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PowerBooks & iBooks Get Speed Bumped
Currawong writes "Apple has, as rumors predicted, speed bumped its line of portables. The PowerBooks now come in 1.33 and 1.5Ghz G4 versions, including either NVidia 5200's or Radeon 9700 video hardware. The iBooks can now be had at 1 or 1.2Ghz with Radeon 9200 video included. All can be purchased at the Apple Store. This complements nicely the recent speed and feature increases on the eMac range."
Is this a standard term to describe the process of increasing processor speed in a line of computers? If so it's very poorly thought out. A speedbump is normally something that is used to slow down motorists on a tretch of road. So I instinctively interpreted that as meaning that Apple had released a line with capped processor speeds!
I suspect that this is just the poster's own term to describe this. Oh well!
A little planning goes a long way...
It's a bit like buying a Ferrari: The first one is really costly, but resale value makes later models pretty affordable.
That this is a video card for a low-end consumer laptop, not a 1337 game system, maybe?
"The prohibitive price is still a bottleneck for me though."
Go price out a PC notebook with all the bells and whistles in an apple. then compare prices. The apple will be less expensive when it comes to bang for your buck.
Evolution or ID?
Because dropping the price would kill their nice margins, and they wouldn't make as much money. Let's say it costs (pulling numbers out of thin air) $500 to build a $1500 laptop, and $200 to build a $800 laptop. Assuming they sell the same number of each, which are they going to want to sell? Of course, they'd probably sell more of the $800 laptop, but they'd have to sell a lot more to make it worthwhile...
"speed bumping" is the act of bumping the speed up on a product line.
This has been in use for years.
Ummm... i assume thats why they're offering the higher end video card - to those few dedicated mac gamers, or those who do graphics work. but they offer a lower end card so a general user doesn't have to pay for something they really don't need. this is, as far as i recall, the first time that apple has offred a video card option in its laptops.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
Wait all you want. What you need to do is get your wallet ahead of the hardware curve. Cause you know, once you buy a notebook, you're stuck with it. There's nothing to upgrade but the RAM. And maybe the hard drive.
TallGreen CMS hosting
"The apple will be less expensive when it comes to bang for your buck"
No it won't. It might be close, but the pc will be cheaper. Especially if you are a smart shopper and can take advantage of all the rebates that are offered on pc's.
How much faster, I will not say, but a 1.4GHz G4 is very different from a 1.4GHz P4. Or P3.
And impossible to do, really, because the amount of difference depends heavily on the application being used. Some applications can take, and are designed to take, better advantage of the PPC + Altivec. Other applications don't benefit nearly as much.
So it all depends on what you want to do with it, really--and I recommend that you determine what you'll be doing with such a laptop most of the time, and then clock those processes. If speed is your chief concern.
--
$tar -xvf
The 1.25 GHz eMac is a steal at 749$ with your college discount. Mine is serving me well, and it is a 1 GHz. If you hate the all-in-one design, there is some good news. While you won't get extra PCI slots, the eMac does have 4 channels of IDE (instead of two), can do display mirroring out-of-the-box (dual display with a little software hack). With a little work / modding, you could get past the all-in-one ness and have a pretty nice desktop.
If all-in-one is okay, then you should have no other complaints. The price is right for all the apps / great OS / great hardware. Besides, it's easier to move around than a monitor + box. That is important if you move from room to room every couple of semesters.
That's not entierly true...
On a PC... you can buy less and therefore pay less but that doesn't make it cheaper... but rather... more configurable.
I've done these comparisons several times... and in every instance, at WORST the Mac comes out even. Rarely does it come out more expensive. With regard to laptops... Apple's laptops alwaays come out less expensive.
I have done the bang for your buck with comparisons and you get more with apple. You need to price them out as equal systems. Take a 15' powerpc and compare it to a top end speed PC laptop with dvd burner, dvd authoring software and all the other bells and whistles including bluetooth and the 54mbs wireless plus gigabit ethernet.
You have to evaluate bang for your buck. Apple wins out there.
Evolution or ID?
Is the apple apologist. Go ahead mod this down, but its true.
You go to the Mac boards, and its all the same "Gee, a G4 is all you need, you don't need any more speed".
The G4's FSB is only running at 167mhz. That's pathetic in 2004. Its why the G4 chip never seemed all that fast and why the G5 kills.
