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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."
These new G4 chips have support for 200 MHz busses. Why does Apple not let those of us still browsing back in the G4 section have that little bitmore performance? iBooks and PowerBooks should have 200 MHz busses all thw way across the board.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
I bet a revision of the PB line can't be far off: the 12" PB now looks way overpriced next to the 12" iBook.
Apple: going out of business since 1984.
Speak truth to power.
Even though I'm more of a PC guy, I have always liked Apple computers, since I don't know a LOT about them (I only fixed them now and then at a dutch apple reseller), I find them to be generally userfriendly and appealing to the eye (Except for the first I-Mac design).
:)
From what I've seen, Apple is not really afraid to take risks (hence the IMac design, 2nd IMac design and the latest IMac, OSX). I've also been quite impressed by their network/server solutions, they do seem to have a lot of horsepower for their intended job.
Even though I'm not buying one (I'm more of a PC gamer/tech than an Apple one), I hope they will do well in the future
This is the sig that says NI (again)
However, There really is no correlation between improved iBooks and the problems that apple face in getting the G5 to stay cool enough for use in the powerbook design. It's just wishful thinking.
Boo hoo. For what I paid for my 486 I could have gotten a dual G5. What a rip-off!
Welcome to the world of technology where it's obsolete the moment you buy it.
"I am not a number! I am a free man!"-- The Prisoner
Could there be a more obvious troll? These posts get modded up far too often.
I love X. But it's just sooooo unfair for X to do this. Y does it so much better, I just can't believe it!
PS - I'm a huge fan of X, so what I'm saying MUST be true!
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.
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?
These are "low-end" consumer laptops. Equivalent x86-machines would have something like 2GHz Celeron in them. And I assume I don't have to tell you how much Celerons suck? And what about the size of the laptop? Battery-life? I think iBook would beat that lowly Celeron-laptop quite easily in those things.
So, smaller laptop with longer battery-life, AND better CPU (Pentium-M is good, but those aren't usually in low-end machines)? Sounds like a good deal to me!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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.
Nowadays all but the absolute lowest-end PC laptops have dual-headed display support with separate "screens" on the built-in display and the video out port. It's in the $1000 Compaq/HPs, the eMachines and Medions and so on. About the only major-brand PC laptop you can now buy withour dual-head support is Dell's 1100-series Celeron laptop.
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.
Should $1800 really be the cost of entry for a dual-head capable laptop in 2004? And if Apple really wants to make Bluetooth ubiquitous it's probably time to make it standard equipment on every machine like they did with USB and 1394.
...possible to build an El Cheapo $500 AMD/Intel boxen to match or even ouperform G5 Apple boxen, the trouble with such a box is still that IT WOULD NOT RUN OS.X. It would probably not be as stable as a Mac either.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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
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
Think secret was right again, even down to predicting the date of the announcement.
By lower price tag, you're really only talking $15, and loosing a lot of functionality. Apple uses these combo drives through all their portables, which means they wouldn't actually be any cheaper for apple, since most people get combos.
:)
Also, like Longhorn, 10.4 will apparently require a DVD drive.
In other words, don't be so shortsighted
What the hell are you talking about?
You're going to tell me that every part in the bottom-of-the-barrel crap case, motherboard, etc., you're going to buy for your build-it-yourself Athlon64 are just as good as what Apple is using in the Power Mac G5? And NO, I'm not talking about things that are predictable and/or identical no matter where you buy them, like the video card and processor...I'm talking about the power supply, case, the RAM you select, the sound capability (Power Mac G5 has optical in and out, etc., so you have to take that into account), no single vendor support (some people actually care about this), no #1 Consumer Reports ranking for tech support, quality, need for repairs, etc. (some people actually care about this), no fantastic industrial design of the case in general (some people actually care about this).
Look, if you want a whitebox homebuilt, that's your business. And YOU might personally consider it "comparable", but it's not.
1.) They released a new iBook, at a lower price point, with more included than before. A fully useful Mac laptop is now $999.
2.) They released a new XServe RAID. They are competing at $2 a gig. This is much more aggressive pricing than their competitors, allowing them to edge into the enterprise based both on price and performance.
3.) They now offer a single processor low-end G5. This lowers the price of entry into their pro-range. It helps keep up with demand, given that supply of G5 processors is an issue.
What is this all about? Well, it lowers the price of entry for the platform. That is good for average consumers, and wooing people to the platform.
However, look at which units these are. The low-end G5 is a great office machine. This is the computer you put under your desk. The iBook is a great laptop for someone who already has a desktop. The XServe RAID gets Macs into the server room. This is all about the Enterprise. Go for the solid midrange, and they will come.
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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.
Probably not a lower price tag at all. Since the drives are built into the machines, it would mean that Apple would have to produce a third version of each iBook, and one that would be in very low demand.
We're talking HIGHER price tag for that, not lower. Cost of a product is a lot more than just the sum of the values/costs of the parts.
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
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
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
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.
$54.00. It'll run GeOS, which everyone knows is just as good as OSX. It'll be cool.
I drank what? -- Socrates
...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?
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?
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.
Yes, because we all know that a 10lb paving brick with a desktop processor and less than 1 hour battery life is SO much more portable than a 5lb thin-and-light with a much more efficient processor for 5 hour battery life and a better OS to boot!
Maybe you haven't met a Mac owner because they don't hang out in crack houses?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.