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Looking Ahead to Tiger, Powerbook G5s
sebFlyte writes "ZDNet is running a preview of Apple's newest version of OSX, Tiger, after Jobs said it was still on track for a q2 2005 release (long before Longhorn...)." And an anonymous reader writes "The Register is reporting that Powerbook G5s will ship in Q2 2005."
I don't see how Apple could make both iBook and PowerBooks based on the G5 at the same time. The processor speed and type have traditionally separated the upper and lower end Apple hardware products, right, with the lower end product always lagging to give the upper end the premium (and margin) that Apple wants?
What could they add to a PowerBook, other than a processor speed bump, that would make it worth the premium price if the iBook has the same class of processor in it?
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
They haven't said anything new about Tiger that they didn't already mention last year, to my knowledge. I wish they would just release Quicktime 7 already, so users could work with H.264 without having to wait for Tiger.
If Freescale continues to improve the speed and heat dissipation of the G4 the way they have been, who cares if its a G4 or G5. G4 is faster at the same clock speed. So whats the difference between a 1.5Ghz G4 and a 1.8Ghz G5? I think it would be much more productive for Applie to differentiate the powerbook line from the ibook line by putting one of those swanky new dual core G4's in it. Hey, whatd'ya know. The new G4's should be available 2nd quarter.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Oh, I guess it would be better if they called it was going from Mac OS '03 to Mac OS '05. Then does it seem like a better deal?
Panther has been out for a long time. Tiger has a bunch of cool stuff in it, plus performance improvements (like every major update so far!). You pay almost as much on the other side of the PC world to get a slower OS (well, if you pay).
It could be that DigiTimes (The Register's source) is up to its up to its usual trick of reporting random speculation dressed as news (their article is slashdotted at them moment, so I can't tell what they are actually saying), and El Reg has just blown it out of proportion. I'd be more inclined to trust the report if it came from ThinkSecret, or someone else who has a reputation for reliability slightly greater than DigiTimes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Remember, it is only a ripoff if you have to pay to update Windows every 3 or 4 years. It is not a rip off if you have to pay to update MAC OSX every year and a half!
Apple isn't going to release java 1.5 until tiger. Disapointing, considering its been out for 4-5 months now. Even though tiger seems like its worth the upgrade anyway , I wish they wouldn't make java tied into the upgrade.
Remember what Steve said
Developers Developers Developers.
Oh that was a different Steve, Dancing Steve?
G5 is 64-bit. Probably they have a 32-bit compat. mode in Tiger.
So skip a version, and pay for a Mac OSX update in 3 years. Last I heard, Steve Jobs did not personally come to peoples houses and hold a gun to their heads to force them to upgrade.
Yuo won't get any feature enhancements, but you will still get security patches for the older versions.
"What's a shame is that Microsoft announced this as a feature of longhorn a couple years ago, but 10 bucks, no 100 bucks says when Longhorn comes out the slashdot crowd will scream copycat. "
/. crowd screams, users look for a good experience, OS X will more likely give it to them, whichever system I or you prefer. This smart folder implementation will be a good example, just return to this issue in say four years time when MS has implemented it too.
While you're very right, I have to say the following:
1) who cares what the
2) not looking to bash MS per se, but just as Apple has this annoying shrowd of secrecy, MS has this annoying habit of announcing features years before production, and while baffled producers of same features flee the field, MS starts delaying and coming back on its word. A good example here is its new meta-data file system that now won't even be included in longhorn. What's different now as opposed to 10 years ago is that producers now say "Hey, deja vue, so go ahead Billy, do your worst, and meanwhile, look at this cool new search engine we built here..."
In short: even if MS announces something ahead of someone else, in my book that means dick. Walk your talk.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
> Going from 10.3 to 10.4 costs $129? That is a huge freaking ripoff.
Going from Windows NT 5.0 (AKA 2000) to Windows NT 5.1 (AKA XP) costs $99? That is a huge freaking ripoff.
Your point being what, that Apple knows how to plan ahead and design their architecture for longevity, extensibility and reuse, while Microsoft's stuff is so crappy that they have to throw it all out every few years and start over?
That's what I thought.
This space intentionally left blank.
"Welcome to the Apple business model. As soon as you consumate your lust, they have a new model for you to lust after."
... happy with it.
You do have a point as far as technolust is fueled on the Mac side by Apple's desire to introduce new models in dramatic fashion. What's interesting, at least to me, is that since I switched to the Mac about five years ago I have become so much less desirous of new hardware. Sure I eagerly devour every detail of every Apple product announcement, but then I go back to my iMac and just enjoy it. It's far from the cutting edge to be sure. But I have become comfortable that the user experience is what I appreciate, not the raw power. My iMac G4 1GHz was superceded a little over a month after I bought it by a model with a 25% faster processor and a larger HD. But I didn't really care. I'm just
A different perspective than most here I imagine.
