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G5 PowerBook "Challenge"
CarlBenda writes "MacWorld/UK has some interesting quotes from Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering at Apple concerning the possibility of a G5 powerbook. He's said that a G5 powerbook is "an issue of good, solid engineering" and that "a few years ago, nobody thought it would be possible to get a G4 processor in a PowerBook". Start saving your money."
The DP G5 has Nine fans in it. I believe the 17" PB has two. That's a little bit of work.
Best read in good ol' Monaco 9 point.
YES!!!!
The Mothership
I have a PB12. There is no heat problem. There may have been a few defective units at the beginning of production, but it doesn't get too hot to use directly on my lap, nor does the wrist rest get so hot that it's uncomfortable. The only way I can make mine seem to get too hot is if I plug it in and leaving it running something like say... itunes visualizations all day, with no air flowing over it, and no hands running over it. Then it gets hot, but still, no hotter than the bottom of my Latitude.
But hopefully Apple, unlike Sony, will allow an easy way to control which gets priority.
They already do:
"In addition, the Power Mac G5 computer allows the user to control bus slewing mode. The options for specifying either high, reduced, or automatic processor and bus speeds are located at System Preferences>Energy Saver>Options; then select Automatic, Highest, or Reduced."
~Philly
you've never been to a 2600 meeting before have you?
some of the most leet guys there use powerbooks. I was at the one in Seattle, WA last month and "Paul" had one of the coolest setups I had ever seen. Not to mention the fact that he wrote his OWN GUI for it. Didn't like the OS X GUI by default...
Hackers are very much into macs... Provided they run the right OS.
Karma is like sex. I can't remember the last time I had either of them.
Agreed.
I'm typing on a 12" G4 right now. I've pounded on the CPU pretty hard, and the only time it seems to get hot is if I set it on a blanket or something rather than on a surface where the heat can actually efficiently dissipate. That's a problem with all notebooks, not just Apples.
The 12" G4 is no hotter, and in fact seems to feel a bit cooler, than the Dell Inspiron 5000 PIII notebook that it replaced.
Run fluxbox.
We do have X11, you know.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Remember, no-one has said that we'll see the Desktop G5 processor (a PowerPC 970) in a portable form-factor. Just like we never, ever saw the first Desktop G4's processor (a PowerPC 7400) in a PowerBook. What the portables got were more power efficient, less hot chips -- like the PowerPC 7410, which popped up in the first titanium PowerBooks.
Since Apple can still call these revised chips "G4", "G5", etc, it may seem like they've accomplished this incredible engineering feat in getting the big ol' chip inside that teeny case -- but the first breakthrough is the improved processor, over at Moto or IBM. They still have thier work cut out for them, but at least Apple doesn't need to ring the entire case with fans...
I have a 15" TiBook (800MHz). I can sit for hours browsing the web (a disk intensive and CPU non intensive app) with it only a little above ambient temperature, but if I run any half decent game, the fans start buzzing and I have to move the thing off my lap PDQ. This happens less if I put the CPU into powersaver mode.
Ouch!
Still beats a Pentium though... Interesting, El Reg is reporting the latest Pentium, Prescott, will dissipate around 100W. That's more than the twin-G5s together do. (Ok, that's a desktop chip, but that said, IIRC the G4 in the PowerBooks is not a "special" laptop model.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
These kinds of statements always make me think of this scenario:
Guy: dude, we're gonna be late, let go!
Driver: yeah, but I need gas. Gas is high today; it should go down tomorrow, I'll buy it then and then we can go
Guy:
Driver: I know, I know; but gas is too much! I'll save more if I wait and buy it tomorrow!
....
AC comments get piped to
Would that be the same "good solid engineering" that produced the extremely overpriced TiBook, which had trouble with airport range due to the materials it was built with, the same engineering that flaking body paint?..
Would that be the same engineering that allows for body and hinge fractures?
Wow, thats some damn good engineering!
