apple will be moving from the slowest CPU bus (167MHz SDR) of the major PC vendors, to the fastest (450MHz DDR, 900MHz Effective), for their top end CPU's. It's also going to force Apple to ship dual-channel capable memory for the first time since the PowerMac 9600 was retired(7/8/9500, 8/9600 and 7300 PowerMac's used interleaved memory access if the DIMM's were installed in Matched pairs, which was simply a more flexible version of current dual-channel implementations), since they'll need dual DDR400 channels to even hope to feed a 1.8GHz PPC970.
"You've got an invalid haircut" -Warren Zevon - Life'll Kill Ya
dnetc exists in the real world. At least it does in mine. It's doing real world work (OGR, breaking RC-xx encryption through brute force). Now, it may not be doing typical user work (ie, word processing, running PS filters, page layout, playing Q3A, etc.), but we're talking best real world--and it gives a 100% increase.
Interestingly, what *wasn't* shipping the same day were two versions of the XServe (not the low-end model or the cluster unit, but the other two). Those were listed as 3-5 days. I haven't done this drill recently, so I don't know how unusual this is for the XServe.
In any case, it might be worthwhile "pinging" the Apple Store this week for the appearance of PowerMac shortages. right now, I don 't see any.
Babar
Are you comparing NEXTSTEP to Win 3.1 and then moving on to compare Mac OS X to Windows XP?? Granted - the comparisons are very similar in nature, but pays insult to both NeXT and Apple.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
The exception is when they have nothing in the way of new software or architecture announcements. (The Powerbook G3-500 release is the only example I can remember of a major product announcement at WWDC; and the other announcements at that WWDC were highly underwhelming.)
I believe the iMac was announced at the WWDC in 98
dave