If you find yourself saying "You don't *need* a G5...." slap yourself. You're apologizing for lackluster products instead of voting with your wallet and not buying.
HEY APPLE! My money is waiting until you get a G5 and build a goddamned 2 button mouse into the case. Don't make me buy an add-on mouse to a laptop to cover up your inability to adapt to the times.
Last Sept. I purchased a 15" Aluminum G4 Powerbook. I am very happy with my purchase, however, IMHO, the battery life is one of the least desirable points of that purchase. I was expecting 4 or so hours of battery life (like on the Titanium G4), but was disappointed to discover I only get between 2 to 3 on normal usage. Granted, everybody uses their machines differently, and this may or may not be a problem for you...
Doh!
why would I need to remember that?
why would the consumer need to remember that ooh macosx is unix based omg kewlor gimme gimme, especially when very few understand anything what 'unix' means if anything in this case?
when you're comparing them you should compare what can it do for you at what price.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Go price out a PC notebook with all the bells and whistles in an apple.
No, go price out a PC notebook with all the bells and whistles that you want. What if you don't need firewire? Most people don't. What if you don't need wi-fi? What if you do need a serial port? A parallel port? USB adapters don't solve these issues all the time either.
The only time it makes sense to stuff a PC full of all the specific bells and whistles that an Apple comes with is A) for someone who needs the exact feature set of a mac but insists on buying a PC anyways, or B) those silly price comparisons that Mac zealots do.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Your sig is ironic.
:)
So your whole point is that your 64b Athlon computer is only good for games?
How about XSan? Motion? FCP? FCP HD? DVD SP? Shake? Logic? BLAST?
You forget that some people actually make money with their machines.
You also forget that for some people, especially those that earn something in the $40 to $50 an higher an hour range, time is money. Linux, BSD, and Windows is too expensive, and strangely enough, Macs, with their plug and play nature, are cheaper. Literally, if it takes me one day to set up something in Linux, and 10 minutes on my Mac, that's the difference between $500 spent/wasted and $10 spent. Over the course of a month, then, a Mac will have paid itself off.
Especially when you're talking about a $1,400 iBook. Make a DVD? Insert a disk, arrange the menus, and hit burn. 20 minutes later you're done. Make a movie? Plug in the camcorder, import video, arrange the video, and 30 minutes later you're done. Send the DVD off for replication, make 500 copies, and start on your next project.
GPL Deconstructed
I'm typing this on a 1998 PowerBook (G3 300) with 10.3.2 installed with a little help from XPostFacto. And OS X has gotten faster with each successive release. Don't let the higher initial cost fool you; PowerBooks maintain their value for a long time. Check eBay and see how much my PB is going for these days; one sold the other day with specs similar to mine for ~$300. Not too bad 6 years later.
And yes, I've said this before. No, I am not a karma whore. Yes, I want to change some perceptions regarding the Macintosh platform.
(I should add that XPostFacto has broken a couple of things,
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
No, go price out a PC notebook with all the bells and whistles that you want. What if you don't need firewire? Most people don't.
Yeah, sure, most people have absolutely no need to use the most popular digital music player of the world.
Granted they're not the fastest cards available, but they're not absolubte rubbish for gaming.
:)
My current laptop (not a Mac) has a 64mb Geforce FX5200 Go. I've been using it over the last few weeks (combined with a Pentium M 1.5 and 512mb of PC2100 DDR) to play Farcry, which seems to be a pretty graphics intensive game.
I've got texture detail set on high with everything else set on either medium or low. The game may not be running at a hojillion frames per second, but it's completely playable with no annoying choppiness or lag.
Incidentally, my notebook's graphics card was advertised as being 64mb (128mb reserve.) Anyone know what this means? Can I buy a memory expansion card for it? There doesn't seem to be a BIOS option to dedicate it more memory.
Note: I have actually got the card overclocked to FX5600 Go clockspeeds, something I don't normally do, but it doesn't seem to be effecting temperature or stability in any noticable way, so I may as well take the bonus.
your ignorance.
I have both a dual 2.0 GHz G5 and a 1.25 GHz 15" PowerBook G4. The G5 is without a doubt faster, but for the typical user and his/her uses, it doesn't offer much. The G5 excells at video encoding and also compiles larger code bases much faster. However, for typical uses (web browsing, word processing, etc.) there is not much of a performance gain.
