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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."
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?"
Not having a Mac Mini or Tiger to test with, I can answer with an unsubstantiated yes!
You don't have to pay for updates to the OS- but each major revision like OS X 10.3, OS X 10.4 costs $129.00.
They keep you up-to-date with the version of the OS your computer comes with.
That's barely long enough to count as a press release!
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
It's a waiting game.
I'm prepared to wait for the next batch of Power book to come along before I part with $AUD4,000 for a 15" PB.
The iBook's were refreshed some time ago so hopefully it won't be too long now.
I can't wait to say goodbye to my shitty overheated Dell D600 - avoid them at all costs. The harddrives geneated too much heat (your hand gets really hot), AND at my work we have at least replaced 30 batteries out of 300 units.
Tiger will run on G3 - G5. There were still iBooks shipping less than 2 years ago that still had G3 processors. Apple's window for supported machines is normaly about 4 - 5 years so I would find it hard to believe that apple would leave those G3 and G4 out in the cold.. Not to mention that only like 10% of Mac owners have a G5.
Oh wait was this a troll. Damn I bit...
That is usually for macs bought after tiger is released and the computer you bought comes with panther.
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.
"The Register is reporting that Powerbook G5s will ship in Q2 2005."
Actually the Register said:
So claim sources close to Taiwan's contract manufacturers, DigiTimes reports.
Which makes this more of a glorified rumor than anything else. Of course if it is true I'll be first in line to buy a G5 PowerBook come Q2 2005 and judging from what is being written about cooling problems I will also be able to fry bacon and eggs on it.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Unless you bought it just before the new version was released (a few months), in which case they offer a $20 upgrade. I got my upgrade to Panther this way. The upgrades are irritating if you wish to do a reinstall, since you need to reinstall the earlier version then run the upgrade, but they are a lot cheaper than the full version.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It will run just as well, if not better, than Panther runs on it right now.
Hardware T&L or not, Tiger has many many optimizations for all hardware.
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 just bought a Powerbook G4, so you can expect the G5 announcement any day now.
No, Mac OS X 10.3 and below are strictly 32-bit. They run on a 64-big G5 processor by virtue of the fact that the 64-bit PowerPC is 100% compatible with 32-bit code.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
..irelies on a miniturised Reality Distortion Field which diverts the hot air into the Marketing division.
A less sarcastic answer - it has to be a proc. revision or variant which lowers power demand. In a portable, waste heat is wasted battery life. Apple laptops excel at battery life/ management - I would be amazed if that got tossed just to get to market.
Mac mini has a ATI Radeon 9200 card with 32MB video RAM. Not a great card, but not too shabby. Plus Apple does a really good job at making things look really pretty with even the most minimal hardware. OSX has historially run better/faster on the same hardware each new release. So I'd expect Tiger to run even better on Mac Mini than Panther (the current default OS). Strange I know, but Apple is a strange company.
Little Bricklets
After reading TFA, I don't think that we will have G5 laptops anytime within the first half of this year.
/. so of course!
It states that sources close to the Taiwan manufacturer claim they will ship. Aren't these the same sources that have been promising a Tablet Macintosh?
It also states that there are the known heat problems, Apple saying it won't happen, and has a link to a more likely higher speed 90nm G4 (MPC7448) to be used in the newer models. This doesn't even factor in the fact that a G5 PowerBook would likely have been mentioned at the conference. It even suggests that the quoted source has made a typo!
Is this hype that we should be reading on the front page? It's
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Every single version of Mac OS X has run faster than the previous version on identical hardware. If you had some old iBook that barely managed with the Public Beta, it got marginally better with 10.0, was usable with 10.1, was decent with 10.2, and is now pretty good with 10.3. There's no reason to expect this trend to stop. Yes, Tiger will take advantage of high-end video hardware more than any previous version of Mac OS X, but it will probably also be quite a bit faster than Panther even on low-end hardware.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Almost every 64-bit processor out there is made with the assumption that 32-bit processes will also have to be run.
There is no speed hit for running 32-bit apps on CPUs like the G5 or Athlon64.
