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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 actually helping a close friend purchase a new 12" apple laptop...we had more or less settled on the powerbook (she's a new college student studying film, the thinking being that the powerbook's more robust bus would help with video editing, if she decided to do that) but now I wonder again...what should one know in comparing the ibook to the powerbook, now that the ibook has the new speed increases?
Apple also updated its Xserve RAID system, which starts at $5999, "to deliver a massive 5.6 terabytes (TB) of storage capacity at the industry's most aggressive price for storage of just over $2 per GB. Apple has also expanded support for heterogeneous environments with certification from Cisco and SUSE Linux and optimized the system to work with its Xsan Storage Area Network file system."
t ml
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/sep/19raid.h
$150 - Reasonable Athlon64 processor
) where he says:
$100 - Motherboard
$100 - Radeon 9600-class video card
$50 - Case and power supply
$60 - 80GB SATA drive
$30 - 256MB RAM
-----
$490
So you're telling me that this machine is *comparable* to a Power Mac G5? If you don't care about quality assurance, support, dealing with a single vendor, survey-proven reliability, industrial design, or anything else relating to Apple hardware and specifically the Power Mac G5, great...build your own box. But if you CARE about any of those things, you're automatically talking about someone like Dell, and any Dell machine under $1000 is most certainly nowhere near in the same class of construction as a Power Mac G5.
And perhaps you missed Walt Mossberg's recent column (http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20040923.html
"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."
Of course, you can change a million different options and everything is up for debate, but this idea that "Macs are so expensive" - especially in an institutional setting when TCO is considered - is very, very tired.
I like my iBook's hardware; it's survived enough abuse over the past 3 (or is it 4?) years to make replacing the expensive battery earlier this year worth it, rather than the sort of reluctant decision that it would be if I ever decided to replace the battery in my Toshiba, in which the PCMCIA slots have grown flaky ... and Yes, I know my iBook doesn't even have PCMCIA slots to *go* flaky ;)
...), and I happen to like blackbox/fluxbox, WindowMaker, Gnome and KDE a lot, and I use all of them as my mood dictates. (Others, too.) OS X is nice, and familiarity is nice, but since there's change going on in different directions aesthetically and in supposedly well-reasoned user-interface decisions, I like to switch around and see what's up in the free-GUI world.
:)
:)), I'd think it would be easier to find a good Live CD-installer than it is, esp. considering how very well Mepis/Knoppix work.
When I travel, I prefer the iBook because it's small/light, has a better keyboard than most laptops (though nothing like an IBM's, sadly), and gets good battery life.
However, when I'm near an outlet at least, I prefer my Toshiba laptop or other intel-type machine just because I like the gigantic rafts of software that come with a typical Linux distro, I like auto-raise windows (is there any way to do this with OS X?) and virtual desktops (again -- maybe they exist for OS X, but I don't see built-in to the OS
Also, though I understand it to be a nice application, I don't use iTunes (though I have used it) and don't at this date own an iPod (though I might one day). I am not a big fan of the iTunes interface -- many people like it, and I'll call it better than most interfaces but just not my thing. When I pop in a CD, it used to annoy me that iTunes would load rather than a simpler CD player app. So I'm perhaps not the typical OS X users
So:
Is there any current live Linux CD that will a) work spiffily - wireless, sound, sleep, keyboard controls for brightness and sound - on all current macs, or even all G3/G4 current macs? and b) serve as an easy installer, the way Knoppix or Mepis (or a bunch of others) will on x86?
Something that comes with OpenOffice (with good fonts), AbiWord, The GIMP, XMMS, mplayer / vlc / firefox / gaim / several window managers would be good. Yes, I know some if not all of these are available for OS X, but only piecemeal afaik.
I'm not knocking OS X: it's a very nice OS. I like it. However, I'd rather have a Linux desktop in general (I like the underlying software as well as the application software to be Free, for one thing, and for another thing, there's no accounting for taste), and I'm lazy. I've tried -- last year sometime -- the Gentoo PPC live CD, which was slow and IMO buggy on my iBook, and took googling just to find out how to reach X. There's been a PPC knoppix version, but I don't see any versions newer than July 2003. (Which might be OK, I have not yet tried that on my iBook.)