1-3 belong to commedore.(Amiga)
1. The VIC-20 shipped in 1980 and the Commodore 64 in 1982. The Apple I shipped in 1976 and Apple II in 1977.
2. The Amiga didn't ship until September 1985. The Macintosh shipped in January 1984 (remember the SuperBowl ad?).
3. The Amiga used the same Motorola 680x0 CISC chips the old Macs did. Only the new ones are PowerPC-based. Apple has been shipping PowerMacs since 1994.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
this has been possible on the i and power books for a long time. The issue they are concerned with are people like me who turn processor cycling off.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I went to the local CompUSA where they leave them on all day running some screensaver, and felt both the 12" Powerbook and the 12" iBook. There was a VERY noticable difference. The iBook seems significantly cooler than the 12" Powerbook and the 15" TiBook was cold (Since the case doesn't transfer heat well through the casing).
As a laptop user my #1 priority is being able to use it comfortably. The Aluminum Powerbook was too hot (12"), the 17" was tolerable, and the 15" Titanium was a dream (paint chips are not acceptable either). So I chose to wait for the new Al 15" and when my local CompUSA eventually has one on display (3-4 months from now) I'll see if it's cool enough. I bought a 900MHz iBook instead and it stays relatively cool. Hell maybe I'll just wait another year and hope for the G5 powerbooks.
I'd rather have these things than a hot laptop:
Less speed (Apple already has this covered, My PIII from 2 1/2 years ago is 1.2GHz)
More Fans/Noise
Less attractive case (design is for girls, I'll take ugly and cool over cute and hot every day).
Larger/heavier case.
I keep reading these posts about how hot the 12 " PowerBook gets, yet I know of at least 10 twelve's in the field here in Austin, and all run cooler than our brand new Dell Latitudes. I personally have a 12" PowerBook and a Dell x200 (I support sales applications on two platforms directly), the Dell can get very hot to the touch, yet my Mac gets warm but never painfully.
We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies? -Edward Young, poet (1683-1765)
Erm, unless Apple had a RISC based PC in or before 1987, I very much doubt they were the first to bring RISC out of the server room.
Acorn in the UK developed its own RISC processor (Acorn Risc Processor or ARM - sound familiar?) and released their first computer using it in 1987. It was, what, 5-6 years later or so that Apple released its first PowerPC machine?
Of course, the A in ARM has been replaced with "Advanced", but Acorn were still the first company to bring out a RISC based personal computer.
After about 10 minutes of running any cpu-intensive activity, my PB 17" is typically between 130 degrees and 140- the fan kicks in around 140, shuts off at 130. It's been sitting on my desk all day doing next to nothing(I've occasionally queued up some mp3s) and it's at 110.3 according to Temperature Monitor.
Using it on my lap, say, while on the couch, with any kind of activity, and it'll quickly get rather warm. Playing a movie or AVI file is an excellent way to do this. It gets uncomfortable within a half hour easily.
Oh, and putting a CDROM in and using it for about 5 minutes will cause the OTHER half of the powerbook to get hot and THAT fan to switch on.
Sorry, but anyone who says "my laptop doesn't run hot!" doesn't use their laptop very intensively.
Please help metamoderate.
Note that, for Apple products, various sites already do this for you:
People just assume that G5 consumes this enormous amount of power because of all the fans in the G5 desktop. This isn't true. Even the 2G takes only about 40 watts or so. One P4 3G takes in the range of 80 watts of power. All of the extra G5 fans are to make the cooling quieter.
I'm glad to see someone finally point this out. The exact wattage number is 46.7 watts for the 2 GHz PowerPC 970 "G5" running at full speed (2GHz CPU and a 2:1 multipler for a 1 GHz FSB).
A 2.4 GHz P4 (400 MHz FSB) uses 62 watts, newer P4s use even more. Prescott is expected to use 100 - 105 watts. (And this is totally ignoring the even further power needs of the "extreme" edition with its added transistors for on-die L3 cache)
Apple has always seemed to overengineer the heatsinks and fans in their desktop model, for about as long as I can remember. Oddly, many of the PowerBooks use a much different "transfer the heat from the CPU, Chipset, and GPU right to the bottom of the case" cooling method.
Now, this has already been settled in court. Apple claimed to have released the first Risc PC, oh, two years after Acorn released a home machine actually called the "Risc PC", based on the ARM6 RISC processor. The court stopped Apple from making the claim, and awarded a nominal sum of compensation.
