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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."
If I buy an Apple computer, what is their policy on upgrading to the next version of OS X? Is it free or do I get charged? How up-to-date to they keep you without adding cost?
Supposedly a G5 was too hot to put into a small form factor, like a laptop or the miniMac. Does anyone know how they overcame the heat factor?
Tim says: "please mod me up so my karma won't be terrible. Please?"
Well, as much as I would enjoy a Mac mini, from what I see they are pricey for a decent amount of RAM (add $425 for 1GB), they don't exactly have a blazing processor, and they will likely act sluggish if the touted features of Tiger are actually as power/graphics hungry as the ZDNet article kinda mentions...
I don't think there's much credibility to the claim of a G5 powerbook shipping within the next 6 months. I was just reading something the other day (I think it may have been another article at The Register, in fact), where one of the Apple higher-ups was quoted as saying that a G5 in a Powerbook would be "the mother of all thermal challenges", and then immediately refused to answer any more questions about it.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a superfast Powerbook hit the market, I think it would only do good things for customers and Apple as a company. But it took about 2 years before Apple engineers figured out how to pack the G4 into a Powerbook. I'd love to eat crow about this rumor and be proven wrong, but I just don't see it.
- I didn't spend much time using it
- I'm never that excited by new features until I learn their value through use over time.
That said, there is one new feature that really impressed me: Smart Folders. They are part of Spotlight and are very similar to Smart Playlists in iTunes. In essence they are "virtual folders" that you define using rules. I set one up to list all of my images. It works in conjunction with the indexing provided by Spotlight and seemed to be very fast. I think this one new feature will be the standout in the next release.My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.
I have an G4 iBook and I am constantly surprised how quite it runs. Until last night, I wasn't even sure if it had a fan in it or not. I was compiling a DVD image and this was the first time I've heard the fan come on and thats after about 5 months of having used it for normal everyday things. Using wi-fi and turning the brightness up does drain the batter a little faster, but it still runs pretty long on one charge.
I think it would be a really bad idea to drop the battery life just to have a G5 in the box.
SIGFAULT
Make no mistake about it, a 1.4 GHz G4 is by no means a sluggish CPU.
Perhaps it can't crunch numbers as fast as its more powerful bretheren, but that's not what it's designed to do. (G5s and XServes are)
I have a 1.4 G4 at home which runs on a 100MHz bus (The new ones are at 133 I believe) and from a user perspective its a lot more snappier than my 3.x Intel (w/XP SP2) at work. It handles Photoshop CS, iPhoto (with 6000 pics), iTunes (6GB library) (all at the same time) just fine. (It's also running a webserver)
While they are pricey RAM wise, I don't think Tiger performance will suffer due to the CPU.
(I've actually had a pre-release running on mine, and spotlight ran just fine)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
No, not really. The windows source code has been mutilated and expanded upon to the point where now it's millions of lines of spagetti code. I think it's taking so long to develop due to poor code documentation, imiagine all the MS programmers digging through millions of lines of code trying to find the source for the start button. Windows has not been built from the ground up since NT, and that was only with help from Big Blue.
I'm looking forward to Tiger, mainly because I think Apple just has better programmers and they produce a better product than the competition. It's BSD base is open to the public for scrutiny, and has thirty years of development behind it, lending to secure code maturity.
It's true. Several instruction which are executed in one cycle on a G4, are cracked on the G5. Many instructions also have a longer latency on the G5. However, the G4 (until now) has a worse memory interface, which means that applications that process huge data sets are still slower clock for clock on a G4 than on a G5.
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The reason for this is that a 64-bit application will be slower than an identical application compiled for 32-bit addressing every time.
See, in 64-bit mode, the computer uses 64-bit-wide pointers instead of 32-bit-wide pointers. That means only half as many pointers can fit in registers or the various caches. Which means that, in most respects, you effectively cut your cache sizes in half when you compile for 64-bit.
Apple has no plans to release 64-bit versions of the Cocoa or Carbon frameworks, so your user-interactive applications are going to continue to be 32-bit for the foreseeable future. But Tiger will have increased 64-bit support for the core system libraries so Oracle can release a 64-bit version of their database, for instance.
Despite the hype, 64-bit computing is just not something that normal folks need. I had an SGI Octane on my desk for two years and I don't think I ever once compiled or ran a 64-bit program.
Yes it does. It has: "ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM with AGP 4X support" ...which is almost certainly built onto the main board. Since the specs seem so comparible to the iBook, I'm even wondering if that isn't a Radeon Mobility.
You're probably thinking of an onboard display.
Tiger will only be graphics intensive for machines which CoreImage supports -- and then obviously it will be a non-issue.
If you watch any of the tiger developer conference stuff from back in july (?) you'll see that Apple has done some serious optimization work for *all* Quartz graphics paths -- not just CoreImage. Stuff like bezier paths and text rendering being orders of magnitude faster even for software rendering.
Apple is not stupid. Every release of OS X has been significantly faster than the previous. This may or may not continue to be the case in the future but it's pretty clear that it will be for Tiger at least.
Anecdote: I installed Panther on my mother's Cube ( I think 450 Mhz G4, craptacular video card). It had run OS 9 beautifully, very responsive, but 10.1 was SLOOW and 10.2, while a big improvement over 10.1, was still pretty pokey. Well, 10.3 bought responsiveness back to OS 9 levels. In fact, her Cube running 10.3 was faster and more responsive than my powerbook ( 866 Mhz G4, GF4MZ video ) running 10.2.
Anyway, just saying.
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I can see why - gcc on ppc was poorly optimized and all rendering was done in software. Apple and the ppc linux folk have made progress in optimizing gcc for PPC and Apple has been offloading more and more of the graphics responsibilities to hardware. Then there's taking the NeXT code and targeting a specific CPU set, rather than a general CPU set like in the past.
Apple having outpaced MS in major OS releases by 3:1 since XP (counting Jaguar?, Panther, Tiger), Microsoft may not be "scared", but they ought to be embarrassed!
They're being bitch slapped by the perpetually dying underdog. Make that *former* underdog.
mbbac
Yeah, wasn't one of the promises of a PDF-based display manager that the entire system would be vector-based, not pixel-based, so resolution wasn't important? It's sad that I have more control over those things in Windows and Linux. Heck, the ultimate for that was OS/2. In OS/2 it was sort-of disturbing. When you changed the resolution nothing changed size, you just had higher/lower res icons, fonts, etc.
Anyhow, my eyes can handle higher than 100dpi without difficulty, afterall paper has much higher than 100dpi.