As for your two-button mouse argument: TRY IT! I figured I wouldn't like it much, but I find it to work out quite well. Now, I always have one hand on the keyboard, which makes me operate my computer much more quickly and efficiently. My experiences with Apple lead me to believe that if they are doing something, there is usually a damn good reason for it, and that reason is usually right.
So, instead of loudly proclaiming your ignorance and demand Apple do things your way, I suggest you open your mind to "thinking different" and begin to realize that things can be better than the way you've been ingrained to beleive.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
I agree completely. I have no need for Firewire or Bluetooth. I don't need DVD authoring. A DVD burner without a reader is useless to me. No parallel or serial port? That means I'd have to throw out all of my hardware and buy new stuff. iTunes? I've got Winamp. It's free. The Apple laptops are full of cutting edge crap that I (and obviously, most people) don't need. Apple is designed for those with a LOT of disposable income and the hardcore geek. They have their niche, but that's all it is: a niche. Most peolpe don't want and/or need all of that stuff, and certainly don't want to pay for it.
Wait a second, I think the parent was talking about laptops, not desktops.
Don't worry, you'll get used to it. I've "regretted" every computer purchase I ever made a year later "Why couldn't I have waited just a year longer?". Give it another year and it'll have another half a GHz, 20gig bigger HDD, dual layer DVD burning, wireless broadband and whatnot. And those that bought it now will find it "cool, yet so depressing".
I wonder when computers will really flatline. My dad was hired because the local IBM was just starting computers, you know with radio tubes and all. They were always asking "When is it going to stop?" Like, decades ago. So far, it hasn't.
And I honestly don't see much indication that it will. Dual layer DVD? Blue-Ray? Internet connections as fast as local networks today? LCDs taking over for CRTs (still on CRT here)? OLED taking over for LCD? Wireless broadband? ATI and NVidia shoving fps through the roof?
There's so much that hasn't been done yet. I wish a computer from the future would fall out of a time warp or something. Just in my time, I've gone from 64kb -> 1gb of RAM. That's 16,384 times greater. It won't stop there...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As for the FSB, the PC has a faster CPU anyway, so the FSB isn't going to catch the Mac up.
Well, the fattest FSB pipe in the world won't make the CPU any faster...but having a smaller FSB will certainly constrain performance. So while it is arguable how much faster one chip or the other is, having a skinnier bus and slower HD, not to mention far slower I/O architecture, will more than likely make the PC slower, numbers be damned.
Could any (well, all) of those features not be compensated for with some of the $1,000+ one saves buying the PC?
;-)
Sure. But in that case, you're not saving all of that money, are you? You're having to spend it to get what you want.
As for the FSB, the PC has a faster CPU anyway, so the FSB isn't going to catch the Mac up.
Uh...
If things like 8X AGP are really worth $1,000 then buy the Mac. But I think it's a disservice to say Macs are a better value than PCs.
When you buy a Mac, you generally get more stuff--more features, more software, the whole package--for the money. Therefore, by any objective measurement, the Mac is a better value, where value refers to amount of stuff obtained per dollar spent.
I write in my journal
you must like having cards jutting out of the side of the laptop!
I know I don't. the PC Card slot isn't as useful on a 12" PB when you already have Bluetooth and 802.11g out of the box. what would you put in there that isn't either already handled by the PB or could be done through USB (such as hooking up a camera to transfer photos)?
Asus makes laptops with upgradable CPUs. You can even buy them barebones (No CPU/RAM/Harddrive).
Actually, Apple tried that too. Check here for an informative, if slightly outdated (newer upgrades are available since then) list of these upgrades. However, the economics of upgrading is usually doubtful. I was considering one back in the days of my old powerbook 1400 - finally I reckoned that for the price of new battery + USB card + new CPU + more RAM I can just sell my powerbook and buy a brand new iBook... and still have a much better machine. When you want a faster car, it's usually a better idea to sell the old vehicle and buy a new one, rather than go through the mess of tuning. It takes a hobbyist to prefer the second way - with laptops it's similar.
If you were happy with the product and the price you paid when you bought the iBook, then quit worrying about today and just accept that the timing happened the way it did. Take their $49 rebate and have a decent dinner with somebody.
There will ALWAYS be "better deals" after you buy. You can only worry about what things were like when you bought. If your reseller won't happen to help you as a courtesy, there's nothing you can do other than irritate yourself further with anger or worry. It's your choice whether you enjoy your new iBook or complain about something beyond your control.
