Slashdot Mirror
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."
Guess now I will just have to wait for my carbon-fiber, dual G5 PowerBook with fold out twin displays and fuel cell technology battery with 12 hours of life that the rumor sites are talking about.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Why does Apple never drop the price of current hardware instead? I would love a 700mhz Powerbook for $600 or so (no thanks, refurbed units).
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
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...
seriously, if you are buying an apple laptop with the prospect of playing doom3 or half-life2 you are an idiot. I am not entirely sure if half-life2 is even slated for a mac release. In any case, for a laptop that you are using to do day to day stuff with, then a 5200 is a pretty decent card. If you honestly think you might use it for gaming get a laptop with a 9700. In both cases you are looking a mobile version of these cards which means you are getting a somewhat underpowered card to begin with.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
It will be announced the day after they charge your Visa - no sooner, no later!
That depends which conversion algorithm you use :)
The "Apple Zealot" converts 1.5GHz G4 into 3GHz P4
The "PC Weenie" converts 1.5GHz G4 into 0.1 GHz P4 as that's about the speed it runs Virtual PC (probably, assuming anyone actually bought a Mac. Which nobody does. etc)
The "Geek Index" says 1.5GHz G4 is about 2-2.5GHz P4 probably but it depends what you are doing and anyway it's all easily fast enough to code stuff and surf for pr0n.
The "SETI Weirdo" calculates that a 1.5GHz G4 does more units than their rival^h^h^h^h^hfriend. So that's ok.
The "Arty type people" think oooh a mac. It runs FCP.
8 out of 10 CEOs go "a shiny thing"
etc
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
Troll?
Hey Taco:
I propose a new poll:
"Which sub-group on Slashdot take themselves too seriously?"
My vote has to be the coders. Post a joke in a Perl thread, and you will be modded -1 flamebait. These people are obsolutely incapable of laughing at themselves. Maybe they should get out more.
Some of the Mac people here are almost as bad. This guy asked for a speed comparison between Intel and Apple procs. Sure, it may be a troll, but its not as obvious as the "Apple is (still) dying" thread.
At least the BSD guys usually post the obligatory "BSD is dying" message before anybody else gets a chance too.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
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.
A caution to anyone who'd likely buy one of these new PowerBooks: may your lap beware!
I own one of the "older" 12" G4 PowerBooks (867 MHz), which I absolutely adore, but it has heat issues. The main heat venting location on the case (that I've found) is the bottom rear of the machine. This means that if you're sitting down with it on your lap and you're wearing shorts, prolonged use (3+ hours) may result in warming to the point of extreme skin discomfort. This isn't usually a problem, though it's something you become aware of after the first couple of times you accidentally scald yourself. With the increase in speed, however, the speedy processor would cause an even higher temperature level, barring a radical change to the way in which heat is vented (which is not apparent from the official specs).
Mercifully (in a way), a semi-recent update changed the fan kick-in temperature to a lower threshold, meaning less built-up heat but a lower battery life. Expect the batteries on the new PowerBooks to not quite last as long as they're listed as, though they'd probably last long enough as is. For a college student like me, just having them last through class so that I can go back to my dorm and plug in for the evening's homework is fine.
I'd still buy one (if I had the money and needed a new computer), though I'd be careful to do most of my work on a table.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
In keeping with a 50-year-old trend, the latest computers from [insert name here] are faster and more powerful than the previous generation. Wow. There's news.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
'Speed increase' is no better. If there's more speed, why is it in a crease?
Perhaps 'road hump' doesn't mean gettin' some in the car anymore.
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?
That this is a video card for a low-end consumer laptop, not a 1337 game system, maybe?
Hold on a minute there. One moment people here claim that all Apple hardware should be compared to medium or top-range PC stuff, and that this makes them reasonably good value for money. And then, when people do exactly that, it is suddenly unfair because the Apple is really a low-end system?
You cannot both have your cake and eat it. Either the 12" model is quite overpriced as a "low-end consumer" machine at $1600-$1800, or it's got a really shitty graphics card for a medium/high range machine.
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
First a disclaimer: I am a Mac fanboy. I've got one, I love it and I reccomend it to everyone who's looking for a new computer.
But what the heck is with all the sexy nonsense? Since when did we start humping Macs and iPods?
"Sexy bits of computer art that both inspire lust..."
