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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.
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...
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.
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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.
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".
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
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
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
PPC970FX dissipates only 39W max, 24.5W typical, well within what is acceptable for a laptop. Heck the Pentium M at 1.5 Ghz and above dissipates 21W typical with no max given by the Intel spec sheet.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
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
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.
What are you talking about? H.264 (aka AVC) is an open standard. Apple is not the only one who implents this standard. In fact, Apple is quite slow. Here's a short list of available encoders:
Sorenson Squeeze 4, MainConcept H.264 Encoder, Nero Digital AVC, Hdot264, x264, etc....
And when you look how bad the quality of Apple's MPEG-4 ASP is (compared to XviD, DivX,...), I wouldn't bet that Apple AVC will be so great either.
If you want to encode on Mac I guess that Sorenson Squeeze 4 is currently the best sollution. According to the latest codec comparison on Doom9.net NeroDigital AVC is the best codec (Sorenson was not tested).
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.
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... : )
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
mbbac
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.
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
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.
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
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