Since when do you run a computer without an OS? :) Benchmarks are nice for comparing new revisions of the same processor family but are entirely useless for determining if a computer (OS and hardware) will perform well with everyday tasks.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
You can play Halo though. My first generation 866MHz 12" plays halo fine on an external 19" monitor. You *might* be able to play doom 3 or half life 2 depending on how low you can set the video options.
value is calculated as ultility / cost.
The key is that utility is a function of desired quality.
For me, for example, 3d acceleration has zero utility, while an extremely high-res (I'm eyeing the dell laptop w/ 1920x1200 @17") LCD has a very high utility. Likewise, I prefer MB over MHz, and low weight over internal optical drives.
I think many people who object to apple's prices do so because you may get a lot for your money, but you may not WANT half of it.
I really hate trying to compare Mac and PC CPU speeds, since -- as you correctly note -- the differing architecture makes the speeds comparitively meaningless; my 1Ghz Powerbook runs as fast or faster than my 1.8Ghz Pentium 4 desktop, so I gave up on trying to make the clock speeds map in comparison in any meaningful way.
/me/, the money I spent on the Powerbook was worth it and it's a better solution than a laptop PC would've been.
:)
What really makes more sense is to compare what you're trying to do with the computer, and what will work best for you.
For instance, I find my Powerbook is much easier to write on; for whatever reason, Microsoft Office X for the Mac seems cleaner and less clunky than Office XP on my desktop. I also find my Mac is generally easier to do my UNIX development on since I have X11 and gcc right there, and it's a BSD system under the hood. Similarly, playing with music composition and digital editing seem to be easier on my Mac. With the digital audio output, my Powerbook makes a better stereo/DVD player for me in my room as well. I also like that it has great battery life, so I can pop it onto 802.11b mode, and wander around the house with it; it's nice to be able to have the Mac there to look up recipes on wirelessly, or to work on my writing (stored on a network file share) in the kitchen while cooking.
On the other hand, 3D gaming is definitely easier on my Windows box. And I find, for whatever reason, that my Windows box works better for me when I'm doing website dev; probably because I have Opera, IE and Mozilla installed, because I tend to work best in JASC Paint Shop Pro for doing web graphics, and because I find Evrsoft's 1stPage the best 'notepad on steroids' solution for HTML editing, even if it's defunct and no longer supported. And obviously, doing any sort of Windows development is way easier on my PC desktop than my Powerbook!
Does this make one or the other of them better? Not really. I admit I tend to prefer my Mac lately simply because it seems to run faster/smoother for me, and I've been doing a lot of writing. But my PC gets a lot of daily use as well.
Sure, I could've gotten a 'faster' Windows laptop than my Powerbook. But a six-pound little slim thing with 1 gig of RAM, built-in wireless and firewire, and suchnot is not to be sneezed at. I find the large, crisp screen works well for me when I'm traveling and when I'm writing. To
That doesn't mean that's true for everyone else.
--Rachel
Some people just look at price alone and nothing else. Try doing video editing an a PC laptop and you'll understand why people get Mac laptops for video work.
Lindows Steals Copyrighted Art and Promotes Porn
A DVD burner without a reader is useless to me.
Are you saying you don't think a DVD burner can read DVDs? Are you saying you don't realize that set-top DVD players can be had for $35 at Kmart? Are you just afraid of the DVD standard because you love VHS so much?
No parallel or serial port? That means I'd have to throw out all of my hardware and buy new stuff.
What ghetto hardware do you have that needs parallel and serial ports?? You'd better say $30,000 medical-imaging systems or something, because unless your hardware is highly specialized (or essential for business but not produced in a modern version), you're at serious risk of being branded a silly Luddite. Personally, the last printer I bought that didn't have a USB port was the one I got in 1999. Next one was combo (USB+parallel) and thereafter, they're USB-only. Last serial device was an old Palm cradle (that's $30 to replace by the way, but my current Palm came with USB only.
iTunes? I've got Winamp. It's free.
I've got iTunes. It's free too. And it's better--it does everything the paid version of Winamp does (in terms of audio; QT does the video stuff), for free.
Silly troll.
Most peolpe don't want and/or need all of that stuff, and certainly don't want to pay for it.