Panther has some minor tweaks to certain libraries to allow for 64-bit memory addressing, etc., but the majority of the system (almost all of it) is 32-bit.
Tiger will be the same way.
Apple has a developer note pretty much saying "don't make 64-bit apps unless you absolutely must deal with >2GB RAM".
Granted I guess I couldn't really validate buying an Apple system when I already have several very nice x86 Linux boxes and I am going to be using the Linux boxes more anyway, but.... I can validate getting an Apple PowerBook. I had one last year and loved having it. The wifi just worked and bla cool bla shiny bla. Anyway so I probably wont be buying a mini (no real need at this time), but I was really hoping for some price change on the PowerBook. Waited the past four months, but alas no change this week. So I was going to pick one up next week, but now more credulant (than just dihard mac wishes) of the G5 in the PowerBooks? Should I wait 6 months or ....
-Benjamin Meyer
P.S. Along the same lines started about two years ago I noticed that more and more Linux developers have PowerBooks even if they don't have Apple desktop box's.
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Once I get one of these and put Java 1.5 on it, I'll have some sweet Tiger-on-Tiger action.
hey 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 suspect it will run Tiger better than it does Panther. Every OS X release since the beta has run faster, not slower. In one case new features were added that required a minimum amount of video RAM to be functional. The system still runs better than it did with the old version, just some of the pretty graphics are toned down. Basically what I am trying to say is, yes it will almost certainly run tiger, yes tiger will run better than panther, and maybe you will be able to run all of the new features.
The info comes from a chart and memo about upcoming "PowerBook G5" and "iBook G5" computers to be produced by a contact manufacturer of Apple's for Q2 2005. That is the first grain of salt.
The second is that on Apple's fiscal calendar, it is *currently* Q2, 2005. So if the rumor is true, Apple has less than three months to release a computer which just yesterday was touted in their conference call as "the mother of all thermal challenges... (not) any time soon".
The third is that the PowerBook sales have been slipping because of a lack of advantage over the iBook, and historically, the iBook processor is a generation behind the PowerBook for as long as possible.
Conclusion? This rumor was just a typo. We will be seeing updated PowerBooks and iBooks released near the end of Q2 (in March) but it is very unlikely that the PB will have a G5 under the hood, and impossible that the iBook will.
Move along folks.
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The core of the OS yes.
But you wont get Aqua or any other special features apple puts in there like spotlight, core image, and whatnot.
If you buy a Mac or Panther AFTER THE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF A RELEASE DATE, you will get Tiger for $20.
Tiger hasn't been formally announced yet, so you will not get it for free(cheap) if you buy now.
So, in conclusion, wait until Tiger comes out.
No, wait!
Wait another 2 years for Lion.
And another 2 for Tabby.
And another...
On second thought, don't buy a Mac until Apple stops releasing OS X upgrades completely. That way you'll never have to buy another OS again!
You're much better off buying an Etch-A-Sketch. I hear there's no update coming for those ever.
DigiTimes is NOT a reliable source. They often have information wrong. They said Apple would have 15.4" wide laptops - they remained from the titanium to the aluminum enclosures at 15.2"
They also stated that the 12" PowerBooks would pick up key illumination - none yet.
They also have said something about Tablet Macs in production.
Other problems with the chart. Quanta is also making the Mac Mini - not Foxconn. As far as I know Foxconn just makes cables and circuit boards.
As someone mentioned - it was clearly stated that one of Apple's biggest challeges EVER is the PowerBook G5 thermal issues, but they continued to hint that we WILL see one this year.
I imagine PowerBooks go to 1.75Ghz first THEN we see a 1.8Ghz and a 2.0 Ghz G5 released next to 2.75 and 3.0Ghz G5 desktops.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
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?
> not a very solid release date and could perhaps mean
> sometime this summer.
Foolish consumer! Here's how Marketing dates work.
Summer 2005 means this: Sept 20, 2005, technically the last day of summer.
1H2005 means this: on June 30, 2005 at 11:59 PM, a single person somewhere in Iowa will get a copy of Tiger. All other copies will be "on backorder" or "shipping" which will arrive in September.
