New Mac System Specs

xyankee writes " Think Secret appears to be dishing more of the dirt that Apple loves to hate so much, this time dropping details on updated Power Mac G5, iMac G5, and eMac systems soon to be released. Looks like speed bumps all around: Power Macs get to 2.7GHz, iMacs to 2GHz, and eMacs to 1.42GHz. Video cards and SuperDrives are also upgraded."

Comments

Slow learners?

[TripMaster Monkey]

If my memory serves, a judge passed a ruling on this a little while ago. Shouldn't they be at least slowing down a bit while this is resolved? And if not, why didn't someone give some sort of cease-and desist order?

(Disclaimer: IANAL, and watching them on TV gives me a headache.)

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

I pretty much believe that Think Secret is deservedly screwed, but I also think it would be silly (at this point) to "slow down" as they have assserted from the beginning that they're not doing anything wrong.

Re:Slow learners?

[TripMaster Monkey]

Yes, that's what I was thinking...if they do change their stance, it would be interpreted as an implicit admission of guilt, so may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, I guess.

Although this really doesn't address my second point...if a judge ruled in Apple's favor, shouldn't they be able to stop this sort of thing in the interim, until the case is settled one way or another?

Re:Slow learners?

[amliebsch]

THere's nothing that says they can't publish the information. They only can't refuse to reveal their sources who may have violated NDA contracts.

Re:Slow learners?

[Omnifarious]

And basically admit they're doing something wrong? That seems especially weird to do when, in fact, they weren't doing anything wrong.

Re:Slow learners?

[Omnifarious]

From what I understand, the judge forced Thinksecret to become an informant. The judge did not tell them they couldn't publish the information. The judge can't tell them that. They never signed an NDA with Apple, and every once in awhile, the first ammendment actually means something in this country.

Re:Slow learners?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The judge did not tell them they couldn't publish the information. The judge can't tell them that. They never signed an NDA with Apple, and every once in awhile, the first ammendment actually means something in this country.

Actually, the UTSA does restrict the freedom of speech and has been upheld as constitutional thus far. As have slander, liable, copyright, trademark, military secrets, etc. laws. Apple has just never sought an injunction, although one would almost certainly be awarded. I think it is because Apple does not actually mind rumors sites. It does however, mind employees breaking their NDA's

Re:Slow learners?

[Richard_at_work]

Yes they were, they broke the Uniform Trade Secret Act by wilfully receiving and publishing information under NDA.

Re:Slow learners?

[amliebsch]

Actually, the UTSA does restrict the freedom of speech and has been upheld as constitutional thus far.

Er...the UTSA is not a law. It is a model statute. It only applies where and to the extent to which it has been adopted. It also usually requires that the publisher know that the source of information is violating the law by disclosing it, essentially making the publisher a party to a crime.

Re:Slow learners?

[As Seen On TV]

Actually, there is. In California, which is the controlling jurisdiction, it's against the law to knowingly publish trade secrets. Unannounced product details are definitely trade secrets.

Not to mention the fact that Nick Ciarelli is apparently still actively engaged in tortious interference.

Re:Slow learners?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Whether or not you think it is morally wrong, it was still judged to be illegal.

Re:Slow learners?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It also usually requires that the publisher know that the source of information is violating the law by disclosing it, essentially making the publisher a party to a crime.

Has anyone suggested otherwise in this case? Actually I believe the wording is slightly more open, and includes cases where the publisher should know what they are publishing is a trade secret. In any case, a mac rumors site run by a ivy leaguer almost certainly knows that what they are publishing is a trade secret.

Re:Slow learners?

[Omnifarious]

They weren't under an NDA. I can't see how they could be bound by its terms.

Re:Slow learners?

[amliebsch]

Only if they were improperly divulged, and the publisher knows or has reasons to know this.

Re:Slow learners?

[As Seen On TV]

Have you not been following the case? Ciarelli actively solicits Apple employees to break their confidentiality agreements by offering them a promise of anonymity. He then publishes the information they leak to him.

He's breaking the law six ways from Sunday. This has never been in dispute.

Re:Slow learners?

[wtmcgee]

Knowingly revealing (and soliciting, no less) trade secrets is in fact illegal and not protected as 1st amendment speech.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shame on you and your parents for having had the coitus...

A comma might have really helped in there.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

"and every once in awhile, the first ammendment actually means something in this country."

To take your arguments to an extreme -- is it protected speech to go up to someone and claim that you'd pay two thousand dollars to anyone that killed your wife -- now you aren't telling someone to do anything illegal, but if they just happened to do so and report back to you, you will given them $2k no questions asked and would protect their identities from the police?

Not soliciting anyone to do anything illegal -- but you are encouraging what any reasonable person would know to be the obvious outcome.

Is that protected speech? And if not, why draw the line here and not at speech intended to protect a company from having information that will financially effect them via soliciting someone to break legal confidences. Both are encouraging someone else to break a law.

Protected speech is free up to a point but not entirely free. Encourage someone to break a law in a manner that is specific and one that you yourself will benefit from and you have broken the law. Encourage people to go out and fuck everything up with no expectations that it will actually happen -- now sadly, that is free.

Some people just don't get it...

Re:Slow learners?

[iminplaya]

He didn't ask if they were doing something illegal. He asked if they were doing something wrong. Two very different things.

Re:Slow learners?

[MoneyT]

The judge actualy specifically said the rumor sites could continue to speculate and publish rumors, but that they had to turn over their sources in the cases in question. Apple still has to plug the leaks on their own, the sites just can't protect the leak.

Re:Slow learners?

[Richard_at_work]

If you are going to play that word game, then nothing in the world is 'wrong' because someone somewhere considers it not to be. You might not agree with the law, but you have no more right to blatantly disregard it than the mass murderer living next door. Thinksecret did something wrong.

Re:Slow learners?

[iminplaya]

...then nothing in the world is 'wrong' because someone somewhere considers it not to be.

And that would be right. Killing people is wrong, yet we come up with all sorts of reasons to do it anyway. Killing is wrong no matter who does it. Your reasons don't make it any more right. The UK/US/Chinese/European/world's govenments are commiting mass murder right now. Please save the lectures on the "mass murderer living next door" for someone who believe it's any different. I'm not falling for it. We do have a right to disregard a law we disagree with. Prohibition and IP law come to mind here. Some would say we have an obligation to do so. I don't believe in letting 51% of the people write laws for the other 49%. This whole case is nothing more than a publicity stunt anyway. All this noise can only help sales. Apple's only real concern here is that they get the names right.

Re:Slow learners?

[carpe_noctem]

IANAL, and watching them on TV gives me a headache.

That's why you shouldn't be watching Cinimax between the hours of 12pm-6am.

Re:Slow learners?

[grimharvest]

Some of you Mac users are so paranoid. Other posters are right. Apple can only gain from this early leak and probably does the leaks intentionally at least some of the time.

Re:Slow learners?

[sharpestmarble]

Or at least that's what Apple says.

Re:Slow learners?

[grimharvest]

Now why would trade secrets be protected so extensively when journalists are free to publish governments secrets (Daniel Ellsberg) and then of course you have some dipshit like Nixon trying to discredit him. Once a secret's out, it's out. Tough shit.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you watch gay porn in those hours? I reckon so. Faggot.

Re:Slow learners?

[babbage]

As have slander, liable, copyright, trademark, military secrets, etc. laws.

In the context of this sentence, I'm pretty sure that should be libel, not liable:

$ dict -d wn libel
1 definition found

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

libel
n 1: a tort consisting of false and malicious publication printed
for the purpose of defaming a living person
2: the written statement of a plaintiff explaining the cause of
action (the defammation) and any relief he seeks
v : print slanderous statements against; "The newspaper was
accused of libeling him"
[also: {libelling}, {libelled}]
$

Hope this helps... :-)

Re:Slow learners?

[BitGeek]

You're confusing law with reality. Revealing trade secrets is clearly protected by the first ammendment-- just read it.

A law cannot repeal the constitution. A law that violates the constitution, like the one you mentioned, is not in effect the day it is written- its as if it doesn't exist (Marbry V Madison).

Furthermore, from a morality viewpoint, Its not clear that they are revealing secrets at all- most of their articles mention "secrets" taht are easily discerned from public information.

Re:Slow learners?

[As Seen On TV]

No, that's what his own lawyer says as well. Ciarelli's position since the beginning has been that YES, he did indeed break the law, but that he should be exempt because California has a (stupidly misguided) "shield law" that gives certain special classes of people certain protections.

I was actually kinda hoping that this case would inspire either the court or the legislature to get rid of that absurdly unconstitutional law, but it doesn't look like that will happen. Instead, the judge just declared that whether the "shield law" is constitutional or not, Ciarelli isn't protected by it.

So the facts of the case are not in dispute.

Re:Slow learners?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Thanks, the spell checker can only save me 70% of the time, and on days like this I sure don't trust my brain with the other 30%.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'm wondering is whether eMacs now have enough processing power and RAM to run a single instance of Emacs. It's my favourite development utility, y'see.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a contract-violation issue, not a law one. If I sign an NDA promising not to tell anyone that you are a transexual crocodile born in Antarctica, and I then go ahead and tell someone, you have recourse to sue me and collect the penalties as defined in the NDA.

It's not a First Amendment issue, you aren't brought to trial by the government because you said something they don't like. You're sued by the other party to the contract for violating its terms.

Yes, most states have laws that broaden trade-secret protection to cover those who know or *have reason to know* that the information is a trade secret, but that's *still* not a First Ammendment issue, because it's not the government which takes you to court over the violation. It's the private entity whose right to privacy you have violated.

If I drop by Apple HQ and ask everyone who walks through their lobby to tell me what the next big news is, offering compensation of any sort (even just a promise to not reveal my source), I'm *soliciting* a violation of a trade-secret-protecting NDA.

On the other hand, if I drop by Apple HQ, and simply overhear two engineers, or executives discussing that same 'next big news', I'm in the clear because if they're talking about it openly in a publicly-accessible area, I can make a reasonable assumption that it is not a secret.

In general, as a non-party to the contract (NDA) the laws to help protect trade secrets can only force me to reveal my source.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, Apple can only *gain* from people cancelling orders or holding off on submitting orders until after an announcement some time in the future.

So it's only to their benefit to have excess stock floating around in warehouses, and have a month-long drop in revenue *before* they announce a new product.

What version of reality do *you* live in?

Re:Slow learners?

[vertinox]

No, but neither are trade secrets protected by the constitution, but rather other system of laws.

Unless you count copyrights and patents, but this is not copyright or a patent issue since you cannot tradmark or patent the fact you have done something or plan to release something... Besides corporations should not be treated as nations unto themselves otherwise they will violate the Bill of Rights via proxy.

Re:Slow learners?

[Wolfkin]

Let me get this straight: are you really saying that the reason mass murder is wrong is because the government says so?!

That seems bizarre on the face of it, but it does appear that large numbers of people agree with you.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

You really have a lot to learn abut trolls. Like, "don't respond, that's why they live for".

Idiot.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

If my memory serves, a judge passed a ruling on this a little while ago. Shouldn't they be at least slowing down a bit while this is resolved? And if not, why didn't someone give some sort of cease-and desist order?

Ah, but you're assuming that what they are posting now isn't made up or guessed-at. Just because they posted inside information before doesn't mean that everything they post is.

If they truly have "highly reliable sources" that provide such detailed information, why don't they publish such details consistently?

If you look at the previous article, it's pretty content-free, and impossible to disprove the accuracy of. They take something very predictable ("Apple will update the PowerMac G5 line."), add in something likely ("Apple will release new and updated products at or before NAB."), throw in some plausible speculation ("They might use versions of the PPC 970 chip that have been developed publicly."), and some eventual guarantees ("Apple will adopt Blu-Ray") : and you end up with the "message":

"Apple will release updated G5s with new chips and Blu-Ray at NAB."

If Apple *doesn't* do exactly this, ThinkSecret can always say "Well, Blu-Ray was delayed because of technical issues." or "It's been pushed back to WWDC."

So, my point is that : if they had access to the detailed specs they posted today, why would they post plausible fabrications like the above instead?

Re:Slow learners?

[AstroDrabb]

I don't believe in letting 51% of the people write laws for the other 49%.

I wish 51% had the ability to write laws; things in the USA would be much more balanced. As it is now, "We The People" (about 300 million) are "represented" by only 535 members of Congress. Those 535 members handle the law and all the corruption/bribing that goes along with it. I don't believe in letting 535 citizens write laws for the other 299,999,465!