Since the iBook hardware (and Apple hardware in general) is pretty stable (not to say "limited"
timothy
p.s. Really, I've read the flames on this topic before, so you can just say "FLAME" if you want; I'll get your meaning, and you'll save your wrists. I like OS X and do not demand that Live CD-Installers exist, but I am hopeful and curious.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Actually, unless I missed a press release somewhere, the 200mhz bus isn't a factor until Freescale rolls out the MPC7448 chip sometime in the near future. That's the one that's ridiculously low power (Freescale claims 10 watts at 1.8ghz), with pin-compatibility to the older parts and the upgraded bus. These are likely MPC7445 or MPC7447A parts, which are slower, hotter, and not manufactured at 90nm like the new offerings will be.
I expect to see the 7448 as an incremental update to the PowerBooks, until apple can stick the MPC8461D dual-cores in their place later next year. Apple is, as usual, playing their cards close to their chest, but anyone that's been paying attention to Freescale's moves knows that Crolles2 is online and rolling out parts from the production lines. They've got functional 90nm production, the last I heard, and are working on tooling for samples at 65nm in 2005.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke
Depends upon what you call point upgrades. The naming scheme for OS X goes like this: major versions go 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 (with 10.4 coming out next year). Those you pay for because of major system updates (ie Expose, Quartz Extreme, etc.) Point upgrades are like 10.3.1, 10.3.2, etc. Those are free and are pulled in via the System Update app.
I've got OS X 10.3 and might pass on 10.4 because the new features coming up don't interest me. But going from 10.2 to 10.3 was a major step in terms of system performance and features. Our old Blue & White G3 400 actually got faster when we upgraded to 10.3.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Didn't MS charge for the point upgrade from 2000 Pro to XP Pro (5.0-5.1)? Version numbering is completely arbitrary and is not a way to measure whether a version is a major upgrade or not.
I work in software development and sometimes version number increases are done for versioning reasons rather than by the amount of features.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Yup. I ordered an 12" iBook a few days ago. Now I got a mail from Apple saying that they've upgraded my order to the new iBook with "similar or better" features. Which means that in my case the 60 GB HDD magically grew by 20 GB and I still pay almost 200 Euros less.
Up until this point my experiance with ordering from Apple has been pleasant. Now I'm absolutely positive that buying a Mac was a good idea.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Having used a low-end Mac and a high-end Viao, the Mac is a much more complete package. You aren't running an OS with Laptop drivers bolted into it. You are running an OS that was designed for your Laptop and vice versa.
Software upgrades on PC laptops are horrible. My 505 came with Windows ME. I had so much fun trying to upgrade the puppy to XP that I finally reformatted the thing and ran Linux. (First RedHat, then Gentoo.) Apple stuff tends to upgrade very well, assuming you have enough RAM and horsepower. It's easy to find an 8 year old Mac serving files.
An 8 year old x86 would have been thrown out by now. A top of the line box would have been a 200Mhz Pentium Classic then. My cutoff date for a salvageble PC is a PII 450, Circa 1998.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
For $799? Where? I foolishly promised to purchase my gf a laptop and so far a shitty dell looks like what she is getting. Although, frankly, since she is a light user, I am tempted to get her an iBook. Do they still have the ability to run classic OS9 things?
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
They don't forbid selling below a price - that's illegal. What they do, though, is set a "minimum advertised price" for the product, and withhold advertising and co-op fund support if you break it.
Which is why resellers advertise bundles at the listed MAP - it gets them around the requirement and still lets them undersell in a way that passes Apple's muster.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I find that Apple has really done it's homework designing the OS for the hardware, and the hardware for the OS. My PC laptops, even the Sonys (designed from the ground up as a consumer electronic) to be Windows with laptop features bolted on. Macs on the other hand are an integrated package. You just turn the thing on, and it works. You plug in peripherals and they simply work. (I did have to buy a piece of shareware for OS X to talk to my Sony Clie, though.)
The other nifty thing about the units is that they come with all the software you need to make them useful. Work would happily buy me a copy of Office for X, but I find that AppleWorks does everything I need it to do.
Now what do I do on this thing? I run a 200 person network. My "killer app" is a package called Fink that lets me compile Unix applications under OSX. I have all of my Linux tools (even our in-house intranet application) ported over to run natively on my iBook.