[begin BeOS whoring]
BeOS did that back in the 90's. And it Worked, and it was Good.
[end BeOS whoring]
Oh, and MS has been *trying* to do WinFS for what, a decade now? Good luck to them. They've got the brains, they've got the resources: but I suspect that by this point Windows is simply too HUGE and crufty now to really make something as significant as WinFS really integrate cleanly.
Again, good luck to MS.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
I should say that I would love to have a PowerBook with dual G5s and 10GB of RAM with 300GB of SATA in it - but what I mean when I say that I am not sure I want a G5 PB is that I know it is going to be warm if not HOT.
My current G4 PB gets hot enough to be uncomfortable at time - this is especially annoying if I am running background programs that are designed to be processor intensive.
While it would be great to have the G5, I am not sure it is something that I NEED - the G4 works really well as it is and I think I would rather see it drop in price than go up in speed at this point.
That said - there has been talk of a G3 based unit that has some additions (something by IBM or Motorola? I forget which, but I think it was the latter of the two) which makes it much like the G5 in that it is faster/better than the G4, and it would be well suited to the PBs in that it is smaller/thinner and uses less power (and therefore puts off less heat).
That said, they can never release something with a G3 in it and call it better than the G4, even if it is - people will just smack themselves about the face and whine about how they want the G5 because as we can all clearly see: 5 is bigger than 3, even for very large values of 3.
So perhaps this "G5" PB is actually using this new superG3 chip, which gives G5-like performance, and therefore they are going to come up with some new name for it - like G5m or something - but it technically isn't the G5 chip that we know in our workstations/servers?
In the end, regardless of what they do, I am going to wait about a year on it to avoid issues in the first generation that always seem to come about (said as I sit here and type on a first generation Al book with white spots - but I still love it).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I have to say here, if you want a cool laptop, why are you waiting for a G5? I've got a 1.5Ghz 15" G4 PowerBook as my desktop replacement, and it rocks, but it's about as hot as I'm comfortable with. Do you genuinely do anything that requires processing power with your laptops, or do you just want the latest thing? Unless you're going to use that CPU grunt, I'd really recommend getting a 1.33Ghz or 1.5Ghz PowerBook.
"Tucked away in a discussion about Apple's manufacturing partners are references to an iBook G5 and a PowerBook G5, which will ship in Q2 2005."
Even if there were a PowerBook G5 on the way, and that's a big 'if' for H1... there's no way it would happen for the iBooks in that timeframe. None whatsoever. Everybody knows how Apple feels about their market segmentation.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I have to say, I use a 1.5Ghz PowerBook with 512mb RAM, and it's wonderfully fast. Sure, I wouldn't want to run seriously CPU intensive stuff on it (Doom 3 springs to mind), but for web, e-mail, text editing, music/movie playing etc. I can't tell the difference between it and my Athlon64 3200+ Linux box at home. Startup times are a little longer because of the slower HD, but that's about it.
People are too used to PC requirements. In particular, as someone else pointed out, OS X has been getting progressively faster with each release, not slower.
Based on Apple's previous record of backwards compatibility (e.g. 10.3 installs on quite a lot of Macs that predate 10.0), I feel safe in saying yes.
More importantly, will all the functionality of Tiger, e.g. CoreGraphics, works on a Mac Mini -- I'm guessing that one factor in choosing the 9200 was that it should at least let CoreGraphics run, if not especially fast.
FYI: CoreGraphics is a graphics library that transparently allows GPU acceleration of common image filtering functions (e.g. using pixel shaders to do gaussian blur).
Your sig mentions worrying about moderators who mark things "overrated". I have to admit that I've done it sometimes because there's no "just plain wrong" or "clearly living on another planet" tag.
I'm not talking about "I disagree", I'm talking about posts that claim things that plainly aren't true, like "Apple is -already- making G5 laptops." That stuff tends to percolate up because moderators look at it and say "Wow. I didn't know that." without realizing that they didn't know it because the poster is either misinformed or making it up.
(Mods: Yeah, I know. Off to "Offtopic" land for me.)
--
that being said, i own a powerbook, run os x on it, and love it
It is the time between releases that is called into question, not the difference in version numbers.
That is hilarious. The difference between two products is the time between their availability, not the qualitative differences between the products? So you can release the same thing every two years and it is OK to charge for it, but if you release radical new features every 6 months, they should be free. I think someone is smoking something.