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exaggerating a bit, aren't you? People who are going to buy Macs are already largely loyalists. They want the specs early. They're going to buy the product regardless. We're not talking Mac Minis here, we're talking the usual brand of Mac priced out of the range of users who are more likely to buy a pc.

Moreover, if there's a leak among Apple's employees, that's Apple's problem, not Think Secrets.

Re:Slow learners?

[Omnifarious]

I'm actually OK with restrictions on soliciting. If there is a pre-arrangement for any kind of compensation other than seeing the information you give out in print as a condition for you having given the information, then I'm OK with calling it industrial espionage or something.

But, IMHO, there should be no restrictions at all on publishing information that was under NDA if you didn't offer people something to get it. Once it escapes from being under NDA, it should be free. Otherwise, we could just replace all copyrights with NDA-style shrink-wrap agreements and have perpetual copyright.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unannounced product details are definitely trade secrets.

That is WAY to vague to be insightful. Announced to who? A third party that handles "official announcements"? Is there an official place that something has to be announced to for it to become "officially announced"? I have a product I am about to start selling. If my neighbor tells his brother, did he automatically violate a trade secret?

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment is the stupidest one I've ever seen. And that is saying something.

Something which is unannounced has not been announced. See how that works? That's what "unannounced" means: not yet announced.

When it's announced, it ceases to be unanounced.

Publishing something which has not been announced is not the same as announcing it for reasons that are so blindingly obvious that I refuse to explain them on the grounds that if you don't get it I'd rather just punch you in the nose instead.

Re:Slow learners?

[steeviant]

Is that protected speech? And if not, why draw the line here and not at speech intended to protect a company from having information that will financially effect them via soliciting someone to break legal confidences. Both are encouraging someone else to break a law.

Firstly, no one is killed when someone publishes a rumor about the mighty Apple, for you not to be able to tell the difference between killing and violating the NDA shows your level of zealotry is hitting dangerous levels.

But more importantly, none of these sites were breaking any laws, they were publishing unconfirmed information given to them by third parties.

Those third parties were breaking an agreement, not a law, and again NO ONE WAS KILLED, so you can calm down about it.

There's no reason to support Apple or the slimy employees who run straight to the rumor sites every time they see something new. Neither are showing a great deal of ethics at the moment.

But the rumor sites are just publishing information they get from other people, which they should be entitled to do anywhere. They attempted to protect their sources and were told that they had no legal right to withhold that information.

That's the bit that should matter to the rest of us, because it tells normal US citizens that they have no ability to protect sources unless their work is published by a news company.

Re:Slow learners?

[iminplaya]

As it is now, "We The People" (about 300 million) are "represented" by only 535 members of Congress.

And 51% of the voters are ok with that. If they were smart, they would buy a Mac.

I don't believe in letting 535 citizens write laws for the other 299,999,465!

But 51% of your neighbors do. They give them the power. And speaking of power, did you see that part where it says that the Xserve consumes just over half the power as a comparable Xeon?

Just trying to get back on topic...

Re:Slow learners?

[amliebsch]

Killing people is wrong

Why? I love how you toss this out as if it is patently obvious, but I disagree with this premise. Murder is wrong. Killing is sometimes excusable. Prehaps even sometimes the right thing to do.

Re:Slow learners?

[nolife]

Blueovalnews went through this exact thing several years ago with Ford. The court and the rulings were in Blueovalnews's favor. They were even posting actual scanned internal Ford documents online of past and future vehicles. Here is the timeline.

Re:Slow learners?

[Anonymous Coward]

"That's the bit that should matter to the rest of us, because it tells normal US citizens that they have no ability to protect sources unless their work is published by a news company."

The constitution provides for NO protection of sources by the press and neither do any of the ammendments.

This is something that the Press has done and most in this business know they can be jailed for not violating their promises to the their sources. Most would willingly go to jail to protect their field and own morality, but thats their perogative. I've beaten the living shit out of someone abusing his girlfriend -- I could have EASILY gone to jail for it and when I met the judge for bail and otherwise, I admitted what I did and why and let the judge know that he would be well within his rights to jail me until the trial. I was acting outside of the boundries of the law. Luckily, the judge told me that if he were in this situation, he'd have done the same thing and let the prosecutor know this case better not show up on his docket because he'd throw it out.

The judge knew that I knew it was wrong -- and as I didn't try hiding it and when asked if I'd do it again and said Sir, Yes I Would, he point blank told me that he'd have thrown me in jail if I had said anything different.

So do you have the legal right to withhold information? No. But at the same time, it is morally right to do so in some circumstances. Was it in this case? Fuck no. As you mention, NO ONE WAS KILLED. No one was being injured. No one was threatened with injury. There are no real reasons to keep the source a secret other than the journalist just felt like it was his moral obligation to do so.

There was no real reason to convince someone to break their duties to their employeer other than for a headline. As such, I agree with the judge(s) in this case.

Note: for the record, several states DO extend protection to journalists for sources. But even those have their limits.

No word yet...

[daveschroeder]

...on whether these use the already-known-to-exist IBM PowerPC 970MP, a dual core version of the G5. This could mean that we'd have >2.5GHz dual-dual core Power Mac systems.

Further, an update to Apple's CHUD tools (subsequently pulled) had clear references to quad processor capability, as well as references to the 970MP, and the single core 970GX.

What could essentially be called "quad G5" systems (including Xserves) are just a matter of time. And with dual >1GHz frontside busses and PC3200 DDR RAM (8GB max in Power Mac, 16GB max (also ECC) in Xserve), these machines are nothing to sneeze at.

What will be interesting to see is when the Power Macs will have PCI-X and Blu-Ray. From the most current round of rumors, it looks like that's still another upgrade away...

Re:No word yet...

[hunterx11]

PowerMacs already have PCI-X. You're thinking of PCI-E. Though I really think somebody out there must be a numbskull when we have PCI Extended and PCI Express.

Re:No word yet...

[daveschroeder]

Yeah, and the sad part of it is, I explain this difference to people frequently. I was looking at Think Secret's specs, and saw PCI-X still, and just had that on the brain when I typed PCI-X instead of PCI Express. :-/

Re:No word yet...

[EggyToast]

I'm personally curious what companies think we're going to be using PCI-X and PCI-E for. Gamers are loving it for video cards, but games are really barely taxing those 8x AGP video cards.

I'm on a G5 with PCI-X cards and they're all SATA controllers and the like. Well, I've got external FW for that stuff, and FW is built in. So's USB. Most people nowadays use PCI for 2 things outside of the AGP video card -- extra ports, and soundcards. Apple don't need the internal soundcard support -- their built in audio is pretty much as good as many cheapy internal cards, and serious music people want external devices anyway. What's left? What are people going to be sticking in these super PCI slots that aren't grafted on to the mainboards already?

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh, I was hoping for Dual Core processors and PCI-Express.

Re:No word yet...

[EggyToast]

Meant to say "... G5 with PCI-X and looking at the cards, they're all SATA..."

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know, the nforce 4 is the first (only?) x86 chipset that doesn't pass onboard equipment through the PCI bus. Even though your IDE controller doesn't take up a slot on your motherboard, its still a PCI device.

No idea if OSX has an equivalent to "lspci" but if it did, it'd probably list your firewire controller.

Re:No word yet...

[wgaryhas]

What about things like Audigy 4 Pro? Requires the pci card, and the external thing for the audio connections.

Re:No word yet...

[superpulpsicle]

Gamers have bigger things to worry about on the mac platform than video cards.

Re:No word yet...

[Elwood P Dowd]

Thing is, unless Mac OS gets its "funnels" figured out better - just slightly better locking - 4 cores will be hard to use. I haven't heard anything about Tiger in this regard.

Re:No word yet...

[zhiwenchong]

Boy this reminds me of DOS days:

XMS - eXtended Memory Specification
EMS - Expanded Memory Specification - uses page frames

Confused the heck out of most non-techies....

And then we had:
USB 2.0 Full-speed (12 Mbps)
USB 2.0 Hi-speed (480 Mbps)

And:

Victorinox - Original Swiss Army Knife
Wenger - Genuine Swiss Army Knife

Re:No word yet...

[FuturePastNow]

PCI-X is really designed for servers: RAID cards, gigabit ethernet, fibre channel, things like that. It's just an extension of the original PCI, to wring more life out of it until PCIe was ready, so it's unlikely that more uses will be found for it.

PCI-express is, on paper, good for everything. The x16 slots are for video cards, the x8 slots for RAID and gigabit, the x1 slots are for everything else, from new ports to sound cards to whatever. Or they will be, anyway; I've yet to see a PCIe device other than a video card.

People stick all kinds of things in slots (there's a joke there, somewhere). With more stuff being integrated into computers, it's become sort of a power user thing, though, which is why only the Powermac on the Mac side has the slots.

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI makes the TV Wonder Elite in 1x PCI Express flavours, but understandably they are extrememly difficult to find.

Re:No word yet...

[ArbitraryConstant]

It's very unlikely that IBM can deliver a dual-core chip with higher clock speeds than are currently available, due to power constraints.

Re:No word yet...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

How about video capture cards? TV tuners? I have an HTPC with four video capture cards in its card cage. Overkill, yes. There are third party add-ons where people can add more drive mounts inside the PMG5, depending on the options chosen, something like up to five extra bays. Apparently some people buy PCI-X FiberChannel cards to connect to an XserveRAID. There are SCSI RAID cards that support PCI-X too.

I think the PMG5 is more aimed at a workstation market (though lacking support for ECC RAM and true workstation graphics cards). It makes sense to support PCI-X, though I think the time to move to PCIe is approaching quickly. If Apple keeps the update-only-once-a-year pattern, without a mid-cycle change, their top-of-the-line models are going to look woefully behind the times until June 2006, especially as mid-range and low-end x86 machines are starting to come out with PCIe support..

Re:No word yet...

[doggkruse]

Tiger is supposed to include this feature:

Fine Grain Locking (SMP scalability)
Enjoy improved performance and scalability.

see http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/

Re:No word yet...

[EggyToast]

Yeah, obviously there'll be more stuff coming out when it's more widely available on a major platform (the PowerMac is a small subset of even the Mac community). But I totally agree with you that PCI slots are becoming more and more a power-user only interface. Casual users like external stuff so they don't need to muck about on the internals, plenty of ports are getting stuck on the mainboard or have connectors to the outside world included, and there's less that people really need PCI for.

I mean, i've got the 3 slots, and I consider myself a power user, but they remain empty because all the ports I need are already on the computer, or it's cheaper/easier for me to simply buy an external device. I've got 2 FW enclosures and an external nice soundcard on FW.

I know it's not just me, either, since the last Windows computer I put together only used PCI slots for a FW card and a fancy soundcard. If anything, the video push going on will get FW on PC mainboards more steadily, and, well, most people don't need fancy soundcards either. I know shopping around there was always the "I need 6 PCI slots" crowd, but I would've been perfectly happy with just 2.

It's almost like, the sooner PCI is sidelined, the sooner mainboards will come with better equipment installed and the sooner external devices with essentially more functionality will become common. But now I'm dreaming...

Re:No word yet...

[algae]

Actually, the 1x PCI-E should be plenty for gigabit ethernet, especially since it's a point-to-point instead of shared bus; there'll be no contention with other high-bandwidth devices.

I'd imagine 4 or 8x would be pretty nice for a multiple (quad?) Gig-E card though :D

Re:No word yet...

[FuturePastNow]

I don't deny they exist. Here, now I can say I've seen one. Couldn't find the anything PCIe but vid cards on ATI's site, though.

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I can help you with the last problem: Both Victorinox and Wenger make very good knifes, both are originals and genuine swiss army knifes (and both are expensive :-D ), so it basically doesn't matter. No consumer is duped into anything there... Unless you're also expecting an umbrella inside those things :-)

Re:No word yet...

[ZeroLogic]

Victorinox is the true swiss army product line, wenger is just a cheaper knockoff.

Re:No word yet...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

As far as I know, the nforce 4 is the first (only?) x86 chipset that doesn't pass onboard equipment through the PCI bus.

I thought NF2 had something like that. My x86 workstations seem to have multiple PCI segments, when I went through the listings, I counted devices on four PCI busses. OK, one was the AGP bus, but there were still three other segments. Most standard PCs only seem to have two full segments, PCI and AGP.

On my mini, System Profiler only shows the graphics cards on the PCI/AGP busses.

Re:No word yet...

[Elwood P Dowd]

Oh.

That'll do.

Re:No word yet...

[znu]

The block diagram for the Power Mac G5 seems to suggest that USB, BlueTooth and AirPort sit on PCI, but SATA, ATA (for the internal optical drive) and FireWire do not.

Re:No word yet...

[xutopia]

seems as though Victorinox is the first but that Wenger later became the people who produced the knives used by the army. Victorinox is the "original" right?

Re:No word yet...

[MaxRahder]

Not to mention the perennial confusion between "Original Wisconsin Ducks" and "Dells Army Ducks"

http://dellsducks.com/

Re:No word yet...

[beerits]

According to this page at apple.com. Tiger will offer:

"Fine Grain Locking
High-end feature allows for SMP scalability."

Of course I really don't know what that means but it sounded similar to what you were looking for.

Re:No word yet...

[EggyToast]

There's lots of options nowadays that only use the external "breakout box" and connect using something like Firewire. There are pros and cons of both forms, but they're a good example of how PCI is a limited format, not for bandwidth but for size. You can't stick a lot of stuff on just a PCI card, and by forcing things onto a breakout box or dongle card, why not simply use a standardized high-bandwidth external protocol like Firewire?

Re:No word yet...

[Tumbleweed]

What will be interesting to see is when the Power Macs will have PCI-X and Blu-Ray.

I think someone else has already correction your confusion about PCI-X and PCIe, so I'll comment on the Blu-Ray thingy. Sony has been making noises about helping avoid the format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, so I think Apple would be making a _huge_ mistake going with Blu-Ray just as Sony's about to cave. Let's hope they're not that dumb, and that they simply use NEC's dual layer DVD+-RW drives.

Re:No word yet...

[daveschroeder]

That may be why serious scientific/computational clusters are Xserves, which have ECC RAM.

But yes, I'd like at least an option for ECC RAM on the desktop systems as well.

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Victorinox - Swiss owned, Swiss made
Wenger - Swiss owned, Made in China

Re:No word yet...

[Jeffrey Baker]

You can already get storage controllers with PCI-Express x16 connections. There are 24-port SATA-II controllers from Areca and Tekram, and there are dual-bus u320 SCSI RAID controllers from various parties. These HBAs can make full use of x16 and more, so it's not a waste. PCI-X is insufficient, even at 133MHz.

Re:No word yet...

[araemo]

I'm personally curious what companies think we're going to be using PCI-X and PCI-E for. Gamers are loving it for video cards, but games are really barely taxing those 8x AGP video cards.

Actually, I'm eagerly awaiting pci-e video cards for one thing: Downstream bandwidth.

At least, the pci-e bridge driver is more likely to be optimized for downstream as well as upstream than agp bridge drivers were.

The graphics chips and graphics drivers themselves will still likely ignore downstream (Framebuffer->ram copies) bandwidth, but the possibility is there to actually be able to capture full screen movies at something resembling a normal frame rate.

Re:No word yet...

[Elwood P Dowd]

Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for.

Re:No word yet...

[shotfeel]

What would they be used for?

I'm thinking things like the Cell processors IBM unveiled.

Video coming in via Firewire being encoded and burned to DVD in real time while I'm playing the latest/greatest game with frame rates that would make the PC weenies cry!

OK, I can dream, cant' I?

Re:No word yet...

[ruiner5000]

I would be real surprised to see these being dual core particularly with all the problems they are having cooling the single core parts and getting them to 2.5GHz. If you want dual core for servers then you should be looking at the HP dual core Opteron blades that are for sale now. Yes, this is not some Intel paper launch. Vendors are selling them a week prior to the official release. It is also the 2 year anniversary of the Opteron as well.

Re:No word yet...

[otis wildflower]

I'm personally curious what companies think we're going to be using PCI-X and PCI-E for.

Ignoring PCI-X, PCIe would be a wonderful thing for you if you ran any kind of graphic rendering, such as Photoshop or Final Cut. Because PCIe is bidirectional, you could integrate support for GPUs as accelerators into CoreVideo and CoreImage. In theory you could also take advantage of 'spare' GPUs as accelerators for non-video functionality (like audio or computation) but given the vector capabilities of the G4/G5 CPUs that probably wouldn't be necessary.

Re:No word yet...

[adiposity]

I've seen quite a few Gigabit PCI-e adapters; here's the first one I found on google:

Gigabit PCI-e adapters.

-Dan

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

PCIe 4x whould be overkill for a quad Gig-E - 1x PCIe can support 2.5GBps each way, so 2x would provide room to spare for 4 x 1GBps ports.

Re:No word yet...

[DrXym]

I remember when I needed slots for a graphics card, modem, network card, sound card and an IDE controller. I'd be worrying if I had less than 5 slots on the board to fit everything in. Nowadays all this stuff is built into the mainboard and you have a dedicated AGP for graphics or PCI-e. I'm seriously thinking of giving up on midi-tower PCs because there is little point any more - something with a single slot like a Shuttle should suffice. The only reason I see left for a larger case is for sticking in second drives and DVD / CDs. But even that is not necessary when Firewire (or USB2) means it makes little or no odds if the device is internal or not.

Re:No word yet...

[myov]

IIRC, people were confused between USB 1 and 2 (which were USB low speed and high speed). People would see a USB 2 low speed device, not realize that it would work just fine on USB 1 and panic?

To end the confusion, Intel decided to rename USB 1 as USB 2 full speed, giving us the non-confusing USB 2 and USB 2.

I'm waiting for USB 3 - Warp speed.

Re:No word yet...

[myov]

Not to reply to my own post (/., give us an edit button for 10 min or so!)...

It's just like the 100 Base-T USB 1 adapters (ie: 12 Mbps). There's no way the thing can do more than 10 base-T, but since it will physically plug in to a 100 base port the marketing people called it 100 Base.

I blame all the companies who mis-labeled their USB 1 devices USB 2 so that they wouldn't lose sales of people who didn't understand the concept of backwards compatibility.

Firewire 800 having a different connector is an inconvenience, but at least it prevents the "Firewire 800 low-speed" marketing. Of course, if they continue this pattern than firewire will be the new SCSI.

Still, we don't have this problem with things like IDE or memory. Maybe because you shouldn't touch them if you don't know what you're doing?

Re:No word yet...

[myov]

I've always wondered why PC's still don't seem to include firewire. Apple vs Intel? Even finding firewire devices can be hard. I can find many flash card readers for USB 2. I've found only one for firewire (my notebook has USB1) and it's 3-5 times the price.

The advantage to PCI is that it's internal and harder for users to mess up. How many times do people drop, trip, unplug or otherwise destroy external devices? One of my clients has a large stack of devices carefully balanced on the tower, and a basically empty case.

Maybe what we need is a standard for stacking firewire devices.

WIth PCIe and it's various types of slots, my question is how this will actually work? Before AGP, if you wanted to you could run as many video cards as you had slots. How do you avoid having open slots of the wrong type?

Re:No word yet...

[i wanted another nam]

Latency, maybe?

Re:No word yet...

[TheNetAvenger]

Tiger is supposed to include this feature:

Fine Grain Locking (SMP scalability)
Enjoy improved performance and scalability.

And with the cool feature of being built on a monolithic kernel interface. Way to go Apple. Whoo Hoo.

Oh wait, the monolithic kernel interface they stole kind of sucks at multi-processor and mult-threaded performance.

Maybe the next Open Source software they steal and sell at high prices will be better suited for the G5 architecture with Dual Core Processors.

And people have the nerve to bitch at Microsoft, when Apple not only rips off who they can, and then drops it in a propriety OS on proriety hardware. At least Microsoft Built their own freaking Kernel and Kernel client/server system - i.e. Cutler's development team.

Re:No word yet...

[Chagrin]

Adaptec and TekRam sell 8x PCI-E SCSI cards -- not that uncommon if you just look.

* Obligatory note that an 8x card will work in a 16x slot, etc. Tom's Hardware has an article where they actually cover up pins on a 16x card to reduce it to 8x to watch the change in performance.

Re:No word yet...

[0racle]

Well troll, what did Apple steal exactly?

Re:No word yet...

[MoonBuggy]

New Power Macs (don't know when it started, but I got my current machine mid March this year) have dual layer burners included, but not functional.

Apple calls it a "PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-117D" which is referred to almost nowhere, but on the physical drive it has another model number (I forget what) which is a dual layer drive. Many people have speculated that since Tiger supports dual layer burning from the Finder but Panther does not, the drives will automagically open themselves into dual layer mode when it's installed, or from a firmware update shortly afterwards. I guess I'm gonna find out when my copy arrives.

Re:No word yet...

[Delita]

Dell and HP have already committed to Blu-Ray. It would make sense for Apple to choose the same format and avoid the whole DVD-RAM problem they had last time.

Re:No word yet...

[evilviper]

Actually, the 1x PCI-E should be plenty for gigabit ethernet

Perhaps the parent was referring to 10Gb Ethernet (fibre).

Re:No word yet...

[wirelessbuzzers]

I know, don't feed the trolls...

First, Apple didn't "steal" Darwin. It was based on BSD-licensed open source and they use it legally, and furthermore they maintain it as open source (which they are not required to do, but it costs them nothing so they do it anyway). The BSD community benefits from Apple's work in Darwin in several places, which doesn't hurt Apple because they don't compete with BSD.

Second, the best part of OS X is not the UNIX part. The kernel is stable and fast enough, and the BSD base system is OK, but really, Linux and Solaris are better for UNIXy things. What Apple wrote by themselves (and bought from NeXT, which was owned by their co-founder) was a GUI that is much better than any other GUI in any operating system, and a development environment to match it. This was never open source, and Apple did not "steal" it.

Finally, Mach and Darwin do not have fine-grained locking, and thus they suck on SMP. That's why Apple is adding fined-grain locking to Tiger, so their kernel synch isn't so monolithic. They're not stealing this either, they're writing it themselves, and it's possible that the BSD community will benefit from this, too (not sure how much it will only affect Mach stuff).

Apple has stolen plenty of designs (cough Watson cough), but this is not one of them.

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

And:

Jessica Simpson
Ashley Simpson

Re:No word yet...

[javaxman]

. Sony has been making noises about helping avoid the format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, so I think Apple would be making a _huge_ mistake going with Blu-Ray just as Sony's about to cave.

#1 - Sony's not about to cave.

#2 - Apple's already backing Blu-Ray. Check out the list of companies. They aren't alone.

Sony is sure to put Blu-ray drives in their PS3. They're equally as likely to release a bunch of movies in this format. They may have some olive branch to offer the HD-DVD association, but they're not saying they're stopping BD-DVD to create a single standard. Here's the story you may be talking about. From what miniscule information is there, it may just be that they're doing either (a) a PR move to make it look like they tried, or (b) offering up their tech with some modifications, pricing, or other tricky business. Either way, it's a pretty safe bet that Blu-ray is going to end up in PS3's at the very least, and it may just be Sony saying "we think we've already won, how about you save face by playing nice with us, we'll call Blu-ray HD-DVD if you like".

In any event, it'll be well over a year before Apple has the option of putting a Blu-ray disk reader in a machine, let alone a writer, so they simply will use dual-layer DVD+-RW drives for some time.

Re:No word yet...

[drinkypoo]

You can get 10Gb on copper.

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple playing catch-up with PC technology again.

Why is it that when Apple produces something like a translucent chassis, firewire or an iPod, it's "innovative"? When Intel or AMD invent a multi-core processor (and Apple copies) the same thing isn't said even though it's far more innovative.

Re:No word yet...

[daveschroeder]

I know you're just trolling, but for others' benefit:

Intel and AMD didn't "invent" dick in the way of multi-core.

And it's not "Apple" copying anything. IBM makes the PowerPC 970, and IBM has been in the multi core business a hell of a lot longer than Intel or AMD.

Thanks for the troll, though.

Re:No word yet...

[mabinogi]

um that's because neither Intel nor AMD "Invented" dual-core CPUs.

Compaines like IBM and Sun (and others) have been making multi core CPUs for years.

Guess where Apple gets their CPUs from?

The industry as a whole sees it as time to move to multi processing on the desktop, and Apple is hardly playing "catch up" if they're only a month or two behind in it. Especially since as soon as they announce it, you'll be able to buy them.
However, that's assuming that they _do_ in fact go dual core. It's pretty hard to base any sort of argument on speculation.

Re:No word yet...

[adpowers]

I prefer this one from the same page:

Fine Grained Locking
Invite more threads to the party in your processor.

(it is on the right side)

Re:No word yet...

[jonadab]

> XMS - eXtended Memory Specification
> EMS - Expanded Memory Specification

There were also some applications that required UMBs. At one time I had a
set of BAT files that changed AUTOEXEC.BAT to different versions for the
different configurations required.

> USB 2.0 Full-speed (12 Mbps)
> USB 2.0 Hi-speed (480 Mbps)

Screen resolutions were like that...
300 x 200 Medium Resolution (CGA four-color mode)
600 x 200 High Resolution (CGA monochrome graphics mode)
And then EGA and VGA came along and more superlatives had to be invented to describe the resolutions that were higher than high. Eventually everyone decided to just stick with the numbers, because it's actually easier to remember which resolution is which that way; when we say 800x600 and 1024x768 and 1280x1024, everyone knows which is the highest of those three resolutions.

Oh, and do you remember Full Color, High Color, and True Color? Fortunately these days we can just say 24bpp or 32bpp or whatever it is, which is much easier to keep straight.

Will USB/1394/whatever head in that direction, so that we can just talk about the port's (or the device's) speed, rather than quoting version numbers? Wouldn't that be nice?

Also, how about floppies:
360K Double-sided Double-density (5.25")
1.2M Double-sided High-density (5.25")
720K Double-sided Double-density (3.5")
1.4M Double-sided High-density (3.5")
There were also at one time single-sided and/or single-density 5.25" diskettes and drives. (And if you had double-sided diskettes and a single-sided drive, you could flip the diskette over and format the other side and use it separately, without interfering with the first side; people used to put a program on one side and data on the other, sometimes.) I don't know whether there were ever single-sided 3.5" diskettes.

Re:No word yet...

[NutscrapeSucks]

No modern motherboards put (S)ATA on PCI -- they are directly connected to the northbridge. In most cases the sound and network bypasses PCI too.

However, even though these devices aren't limited by the PCI bus, they still emulate PCI devices for the OS. That's why they show up with lspci.

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't it Elwin?

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

The IBM PPC 970MP is in development. Intel's dual-core processor is complete.

IBM's vapourware doesn't count as "inventing", thusly Intel not only co-invented the microprocessor, but also the first multi-core CPU.

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea that multi-core CPUs are only relevant in the PC microprocessor space is rather parochial.

You should consider also the use of multiple-core CPU modules in the mainframe space, which IBM has been doing with POWER for some time.

Re:No word yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I want you to remember something that Apple said about its 1GFlop "Supercomputer" G4, even though there were mainframes (and even PC's) that could outperform it.

Re:No word yet...

[mkiwi]

I bought a video card from ATI that said "PCI-X" Compliant for ExTrEME gAmErz or something. Had to send it back because it was pci-extended not pci express. Heck i have PCI express slots, and the extended cards won't fit. Maybe ATI is a little heavy on the dude/leetspeak these days....

Smaller portable needs.

[BWJones]

I am still waiting for a subnotebook from Apple. My 12in Powerbook is nice, but what I would really like is a subnotebook, perhaps even an Newton replacement. I've made an argument for Apple's reentry into the "PDA" market here. If such a device could be made, I am sure it would have huge sales. The market is moving towards smaller devices that are even more portable and there are folks that are clamoring for it. Mark Cuban also makes a compelling argument for smaller portable devices here.

Don't get me wrong....Apple needs to keep its Pro level line on top of things. In fact, I will likely be ordering a new G5 to replace my dual 2.0 G5 if they are in fact announced, but as the numbers are showing after Apple's financial conference yesterday, portables are where the market is at.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Renaud]

In fact, I will likely be ordering a new G5 to replace my dual 2.0 G5 if they are in fact announced,

Wow, I'm curious to know what kind of needs you have that would justify this...
Sheer gear lust ?

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Girls ofcourse ...

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[BWJones]

Wow, I'm curious to know what kind of needs you have that would justify this...

Scientific computing would be the answer. When decisions are made that depend on calculations, the sooner those calculations can be completed, the better. I am not yet at the point where I need my own cluster, but when calculations start to eat up hours per day or even whole days, you start to think about these things.

We are starting a project however, that will likely need a small cluster. I am thinking 5-10 Xserves would cut it for image analysis and dataset construction.

Sheer gear lust ?

Well, hellyeaa. It's Apple Computer we are talking about.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a nice collection of digital images. I guess you do lot of image processing, what better choice than a rocking G5 ..

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[devmage]

I have an original Dual 2Ghz G5 and though it has more than enough power for me I would have strong urges to get a new one if they realeased a Dual Dual Core G5 just so I could say I had a Quad Processor Desktop :)

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[BWJones]

You have a nice collection of digital images.

Thank you. I am just getting back into photography and have been told that many of my scientific images also have aesthetic value. So, I am exploring using the scientific imagery as art. Perhaps a SIGGRAPH presentation is in order....

I guess you do lot of image processing, what better choice than a rocking G5 ..

I do lots of image processing and those are my thoughts exactly. My work flow is something like a week at the bench doing "wetlab" work and approximately a month behind the computer screen analyzing the data. Computer systems that are fast minimize the amount of time in analysis and help get results published faster.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[daviddennis]

Apple Motion and Apple Final Cut Pro always can use more hardware thrown at them. I'm working on a long form project where quad processors would really help annoying multiple hour rendering times on FCP.

The real-time rendering really helps with most things, but it still doesn't work for layering video at different sizes, exactly what I'm doing :-(.

(I know the original poster made a reply already, but I wanted to point out that he's far from the only person who can use serious power).

D

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[burns210]

"I am not yet at the point where I need my own cluster, but when calculations start to eat up hours per day or even whole days, you start to think about these things."

You may know this already but with Xgrid being built into OS X proper, buying a second Powermac could be used as a ad hoc 2-node cluster. If money isn't a problem, getting 2 of the new Powermacs, one as your workstation and both serving as grid nodes with Xgrid may be your best bet.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[McGiraf]

The next "Newton" will probably be a souped up iPod with a large screen. ( do not tell anybody where you got that from)

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly. You could practically buy a whole girlfriend for the price of one of these new Apple systems.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

If such a device could be made, I am sure it would have huge sales.

If the last few Apple releases were any indication, it doesn't matter what it is - it's going to have huge sales.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[bleaknik]

to replace my dual 2.0 G5

... I'd be willing to take it off your hands..........

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Threni]

> When decisions are made that depend on calculations, the sooner those
> calculations can be completed, the better

Can't you get a proper computer and access it via a thin client (aka `dumb terminal`)?

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[darkov]

I have to agree with you. Maybe because I spend so much time using my 12 inch in bed, often holding it up above my head. In particular I'd like to see them lose the CD drive, put in a 1.8" HD, slightly smaller battery and make it much thinner, otherwise it has perfect form and functionality. They could put a better screen in it though. It's much lower quality than the 15 and 17 inch models.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[xenoandroid]

-1, Zealot

Reason: Phrase "proper computer"

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[As Seen On TV]

If such a device could be made, I am sure it would have huge sales.

Well, that's kind of the thing, isn't it? On the one hand, we have people like yourself saying "I'm sure it will sell!" On the other hand, we have extremely highly paid experts in market research telling us that a product like that will never sell.

The fact that you want it doesn't mean it'll be a successful product.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

...because I spend so much time using my 12 inch in bed

'nuff said....

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Johnny Mozzarella]

Check out these sales figures for the second quarter: Keynote Presentation

In spite of the recent trackpad isses, PowerBooks are selling like iPods(yes, hot cakes have been replaced by iPods).

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but I want it too, so that's two units sold.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you want a ThinkPad X40 with OS X (which is exactly what I want). If you look at the Japanese subnotebooks in Dynamism like the Panasonic W2, you can make them smaller and much lighter than the 12" PB without even losing the optical drive. The really skinny subnotebooks all tend to be much more expensive than Apple's though.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple needs to work on a Cray Link type of thing for their Xserves... It was pretty sweet to connect a couple 2 way Origin 200s to make a single image 4 way system, with RAID across the two systems drives... Back in the day, even.

How cool would that be with a small rack full of Xserves? That would all but gurantee a huge market in the the category where people need big computing (serving, scientific data, engineering), but can't afford--and can't exactly justify a full-on super computer.

Even people that do lots of HUGE graphics (and I think this applies to many graphics people) could string together a couple Xserves and a G5 Desktop and have 3x the capacity. Hell, make it all connect via Firewire2. It's about to the point Cray Link was (1GBps, super low latency). Every mac has that now. Apple could become the company SGI *should* have been.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[UWC]

Every time I'm in CompUSA I have to take a few minutes to marvel at the tiny Sony subnotebook (I guess it's branded as a Vaio of some sort). No optical drive, of course, because it's maybe half an inch thick when closed, but a surprisingly nice screen (I forget if it's 800x600, 1024x768, or something in between with a different aspect ratio), full size keyboard that extends to all edges, and a 1GHz Pentium M. The pointing device is a Thinkpad style nub because there's no room for a touchpad (even the mouse buttons are curved a little around the edge of the case in the half inch beyond the space bar). It can't weigh much more than 1 pound. I fear I might have bought one by now if it was $1000 instead of $3000. I'm still paying off a bulky $2800 desktop replacement from a couple years ago... though I've bought a Mac mini (and the obligatory 512MB RAM and putty knife... and a new LCD...) in the interim and am enjoying it.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[mrchaotica]

I want it as well, so that's three (including the AC who posted above me)

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Digital Pizza]

I spend so much time using my 12 inch in bed, often holding it up above my head.

Braggart.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[otis wildflower]

am still waiting for a subnotebook from Apple. My 12in Powerbook is nice, but what I would really like is a subnotebook, perhaps even an Newton replacement.

I highly doubt Apple would introduce a new PDA anytime soon, given that PDAs are becoming merged into other things like smartphones.

I would like to own a 'PDA' that ran OS X and the following attributes:
* shaped like a scaled-up iPod Mini, but with a wide touchscreen (higher res but the size of the PSP's) instead of scroll wheel. Anodized aluminum. Maybe a multifunction click/tilt wheel on the top edge like my P800. Headphone jack and hold switch.
* integrated wireless everything (GSM/GPRS and/or 3G, Bluetooth, Airport)
* touchscreen can handle HWR via Inkwell, and gestures (like, say, emulating the iPod interface clickwheel)
* new app iMedia, that integrates this device with DVD player, some form of DVR, and iTunes.
* 60+GB HDD

Options:
* Cradles that output analog and/or digital video and audio out, along with firewire and usb.
* a bluetooth remote control and/or bluetooth IR repeater for IR remotes.
* obviously, every current bluetooth peripheral, and maybe even a bluetooth 'headset' shaped like a telephone handset for the GSM function.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[As Seen On TV]

Three totally non-binding committments to buy a product with imaginary specifications at an impossible price point from anonymous Internet users? Let me get marketing on the phone immediately!

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[mihalis]

Not a direct reply perhaps, but I think of Final Cut Pro as sort of a "G5 purchase coercion kit". I have Final Cut Express and have tried to use it on my original 12" powerbook (867 MHz, 640MB, 60GB). It's only -just- possible, and certainly not nice. You get just a taste of a real editing suite, enough to hook you.

So I've been itching for a G5 for quite a while, and I just bought an HDR-FX1, so now I REALLY need some horsepower in the editing suite area!

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[shotfeel]

Yep. That will do it. Nothing like bringing a girl home and spending the next hour showing off your new computer to get her in the mood (to leave).

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[macaulay805]

... Xgrid being built into OS X proper, buying a second Powermac could be used as a ad hoc 2-node cluster.

Or you could just use your linux box as well as!

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[sakusha]

You apparently haven't read the rumors on the next releases of FCP and Motion. They are rumored to support XGrid rendering, so you can slave together whole render farms of Macs for additional processing power.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[shotfeel]

The Image Analysis Facility where I work (big university) has an art contest every year featuring scientific images as art.

There's some pretty cool stuff there.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

With XGrid and XSan you can do (roughly) the same sort of thing.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[elemental23]

Hey, it worked in the late '90s!

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so fucking stupid. What the fuck are you thinking ? Because you want it a 20 billion dollar in-the-bank-company and one of the best design firms on earth is going to build it just for you because you rallied support for it on slashdot ? Go suck your own dick because I am sure that you have found the optimal way to do that as well slashbot!

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but can you plug in a few Xserves and have your SMP aware Adobe Photoshop plugins (or other programs that benefit from SMP) work across them as if it were one big computer...and seamlessly at that?

That's the trick.

When you hooked the CrayLink up to the Origin 200' and booted, they became a single system. All of the slave's resources were taken in as part of the masters. It's the same technology that SGI uses in the Origin2000 and 3000s that allows them to grow to such sizes. I think with a bit of work that it would be possible to do with macs and firewire. Who wants a cluster if you can have a single image machine?

Apple needs a way for a single kernel to occupy multiple machines (or at least act that way to individual applications). It's probably patented, and that's the main reason we won't see it anytime soon, which is unfortunate. When the "network is the computer" they will win.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, hot cakes have been replaced by iPods

unfortunately, they don't respond as well to maple syrup

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[timeOday]

People I know with Sony subnotebooks also claim mad battery life, like 8 hours continuous.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[jo_ham]

You're not kidding.

When you start pushing those multiple layer videos at different sizes at HD sizes then the render time really does start to go up.

Throw in a few LiveFonts (the fire explode one is excellent for fading out standard text when you run it really slowly), chuck in some distortions, tweak the colour of the sky to match your pervious shot...

The processing really adds up!

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[NivenHuH]

Or.. for the time being, use this:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/xgrid/

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[UWC]

Yowza. That's impressive. If I ever get a job that requires even moderate amounts of travel, I'll probably start to very very seriously consider one of those.

Intel's apparently done a very good job with the Pentium M design, and Sony's apparently done a similarly good job at optimizing power consumption in other areas. And I guess the high price tag reflects the effort and component cost exerted toward that end.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[HTH NE1]

I run a Blue & White G3 upgraded with a G4 processor and run versions of Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro modified to run on this AGP-less platform. I'd run them on the G4 Cube instead if the Cube wasn't 100 MHz slower and I felt confident in my Firewire enclosures to not suddenly eat all my data. (I've installed a drive bay vertically in one of the B&W's drive bays to allow more internal hard drive storage and an extra ATA card for larger volume support.)

You know I'm drooling over getting a new machine. And if FCPHD will support Xgrid, I'll have an extra five-seat license for Tiger to squeeze out a little more power out of those other two and a PowerMac 7500/300G3 w/XPostFacto if updated for Tiger. (I don't get rid of my old machines.)

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[GaryPatterson]

While you've at it, you'd better get Steve Jobs on the phone and let him know how to *really* run Apple properly. People around here have known for quite some time how to bring Apple profitability up, and there's been great disappointment that he just keeps getting it wrong. (I think we get a lot of retired CEOs around here.)

It's obvious. Just licence the OS and start clone programs. Or keep cloning dead and create a seperate x86 (or 64-bit Athlon) OS X. Or... don't do that, but buy a big gaming house and start releasing Apple-only games and Half-Life 2. Or release an Office-killer (this time with Excel replacement). Or...

Maybe it's better just to release sub-notebooks and micro-sub-notebooks and chuck in a few nano-notebooks for good measure. They're bound to sell, because some guy on the Internet said he'd buy one, and no doubt he's indicative of all people.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[As Seen On TV]

Actually, I'm pretty sure we screwed the pooch irrevocably when we went with a BSD user-space environment instead of adopting Linux back in 1997. Having a robust, stable environment that we don't have to sell our souls to the devil in order to distribute commercially was a real cock-up. Apparently.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but can you plug in a few Xserves and have your SMP aware Adobe Photoshop plugins (or other programs that benefit from SMP) work across them as if it were one big computer...and seamlessly at that?

Well sure, but they'd need to be XGrid aware in addition to being SMP aware :)

The CrayLink stuff sounds pretty cool, not quite what XGrid and XSan are going to be though, they're more of a distributed network paradigm than a mainframe computer.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[daviddennis]

Well, I have my G5/2ghz dual processor and two other Macs, a G4/450 dual processor and a G3/266 system. I somehow don't think they would make a lot of difference in Xgrid. I'm not sure if my G3/266 could even run it :-(.

So it's time for a new G5 when the new ones come out. Then I suppose xgrid would be useful with the two G5s. But, sadly, not until then.

D

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd bet that Apple's re-entry into the PDA market is going to come through continuous upgrading and expansion of iPod.

At the rate they are going with it, Apple is getting to introduce people to the quality of their technology with very simple interfaces. They gain more and more favor from the non-Mac crowd with every iPod that they sell.

With so many people happy with their iPods, when the iPDA comes out you will see a boat load of fervent fans jumping on board.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[mrchaotica]

Hey, the 12" *books are designed to be portable. Merely asking for a replacement that's better at its current purpose isn't equivalent to hare-brained schemes like x86 OS X.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the Sony Vaio VGN-X505VP (see http://www.vaio-link.com/specifications/specificat ions.asp?l=en&m=1664[vaio-link.com]) weighing 835 grams or 1.7 pounds.

Yes, it's cool, but vaio's are always at a premium price, especially the 505 super-ultra-portable-subnotebooks models.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[amper]

I've made similar arguments. The basis of my argument is that the biggest thing holding back the subnotebook market is the parctical requirement for some sort of optical drive in order to load most software.

At some point, Apple will make the jump and drag us all kicking and screaming into the post- 12cm optical drive world, just like they dumped the 3.5" floppy and forced USB on us.

Of course, what probably needs to happen first is ubiquitous wireless broadband for this to make real sense...

Once we've gotten rid of the battery and space hungry optical drive, we can have much lighter, smaller portables. Such a device wouldn't be for everyone, but for those of us who still have good eyesight, I wouldn't mind seeing a Mac with a screen like the ones on the smaller Sony VAIO's.

As it stands, it seems to me that those subnotebooks out there that do not have optical drives are seen as less-than-capable devices. It's time to change our thinking again, real soon like.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[sakusha]

Well, obviously this isn't targeted at a typical home network with an assortment of older Macs. But just imagine FCP5 with Xgrid rendering speed on, say, 5 XServe cluster units (the stripped down units with dual 2.3Ghz G5s and not much storage). Or maybe in a typical office or university computer lab with lots of the latest G5 computers sitting around mostly idle while reading email or surfing the web. Then you've really got something.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[Threni]

Proper computer = one capable of doing the work, being easily and cheaply upgraded etc. Not saying there's anything wrong with getting an Apple laptop ( except perhaps it's lack of power compared to other similarly priced hardware), more a criticism of laptops in general, which seem to get replaced every year or two, due to their almost complete inability to get upgraded, combined with the shocking low build quality of most of them.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[daviddennis]

I've run Final Cut Pro on similar hardware and it works just fine for me. That's fast enough for the first level of their real time rendering, so you get dissolves and the like instantly.

What sort of problems are you having with it? Perhaps I can be of help.

How do you like the HDR-FX1? I'm thinking of getting one but will hold off until after NAB. You're fortunate that you have FCE because Final Cut Pro has not yet been updated for HDV support. It will be at NAB, of course, but I'll have to get the upgrade (in the $499 range again, no doubt) while you can just upgrade to the latest FCE for $100.

D

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[xenoandroid]

You may not be able to upgrade your CPU or motherboard without buying a new machine, but most other components are upgradable in the G5. Usually by the time you want to change those components you're better off just buying a new machine anyway. If you're using the system for pure calculations than there's no reason not to go with XServe and whatever machine you want to use to connect to it, the person obviously likes Mac OS so I'd assume they'd use their Powerbook. If you go with XServes than your upgrade money goes more into the components you need (for example, every time you buy a new Dual G5 tower, you're paying for a new optical disc drive, high end video card, keyboard, mouse, etc). The Power architecture is better anyway (you can accuse me of IBM zealotry if you like).

I see no reason for him to switch to 'proper computers'. I believe most people say that Apple hardware gives you more 'bang for your buck', since he's using the hardware for scientific calculation I'd assume that Apple hardware would actually be cheeper for him.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[mihalis]

I've run Final Cut Pro on similar hardware and it works just fine for me. That's fast enough for the first level of their real time rendering, so you get dissolves and the like instantly.

What sort of problems are you having with it? Perhaps I can be of help.

That's kind of you. I tried to apply effects to the footage and the mouse pointer got a sort of flashing yellow light in it and then performance went to hell. Maybe I did something wrong, FCE was a recent purchase (or more accurately I haven't put in many hours with it yet),

How do you like the HDR-FX1? I'm thinking of getting one but will hold off until after NAB. You're fortunate that you have FCE because Final Cut Pro has not yet been updated for HDV support. It will be at NAB, of course, but I'll have to get the upgrade (in the $499 range again, no doubt) while you can just upgrade to the latest FCE for $100.

Initial results played back on the LCD viewfinder seem very nice. I really appreciate the much better lens than my DCR-TR80. I don't have a widescreen or high-def TV yet, so I can't really see the results in their full glory. Have only played with it anyway - filmed stuff on my coffee table. Tomorrow I am filming a gig in Manhattan, I have high hopes. And yes a mere $100 to get the FCE-HD upgrade seems like excellent value. If my Powerbook had not been off for repair twice in the past month I would no doubt already have that

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[daviddennis]

Before FCP version 4, most effects required rendering. Rendering is the name for the complex calculations that make effects happen.

FCP version 4 essentially did simplified versions of these calculations that, thanks to FCP technology and the improvement of processor speeds that has been continuously improved, provided a real-time experience. Quality wasn't top drawer, but it gave you an immediate impression of how things would look.

This was possible on some effects, but not on others. A lot of special tweaking was needed to do this, so that's only understandable. The upshot, though, is that you need to render if you use effects that are not bold in the effects tab. It's pretty obvious when this happens - there is a bright red bar above the offending effects, and when you play it it will say rendering is needed.

Most likely you are using some combination of real-time effects that are collectively too much for your processor to handle. The solution is to ignore the real-time mechanism and render them. You do this by selecting "Render All" from the Sequence menu. Once you have rendered the sequence, you should be able to see things just fine. Remember, a tiny amount of experimentation can create a rendering nightmare for the software if you don't understand how it works and what you're asking it to do.

Did that help?

D

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[mihalis]

Sorry for not quoting...

yes that is very helpful. I don't recall exactly what I did, but it is useful to know that even though what I tried to do failed, it is reasonable to think of applying effects and taking an immediate look.

My perception was everything works really well and then I applied one or two effects and it all completely fell apart, to the extent I felt like I'd broken it somehow.

At my naive level of understanding, I didn't think the effects could really be too demanding. I think I put on a volume attenuation and a gamma correction (think horribly loud punk rock gig in poorly lit basement bar).

I definitely did get an entirely new level of respect for iMovie after struggling like that with FCE. What an incredibly awesome program for the money! One of my projects in iMovie/iDVD partially helped a friends band get a deal. Not by my skill, but these free Apple packages let the raw performances shine, without any appreciable editing skill.

Re:Smaller portable needs.

[daviddennis]

Final Cut makes it easier to fine-tune things than iMovie, so I much prefer it. You'll probably prefer it too when you give it more of a hearing.

But bear in mind that any software with a 1000 page manual requires some reading and learning time. I'd recommend that you look at the Final Cut Express Visual QuickStart guide - the guides are pretty good and make it easy for you to dive in and get the information you need. They're also cheap, which helps.

Hope that helps.

D

Heh, speed bumps...

[wolfemi1]

"Looks like speed bumps all around"

You mean, like, to keep them all from going too fast?

Re:Heh, speed bumps...

[illumin8]

You mean, like, to keep them all from going too fast?

No kidding. These things damn well better have the 970MP on the top end, because a 200 mhz. speed bump in almost 1 year (June 1, 2004 since the 2.5 was top of the line) is pretty poor. I have my credit card all charged up and ready to rock if they release a dual 3.0 970MP (4 cores total)!

Re:Heh, speed bumps...

[jht]

That would be most cool if they started shipping the dual-core 970, (if they also came with two processors, would they be called dually duallys?). But based on what's going on at Intel and AMD also, I'd say the days of having enormous speed increases over the course of a year are petering out. The top-end Intel P4 chip is specced at 3.8 GHz - and I think that's only .4 GHz faster than this time last year.

The improvements I'd expect in processors over the next few years will probably be focused on faster RAM access, streamlining the internals of the processor for better performance at the same clock, and faster bus speeds. And better multiprocessor support (along with dual-core).

Even if Apple only bumps up the PowerMac G5 to 2.7 GHz, it's still a .4 GHz overall improvement with a dually system (yes, I know that's not an exact number), and if they combine dual-core chips with that it'll be even nicer. Especially if the price stays the same or drops a little, as they've tended to do lately.

Re:Heh, speed bumps...

[ColMustard]

Truly. Remember when Steve Jobs boldly declared at MacWorld that the G5 would be at 3.0 GHz within about a year? Almost two years later and we find they're only at 2.5 GHz with 2.7 GHz rumored. I knew it was too good to be true.

Re:Heh, speed bumps...

[Anonymous Coward]

ya I have to emit that Apple got lucky with the current state of their competitors. IBM/Motorola's chips have been known to not be the most scalable in the past and thats why it never got big, well that and other reasons but thats the big one. However with the state of Intel and AMD slowing down Apple might just be able to keep up and even get ahead. Their dual core G5 are better then their competitors so hopefully they won't fall behind again. Overall I don't think Apple has ever been in a better position to actually get a decent share of the market. Well at least the desktop because I can't see them beating out the centrino. Intel actually got something right when they put that out.

Cool!

[jargoone]

I decided a couple weeks ago that I wanted to Switch(tm). Tiger release gets announced, I'm good there. Now I have another reason I have to wait for! It's all good though, the Dual 1.8 is the one I want, and I expect the refurb prices to drop like a rock once the new ones come out. Anyone know if this will be the case?

Re:Cool!

[brainnolo]

Price will drop but not as substantially as you may think, usually there aren't big price drops on Apple's hardware (you can see that even on the second-hand market they retain much of their value).

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Check the apple store - they'll have old stock (perhaps $300 off) and refurb old stock (perhaps $600 off).

Price estimates are based on my old stock refurb powerbook purchase the day after the next gen were announced.

Re:Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

They won't drop like a rock, this is Apple hardware you are talking about. Not some crappy Dell box.

Re:Cool!

[Ballresin]

The prices on old equipment will not drop "like a rock" at all. You may see a $200 hit. That's it. And even then, those machines can be purchased through education channels at that price right now. So you won't save tons of cash, just a bit. If you want a really good deal, you have to wait about 2 upgrades down and hope an Apple store kept a demo 2.0Ghz G5 on display (cause they're all identical) and they dump it for whatever comes out. Then they discount it pretty big. ~$600 off. I saw iBooks at a store (1Ghz and 800Mhz) going for around $500-$600 total. Those were giant deals, and the store had about a half dozen of them. Those could be sold on eBay right now for a profit.

Re:Cool!

[__aafutm5472]

Keep an eye on dealmac.com, specifically the Systems page. Lots of good stuff there.

Apple regaining strength

[JoaoPinheiro]

It's great to see that Apple has regained it's strength and is providing some serious competition on the desktop segment once again!

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

It's disheartening to see that you don't know the difference between "its" and "it's".

Re:Apple regaining strength

[JoaoPinheiro]

The real disheartening thing here is the fact that you don't have the courage to identify yourself before posting that. you hide behind the aptly named "Anonymous Coward" status.
I made a type there, so what? As if you've never made a typo before!

Re:Apple regaining strength

[JoaoPinheiro]

Also, may I remind you that not all the users who post here are of American origin nor is English their first language.
I'd like to see you replying to a post in Suomi, I'm sure you'd be great at that.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[dreamchaser]

It's disheartening to see pedantic grammar and spelling nazis who are too cowardly to post as anything other than an AC.

Go ahead, mod this off topic because it is. I'm just sick of the asshats :-)

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

Foda-se, homem, o teu site é o mais fuleiro que vi na minha vida. Portanto, ou és um paneleiro ou então devias sê-lo.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[JoaoPinheiro]

That's exactly what he did to one of my replies - mod it down because he's afraid/unable to give a decent reply.

This is the reason why Anonymous Posting is disabled on most forums. It allows people to make this kind of posts and troll around without having to suffer the consequences.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[ceejayoz]

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

Should've included the link.

Some entertainingly wrong comments in the discussion there, heh.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[JoaoPinheiro]

Great, another anonymous coward (and a Portuguese one this time).
First of all, that's nothing more than a temporary page.
Secondly - it's my website, so I'll do whatever I like with it. Don't like it? That's your problem, no one's forcing you to go there.

Also, who the hell do you think you are to come here and insult me? You don't even have the fucking guts to identify yourself.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

O facto de teres a merda do link duas vezes em cada mensagem tua obriga-me a querer ver aquela merda. É irresistível. Seria melhor se pusesses um "Em construção" ou outra coisa qualquer do que esta porcaria, mas tu é que sabes. Uma vez que queres que a gente vá ver o teu site, devias esperar críticas, maduras ou não.

Quanto ao meu nome, achas que o facto de teres um ID no /. identifica-te? És mesmo estupido...

Re:Apple regaining strength

[JoaoPinheiro]

Well, that's your problem. As for the /. ID. It doesn't identify you as a person, but it does bear with it a certain responsibility for what you post here.
Your Anonymous Coward obviously shows that you are unable to assume the responsibility for the things you post.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

Em Inglês agora, uma vez que deves-te pensar superior por responder em inglês, seu balde de porra...

Your short presence in this site shows (through your posting history) that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Pair this fact with your hideous site and you make yourself a prime target for attacks such as mine. This is not a fucking playground, saying "tell me who you are" means fuck-all and shows you are cornered. Yes I am unable to assume the responsibility for my replies to you, mainly because I reserve my ID for serious posts since I work in government.

I don't have a problem in talking to you but please change your fucking site, it offends me. You have until tomorrow.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[JoaoPinheiro]

This website is visited by users of multiple nationalities. It is incorrect practice to post in languages that most of the users here wouldn't understand (Portuguese for example).

This is not a fucking playground
It certainly isn't, but you don't seem to realise that. You're acting like nothing more than a spoiled child.

Yes I am unable to assume the responsibility for my replies to you, mainly because I reserve my ID for serious posts since I work in government.
What I conclude from there is that since you work for the government you do not have to assume the responsibility for your words/acts? Or does it mean that, it's acceptable for someone who works for the government to say/do/post whatever he wants as long as he transmits a fake image of dignity? Now that's an encouraging thought.

I don't have a problem in talking to you but please change your fucking site, it offends me. You have until tomorrow.
I have until tomorrow to do what? To change my site because you don't like it? Just grow up and get a fucking life.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

That quote will go down in history along with '640k is enough for anyone' and 'there is a world market for about 5 computers'

Right on Cmdr!

Re:Apple regaining strength

[UWC]

Well, I know iPods will play mp3s encoded with LAME...

Ohhh, never mind, then.

Though I guess this attempted pun beats both the iPod and mp3 encoding in the "lame" department.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

A language of commie- and nazi-sympathizing dogs. Yap, yap, yap.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[coopex]

And JoaoPinheiro is any more of a valid identifier than AC. This is the internet, your identity means nothing. It's not as if JoaoPinheiro is your SSN or drivers license or passport. Let me repeat that, an AC has the same validity as your pseudonym. He had a valid point, that you don't seem to understand what has been repeated on this site thousands of times by grammar nazis.


Mod ACs +1, because AC is as valid any any username

Re:Apple regaining strength

[otis wildflower]

Very funny, though you forgot to include the adjectives 'Beleagured' and 'Doomed'...

Re:Apple regaining strength

[JoaoPinheiro]

But it does bear the responsibility of my actions. Maybe not for myself, but for my account, which is as close as you can get to your identify in the internet.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[coopex]

It bears as much responsibility as does AC.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[JoaoPinheiro]

AC cannot be penalized for their bad posting, identified users can.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[coopex]

ACs are moderated for their bad postings, and you're still and idiot and I make it a habit to not to argue with idiots. Enjoy your delusions, moron.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Secret Agent 99]

Appple owns 3% of the desktop market. That's not "dying," that's pretty fucking dead already.

You get back to us when your quarterly sales top $3 billion and your market cap is over $30 billion, mmmmkay?

Re:Apple regaining strength

[pdh11]

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." The iPod went on to fail with 10,000,000 sales in the next three years.

He didn't say "unpopular". He said "lame". Many hella lame products become commercially successful.

Peter

Re:Apple regaining strength

[TheNetAvenger]

You get back to us when your quarterly sales top $3 billion and your market cap is over $30 billion

Mmmkay...

Ok, and how does this compare to IBM or even Dell alone, and they are single companies selling a variety of the the competing architecture. Mmmkay...

Shall we compare Microsoft's Sales and Cap?

Gates alone could personally Buy out Apple out of his personal assets.

So we should all hail the great success of Apple, why again? Mmmkay...

Oh wait, they are successful because of the popularity of the IPOD. A device that mimics features found on products that Create Jukebox had released in 1998 - wow some innovation, rip off the competition... Oh wait, only Microsoft would do that, not your precious Apple. Just like they wouldn't rip off the BSD interface or the Kernel in OSX. Oh wait, they did that too.

When oh when will Apple innovate again?

Ipod sales do not equate to Market share on the desktop, nor is the halo effect going to increase the Mac's market share enough to even make companies like Dell or Microsoft BLINK.

Why? Because Apple is small potatoes... MMMKay...

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever dick. He sucked it. You are still trying to suck it.

Rock that nomad LAm3r!

PDH11 is a lam3r!

Nomads rock. Nope they don't.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

So we should all hail the great success of Apple, why again? Mmmkay...

Maybe cuz they make awesome stuff. OSX rocks the fucking shit out of XP and everybody with a working mind can see that within 5 minutes of trying both. Given the choice just about 90 percent of people would like an apple on there desktop instead of a Dell, which sucks.

The resale value of apple computers is a testament to their success.

yeah, Ferraris have only a fraction of a percent of the automobile market but I would rather drive one of those given a choice between that an a honda accord.

fuck off dorkbot.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

Bravo... what in intelligent response.

Maybe when you grow up and learn about business, you'll understand. Until then, shut the hell up.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Secret Agent 99]

When oh when will Apple innovate again?

Among the many things you're not getting, this is a key one. When Apple innovated with Newton, they were first to market and made a shitload of mistakes for the benefit of the latecomers.

They avoided that with the iPod by not being first but instead taking an existing idea with niche appeal and perfecting it for the mass market. Oh, how terribly stupid of them!

Of course, naysayers will look on one strategy and mock the mistakes; and then they'll look at the other and mock the "lack of innovation." Who gives a shit? Would you rather be first and a big fat failure, or second and most successful?

As for "3% of the desktop" representing "death", why not look at it as four million CPUs sold annually? That's a viable platform, whether you like it or not. (If it's so irrelevant, why do you even care?)

Oh, and look. Roughly 30% growth in CPU sales versus the year-earlier quarter. Gee, how does that compare to the industry?

It's not about "all hailing Apple's great success", it's about letting go of the idiotic idea that a small percentage share of a gargantuan market is a sign of impending doom. While we're at it, how about letting go of the equally idiotic idea that a company that scores a success outside its core market has somehow done a bad or irrelevant thing.

Mmmmmkay?

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, see this, where Taco again calls it a "lame MP3 player"

Yep, and it still is. Except that the popular 5+ karma whoring saying now is "it isn't an Apple branded mp3 player, lame."

Don't bother foaming at the mouth and writing a long winded circle jerk reply; fanboys, just get over yourselves.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

Bravo... what in intelligent response.

Well, it's hard to come up with "in intelligent response" when you're answering a moronic troll.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

7% or so of the portable market, though, which is bigger than desktops.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Alioth]

3% might sound small. Indeed, it would be small if the market for computers was a few dozen a year. But it's not. 3% of a colossal market is still an enormous amount of revenue. Witness how Apple's market cap has now overtaken Sun's.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

There's only one response to that idiotic drivel you posted that you have a chance of understanding:

wtf n00b?!

Re:Apple regaining strength

[TheNetAvenger]

No one seems to get the point of my post.

Everyone seems to think that Apple or OSX is going to make a large impact on the computing world.

In reality, Microsoft and even the Linux world doesn't see Apple as a threat, they are not a big enough fish in the market at this point. If they were or are a threat Microsoft would not have supported Apple in the tough times, or continue to make Microsoft Office for the Mac, when it is not a large revenue product.

Secondly, Apple could of been a LARGE contender, they blew it, several times.

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Secret Agent 99]

I'd like you to show me where I said Apple was a threat to Linux or Windows.

What I have said is that Apple is a successful company and the Macintosh is a viable platform.

If you're reading that as "Apple is going to make a large impact" you're reading too much into it. What I do think is that the computing world is large enough for Apple to be successful -- even wildly successful -- without posing a significant threat to other platforms.

Besides, so many Mac users buy Office and/or VPC that Microsoft actually loses very little, if any, money from people switching to (or sticking with) the Mac. (And Office may not be a large-revenue product, but it is a high-margin one.)

Re:Apple regaining strength

[Anonymous Coward]

In reality, Microsoft and even the Linux world doesn't see Apple as a threat...

Yeeesss..That's exactly what Apple is expecting them to do...Then the "Crouching Tiger" moves in for the kill...ha ha ha ha ha HA HA HA HA HA!!!

No mac mini update

[LiENUS]

Too bad there is no speedup for the Mac mini yet, I'd love to see a Mac mini with a base G5. However it does look like they may begin putting dual core processors out in this update.

Re:No mac mini update

[toddestan]

Too bad there is no speedup for the Mac mini yet, I'd love to see a Mac mini with a base G5. However it does look like they may begin putting dual core processors out in this update.