Actually, powerbooks are cheaper than ever. Sit down and price a dell laptop with comparable clockspeed and all the features you'd find in a powerbook (bluetooth, gigabit wireless, etc.) -- it's pretty comparable.
IBM brought out their ill-fated RT PC in 1986. IIRC, RT stood for RISC Technology but we called it Real Turkey. They later dropped the PC designation when ppl realized that it was kind of expensive for a PC.
I got to use a RT when I was in grad school (IBM donated a bunch of them to our University).
It's funny to "I really hate upgrading operating systems" and "OS X" in the same post. I've been installing (legally obtained) Panther builds every week for a couple months now on my TiBook. What's my process? - Drag and drop home folder and Applications folder to external firewire drive (40 GB, 15 minutes) - Erase Install with Panther disc 1 (15 minutes) - Drag and drop home folder and Applications folder to TiBook (40 GB, 15 minutes) Yeah, okay, I have to log out and log back in too :P Back to work in less than an hour.
Last year I purchased a top of the line 14.1" ibook with 700Mhz G3 and 640MB ram, combo drive and Airport card. If I am using say iTunes, iMovie and Photoshop, the lower left hand corner will get a little warm and the fan kicks into overdrive, but that is after 3 or 4 hours of running all those apps. I bought this to replace a Viao Z505 ultra thin. I loved the 1"thick and 3.5 pounds, but even with a pentium 233, the damn thing would almost burn me if I left it on for too long and windows would crash due to overheating. I say someone saying how they had 1.3Ghz PIII laptop a while ago, that's nice, but can I tell a difference in say PowerPoint between my 700Mhz G3 and a 1 Ghz Althon? Not really and my mac has crashed twice in the last year. Once I was trying to see what it would take (photoshop, itunes, imovie, Golive, and FCP and then launch a classic app...that did it). I can close my laptop and reopen it without it crashing like on my old laptop. I reset my ibook only after downloading updates every two weeks or so. At one point it had an uptime of over 28 days. That's 28 days of open, close, open, close and the system began doing strange things. I guess 1 reset a month isn't that bad for a laptop. Now I design webpages for living deployed on *iux based servers. Being able to develop in a *iux enviroment and still have tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver/flash is a tremendous advantage to me and a feature that I will pay a little more for. Another issue is TCO. One the clients I met with today does video production and he is still using a G3 500 and uses FCP and PS on a daily basis. He's had the machine almost 5 years and can still purchase new software. Will it run as fast as a G4, no, but as he said, if it takes 4 hours to render a video, I go fishing and come back. One other photographer switched to using Dell's, but quickly found that he was upgrading about every 18 months compared to 24 - 36 with Macs and even though the hardware costs are cheaper, but he said that he was losing a lot more time with system crashes and is considering going back to Mac's and getting a dual G5. This laptop will proable last me another two years with proably a new battery needed in that time, but maybe at that time I will consider a powerbook and a g5 will be in it.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Lemme help joo with your history. It's not like Acorn was alone in its intent, or that Apple was just some opportunist:
_ ID =1793
ARM was established in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd., a UK-based joint venture between Apple Computer, Acorn Computer Group and VLSI Technology. Apple and VLSI both provided funding, while Acorn supplied the technology and ARM's 12 founding engineers. Acorn, developer of the world's first commercial single-chip RISC processor, and Apple, intent on advancing the use of RISC technology in its own systems, chartered ARM with creating a new microprocessor standard. ARM immediately differentiated itself in the market by creating the first low-cost RISC architecture. Conversely, competing architectures, which were more commonly focused on maximizing performance, were first used in high-end workstations.
http://www.mobileimperative.com/documents.asp?d
I hope that apple will soon discover that a mouse can have more than a single button...
And I hope slashdotters will soon discover they can buy a 5-button scrollwheel mouse for, like, $12. Mac OS X is aware of 2+ button mice.
I don't know the exact reason Apple ships a one button mouse, but I think most people that complain about it have easily wasted more money in time than the cash it would take to buy a mouse.
Seriously, any USB mouse should work.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas