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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."
A G5 PowerBook.. not bad for a company that has been dying for 20+ years according to the trolls.
Trolling is a art,
Start saving your money.
Is that the challenge? To save enough money to buy a Mac? That is going to be tough.
- The G5 processor runs really hot
- Notebooks don't like heat
- It'll be tough to get the G5 in a PowerBook
How did this made the front page?Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
You know they wouldn't have chosen it if they couldn't make a good laptop with it.
Now, they'd better make sure they sort out that heat problem that the current 12" G4 Powerbooks suffer from.
"With the new Powerbook G5, you'll never find your hands cramping up during long typing sessions again! The CPU/hand warmer keeps you going during even the coldest of temperatures!"
Kick in the Head
By the time the G5 Powerbooks come out, I think I might be able to actually afford a Macintosh laptop system. Here in Canada, the Powerbooks are at least $2300, and the iBooks are at least $1400. Right now, this is not feasible. But, by the time the cooling system works properly, I might be able to scrape up the thousands of dollars required.
I do applaud Apple for not releasing information on products that it is unsure about, including these G5 laptops. They have strongly hinted in the article that they are looking at it, but they did not make any promises as to when it will be released. This way, they are not forced to rush production which would result in an inferior product. They are going to make sure they have quality over timeframe, which is something some other software companies should learn. Before you set a release date, get a demo/prototype done, and do at least a minimal level of testing!
Given that God is infinite, and the Universe is also infinite, would you like some toast?
> As hot as the G4 PowerBooks get, they'll need some
> hellacious cooling on these things.
While I realize that the parent post is a joke, this is a fairly common misconception I figured should be addressed eventually.
The reason why PowerBook G4 systems get hot tends to be the hard drive and has little (if anything) to do with the processor (which runs at a much lower temperature than anything Intel has offered in years).
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
They could make one with a G5 tomorrow. But, it would only be maybe a little over 1GHz (10-15 watt range for the G5)*. That is certainly doable in a laptop and Apple has made them in that power range before. Ufortunately, the clock speed won't be any higher than the G4 and you wouldn't be able to take advantage of huge amounts of RAM (that won't happen for years). So, from a marketing perspective the G4 is still an easier sell.
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.
*note that in the PC world 20-30 watt peak power consumption has been considered useable in a laptop.
We can only start to hold our collective breaths (for a significant time) until IBM kinda announces a G5 revision that's suspiciously low-power and is much cooler (surely helped with some of the latest IBM fab breakthroughs). They might or might not talk the same Moto gibberish of aiming at the embedded market, blah blah.
Only then Rubinstein and his faeries can reasonably start to work their magic. Supposedly, once bi'blue hints them they can start engineering the wondruous shrinkage of the original G5 motherboard without actually having a G5' sample. After that heroic feat, that industrial design archangel and his minions will come down and design yet another striking enclosure...
By then, a couple of revisions of the motherboard will have shipped, as well as a couple of G5 tower speed bumps. Besides, one might expect that preceding the mobile G5 we will see the infamous speedy G3+Altivec (IBM's G4) that bi'blue is secretly eager to hurl into Motto's face, to prove their incompetence.
My two eurocents. You can safely spend your money now
dani++
While putting the current .13 micron G5 in a laptop would be hard, it's not impossible. The chip itself is hot, but at lower speeds, it's not particularly hot. Desktop P4's are being put in to laptops, and those do upwards of 90wts of heat(with Prescott set to surpass 100wts), which makes for a hot laptop, but isn't impossible, as it results in a powerful "desktop replacement" machine.
The reason we're not seeing a PB G5 is because the kind of "desktop replacements" being made out of P4's are unreasonable as far as Apple's concerned. Apple wants something sleek, and they're willing to wait for it. Still, compared to the P4, the G5 is far less of a challenge to implement in to a laptop.
And the G5 chassis is basically a giant wind tunnel with carefully aligned vanes and aerofoils. There's no easy way to fit that sort of design into a chassis less than an inch deep (even if it is over 17" wide).
I was already saving for a G4 powerbook. Now I have to start saving for a G5 powerbook. At this rate I will own a powerbook when the sun is a cold, dark lump of coal. Great business model, Apple.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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...
The Power Mac G5 has nine fans in it because they want it to be quiet. If you run nine fans at low speed, you move the same amount of air as one fan at high (i.e., noisy) speed.
The PowerPC G5 at 1.8 GHz dissipates 42 watts of power. That's about the same as the G4 at 1.25 GHz... which is now shipping in a PowerBook.
Good grief, I see comments like this in every story about the G5. There are large numbers of fans so that the machine can run quietly. They could have got by with less if they made a machine as loud as a typical Intel/AMD offering. The fans spend most of their time not spinning or at very, very low revs. Also means that they can add faster, hotter processors for quite a while before they need to worry about changing the design. It's a forward-looking, quiet, controlled bit of design, not a roaring oven.
Since you seem to accept that roadmaps are often works of fiction, why not make up your own roadmap? Hmm, the interval between previous generations of iPods was x, so I project the next revision will be in the month of y. Then, if you delay a purchase after looking at your roadmap, you will be happy if the roadmap was accurate and new models arrived when you projected them. And if your roadmap was inaccurate, you have only yourself to blame.
If Apple published a roadmap that they didn't live up to, everybody would be unhappy about it. And there are lots of reasons why they might not introduce new models by the projected date. A manufacturer always incurs additional costs in introducing a new model so they would prefer to keep selling the old model as long as they can. If the old model is still selling well, why bother introducing a new model at all?
Asbestos iPants?
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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.
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