My guess is that you would not be able to get a G5 into a mini without it sounding like one of those SFF PC's with an Intel Prescott in it. The G5 is just too hot.

A dual core G4 Mini would be interesting though.

Re:No mac mini update

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so you know, the mac mini is the bottom end cheapest mac.

Re:No mac mini update

[LiENUS]

I suspect at some point a G5 mini will happen, we have the technology now with things like liquid cooling and whatnot. The major show stopper is cost, you're not going to hit the 499$ price-point with any G5 mac mini. Between cooling costs and cost for the processor itself it just aint happening.

Re:No mac mini update

[Bronz]

A G5 Mac Mini doesn't make any sense. Apple is still loosely applying themselves to the Good/Better/Best lineup. The Mac Mini is good. Putting a G5 in it would make it better, but then there would be no good. It would only serve to confuse customers -- a confusion that a lot of people simple accept on the Wintel side of things. I am saddened when I see a non-technical couple shopping for a laptop at Best Buy as they are presented with dozens of choices that -- in their eyes -- are only seperated by price.

People have traditionally held that Apple hardware is expensive, and it was hard to argue against that for a while, but it is also well built and carries a unique (if not pleasurable) user experience. Don't under-estimate the soothing nature of walking into an Apple store and being presented only with Good/Better/Best. To that end, there always has to be a "good" option. Hence no Mac Mini G5.

Re:No mac mini update

[chasingporsches]

get an Athlon64, FX, Xeon, or Opteron inside a Cappuccino PC and have all the components (video, sound, firewire, usb, superdrive, bluetooth, wireless, memory, hard drive) to fit and work nicely, in an under-$1000 price range, and with no heat issues, and then we'll talk.

otherwise, buy a powermac G5 for $1499 or an older G5 on ebay for about $1000.

Re:No mac mini update

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh.

They will put a G5 in a powerbook before they fit it into the Mini. Keep in mind the Mini uses notebook components to fit into that small container.

Expect a G5 Mini about 6-12 months after you see a G5 Platinum PowerBook.

Re:No mac mini update

[valhallaprime]

The Mac Mini, however, is positioned differently, and -dare it be said-, does not really need to be considered for a speed bump at this time. The lower-power consumption G4 in there dissipates very little heat, and serves the needs of most users it is marketed for. I purchased one the day of release at the local Apple Store, getting one of 50 that Delaware received. It has been an absolute perfect replacement for my grandparent's Performa 6200. Without an optical spinning, it is really damn quiet, and hooked up to my UPS, it reported the power draw under 50 watts under load! Faster procs mean more power usage, and speed that the average user of a mini will not use. 1.25ghz G4 is hella plenty for Surfing, digiphoto organizing, email, and burning their audio disks. It really is the gateway/Entry level mac digital appliance for the masses.

Re:No mac mini update

[rbanffy]

Didn't Motorola/Freescale have a dual-core G4 (MPC8641D, IIRC) processor somewhere?

It could be a very nice speed-bump for the Mini, Powerbook and eMac families and make all Apple computers multiprocessors (the marketing people would love to be able to claim that against those poor PC people)

Re:No mac mini update

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy on the forecast there boy, you don't want to get sued do you? /Steeve

Re:No mac mini update

[Anonymous Coward]

get an Athlon64, FX, Xeon, or Opteron inside a Cappuccino PC and have all the components (video, sound, firewire, usb, superdrive, bluetooth, wireless, memory, hard drive) to fit and work nicely, in an under-$1000 price range, and with no heat issues, and then we'll talk.

one missing feature:

Mac OS X

Re:No mac mini update

[MayorDefacto]

I'd love to see a Mac mini with a base G5.

Seeing as how they're still having a helluva time developing a G5 Powerbook, my guess is that you shouldn't start holding your breath. Dual core G4's might be a distant option, but seriously, I would much rather see a memory bump to 512MB on the Minis, followed by perhaps a faster CoreImage-supporting video card or maybe a 7200 RPM hard drive.

/Already waited 3 months for Tiger-loaded Minis to consider purchasing one

//Considering waiting for 512MB memory bumps

///Really want a damn Mini NOW!

Re:No mac mini update

[svanstrom]

Mac mini G5 would be nice, but BT2 and FW800 would IMHO be much more important.

I don't want a silent(ish) computer next to my tv, if I need to have not so silent harddrives next to it... using FW800 I could have the harddrives in a closet in another room.

BT2... well... it's in all the other Macs, and sooner or later I'll end up with a cellphone which handles it...

Re:No mac mini update

[furry_wookie]

I don't want a G5 mini...

I just want a little more clock speed, FW800, and the same Radeon9600 they put in everything else and not the crappy 9200 the mini has now.

Heck they are even upgrading the eMac to a 9600 now and getting rid of its 9200.

Personally, I would have to bet we see a 9600 mini once they start another production run of them, possibly late summer.

Re:No mac mini update

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

good = mac mini with a low end G5 better = imac with dual core G5 best = dual dual-core G5's sounds good to me

Re:No mac mini update

[mikis]

You mean something like this: Iwill ZPC 64 (Athlon 64, Nforce 3, Firewire, 6ch sound...), or maybe this: Iwill ZMAXdp -- Dual Opteron workstation in SFF case?

Rough calculation shows that first one would cost about $750 (3.0Ghz CPU, 512MB DDR, 80GB 2.5" HDD, slim 8x DVD+-RW DL). Add 30-40$ for Bluetooth or WLAN dongle or MiniPCI card if you really need it... (or buy Logitech DiNovo Media Desktop and you'll get one for "free" ;))

i think you mean pci-express

[Anonymous Coward]

right?

emac?

[smittyoneeach]

just an 's' shy of immaculate...

Re:emac?

[SmokeHalo]

Wouldn't that be emaculate?

Re:emac?

[ch-chuck]

and in their ongoing efforts to please everyone, I hear they're coming out with a 'vimac'

Re:emac?

[MonoSynth]

Maybe it helps if you buy two of them?

Re:emac?

[John_Booty]

Wouldn't that be emaculate?

No, he's talking about the text editor, emacs. So the word you want is emasculate, at least for vi users.

Re:emac?

[SmokeHalo]

I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had considered emasculate, but I was just going for a simple jest -- I didn't want to be mistaken for a dyslexic.

Re:emac?

[methangel]

I believe he was saying that Emacs (the editor) is immaculate. Bring on the vi vs. emacs flamewar.

Re:emac?

[I_Heat_Sexylaid]

I re-assemble taht reamrk.

Re:emac?

[MooseGuy529]

Bring on the vi vs. emacs flamewar.

I'll get it started:

vi is better. ;-)

(unless you're doing either C or Lisp development, or looking for a replacement for /sbin/init, in which case Emacs is better.)

Re:emac?

[Mr.Progressive]

no no. that's too close to 'ejaculate'. although it would explain the color.

Re:emac?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dyslexics untie!

Errata - PCI Express, not PCI-X

[daveschroeder]

Doh.

That's what I get for not thinking before I type.

This'll be my first mac

[m_dob]

My XP laptop's dying, and I've been looking for a new computer. Had ThinkSecret not put this rumor out, I may have gone for another windows machine. Now it'll be a mac for sure.

Re:This'll be my first mac

[gl4ss]

that's a completely.. well.. twisted way to say the least to decide on a mac.

what would the reasons for going pc route would have been? these upgrades wouldn't really address any major problem you would have had in migrating to mac(software only available for windows or whatever). on top of that.. you don't even know the prices for these babies yet! surely if a tiny speed bump was the deciding factor then price should matter as well(you weren't seriously going to buy the fastest of the lot anyways?).

Re:This'll be my first mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Allow me to translate this post for the others who have replied in confusion. What m_dob is really saying here is this:

Dude! Information wants to be free! Apple are teh evil oppressors for sueing[sic] Think Secret and Think Secret is just using their first amendment rights! Apple are The MAN!

I have a great idea -- I will post to slashdot some made-up story about how the rumor has made me buy a Mac and then someone at Apple will read my fake story and tell Steve Jobs and then Apple will know that they are wrong and will stop being mean to websites.

RIAA is evil! I buy more music because I steal it first! Apple is evil! I will buy a mac because I have read this rumor. Go Cowboyneal!

MP

[Anonymous Coward]

Antares?

Re:MP

[Anonymous Coward]

Gloweth thou in the skies of Scorpious.

Re:MP

[Jon_E]

why not .. everybody else is doing it

They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[thatguywhoiam]

... on the old dual 2.5 G5. Thats a good thing I think. As impressive as the system was, there's something (irrational) in my mind that just gets nervous about things like that. I'm worried that the... juice... will leak out onto the mobo.

Nice to see the iMac getting a more decent video card. (Yes, I know it probably 'sux0rs for gam3z' but honestly, a mediocre gaming card these days will slay practically any other reasonable computing task. It makes me laugh when you see the gamers dis something like, say, a nVidia 5200. That card sucks rocks! but it will also do realtime previews in Motion on uncompressed DV. That used to take some heavy hardware. Just sayin'.)

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[cyberwiz01]

... on the old dual 2.5 G5. Thats a good thing I think. As impressive as the system was, there's something (irrational) in my mind that just gets nervous about things like that. I'm worried that the... juice... will leak out onto the mobo.

I don't understand why people are so paranoid about water-cooling.As long as the hoses are clamped well and the user doesnt do anything stupid like waving sharp objects near the tubing, there should not be any problems. Apple uses a special mixture that is non corrosive and kills algae so there's no need to worry about that. Besides a good quality pump can last just as long as a fan 90 there are no reliability issues either. People need to stop being so paranoid about water cooling.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Is the liquid cooling water-based or refrigerant-based? If it is refrigerant based, it is likely a gas at room temperature and pressure. Water is a different story.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[Anonymous Coward]

>I'm worried that the... juice... will leak out onto the mobo.

since the mobo stands vertically with the cooling rig hanging off of it and not laying horizontally with the cooling rig above it, should there be a leak, it would fall onto bare aluminum chassis

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[As Seen On TV]

Neither. It's filled Delphi 151 Heat Transfer Fluid which is mostly propylene glycol.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[caldaan]

lol, until it finds its way into the power supply beneath. I'm pretty sure the screws that hold the power supply in are right there. But anyway, there is little to worry about with a cooling system like this anyway. Some supercomputers are completely immersed in fluid for crying out loud. There are non conductive heat transfer liquids that are non toxic that can be reliably used. The hose connections on this particular liquid cooling system also seem to be over engineered to prevent such a leak. It is just a matter of time before some of IBM's open systems power based solutions are liquid cooled.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[thatguywhoiam]

I don't understand why people are so paranoid about water-cooling.As long as the hoses are clamped well...

Well, I did say it was an irrational fear. :)

More to the point, there's something a little hackish about needing liquid cooling for a desktop CPU. Its neat that they pulled it off, esp. in a production-line unit, but it was pretty obvious that this was the only way they were even going to get halfway to the promised '3Ghz by year end' (which still hasn't happened. Shades of Moto.) I would prefer (and in fact went with) a slightly slower part that didn't require elaborate cooling that I need to pay for.. dual 1.8 in my case. Just a personal opinion.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[cyberwiz01]

If you think heat is a problem now, just wait until IBM, Intel and AMD dual core chips become mainstream. Then, even low end machines will need complicated cooling solutions. I doubt you will see a stock heatsink without at least a few heatpipes with the next generation of chips.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[Anonymous Coward]

Heat Transfer Fluid which is mostly propylene glycol

Ah.. so this means no drinkey?

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[Anonymous Coward]

There are non conductive heat transfer liquids that are non toxic that can be reliably used.

True, but Flourinert (and the like) certainly ain't cheap. A 100ml bottle will set you back around $70, which makes it somewhat impractical for use in mass-market cooling systems.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[noewun]

Ah.. so this means no drinkey?

Well, you can drink it once. . .

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[adamfranco]

Heat Transfer Fluid which is mostly propylene glycol

Ah.. so this means no drinkey?

From Wikipedia:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined propylene glycol to be "generally recognized as safe" for use in food, cosmetics, and medicines. Similar to ethylene glycol, propylene glycol affects the body's chemistry by increasing the amount of acid, potentially resulting in metabolic problems. However, larger amounts of the substance are needed to cause this effect. Eating or drinking very large amounts can result in death, while large amounts can result in nausea, convulsions, slurred speech, disorientation, and heart and kidney problems. Propylene glycol is considerably less toxic than ethylene glycol.