He might even get a stuffed tiger doll with an Apple logo on it in lieu of a copy of the software package. "Oh, yeah, we shipped Tiger to our first customer."
Or, they might rename the local high school's marathon track to "10.4", and force that person to do laps on the track on Sept 20. "Oh yes. Our first customer is running 10.4. No doubt about it."
This reminds me of an urban legend at a company I worked for. We had to ship some equipment out to a customer to make revenue at the end of the quarter. The customer wanted to make sure we quality checked it first. So they had someone physically pick up the hardware cards and dash through the Quality department's lab before sending it to the loading dock. The salesperson was then able to say, with a straight face and minimal snickering, "We ran the hardware through Quality before we shipped it."
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Easy, just have marketing gussy it up as a "feature", not a bug.
You get a gold star simply for using the phrase "gussy up" in a sentence.
PS Now you're on the trolley!
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I'm envisioning a longhorn cow grazing stupidly in a field. A tiger sneaks up and noisily devours it.
Then, later, RedHat could make a competing commercial. Same thing happens, except after the tiger attack, a fat little penguin waddles up and eats the tiger.
--AC
So does anyone besides me want Apple to name a MacOS X version 'Kzinti'?
The trend in Tiger is moving towards Smart . iPhoto has Smart Albums. Finder has Smart Folders. Mail has smart Folders. Address Book has Smart Groups. Probably a bunch that I've missed.
Some third-party developers have already taken it to heart. NewsFire recently added Smart Feeds, which combine news items from different feeds based on criteria - every news item from the last 3 hours containing the word iPod, say. And Colloquy's developer is working on adding Smart Channels, combining messages from any IRC channels you're currently a part of.
It's most definitely a good trend. This shit is cool.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Here's the source for the UNIX corse of OS X: http://opendarwin.org/
But, as the other reponce noted, the GUI and some of the Apps are closed.
.\.\att Clare
So, basically, who knows what's going to happen?
3GHz or bust, I say.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
It works like this: Dump the idea of ever buying another virus infected, spyware ridden PC again, buy an iMac G5 and a copy of Move2Mac, plug in and enjoy a better computer!
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.
Donate free food here
There are so many over-simplifications implied in your statement that the only real answer to your question is: No, that isn't it.
Just a small selection:
Longhorn is seeing quite a bit of change, but is not being built from the ground up. That would force them to toss out all old code and programs, and that is not something Microsoft is about to do. Longhorn will mark the biggest loss of compatibility with old programs in Windows history, but it is not going to be anything like what a "ground up" rewrite would cause.
MacOS X does have a BSD-ish layer in it, but much of MacOS X (and the programs on top) is not necessarily built on top of that layer. It is a very complex topic. The better statement would be: MacOS X was built on top of NeXT OS, which derived much of its base from *BSD (mostly FreeBSD 3.x, but some OpenBSD).
Your indication that Tiger is not a ground-up re-write is correct. The huge plumbing changes have already happened in MacOS X, but Tiger is going to add some major "core" changes. These include major re-writes of the text handling system, graphics systems (multiple layers and APIs), and the addition of a number of other system services (CoreData and Spotlight for instance). Many of these core changes are to further Apple's developments into areas that are being touted as major improvements in Longhorn. I am not commenting on who will have the better implementation, just on the broad areas of what they are implementing.
I still haven't upgraded from the 512 that my G4 came with, and it really seems to do just fine running Mail, Camino, iTunes, Word, AIM/Yahoo/BitchX and MT-NewsWatcher all at once - the hard drive actually goes to sleep quite often. It does start to thrash if I try and run VPC on top of all of that, but for anything you'd want to use a mini for, a half a gig ($75 extra?) should be plenty.
Oh, and a 1.25GHz G4 isn't exactly NOT blazing...no, it's not as fast as a P4 3.6, but again, for anything you'd want to use a mini for, it's more than adequate.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
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.
"Tiger, after Jobs said it was still on track for a q2 2005 release (long before Longhorn...)"
I'm sure Microsoft is really scared. OSX is always threatening Windows market share...
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
We have 10.2.8, and I wanted to get Safari 1.2 to test some stuff with. When we tried to update, Apple told us Safari 1.0.3 weas the latest version available for that OS.