Correction: Most people want or need most of that stuff, and obviously many are willing to pay for it. Some people want actual modern technology on their laptops! And the only thing Wintel laptops can offer that is cheaper than a similarly-outfitted PowerBook or iBook is CELERON! Sorry, that's unacceptable to me. Celeron is just plain pathetic and I will never own a Celeron-based machine of any kind. Celeron laptops are for people who want to say they have a laptop and who just want to get on the IntarWeb and run Kazaa in their dorm rooms. Real computers are a totally different market.
Perhaps my entire comment can just be summed up in a revision of yours:
I disagree completely. I have no need for a parallel or serial port. I need DVD authoring. A portable video-editing studio without DVD recording is useless to me. No FireWire or Bluetooth? That means I'd have to throw out half of my hardware and buy cheap, crappy stuff. Winamp Pro? I've got iTunes. It's free. The Apple laptops are full of actual modern technology that you (and obviously, not many others) are afraid to adopt. Cheap PC laptops are designed for those with a SERIOUS budget problem, and no real demands for performance. They have their niche, but that's all it is: a niche. Many people want or need a lot of those features, and clearly 711,000 people were willing to pay for it last quarter alone.
Sure, but that's silly, these are laptops.
I think a 7200 rpm drive is a mistake, if you want a fast drive you can pick up a 5400rpm travelstar drive with a higher capacity and a 8MB cache. The higher density will make the drive faster without killing your battery and keeps your lap cooler. 7200rpm is damn fast, but not worth the power it uses.
You've taken a valid problem that only affects a very small number of users, and blown it way out of proportion.
>Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
It's a fairly safe argument that current Apple laptops are the among the most usable laptops ever made. Many, many articles have been written and awards given praising their excellent usability and design. They were specifically designed to run Apple's own Unix which ships preinstalled.
As far as I know there are no non-Unix operating systems that will run on directly on the hardware of current Apple laptops. (I'm lumping Linux in with Unix here.) I'm not 100% sure that somebody hasn't gotten AmigaOS or Be or something like that to run on current PB or iBook hardware, but even if they have, I doubt that there is even a single user in the whole wide world who uses anything like that as the primary OS on a current Apple laptop. It would be shocking indeed to find that they sold 157,000 PowerBooks and 217,000 iBooks last quarter if your claim that they were "effectively unusable" for all of their users were true.
>Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part.
No, it's a misunderstanding on your part, apparently reinforced by a single Apple employee who is either spreading incorrect information or whom you misunderstood. For Apple to ignore all Unix users would be to ignore all of their Mac OS X users.
>Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 13 years.
Well, they must have ignored their A/UX users (I believe A/UX was discontinued about 9 years ago, which was when the AWS 95 was discontinued), and their Apple Network Server users as well (the ANS line was discontinued just over 7 years ago, and ran AIX), if your figure of 13 years is to be believed. I do agree that Apple is probably not paying a lot of attention to A/UX and Apple Network Server users lately.
In fact, all that your "more than 13 years" link shows is that there was somebody 13 years ago who wanted to remap his Mac's keyboard and didn't know how.
You make a huge leap in assuming that the majority of Unix users want their Ctrl and Caps Lock keys in the same place that you do, and that Apple's failure to reimplement their keyboard hardware interface proves that they are ignoring Unix users as a whole. The fact is, uControl fills this need for Mac OS X users.
If you have a genuine need to run OpenBSD or NetBSD on an Apple laptop, you could run it inside Bochs/WinTel or VirtualPC. I don't know of any good non-emulator virtualization layers for Mac OS X that are comparable to VMWare on x86; that is, ones that can run PPC on PPC without the overhead of emulation. (Panther has a Linux API compatibility layer, so it may be possible to compile User Mode Linux (which has been ported to PPC) so that you could run LinuxPPC on top of Mac OS X without emulation, but that doesn't get you OpenBSD or NetBSD.) However, since Mac OS X is Unix already, there isn't much need to run another PPC *nix on top of it, so I can understand why there don't seem to be any projects that provide this functionality. Likewise, I can see how Apple could be aware of the requirement that some users prefer that keyboard layout tweak, and could be satisfied with uControl + Mac OS X as the solution for that requirement. I'd like to hear what an Apple systems engineer or Apple Store "Genius" would have to say in response to your demand ("I want to run OpenBSD/NetBSD on one of your laptops instead of Mac OS X, so you have to re-engineer your keyboards to not use ADB anymore"). It would be pretty funny watching them try to be diplomatic in the face of such a request.
>How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X prog