Slashdot Mirror
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."
Man, tough morning, first I'm thinking something about WMDs, then I'm thinking some kind of zany religious shit (What Would... DC? Huh?).
Then I realize it's Mac-related, and so it is kind of zany religious shit (as if us linux-ites are drinking any less kool-aid).
they HAVE threatened legal action on quite a few rumour sites recently - Think Secret's still got 2 pulled stories on it's front page.
That was classic intercourse!
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...
----
12" ibook, G3 700, 640MB RAM, 20GB HD
But I believe "G4" is not the name of the processor that will be in the replacement machines...
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Whether or not slashdot editors will ever startproofreading their stories or not.
I'd think that'd be a rather low estimate on the number of PowerMacs they'll be able to ship.
2. Get mentioned at Slashdot.
3. Everyone jeers and boos.
4. ???
5. Loss
Loss? Apple has been posting underwhelming but definite profits (almost) without fail for every quarter in the last three years. Name five other companies that have done that. On second thought, given the economic landscape, those profits are not really underwhelming. Still, it was a useful post. Thank you for attempting to add to the Apple Death Knell Counter. Given the likes of John Dvorak as your potential company on that list, your parents must be very proud.
The simple truth is that Apple matters. There are things they innovate (like Quicktime, the Newton, and Firewire, etc etc etc) that are ahead of their time. They also can take existing markets and make something far and away better than what is there (iPod being the most recent example). What's more, they can take someone else's technology and make it acceptable (USB, anyone?) And they also can produce things that change the way you think about 'X'. In this latter category I'd put the GUI, Quicktime, and most recently the Music Store. I have completely changed the way I look at music, thanks to the iTMS and my iPod.
As long as they keep this up, and I don't see why they can't, they will matter and will draw people who want to speculate about the latest and greatest.
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
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.
Jobs will do his imitation of Ballmer's monkeyboy dance.
"Apple rumors aren't tasty"
Don't you want to know what your Windows box is going to look like in 2009?
-Nex
This sig has been deprecated.
They promise to... just as soon as Slashdot posters startproofreading their posts!
Same goes for some other technologies being introduced now. Nothing worse than a system design that is obsolete before it hits the shelves.
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.
Now, that leads to a scary possibility. There are no new 970s. Panther's just an incremental update. The new 15" PowerBook replacement is a 15.4" PowerBook with the same-old G4 as always. But Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has decided that a webcam is the "next big thing" and are convinced that Jobs demonstrating a $400 webcam with an in-built 10G HD will suitably wow the entire world.
It might happen. And, given the success of the iPod, which is "only an MP3 player", they may even be right about the "iCam"... ;-) It'll suck to be a Mac user though after that...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I like Safari because it is quite pretty. Nevertheless, there's no ignoring the fact it currently does less than the Gecko-derived browsers so it hasn't quite done enough to become my default browser yet.
Cheers,
Ian
Apple will close down its operations before June 23rd of this month. This is not a rumor. WWDC is going to be a huge going away party, where Steve Jobs will reveal to everyone that he is the Architect.
Now, you might be asking yourself where I got this information from? Simple. Oracle told me. Larry Ellison led me to her, and we had a conversation on a park bench. She said I must spread the truth.
Cupertino _IS_ the Zion and Microsoft centinels are moving closer to destroying it. We must fight their evil forces with devices powered by embedded linux kernels.
- The One
In a past slashdot thread, I predicted that people would be sorely disappointed because Apple would wait to demo new iApps, unveil new prices and cases for new hardware, and keep GUI changes under wraps until they can make a bigger splash to a more consumer audience. Things may be different this year because of their falling out with the MacWorld Expo organizers and so much consumer attention has been focused on WWDC by the Mac fan sites. I won't try to predict what consumer focused changes will appear at wwdc. In the past the biggest announcements were those designed to affect developers in the biggest way, if that holds true, this is what I'd like to hear about:
I'd be happy if we saw official Apple support for Cocoa bridges other developers have created such as Camel Bones (Cocoa/Perl) and PyObjC (Cocoa/Python) as officially supported as the Java/Objective-C bridge.
It might be interesting to see the addition of an optional garbage collector added to Objective-C for newbies to use but engineered in such a way to make it optional for those Objective-C veterans who want to make their work execute more efficiently. Memory management headaches are the biggest difference between the simplicity of Cocoa and other more "popular" languages like Visual Basic (and heck, even Apple's old Hypercard).
Apple went a long way in Jaguar toward re-engineering the bowels of the user interface architecture (HIToolbox) to unify Cocoa and Carbon. I'm sure Panther will see this effort finished, but it'd be great to see a global user interface macro recording feature added now that there's one robust, well-thought and well implemented API underneath.
