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Apple Announces New iBooks
vasqzr writes "Apple has announced new iBooks. New features include G4 processor up to 1.33GHz, built-in wireless networking capability, a DVD-burning SuperDrive and up to 1.25GB of memory. G5 PowerBooks can only be closer...They also show a single processor 1.8GHz G5 PowerMac desktop for $1,499"
I'm not sure if I'm the only one to notice this now, but I haven't seen it before. While I was browsing the store, I saw an Apple Price Matching ad... Apple is now going to Price Match all resellers on hardware and software.
Price Match details and FAQ
I usually only see the resellers selling for $3 or $4 less on most products though, so not sure how much this will help sales. Where Apple seems to maybe get bitten on this is when resellers are bundling printers and other items with big hardware purchases.
Also, with the new 1.2GHz iBook with 256MB RAM, 30GB drive, and 802.11g wireless coming in at $899 (education), and the eMacs and iMac G5s coming in at $599 and $1099 (education), respectively, I fail to see how people continue to say Macs are too expensive. Even Walt Mossberg notes "If you tried to match the specs of the base iMac G5 in a traditional Dell tower, you'd also pay more. A Dell Dimension 4600, with the best processor, Windows XP Pro, the best 17-inch flat-panel monitor, a CD recorder and the same graphics card, costs $7 more than the 17-inch iMac. And it's much bulkier and uglier."
They didn't just redesign the site, they're now offering different products - I ordered an iBook a few weeks ago and they have changed my order to reflect this change, which is nice since I'm now getting a faster processor and a bigger hard drive for the same price.
Lighter, more professional looking*, better FSB, possibility to go and haggle for a lower price due to the new ibook being so close in perf? :). Oh, and the PB is slightly smaller in every dimension. Note that i only made the comparison for the 12.1" models, some points may not apply on larger ones.
More built-ins: 802.11g, BT, larger HD. More video RAM, which i guess is more important with Quartz. Better case (aluminium > plastic
*That was actually important for my Corpo sister. She can't go on a board meeting with a shiny, cutesy iBook.
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
Actually, I have had experience with both single and dual processor G4 and G5 machines, and the speed boost is no small deal
I was skeptical at first too, given that on Windows machines I am used to an intensive application sucking up all of one processor and just letting the other take care of mouse clicks in the GUI. However, with Apple software, and actaully a lot of non-apple software I have found that it thread very, very well, and utilizes both processors to their maximum almost all of the time during an intensive process.
Just a FYI that I have noticed working with these in the past
Unless you do this:
l
http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.htm
This works well, is incredibly easy to do, and can be reverted at any time.
Think secret was right again, even down to predicting the date of the announcement.
Apple still cripples the iBook with mirrored-only video. No desktop spanning. The Radeon chipsets they use do support it, but Apple reserves that feature for the Powerbooks.
:-)
I've no idea why they continue do it, but it's easily worked around.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
a a recently graduated film student, I can attest that the Powerbook is the way to go. Much faster, more robust, larger screen area, and the ability to have monitor spanning really make the Powerbook the way to go. I've seen and used both in action, and while the iBook functions for stuff like iMovie, When you get into Final Cut Pro, Motion, After Effects, and Photoshop (all needed in film school) the Powerbook really is the only useable solution. Editing a movie on Final Cut Pro on an iBook is an exercise in tedium and patience.
You can do monitor spanning on the iBooks, despite what Apple or resellers may say. It just requires a (simple) firmware hack to enable it.
I've got it enabled on my iBook (the first model, G3/800, in the white plastic design).
