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Apple Updates PowerBooks
Tablespork writes "Apple this morning has updated the PowerBook G4. The new models feature 1.5 or 1.67 ghz processors, 8x superdrives, 512MB memory standard, Bluetooth 2.0, updated graphics cards, a sudden motion sensor, as well as a scrolling trackpad. Looks like we'll have to wait a little longer for the PowerBook G5."
the 15" and 17" can now drive 30" cinema displays!
And optical audio out on the 17"
Plus, brighter backlight, better prices and 5400rpm drives across the board.
Now where is my powerbook G5 damnit!
You can scroll with the trackpad now in an ipod esque manner. Of course many PC laptops have had scrolling built into the trackpad, this new feature on the powerbooks might prove to be interesting.
Ohh and it is different from other features by the fact that first of all, it requires both fingers on the track pad, secondly you can either scroll up or down, left or right, or you can scroll in a circle.
I dunno, but on the portables I dont find ctrl+clicking to be that bad mainly because one of my hands is already in that general area ontop of the ctrl key, and the other hand on the trackpad.
12" used to be $1599, now it's $1499.
I have a 12" PowerBook, I love it. I was just on Groklaw and PJ admited she uses a PowerBook.
I would love a G5 laptop except for 2 things.
1: Battery life. All that heat has to come from an energy source, so unless you have jumper cables hooked to a huge Cat Battery, the G5 oven will not last long.
2: Heat. I have a Dual G5 PowerMac, and when CPU usage starts to go up, I hear all 6? 7? fans spooling up like some scene for the old movie "Strategic Air Command" getting a 50's SAC bomber ready for take off. This is not what I want in a lappy.
Besides, how fast does a lappy need to be. I love my PowerBook, and I'll bet everyone that has a PowerBook will say the same thing. It is a product that is just right, it really is.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Um... the keyboard is NOT tiny. Hold a standard keyboard up against an AlBook, you'll see that the main keys are exactly the same width.
Yes, I suppose on the 17" they could have gone wild and put in full-height arrow keys, maybe even a number pad. But the keyboard is already normal size.
I'm more glad they finally installed the right amount of RAM: 512MB on a single stick. First off, no Mac should ship with 256MB, especially not a "pro" machine. Second, last year's high-end models came with 2x256MB sticks, which means you lose half of it when you upgrade. Adding a 512MB stick (for 768 total) was severely value-deficient, and unfortunately 1GB SO-DIMMs are still at a nasty price premium.
I think this is a deliberate choice. Apple seems to have the idea of an ideal DPI - see this page, which says "After years of experience, Apple engineers have discovered the ideal resolution to display both sharp text and graphics -- a pixel density of about 100 pixels per inch (ppi)." If my trig is correct, a 1680x1050 screen with a diagonal width of 17" has a horizontal width of arccos(tan(900/1440)) * 17" ~= 13", and a DPI of 1440/13" ~= 110, so this PowerBook is already over their ideal.
In the long run, Apple is clearly wrong - if you have high-resolution images and can scale them any way you like, there's no reason not to display that detail. But for now, scaling probably isn't a good idea. In addition to having to change all the software for it, you'd probably be upscaling slightly, at odd ratios. It would make the images look worse. And having more resolution but not rescaling just means that the icons are smaller and harder to see. I think Apple made the right choice for the short term.
I'm using a 17" PowerBook right now, and for what it's worth, I'm fairly happy with the resolution.
I had put in an order for a 15" powerbook, on friday, (I didn't believe in a G5book) and checking my order status today, apple upgraded everything in the order, and dropped the price. they even dropped about a week off the ship date. Pretty happy with them right now.
Apple still is crippling the 12 " PB by not including
- Gigabit Ethernet
- FireWire 800
- backlit keyboard
OK the backlit keyboard just looks cool but why can't they at least make these optional?
I have a 15" but would have liked to have gotten the 12" if it had better specs. The only real advantage the 12" PowerBook has over an iBook is the dual screen capabilities. Even that can be hacked into the iBook.
An earlier post proved the following link:
Best Resolution for Images and Words
The quality of the pixels you see impacts how you use your computer. After years of experience, Apple engineers have discovered the ideal resolution to display both sharp text and graphics -- a pixel density of about 100 pixels per inch (ppi). Other vendors may offer a larger monitor, but with less resolution, so you end up with fewer pixels, or a smaller monitor with a high resolution that causes eyestrain and headaches. Apple's balanced 100 pixels per inch format is optimized for images, yet allows you to easily work with text in email, Safari and sophisticated type treatments in layouts.
So that would be the reason why they don't make higher resolution displays.
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Since the dual core freescale supposedly outperforms a G5 at same clock speed, I really would have liked to see the freescale in the new specs.
Not to flame, but I'm interested in where you're getting your information from (benchmarks, reviews, etc). I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a Dual Core G4 outperform a single core/CPU G5 when it comes to apps that are fully MP-aware (threaded properly). But I would be surprised to see a Dual Core G4 outperform a single core G5 on apps that are not threaded. I'd love to see some real world comparisons.
Remember just because it has 2 cores doesn't mean that it's twice as fast. It only means that there's the potential to do more at once if the software can take advantage of it through threading. Here's a great article that explains the problems/challenges software developers are going to face with multi-core CPUs.
Now I'd love to have a dual core CPU in my laptop and I'd love to program for it, but I image Apple would face some of the same challenges trying to get the dual core Freescale CPU into a laptop as they would in getting a G5 into a laptop, namely heat. A dual core G4 is going to be hotter and more power hungry than what they've got now. I'd love to see either the dual core G4 or a G5 in a laptop.
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The G4 is fine, but that's not the problem, it's the anemic 167Mhz bus which is the bottleneck with the G4s.
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