What would be bigger news to me than any sort of user interface bauble (like the fabled "piles") would be an announcement by Apple that it was completely updating the Mac OS X online help system. They've done a great job of trying to make it easy to get to, but it's very slow and very awkward to use. Any improvements in this area would be very welcome for users and developers.
While new Macs, new iApps, and new user interface trinkets could debut here or at any other Apple event, this is the only time of year Apple really focuses on making geeky, developer relevant announcements. I hope this WWDC doesn't disappoint in that regard.
There seem to be quite a lot of slots "to be announced" at the WWDC, especially for tuesday...
Is this normal? Could these be demonstrations of new products? Ideas, anyone?
" Estimated initial clocks are 1.4-1.8. An dual 1.8 (3.6 total) 970 wouls be CONSERVATIVELY equal to a 9 GHz P4. Make sense yet why this is important?"
This is absolutely ridiculous. IBM have already published provisional SPEC scores for the PPC 970 @ 1.8Ghz, if I remember rightly, the scores were about equivalent to the top of the range Opteron. If Apple use 2x 1.8 Ghz 970s in their top machine, it'll be very fast, but hardly bettr than it's x86-64 equivalent.
That was classic intercourse!
People, pay attention. The 15" powerbook was held back because Jobs promised to support MacOS 9 until ... this summer. With that constraint off, it can get the new technologies that are not supported in MacOS 9 (bluetooth, airport extreme). That doesn't mean it's getting the 970.
I'd like to see a few issues addressed. Yet oddly enough, they all seem to involve Microsoft:
1) The whole Virtual PC thing. Is Apple going to talk to developers to find ways to continue to run Windows on the Mac should MS decide to kill VPC?
2) Safari/IE. MS is killing IE for the Mac. Many sites currently don't look so hot, or don't even work, on non-IE browsers. How will this be addressed? Safari "giving in" to IE-style rendering?
I do also expect some yummy hardware announcement, I just have no idea what it is. It's beyond speculation, but whatever it is, I'll be happy.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
"Dual rpocessors give a 70% speed increase at best."
Err... nope. Dual processors give a 100% speed increase at BEST.
That was classic intercourse!
Better than that... in some cases, the decrease in context switching (among other things) can give a greater than 100% increase. I've seen such a thing happen before.
While there were a few rumors of an Apple browser before Safari came out, few people expected it to be based on open source Konqueror.
I'm wondering how big a surprise a behind the scenes port of Open Office to the Mac would be.
In the situation where someone just woke up and didn't have their coffee. It seems that they are saying the new PowerMacs cases will be a matalic color as well as 10.3 using more of the brush metal theam. I can only assume that they want to OS to look more like the case itself and vise versa. Which is basicly what they have been dooing OS up to 10.2 have been on Macs that were normally White in color but now the new ones are becoming more metalic as well as the powerbooks so the New OS will look like the case thus making the brush metal theam fit with the computer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For just navigating thru menus and windows and general GUI stuff my 33MHz 68040-based NeXTStation Turbo Color slab feels about the same speed as my dual G4 800 Mac!
Don't knock the '040!
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
He didn't say 'if nothing interesting happens, they're dead,' but rather 'if there are no 970's, they're dead' which is rubbish because Apple makes more than just professional Macs, they've plenty of cash and there can be interesting things happening aside from the 970.
They wouldn't think it's okay, but Apple survived the Amelio era, haemorrhaging billions, yet still being alive. They're considerably healthier now than they were then.
A define profitable as them saying in their quarterly financial statements that they're making a profit.
The Velocity Engine is in the 970 so it's pretty clear that Apple is going to be using it and we know that if IBM hasn't already started volume production of the 970 but now, they will before the end of the year. If they didn't and Apple didn't have another good chip to switch to, then there would likely be sufficient bad publicity and loss of faith from professionals to cause them serious problems, but the WWDC is not the turning point.
When did I say questioning Apple was flamebait? I think he was being over-dramatic and got modded up for it, but I wouldn't say it was flame bait and neither is your post. I think your point about profitability is valid for instance. Just because some people are zealots doesn't mean all are.
Has your OS got piles?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Part of the fun is speculating on what Jobs will pull out of his ass this time. Security is so tight at Apple, any hint of what is to be is big news.
It is a game Mac users and others enjoy. Jobs is into the joke too. Watch his presentation, it is sheer entertainment. We know to expect the unexpected, and would be disappointed if the rumor sites were right.
Even if you are not into Macs, it is worth it to watch his presentation. You will be learning from the master.
photosMy Photostream
I'd also point out that he is VP of Hardware Marketing, not Hardware. (i.e. Engineering)
Random is the New Order.
Imagine if MS or IBM was threatening web sites because of rumors they published... people would be apoletic, and rightly so.
Whether or not people would be apoplectic is not the issue. (On Slashdot, people get apoplectic over what to have for lunch.) The issue is whether or not they would be rightly so.
