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."

Comments

Too hot?

[LordNokia]

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?

Re:Too hot?

[TheKidWho]

It could be that they are using the new freescale dual core G4 chipsets with on die memory controllers and 1mb L2 cache. They are supposed to be really really good with power consumption too.

Re:Too hot?

[Anonymous Coward]

One data point: Apple employees get an email about once a quarter with things they can buy at a discount - informally called "qpromo". The current qpromo is selling off all sizes of Powerbooks. Generally, qpromo is used to sell off something that's about to be upgraded or revved. For example, I bought my 15" titanium Powerbook through qpromo, and a month or two later they brought out a titanium Powerbook with a higher screen resolution and a faster processor. The next time titanium Powerbooks appeared on qpromo was just before it was replaced by the aluminium 15" Powerbook. The presence of all sizes of Powerbooks in qpromo hints strongly at either a speed rev or a totally new processor.

huge thermal challenge

[kaan]

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.

Re:huge thermal challenge

[dman123]

Don't forget it was The Steve Himself who denied that Apple was interested in the low-end flash market for new iPods. Wasn't that at the July 04 expo (6 months ago)? I can't recall the date, but He was pretty clear about that; I fell for it.

I now predict a new G5 PowerBook within 6 months for that very reason.

Smart Folders

[your_mother_sews_soc]

I just installed the latest Tiger Preview last night. It seems to be just like Panther in many respects. I can't say I was wowed by the all of new features since:

• 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.

Re:"Long before Longhorn"

[Master Foo]

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.

Re:Question

[Sophrosyne]

It does have to do with fixes found in panther that were not in jaguar- they are not just minor fixes, and they affect many aspects of the OS. There are API fixes as well.
Although the naming scheme is the same, Panther is it's own O.S.- some developers can write apps that function on both operating systems- but they don't have to.
Apple would have to maintain two very different versions of Safari. Safari on panther is a little different as Apple has split Safari from Webcore- leaving webcore available for any application to use.
Safari 1.0.3 does work, and it wouldn't be practical for Apple to support 2 versions of Safari on two different O.S.es. Firefox may be the best alternative to Safari.

eye candy

[mbbac]

The much-touted features Spotlight and Dashboard may end up just another layer of eye candy, further moving Apple away from its halcyon days of interface design based on good science, rather than style.

What is this guy thinking? Spotlight has very, very little to do with eye candy. The only way you can associate it with eye candy is the way it was implemented in System Preferences where search result icons are highlighted with a quite literal spotlight. Other than that it does the vast majority of its work behind the scenes. And where it does have a GUI, it is a straight-forward interface that is based on science and lets user find files and documents in a fraction of the time it would normally take.