Lust?
Sure their products might be sleek and very well designed, but to call them sexy and lusty ALL the time? I'll take good ol' T&A over hardware any day.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Altivec code, on the other hand, seems to be very different. Code that heavily uses the altivec, like MP3/AAC encoding, graphics work, Folding@Home, and the OS X UI seems to be much faster at the same clock speed. For doing Folding@home, for example, my 1.25GHz G4 is quite a bit faster than my 1.7GHz Pentium-M. A few years ago, I had a 667 G4 and a 1.2GHz athlon. The G4 was nearly twice as fast as the athlon when doing Distributed.NET type stuff (rc5-64 at the time, I think).
For those of you doing Java, a G4 seems to run Java code of any sort, including the compiler, the same speed as an Athlon XP or Pentium-M at a 50% greater clock speed, or 80% higher for a P4. I did tests compiling the same code in the same IDE, doing code refactoring, etc. The disks drives, btw, were approximately the same speed and the ram was the same for all these tests.
I know I haven't done really official tests, I'm just stating my experience.
Fast forward one year. "The G5 laptops are OUT?!?...."
(This is a repost of an old post of mine, but as relevant today as it was then...:)
You forgot to yell "you kids get off my lawn".
I ordered a PowerBook 1.25ghz 15" SuperDrive on Friday. I awoke this morning to see that my order had been cancled, but re added. I was pretty confused until I saw this post on slashdot, and I checked some emails, and bam! They switched my order for me! Why do I think this wouldn't have happened with a company whose name begins with M and ends with -onopoly.
"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."
That's great and of course not. The valuation of what one purchases is very much subjective to the party involved. To you, it's not a huge premium, to others it is. There is no right or wrong in this case.
"Anyone who believes a bottom of the line Dull is comparable to a Mac workstation deserves exactly what they get when buying said Dull."
A spectacularly impressive argumentative tactic, taking the name of the particular company being argued against and turning it into name calling. This gives about as much credibility to your presentation as someone referring to Apple as Crapple or the Macintosh as the Crapintosh. Just wonderful.
"You're comparing Apples with oranges (or better yet, Apples with crap)."
I've worked with "crappy" Dells and Apples and great ones. It's true!
"add in a OS to compare with OS/X (oops - there aren't any)"
Wonderful. Continue the absurdity by stating that nothing compares to OS/X. Statements like this make a constructive, sensible debate impossible. You sir, are a wall.
"and the other standard software packages (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc., etc.)."
It is wonderful that you like these and see value in them. That said, others do not. Like me for example. Don't care for any of them, particularly iTunes. But that is just my opinion, and in no way is a statement that you to must see it as I do.
"Why can't PC bigots get over the fact that today's Macs are price competitive with PC's?"
What is a PC bigot exactly? A person who sees things differently is a bigot? Here in Canada, Macs are, in my humble opinion, very much competitive with PCs in the laptop area and yet bigot that I am, I still prefer the PC and one of the factors is price, and the other is features. Having said that, other opinions are welcome and not judged, unless of course they offered in oh you unholy unwashed masses sense. Let's take a look at an example or two shall we?
The 17" Powerbook is $3,699.
The 17" Toshiba Satellite P20 is $3499.
Features vary, such a RAM, Firewire ports, etc. but its all down to which one you like better. What's your name for Toshiba? Toshita?
Now as for desktops, I recently upgraded to a P4 2.8Ghz with a Gig of RAM, 800MHz FSB, 36 GIG SATA, Pioneer 107 DVD-R+R, ATI 9600, 120 GIG ATA second drive, new case, external drive enclosure for the CD-ROM, external drive enclosure for a third Hard-Drive (ATA - 80 gig) for $1800.
I can pick up a PowerMac G5 1.6 Ghz (I know, the speed varies across platforms and OS's) for a mere $2499! I find the PC in this case to be a far better deal in this case. Does this make me a PC bigot? Does recommending the new eMac to a client who personally finds using Macs easier make me a bigot as well? My god, just the other day I was praising InDesign and talking about its advantages over Quark (I didn't say Quirk however). I must be an Adobe bigot! Oh the humanity. When will this rampant platformism ever stop?
Very peculiar. Do people actually see other people as defined by their computer system? Are there millions of PC people out there? What sort of clothes do they where? What strange foods do they eat?