I'm not trying to troll.. but that doesnt seem right. Its not exactly "keeping you up-to-date" if the most critical apps people use are not kept fresh. In fact it smacks of OS upgrade lock-in. I'm not a Mac guru, so I may just be missing something and please correct me.
Is this similar to the whole Linux glib thing where you needed the same version of the system libraries as the applications link to? That glib dll-Hell always aggravated me.
*** DRINK MORE COFFEE ***
Actually, you can get around this. Install the old OS. Then boot the upgrade CDs. Once you get to the dialog about choosing the disc you want to install to, format that disc. You're already inside the install well enough to 'qualify' as being valid, but you can peform a full install w/o going through the upgrade or leaving old unnecessary data.
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.
Perhaps a new market for guys (and gals) could open up for tin foil underwear? Not sure about the fragility of the foil though... :)
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.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Performance is, of course, a function of the task that is running. I don't know how to answer your specific question, but there is a general comparison of the G4 and G5 here that may be of some interest.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
The price for education/government is US$69.
Also, many large institutions, such as the University of Wisconsin System, have an even cheaper deal: we sell full versions of Mac OS X to faculty staff and students for $49.
Departmental/institutional purchasers can obtain a license for the latest version of Mac OS X for a period of 3 years for $69; in other words, they are licensed to run any full upgrades of Mac OS X for free for three years, at which time they have a permanent license for whatever the latest version is at that time.
Same for Mac OS X Server: unlimited is $499 (instead of $999), and 10-client (10-client applies ONLY to AppleShare file sharing clients; everything else is unlimited in every way) is $249 (instead of $499). Users can also, for the same price as that particular version of OS X Server, purchase a maintenance contract which gives them the latest version of OS X Server for free for the next three years.
This three year deal usually equates into getting two more updates to the OS for nothing. So it's not always just "$129".
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.
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 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.
"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.
They mention that Setup Assistant will be able to (future tense) migrate all of your settings to a new computer like XP does now (sometimes). Bullshit. It's here and it works now, ZDnet.
This guy is way out there
When Apple files the lawsuits... : )
... the Mac Mini has a G4
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
here's an update that allows you to use a Serial Mouse with your Etch-A-Sketch!
sorry, OT....I'll take my lumps.
I like microcars
for more information, see The Apple Product Cycle. i certainly think i understand much more about the inner workings of Apple for this.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
mbbac
Apple on occasion will allow users to obtain a free version a major update if they bought the computer within a certain timeframe. For instance, when the PowerMac G5 were first introduced only 10.2 was available and 10.3 was due later. So, when panther was released, powermac G5 customers got a "free" ($20 for shipping) upgrade CD.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
I have a pre-release version of Tiger (no, you can't have it, my lawyer isn't tougher than Steve's) that's working quite well on a 4-year-old 500Mhz G4. Spotlight and Dashboard are both quite peppy. The mini is a whole lot faster than that old G4. How many 4-year-old x86's can run Longwait, er, Longhorn?
Apple's kind of seen the error of their ways with Safari after taking a beating from web developers.
From what I understand (sorry, no links available), they will continue to update the WebCore engine under 10.3 to match 10.4. The only stuff you'll need 10.4 for are the RSS features.
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).
Mac mini has a ATI Radeon 9200 card with 32MB video RAM. Not a great card, but not too shabby. Plus Apple does a really good job at making things look really pretty with even the most minimal hardware. OSX has historially run better/faster on the same hardware each new release. So I'd expect Tiger to run even better on Mac Mini than Panther (the current default OS).
From what I've read, the 9200 doesn't support shaders 2.0, so coreimage won't be able to use it for acceleration, thereby assuring you'll miss out on a lot of the graphical goodness that tiger is supposed to bring. Ofcourse, you'll likely still have a faster and better looking system, so I'm not arguing with that, just saying that there won't be that much visual improvement from going to tiger on a mac mini.
I'm still buying a mini though. I don't care that much about how flashy the gui effects are.
Incidentally, longhorn will require a shaders 2.0 card too for the graphical tricks, and likely when X.org gets support for that kind of gui acceleration, they'll have the same minimum requirement.