The answer is no. You can't just print whatever you want about a company's confidential activities and plans. A poster upthread said it: if Apple doesn't ship the fuckin moon at WWDC, they're doomed. (It's not true, of course, but it's not entirely wrong, either.) Wild rumors are incredibly harmful to a company's business, and you can't just go around hurting people with impunity.
People, this is a fundamental free speech.
It has nothing to do with free speech. Freedom of speech means that that government can't pass a law that says a person cannot express a given opinion. This has nothing to do with opinions, or for that matter with the government. It has to do with people who are publishing things they allege to be facts. If they are false, then they can't publish them. If they're true but they were obtained unlawfully, then they can't publish them. It's not about free speech at all, rights-boy.
But I guess the mac-kooks are more like "whatever... apple says its for the best... whatever"
I guess the Slashdot kooks are more like "whatever... corporations are evil so everything they do must be bad... whatever"
I know what you mean---my 25MHz '040 NeXT Cube is still my main machine for doing TeX and PostScript work.
The really painful thing is the comments from Mac developers when they first tried out OpenStep 4.2 on decent white boxes in preparation for what was then called Rhapsody...
``windows vanish (instantly) (after clicking the close box)''
``feels rock solid''
``man I hope the real thing performs this snappily''
There was recently a post to comp.sys.next.advocacy from a guy who got OpenStep running on a something.something GHz box w/ 1GB or DDR or somesuch RAM.... may have to think 'bout setting up something like that myself, thoough I'd really miss the cool old-style NeXT keyboard....
William
i
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
"...The Velocity Engine is in the 970 so it's pretty clear that Apple is going to be using it..."
What does this prove? IBM has stated that they are going to use the 970 in their own Linux systems, and AltiVec support for linux exists and has been implemented.
In addition, Steve Jobs apparently is satisfied with the G4 roadmap.
We'll know for sure in a week. Well, maybe the night before if we're lucky.
(tig)
"We do not inherit the land from our ancestors"
"We borrow it from our children"
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
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?
Steve Balmers hot dance video Everytime I see that I think "wow that guy is a real psycho"
GIVE IT UP FOR MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! I Love This Compayeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!
When he prances (ok maybe that's too delicate a word) across the stage he looks like a (really fat) upset beaver...and who chose the music.
At least if Jobs does it he'll have some better music (and won't make himslf look like a fat upset beaver).
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.
massive...not.
:)
You must not be able to count beyond 3, and anything after that is a Carl Sagan number
Rehased hash is still hash...where's the beef?
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
On the subject of what rumors have been pulled by Apple legal, squiggleslash writes:
Actually, stories about G5 Macs have also been pulled from www.macbidouille.com, as has www.macrumors.com and www.osnews.com and tech-report.com. All of these were about 64-bit offerings being shown at WWDC.
Now, whether Apple Legal had these pulled because they were accurate, or merely scurilous but potentially hurting hardware sales, is another question.
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
In the interests of Slashdot's non francophile readers and despite the fact that I might screw up some of this translation, here is what that item says:
Grek sends us evidence (lit. testimony) that not only confirms rumors of the release of PPC 970 machines, but but also this time for servers.
I would remind you that the WWDC last year was the the time when Steve announced the first generation of the XServe in addition to Jaguar. This year, Panther will be there, but it remains to be seen if there will aslo be a speedboat for the XServe at the WWDC. [sorry, I'm not sure how to translate "une vedette de la WWDC]
Now, I do not find the logic here completely compelling; this could be just a price drop, or an announcement about software improvements or what have you, but WWDC wouldn't be a silly place to announce changes in the server line by any means.
Babar
also Apple WILL be at MWNYC this year, just no Steve Jobs keynote.... today IDG announced
Not the same as Steve Jobs i guess, but it sounds like he will probably be repeating a lot of what happens next week.... but tuned down to consumer-speak. The NYC conference is being geared more towards consumers and creative people. Kind of makes sense since it's just a month after WWDC. Since theya re targetting the creative Mac users, it seems like all the more reason to keep the East Coast Expo in NYC instead of the northmost edge of the megalopolis.
Usually at WWDC the kinds of announcements that get made are software. If new hardware is announced it's from a software implications viewpoint. They may demo cool new boxes, but they aren't generally announcing ship dates or showing off new plastic cases.
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.)
The big news is Panther. Apple hasn't told most of us what will be in Panther so the idea that they will muddy the waters by fuelling a bunch of consumer-related hysteria when what they really want is to get people excited about a new OS release seems to me to be far-fetched.
I'd be looking for a demo of the PPC970 (or an unnamed chip) but not a product release.
Then again, WWDC has become more and more like a pure marketing exercise as the years have gone by and the leaks have been plugged. The days when you could stand around with system engineers being told about the year after next's OS changes and the current OS's most egregious unfixable bugs seem gone (or maybe they just won't talk to me any more).