Apple Marketing Hypes New PowerMacs

Wacky_Wookie was only one of many who wrote in with a mention of Apple's "leak" of specifications for a new line of PowerMacs to be dubbed "G5", apparently running the new PowerPC 970 CPUs. No offense, but anyone who thinks it was a mistake or leak doesn't understand marketing. :) Update by J : In case those linked sites get taken down too, try MacNN.

Comments

New Mac

[stanmann]

The reasons to have your next PC upgrade be a Mac keep increasing, and the only thing that might make the PC platform attractive are the rumors that HP will be releasing an Opteron soon. Personally I can't wait till I can have a 64-bit desktop machine with built in Gigabit.

Re:New Mac

[thatguywhoiam]

RealMike, your anti-Mac bias becomes more evident with each post. You can't seem to help taking a swipe. It's tiresome.

Oh sure. So the legendary Apple marketing machine will whip up a hyped frenzy in its followers. But other than being in the running again, nothing will have really changed.

Well, nothing at all, except for the fact that Macs might be faster than practically anything out there now, as opposed to before, when they were definitely not.

Home users care nothing for 'vendor independence', etc. They usually just buy the cheapest machine that has the specs they want.

The *really* big news is that a huge chunk of the geek-set here on Slashdot will soon have a really, really compelling alternative to any high-end PC workstation. If the IBM chip scales up fast, Apple is looking very well positioned to displace a few SGI and Sun machines in certain situations.

Think about it - almost everyone on here drools over Mac OS X - rightly so - but they had problems with the slower bus/clock speeds on the G4s (whether justified or not; I still suspect a lot of these goons screaming for speed just want it for Doom 3). With 64bit dual-Ghz high-speed-bus Macs, you will see an even larger migration of those Unix geeks to the Mac. Something I look forward to.

I'm not an Apple apologist by any means - I use the big 3 platforms pretty regularly - but let's give credit where its due, huh?

mmmmm, NUMA!

[mekkab]

I'm sure these would be set at the "You Have To Be KIDDING me!" price point, but I'm sure these would be delicious machines to get a hold of.

Would these be CHRP (common hardware ref. platform) compliant? Or has apple abandoned that? Cuz then you could run MacOS, or Linux, or AIX all native on the same box.

Parent is deluded

[Anonymous Coward]

OK I can't believe the mac world is going gaga over these specs. The screenshot font, color and layout do NOT match that of anywhere else on the Apple site. Taking a look through the specs is also quite revealing

Revealing indeed, but not of what you think.

- 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz or Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5 Processors

It's not a G5, it's a PPC970, completely different beasts. Not to mention neither Motorola or IBM have 2GHz chips in their roadmap until 2005. Bzzzt One point impossible

G5 = branding. And IBM have 2.5 GHz chips in their roadmap for 2004 (in the new blades) so 2 GHz in 2003 isn't that odd.

- Up to 1GHz processor bus

1GHz bus? gimme a break. Intel hasn't yet reached this. Two points impossible

Read the specs of the PPC 970, freely available all over the internet. The bus runs at 1/2 the processor speed, hence 2 GHz is 1GHz bus. Even the 1.8 GHz chips, which are definitely announced by IBM for other products, have 900 MHz buses.

- Up to 8GB of DDR SDRAM

This one is acceptable

- Fast Serial ATA hard drives

This is also possible

- AGP 8X Pro graphics options from NVIDIA or ATI

Almost believable, but for the moment Apple are phasing out the use of NVIDIA cards in their machines. I highly doubt they'll be used. Half a point impossible

They're not "phasing out" anything; at the time they introduced the latest powermacs, ATI simply had better cards available.

- Three USB 2.0 ports

The rest of Apples site would say "3 USB Ports" not "Three". Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0. I take this as one point impossible

The current MDD powermacs already have USB 2.0. That the next models should also have it is not surprising in the least.

- One FireWire 800, two FireWire 400 ports

Once again use of the verbal "One" instead of the numeric. Only one FW800 port? Why would Apple stick with FireWire 400 anyway? I mark this impossible

Because FW800 is not backwards compatible. The connector is physically different. They have to stick with 400 for now.

- Bluetooth & AirPort Extreme ready

Likely

- Optical and analog audio in and out

Bad grammar, but optical audio in a graphics machine? I'm sorry but this sounds like wishful thinking. One more point impossible.

This one does puzzle me slightly, but Apple don't consider their machines "graphics machines". Macs are all-purpose. It's no fault of Apple if they are pigeonholed by others as "only for graphics". Also, even if they were "graphics machines," video editing kind of requires sound...

In total, that's 4 and a half impossible features out of ten. If you're waiting on this machine, you'll be waiting a LONG time

I make that 0 impossible features, and one odd one. Come Monday, you will be feeling very silly.

Re:powerbooks

[Blondie-Wan]

Any idea? Indeed - according to the Register article, "Something seems to be happening on the PowerBook front, at any rate. One reseller was told this week that his order for a number of 15in PowerBooks was cancelled by Apple, notification of which was appended with a comment that he should wait until Monday..."

:)

Don't believe it.

[laertes]

The following gives it away:

- Fast Serial ATA hard drives
- Three PCI or PCI-X expansion slots

While I'd love to believe that Apple is soon coming out with 970 based machines, these two items in particular are the Joe Slashdot wet-dream wishlist items. Apple will go with the same drives you can get in an Xserve today, and I'd be pretty surprised if the jumped on board PCI-X. The fact is, someone not related to Apple just sat at their keyboard, and tried to make a spec which seemed believable yet got all the Joe Slashdot Apple fanboys hot-and-bothered.

Furthermore, as I'm sure has been mentioned before, this is absolutely not how Apple's marketing engine works. They keep the upcoming hardware stricktly under wraps to discourage the wait-until-the-next-machine-comes-out mentality. They are a profitable company, and they'd like to keep it that way. The way for them to do this is to entice you to buy a machine today.

Re:Yay!

[pmz]

The PPC970 wit its Power4 core, clocked at 1.6GHz completely trashes a 3GHz P4.

I just realized that the new Power Macs would be the RS-6000 wannabe workstation for people who couldn't afford the real deal.

Both the Apple and IBM machines now have 64-bit Power 4-derived CPUs, gigabytes of RAM, decent graphics, etc. The IBM machine will certainly stand out as the workstation that overdosed on steroids, and the new Power Mac will be better suited to those who value moderation in all things.