Actualy windows does. While paid updates are farther away from each other, they cost ~3x as much or more. And the mac OS includes free updates too. Since I got panther last year, I've received 7 updates, all of which have fixed things and or added some sort of functionality that was missing. I havne't had to pay for a single one of them.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Linux on x86 is better supported than on PPC. However, once you are running the OS, you will not see much difference. PPC is more stable hardware, but LinuxPPC is not as stable as x86 Linux. (it's kinda a wash).
Try using yellowdog linux. It's a redhat clone for Macs. It seems to be the most on top of macintosh hardware support. Debian and some of the others support macs, but that support is lumped into their philosophy of porting to any hardware platform (including old Amigas and MIPS). Yellowdog is the only one with a narrow focus on Linux for PPC.
Or you can run OSX and Virtual PC. I have SLES 9 and Fedora Core2 running in virtual instances. (Been trying to get Solaris x86 up, but it's a pain). As far as swapping out harddrives? Do you plan on doing this often. Seems that it's not that common of a thing to do, but I am sure there are instructions you can google for when the time comes.
Good Luck.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
that being said, i own a powerbook, run os x on it, and love it
KeS
DigiTimes reported that that both the PowerBook and iBook G5 will be released in Q2. This is rather unlikely, as Apple has historically released new "Power" models at least one full quarter before releasing corresponding "i" models (for example the PowerMac G5 was released on June 9 while the iMac G5 was not released until August 31).
Also, fifty-three minutes into Apple's conference call discussing Q1 2005 financial results last Wednesday, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Operations Tim Cook said, "let me be clear on this one, it would be the mother of all thermal challenges to do what you are suggesting," when asked about releasing a PowerBook 5G in Q2 or Q3.
If anyone could meet "the mother of all thermal challenges," it would be Apple, who has designed innovative cooling systems for the PowerMac and iMac G5, but I wouldn't get your hopes up.
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
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.
A lot has been said on the topic, and quite a few folks seem to be under the impression that, because OS X has had a rapid upgrade cycle that this is going to continue. I tend to think that the rate of upgrades is going to slow. OS X is getting to be where Apple wants it. They are starting to look real closely at attracting users from Windows, and it's becoming more important to offer a stable-appearing feature set, for both users and developers.
Those who cautioned against buying before a release date for Tiger should also be listened to - that's good advice. Wait a bit, I think there is going to be another upgrade cycle soon (eMacs at least, and possibly 'Books), see what Apple does with Tiger, and buy once they've announced. But while you're waiting, go play around at an Apple Store or CompUSA or somesuch, make sure you really want to make the purchase.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
1H2005 means this: on June 30, 2005 at 11:59 PM, a single person somewhere in Iowa will get a copy of Tiger.
Oooh! I am a single person somewhere in Iowa! Maybe it will be me!
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
I think that is wrong. It also doesn't save you the pain in the ass of installing the old OS again. There's a better way around this; the install disk is actually a full install disk but it has an app that checks what's installed and won't let you install unless it deems conditions correct. Fortunately you can delete the app and burn a new fully installable OSX CD by following the instructions here, near the end of the thread (but before all the pr0n links).
According to ThinkSecret (who has a better track record with predicting future mac products) claims that only a modest PB update is imminent. Also, with the advent of dual core processors from Fresscale (due in later this year), Apple engineers have another ace up their sleeve. They could move the PowerBooks in that direction with Jobs hyping the first dual processor notebooks. In any rate, I don't see Apple using G5's this year in the PowerBook because of Apple's own contraints. They have to live up to the standard of today's PB. The notebooks can't be more than a 1" thick, can't weigh more than current models, can't last 1-2hours on battery power, and most important can't cause testicular burns. In essence, they can't live by the standards of Wintel OEM's (Dell, HP, Gateway, Alienware, etc)
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
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.
You can convert the upgrade CD (you only need to do the first disk) to a full install CD using this procedure:
m l
http://www.funmac.com/archive/index.php/t-13.ht
This procedure is for an older OS X but AFAIK it still works on newer versions.