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
The iBook and Powerbook use the same processor with the same bus speed. The G4 has a relatively slow bus speed, but it is quite up to the task of student video editing. I wouldn't use that as a limiting factor. Just about any computer with a dedicated video card is more than up to the task. Essentially the difference comes down to video card. The PowerBook has a wonderful ability to span the video to an external monitor or composite monitor/TV. The native 1024x768 12" iBook/Powerbook screen is the bare minimum usable realestate. An external monitor will be bigger and brighter and much easier to use when doing graphics. I use a 12" 876MHz Powerbook with a 21" CRT monitor and it works wonderfully. Add a full-size keyboard and mouse and this little laptop is a wonderful workstation. The iBook is better at two things in my experience. They seem to have a better battery life which might be attributed to a lesser video card, and they feel cooler to the touch. The little 12" Powerbook gets pretty hot and mine collects sweat marks in the summer. The iBook has a wider plastic shell that insulates the exterior from interior heat. The Powerbook uses the shell itself to shed heat. The Powerbooks are a bit thinner. My aluminum-skinned Powerbook looks old compared to the shiney iBook. Both are very elegant an obvious next to Windows laptops and are both made of high-quality materials. I take my Powerbook to work every day and throw it around everywhere. It has a hard and strong shell. The iBook probably wouldn't fare quite as well since it has such a highly-polished shell. The Powerbook is wonderfully portable and worry-free. If I had an iBook I would probably worry more about keeping it polished. Really the only working difference though is that video card. The iBook can output to an external video monitor, but again, it's only going to mirror to it. A video editor will appreciate being able to edit video while keeping a full-screen preview and review on an external monitor; or inversely edit on an external monitor and preview/review on the notebook's screen. Good luck!
Well I can't give you any empirical data (though I'm sure it exists) but I can speak from my own experience. I currently own a Powerbook which runs at 1.5 Ghz. About six months ago I bought a 1.6 Ghz Pentium M laptop for my mother. The speed difference between the Pentium M and the Powerbook is huge. The Powerbook is simply MUCH faster than the Pentium M laptop in everyday use.
I was really under the impression that the new Pentium M chips are fast, but its performance was really quite poor compared to my powerbook. I haven't done any application benchmarking, but I can tell you for sure that the Powerbook feels much faster.
The G4 and Pentium certainly can't be compared clock for clock. You would get people equating a 1.5 G4 with anything between a 1.8-2.5 Ghz Pentium 4. All I can tell you is that the Powerbook feels very responsive, much more so than any Pentium M or Pentium 4 laptop I've used (I haven't yet used the psycho Alienware type laptops).
This graphics card is soon very obsolete by Apple's standards, because it won't support the upcoming Core Image technology which is part of 10.4 Tiger, scheduled to be out pretty soon as far as the lifetime of the iBook is concerned. Core Image is damn cool, and this little puppy will be left in the dust.
Why not get the basic eMac then? It's the least expensive Mac you can buy. Apple has refurbed 1.25 GHz w/Combo Drive models for $699 (go to the Apple Store and click on the red "Save" tag on the right hand side.), or you can go to DealMac and they usually have something cheap listed. The great thing about Macs is that they will hold their value for a long time, so if you don't like it, just sell it on eBay and get at least 75% of your money back.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Why not just run ALL of the software you want ("OpenOffice (with good fonts), AbiWord, The GIMP, XMMS, mplayer / vlc / firefox / gaim / several window managers") in OS X itself?
.bashrc so you can start X apps from the Apple Terminal application.
Install the X11 server from apple. Then go to fink.sourceforge.net. Install fink.
Then type things like "fink install bundle-gnome", "fink install gimp". "fink install windowmaker". OpenOffice distributes a binary for OSX www.openoffice.org
In X11 preferences menu, set to Full Screen. Now you can run any window manager you like, full screen, command-option-A will swap you back to your normal OS X desktop. Set your xinitrc files to load the wm you want, and/or start gnome, etc...
Another handy hint: add the line "export DISPLAY=:0.0" to your
Best of both worlds!
-Spyky
Then let me break it down for you, since this is apparently so difficult.
The processors that Apple dubbed the "G4" are various iterations of the Motorola 74xx core. Targetted at the embedded and low-power draw computing markets, originally, the highly efficient design was very competitive with anything else in the same price bracket for a while.
When Motorla spun off their semiconductor division, it took the name Freescale and began to ally itself with other technology firms. Right now, Freescale, Phillips, and STMicroelectronics are sharing fabrication space in a facility they built in France. This site, known as Crolles2, is intended to be a next-generation workhorse and research lab, where they can apply the lessons learned from the failing and lagging Motorola line. They'd had successfuly 90nm test runs as early as 2003, with engineering samples being produces in 2004, and a plan to start the sampling process for 65nm in 2005.
