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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."
Pfft. Now I just want one more! Luckily I always manage to remember "...I could buy the parts and build like 7 high end Linux boxes myself for this! WTF AM I DOING!?!?!" right before I hit Checkout ;)
Maybe someday Apple will make affordable (to poor collage kids with a large portion of their annual income devoted to beer and video games) hardware for me. Until then I guess I will have to be happy with occasionally playing with Darwin x86...
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
So, my question is, alongside these great hardware updates just announced (12" PowerBook got bumped 33% to 1.33GHz!!!), has Apple updated any of the included software? I'm especially interested in things related to the Darwin UNIX core, or the Fink system. It'd be really great if Apple included a newer version of Fink, because the version of apt-get which was included with my 2003 12" PowerBook is a little out of date now. If apt-get has been updated, then I'll be getting my current PowerBook onto eBay, and I'll be ordering a new 1.33GHz 12" PowerBook tomorrow!
I look forward to the community's response!
MHz for MHz, G4 is faster than P4.
How much faster, I will not say, but a 1.4GHz G4 is very different from a 1.4GHz P4. Or P3.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
so the /. editors froth at the mouth whenever apple makes a move. Try posting something that will generate lively discussion - what is so interesting about Apple bumping their notebook speeds up a notch?????
that dog dont hunt.
a 15" 1.7ghz centrino w/1meg cache, 1gig ram, 128mb radeon 9700, dvd writer, firewire, usb, 802.11g and a 7200rpm drive can be had for $2200
apple can't touch that....and they don't want to, cause their intended market is totally different.
which is cool by me, but your obvious lies will not be believed here on slashdot.
Mac users (me in particular) don't admit we're paying a huge premium for the Mac brand name because, in fact, we're not. Anyone who believes a bottom of the line Dull is comparable to a Mac workstation deserves exactly what they get when buying said Dull. You're comparing Apples with oranges (or better yet, Apples with crap). Do yourself a favor and compare the G5 Mac with a high end Dull workstation, add in a OS to compare with OS/X (oops - there aren't any) and the other standard software packages (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc., etc.). The price is not only comparable but generally the Mac is less expensive. Why can't PC bigots get over the fact that today's Macs are price completive with PC's?
6.6 lbs, 3 hours of battery life, and I easily use it on my lap. You see the Athlon 64 runs cooler. It is called silicon on insulator. SOI, look it up. Oh, and thanks for modding me down. The one educated post in this thread from someone who knows computer hardware gets taken from three to 1. Buffoons.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
Damn, so that server 10,000 miles away in australia I just rebooted after a problem shouldn't have serial?
On of the PAINS of "legacy free" machines and Apples as servers is that there is no serial port.
Big kudo's for apple
Frankly, I'm more offended that I have to pay more to use the features for which I went out and bought things because Jobs has no concept of "TRANSITION".
I have a firewire card for my -current laptop.
I keep using the laptop in part because of the SCSI (annoyingly a deeply apple-unique connector - no joy when I forget the plug traveling and need it).
I'm offended that my trackball and bitpad became moot when Apple "introduced" USB without an ADB transition time. "Oh, if you wait 5-9 months, I'm sure someone will let you buy an USB -> ADB dongle."
Software wise? OS X (a unix) smokes Windows for ease of use and learning. For the software you can still find for the Mac. Hell, AmigaDOS smokes Windows. Sorry, corporate trouble ticket systems we evaluated only had windows support (I asked all of them, the closest I got was "web and Java" but it turned out that it had to be IE and Java on windows - idiots). We find that story over and over. And vendors are reluctant to develop for Mac when you're assured a smaller market share than Linux and Apple might just replace your software with one in the OS? Ever note the rich fabric of sound tools (developing and playing mp3's for the Mac? No? Thanks to garageband and iTunes, there's no room for something to come in unless its an order of magnitude better).
But for those of us who live in terminal windows and do system admin and don't read slashdot and ponder "maybe some day I'll use unix" - for those of us who put MachTen on Powerbook 180s...
WHat's the win of the $1000 "apple tax"?
Compare 15" notebooks. Apple "Starting at $2000". Loaded with features we really don't need (100baseT would be fine, DVI? 80MB/s firewire attached to 6MB/s disks?
Okay, now compare to a compaq (that can use a DOCK) with ethernet, 802.11g, PS/2 *and* usb *and* firewire similar drives and works fine with BSD or linux for $1200.
Shall we touch on Apple's history of record-short warrantees (fixed after way too long)? Or current customer services that's either fantastic or abysmal? It's notable that many of the fantastic stories are along the lines of "my machine died and I hadn't paid the AppleCare protection money and the day after warrantee the BLAH stopped working. They told me I'd have to send it in and pay $400, but they sent back a new one without charging me because there are 4000 other people with the same problem and they don't want YET ANOTHER class action lawsuit for their Almost Recalled problems!"
Again, if the choice is MacOS/Windows, MacOS clearly wins.
But this is slashdot, home of the Unix wannabes who browse from Windows, so I'll assume it's a matter of "MacOS - the Mach Kernel with a (slow) proprietary windowing system and Display PDF" vs. BSD/Linux running X and GNOME/KDE with lots and lots of momentum behind it for free and commercial apps. And the ability to easily emulate Windows enough to run those "required by work" Windows apps. Microsoft now owns "virtual PC" so its fate is, er interesting.
Pa-thetic.
Ok, apple should support their products better. When screens are going out bad (brand new $3000 machines with several "dead pixels" is *not* ok).
Apple should have a consistent story for the "apple tax" of $500-$1000 extra just for running OSX. They're not gaining a lot of market share. and the competition isn't the (miserable) windows line, it's also Unix with KDE/GNOME.
Apple needs tools to manage them at an enterpise level.
Apple needs to suck up to developers again to get products that make their platform rich with software (again).
They used to do that. I have an Apple //+, a MacSE, a MacCI, a couple powerbook generations and a newish one. And I'm looking at more "ok" software being built in that DESTROYS any market for third party stuff.
No software means no sales.
Psion showed that with developer hostile policies and were trounces in moments when palm came out. Oh, incidentally, SDKs were free or close to free for the Palm. Compare the palm sales to the newton and you see that making is EASY to develop for it and it will pay you back two-fold.
Or does this shake your worldview that AppleCanDoNoWrong?