When it comes time to upgrade, most of the time the new OS will happily install on your old hardware. I came into OS/X late, but many people have reported that 10.3 actually run better on older machines than 10.2. We have original iMacs that are still in operation, and running the latest OS. That's a computer from 1998. Try running Windows XP on a PII 400. Even if a PII/400 was powerful enough, I've tried to upgrade a laptop. Tracking down the right drivers is a royal pain in the neck.
So yes, an iBook is a bit more expensive than an x86 PC. But you can be sure that it will be actively supported for years beyond what is possible for an x86 PC.
(On a sidenote, I did luck out with this particular model of Sony though. The line lasted from 1999 until 2002. Later varients were bundled with 2000 and XP, so drivers were available for my old one. Then again, a Viao isn't exactly cheap either.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I just checked out the site and found this message when browsing the iBook listings:
Small Dog Electronics is an Authorized Apple Reseller and Service Provider. Due to contract limitations imposed by Apple, sales of New Apple Products on the internet is limited to current customers of Small Dog Electronics. If you aren't a current customer with a user name & log-on password, please visit our Waitsfield, Vermont location.
So the only way I can buy a new iBook from them is to drive 8+ hours to Vermont and register? Apple is definitely not reseller friendly and only consumer friendly if you buy from them. I'd like to own some Apple hardware one day but I can never justify the premium I'd have to pay when on a limited budget.
In Republican America phones tap you.
Sadly enough, I find the problem with most unix geeks that "hate the mac" is not that they hate it, they just know jack squat about it and will never admit it.
That said, the stats you rattle off are subjective at best, FSB speed doesn't account for much if the proc can't fill it, and 2.5ghz doesn't mean squat (low or high) in the processor world. PCI-X is about the only constant you have on there, and that's just an interface standard, which amounts to, you guessed it, almost nothing without driver support.
Then again, I don't use my mac because of its speed. I have a G4 1.25 Powerbook and it does more than what I need. When I need beef for practical projects I have servers, and when I need beef for games I have a nice x86 wintendo.
Actually, you can buy a refurbished or used or non-Apple product from Small Dog. Buy a third-party mouse or something. Then you'll be a customer. Then order whatever the heck you want. So, no driving to Vermont is not the only way.
In general, it's true that, excepting 'closeout special' offers and refurbs, you'll not get much of a better deal from Small Dog than Apple directly, excluding perhaps sales tax. That fact aside, Small Dog and several other small Apple Resellers do quite well by purchasing and selling the discontinued or soon-to-be discontinued stuff Apple has sitting around in warehouses, though that doesn't tend to happen often, thus 'small' businesses. And you can often get that stuff from them at a pretty decent discount.
And yea, I'm a happy Small Dog customer, glad to recommend these guys. Getting in on their offers is definitely worth buying something small and random before ordering new computer systems. Actually, I bought a refubished iMac... which was very like new, except several hundred dollars cheaper. With full warranty.
Yea, so Apple would rather have your business directly... I'm no fan of their reseller practices, but it's easy to work around and a hell of a lot more competition-friendly than Microsoft's ( or Dell's ) practices...
...that I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world.
Here's a little maths for you:
A 17-inch 1.8GHz iMac is $US1,499, or $AU2,499.
A 1.8GHz Power Mac is $US1,499, or $AU2,699.
So, why the $200?
They have an 1150 (that you referenced) with a CDR/DVD combo (as you referenced) and a P4 2.8 and a 1 year warranty for $799 with free shipping.
I know you weren't trying to do a direct comparison, but the Dell you referenced is not really an equivalent machine:
$799 is only after a $150 mail-in rebate, which means you pay tax on the full $949 and your rebate check will take months to arrive.
Add $59 for the 802.11a/g wireless card to bring it into parity with the iBook - can you possibly imagine a portable computer without WiFi these days?
Add $39 for an upgrade to a normal battery - the one they bundle with the cheapo model is intentionally crippled.
And you're still stuck with integrated video, instead of what Apple gives you: ATI's Mobility Radeon 9200 graphics with 32MB of dedicated DDR memory and AGP 4X support! Not bad for a sub-$1000 laptop.
Finally, also note that Apple is selling the discontinued models for as low as $700, while supplies last.
Of the handful of people I know who bought the 14", the lower resolution was a positive deciding factor. It seems that for older people with poorer vision, having bigger pixels is just wonderful.
What's the use of more pixels if you can't see any of them?