The product line for Freescale is one of legacy - older Motorla cores like the 74xx series, the 603e, and others - and some new designs. Among the new designs are the e300 and e500 embedded systems chips (shipping now), and the e600 and e700 designs. The first appearance of the once-e600 will be the MPC9461D, which is a dual-core enhanced 74xx chip that will have two 128-bit AltiVec SIMD units, 1 MB of L2 cache per processor, on-die memory control and access to DDR2 (up to 667mhz), four on-die MACs for networking, encryption protocol support on the chip, and the ability to scale past 1.5ghz (the current high-end for 74xx cores).
As a stepping stone between the present and the future, Freescale is revising the existing MPC7447A processor. Breaking from the traditional upper limit of 167mhz on the MPX system bus, they're offering it at 200mhz on the bus, with a jump in core frequency to 1.8ghz. This compares to the previous high-end chips, the MPC7447A and older 7445/7455, with higher clocks and system access ability but lower power draw.
There... Just as geeky, but now more informative.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke
Get the 17" iMac G5 - it has a 1.8 GHz processor and included monitor. And at $1499 it is the same price as the single G5.
Fellowship 9/11
The Sager notebook you linked to is a Pentium 4 (hence a battery hog), and looks like it's going to be their replacement for the Sager NP8790 high-end. If you check their website, it seems that you're paying at least twice what you'd pay for an iBook.
The PowerBook, on the other hand, offers 128MB Radeon 9700 graphics as a BTO option for, as I recall, $50 to upgrade. Oh, and it gets more than an hours of battery life, what with drawing 12 watts instead of 105 for the processor. Perhaps a more fair comparison is the Sager NP1280, with a lower screen size, a Pentium M for battery consumption, and (gasps of shock, all around) shared-memory Intel Extreme 2 graphics. At least it's only $400 more than the iBook, right?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke
I'm no fan of dell but the figures you just listed are pure crap.
My girlfriend has an 1100. Now it is a bit bulky and the warranty is totally gay. However, most of your other points are just wrong.
* The battery life is around 3 hours, whic his better than any mac laptop I've ever owned/used.
* It has a radeon 9200.
* It has a CD-RW/DVD combo drive.
* It has svideo out.
* It has firewire.
* It has a PCMCIA slot for a wireless card, which she has. (All mac laptops come with airport built in these days, but that's a very recent change, it used to be only the high end ones, otherwise you had to spend 99 dollars for a card, which is a total rip off. Wireless cards for PC's are 30-40 dollars which is a negligible price difference).
So let's see... that's 6 points that you were totally wrong about. Good job.
Joseph?
Apple chose Broadcom wireless chips because those were the first pre-802.11g chips available, and Apple stays with the same wireless chip vendor for an entire generation. Maybe when Apple moves to pre-802.11n they'll choose a more open vendor (assuming such a thing still exists).
Apple should decide whether they want Linux users using their hardware (and the resulting money) or whether having total control of their platform and product is more important to them. They can't have it both ways.
That is correct; Apple doesn't care about Linux. How much clearer do you want them to be?
The number of PowerBook Linux users is so small that you discredit yourself by threatening to switch to another platform.
four versions of the 1150. The low end one kind of matches what the guy in the parent thread said (I don't know what kind of 1100 your girlfriend has):
-No S Video
-No Radeon 9200 (i.e. integrated shit video)
-No combo drive for the $999 one
-No firewire
-No PCMCIA
FYI, wireless was debuted by Apple in an *iBook*. That's right, the first machine shipped by Apple to have AirPort was an iBook so no it's not a recent change. I am yet to see more than an hour and a half hours of life from any PC non-Centrino laptop (the bricks with two batteries not counted). Your girlfriend has one hell of a laptop there for $999.
You can also do some research before you buy Apple products, too. Just because Apple doesn't make announcements about products coming up doesn't mean you can't turn to other sources. One source I have found helpful is the MacRumors Buyer's Guide (http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/). They track the release cycles of hardware, and take into account the rumors that float about new releases; based on that information, they give the various Apple hardware ratings from "Don't Buy - updates soon" to "Buy now - just updated"). I think it's a pretty cool system myself. Not foolproof, obviously, but you can at least make a slightly more informed purchase when it comes to hardware.
As I mentioned, this site is for hw only, so it wouldn't help with a sw purchase, but it's a nice resource to have anyway.