So, I wouldn't try to drain the cooling system by drinking it, but it shouldn't be that bad in comparison antifreeze.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[Anm]

Err... Where do you see any hint of them ditching the liquid cooling? You think the 2.7Ghz will not continue the trend of 2.5Ghz? And that still leaves teh issue of the 2.3Ghz. What keeps it cool?

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[MoonBuggy]

The liquid cooling on the dual 2.5GHz is significantly quieter than even the fairly low volume fans on the dual 1.8 though.

I can kinda see where you're coming from - they obviously felt they needed a uberfast machine at any cost, but the upshot of that is far from a hack IMHO. The fact that they were forced to use a non-conventional (if expensive) solution means they got a chance to do it right and cut noise levels even further. The system noise may not be a huge sway factor in the purchase, but it does say to me that they didn't just do it out of neccessity; they did it right.

Having said that, you can 'feel' the difference in using a 2.5 compared to a 1.8. In my experience the cooling on the 1.8 at <20% is a constant, low-level hum which kicks into "150,000,000RPM jet turbine" on the odd occasion that you run it at >80% for too long. The 2.5 at <20% is a much lower level of constant cooling (sounds like one fan, at very low speed) to gently cool the liquid circuit, but then sending it to 25% load or above for more than about 20 seconds will kick in about 4 more fans at about half speed (only for about 10 secs though) and it happens fairly often, beyond that the cooling seems to level itself off - it's similar in stability to that in the 1.8 but noticable quieter, even at full load.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[mrklin]

People need to stop being so paranoid about water cooling.

According to Appleinsider.com, Delphi's estimated MTBF (meantime between failure) for these liquid cooling CPU units is only 2 to 2.5 years. This is a primary driver for Apple to wanting to move to cooler PowerPC chips so that they can avoid having liquid coolers and avoiding having to fix these water-cooling unit en masse starting in 2006.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[blakespot]

Can you post a link confirming Delphi's indication that these liquid cooling systems MTBF is 2 - 2.5 years?

Thanks.

blakespot

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[Steve Cowan]

Well, Apple also touts the liquid-cooled 2.5 GHz G5 as being quieter than the other G5's. This is attractive to me, as I work in audio.

Even if the next-generation G5's don't require liquid cooling, I'd like to see it as a BTO option. If it is only a few hundred dollars more I'd probably spring for it if it in fact is quieter than fans.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[Francis85]

> I must burn my Karma, in order to save it.
Instant Karma! is gonna get you

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[line-bundle]

Neither. It's filled Delphi 151 Heat Transfer Fluid which is mostly propylene glycol.

No. It's mostly water. Click on this reference and click on the M9457LL/A link (next to the G5). Everything you want to know is there.

Re:They've ditched the plumbing/new iMac video

[As Seen On TV]

Heh. No offense, but I'm pretty sure I'm right about this one. Delphi 151 is less than half water.

Midplane

[akira69]

So, do you think they fixed the midplane capacitor issue? I've had to replace one already, and the replacement didn't work... I'm still trying to get my 20" iMac working again. Any insight on this? I really hope they redesigned the board!

Re:Midplane

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no redesign necessary, it was a shipment of bad capacitors. The same design with different capacitors will work just fine.

Re:Midplane

[WombatControl]

IIRC, the issue with the capacitors in the iMac was that a supplier stole a formula for capacitor chemicals from another company, but got the formula wrong, causing the capacitors to burst. I'd imagine that Apple got rid of any remaining stocks of the bad capacitors and replaced them with ones that function normall.

Re:Midplane

[javaxman]

So, do you think they fixed the midplane capacitor issue? I've had to replace one already, and the replacement didn't work..

How did it not work? Our first G5 iMac had this problem ( but not our second ) and the replacement board ( which we recieved literally the next day after calling Apple ) worked like a charm. It should be a snap... at least, it was for us.

Since our second one didn't have the problem, and this is actually the first I'd heard of it happening on any other than that one, I'm going to guess it was fixed a while ago, and may have not been that wide-spread.

Re:Midplane

[akira69]

Actually, after replacing the midplane, the computer wouldn't even turn on. The white power light lit up, then nothing. I tried everything from reseating all the connections to resetting the motherboard via the CUDA button. No dice! I have heard of replacement midplanes crapping out similarly to the original (bad caps). But my problem seems different. Another question is also wether the design of voltage ripple suppression for the caps is good enough to allow bad caps to perform well. Perhaps it's a two fold issue.

Re:Midplane

[javaxman]

Actually, after replacing the midplane, the computer wouldn't even turn on.

Ouch. Sounds like another call to Apple is in order. Since it's a new machine, they'll likely be very interested in helping you out, but that still isn't fun.

Power Book?

[SteelV]

The real question is when where there be G5 power books. I've heard that it will be several months to a year or so, since they can't really get it working right.

Re:Power Book?

[PaxTech]

I'd settle for a dual G4 Powerbook. My old Powerbook went off lease a few months ago and now I'm waiting to buy a new one until either a G5 or a dual G4 comes out.

And waiting..

And waiting..

Re:Power Book?

[argent]

You don't want a G5 powerbook. You want a dual-G4 powerbook. the new Freescale dual-G4 chip breaks the G4 166 MHz system bus bottleneck, *and* gives you dual-core as well. It would breeze past any underclocked G5 Apple could fit in a laptop the size of a Powerbook.

Re:Power Book?

[commodoresloat]

Those will be ready on Tuesday.

Re:Power Book?

[thuh Freak]

...with the added benefit of melting your legs.

Re:Power Book?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...you don't need to make the exact same comment twice. I think we got the point the first time. Dual-G4 good, gotcha.

Re:Power Book?

[Anonymous Coward]

it must be a new troll. how many duplicate posts can you make before the mods notice?

Re:Power Book?

[TheRaven64]

I would personally prefer a dual-core G4. If they are going to put a G5 in, then it is not going to be a particularly fast one, and a 1.5GHz MPC8641D is likely to be far faster than a 2GHz G5 for everything I do that is CPU intensive - particularly since it sports a 667MHz on-die memory controller, eliminating the bottleneck in current G4s.

Re:Power Book?

[TheRaven64]

Really? The MPC8641D is rated at 15 Watts for the 1.5GHz (dual core) version. That's only a bit more than current G4s, and far less than a G5 (about the same as a 1.2GHz G5, if IBM is to be believed, although Apple never made use of that variant).

Re:Power Book?

[bnenning]

I wouldn't be surprised if there is never a G5 Powerbook because of heat issues, at least not one using a processor from the PPC970 family. The next logical step is dual-core G4s, and after that the Powerbooks and iBooks may go to Cell derivatives instead.

Re:Power Book?

[jellomizer]

Me too. My 667 MHZ (In 2002) power book is starting to feel a bit sluggish. Although it seems to run a lot faster (or at least smoother) then my work PC laptop that I got last Month.
I bet if I could upgrade the Video Card, and if it could add more then 1 Gig of ram on my current one It would seem a lot better.

Re:Power Book?

[WasterDave]

(ObAOL) Me too! It would make sense from a "pro gets two procs, home gets one" point of view as well.

Dave

Re:Power Book?

[argent]

That actually makes a lot of sense: you could have the single-core chip in the iBook and Mac mini, the dual-core in the Powerbook and Mac mini DV version with the HD input.

Re:Power Book?

[myov]

I have a G4/800 and it runs warm when CPU load gets high. I'd expect a G5 to be a fire hazard or at least contribute to global warming, based on the desktop's cooling design.

The G4 powerbooks took forever, and the G5 is even more of a challenge.

Something I've thought about though (but IANA thermal engineer)... What if the heat was dumped behind LCD making it a giant heatsink/radiator? Rather than dumping heat out the bottom (the current model), and now attempting to draw air across the board (there's only so much air can do in a given space). The hot air should rise to the top of the unit, and if you still need cooling incorporate some sort of fan.

Re:Power Book?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, maybe I'm wrong, but the last time I saw a really hot LCD, it was completely black.

new ibooks too...

[remove office]

new ibooks are also expected to be shipping around the same time, if not a few days later.

Still waiting...

[brainnolo]

I'm still waiting for the PowerBook G5. THAT would be a great news.

Re:Still waiting...

[MarcQuadra]

No it wouldn't. There's little to no benefits from 64-bit computing on a portable. The G5 was built for machines that can draw a fair amount of wattage. A G5 PowerBook would be hotter, larger, and more power hungry than a machine based on Freescale's 8641 series, a branch off the G4 family.

The only limiting factor of the G4 today is the memory bus, which Freescale has to keep compatible with the ancient 60x bus because of their other clients (like Cisco). The 8641 is a G4 with a totally rebuilt memory controller onboard and RapidIO, an alternative to HyperTransport.

You'd be happier with an 8641-based PowerBook than a 970-based PowerBook. Trust me.

I do think Apple will _call_ the 8641-based laptops 'G5's though, they'll say it has to do with the 'generation of the technology, not a specific type of CPU'.

Re:Still waiting...

[Dan Ost]

I'd rather have a dual core G4 in a laptop than a single core G5. Top speed
isn't as important to me as smooth operation.

Re:Still waiting...

[argent]

I do think Apple will _call_ the 8641-based laptops 'G5's though

How about "G5 Mobile"?

Re:Still waiting...

[MarcQuadra]

How about "G5 Mobile"?

That's exactly the sort of thing that'll hopefully happen. Apple will probably just call it a 'G5' though, and leave the 'mobile' for the techies to know.

I'd like Freescale to get their act together and release these CPUs though, they've been talking them up for a long time now.

And BTW, there are dual-core 8651 CPUs coming 'real soon now' according to Freescale. I'd DEFINITELY want a dual 8651 with RapidIO over a single underclocked 970 in a portable.

Re:Still waiting...

[GlassHeart]

The only limiting factor of the G4 today is the memory bus

That's a bit misleading. The clock speed topping out at 1.67 GHz is a problem as well. Yes, I'm well aware of the myth, but the G4 topped out at 867 MHz on the Quicksilver Power Mac in July 2001. By June of 2003, the final G4 Power Mac only hit 1.42 GHz. A 64% gain over two years is well behind the competition.

The Powerbook did a little better. The January 2001 Powerbook topped out at 500 MHz, while the January 2003 Powerbook hit 1 GHz, and the April 2004 Powerbook hit 1.5 GHz. A year later, however, the fastest Powerbook stands at 1.67 GHz. So, from doubling in two years, to a 50% gain in 15 months, to an 11% gain in about a year. Do you see the problem?

Re:Still waiting...

[TheNetAvenger]

No it wouldn't. There's little to no benefits from 64-bit computing on a portable

Really? Then the AMD 64bit Notebooks that have been out for a year or two are not worth anything, it is just wasted performace or a waste of bits?

Even though they run on a NATIVE 64OS, and benchmark considerably faster than the 32bit counterparts?

Ya, your right, 64bits in a notebook would be insane (only for Mac users though). I guess if OSX was truly 64bit, it might be a bit more of an incentive to have 64bit computing in a notebook.

But hey, some people thought no one would need color screens, more than 128k of RAM, or a two button Mouse. To each his own.

Have you read Plato's Cave allegory btw, it might really help you with this reality thing.

Re:Still waiting...

[qa'lth]

It's not because the AMD64 chips are 64-bit.
It's actually due to AMD64 using their 64-bit mode to defeat the crap of the x86 legacy - more registers, etc, the onboard memory controller, and the other upgrades AMD brought to the table with the AMD64 cores.

Just because it's 64-bit, doesn't automatically make it better.

PPC64/G5 would not be that big of a boon, portably. PPC wasn't as braindamaged as x86 was, so the only real upgrade is the on-board memory controller and 64bit pointers/huge memory space.

In the rest of the world, 64bit actually takes a speed hit unless dealing with things that cannot be dealt with in a 32bit space. MIPS, Alpha, PPC, SPARC, etc. all take a hit to speed.

AMD doesn't, because there were massive design improvements added to their 64bit mode.

The onboard memory controller in the Freescale chips will provide pretty much the same boost that AMD64 gets over the 32bit counterparts - massive memory bandwidth. 32bit CPUs run the memory controller off-die, and get, what, 400MHz? The AMD64 and G5 run on-die, and get 1GHz or so. Major difference. The other boost to AMD64, the registers, aren't needed - PPC already has lots of registers, and the G5 has maybe a few more, but not enough to make a difference

I advise, you know, a little research and fact-checking before you spout off. A few clues go a very long way.

Re:Still waiting...

[MarcQuadra]

I think the reason that moto/freescale didn't aggressively clock the G4 had to do with the slow memory bus. Eventually there's only a tiny advantage from boosting the clock, when it's so far past the bus.

Right now Apple only feeds the bus at 133MHz (maybe 200, but I'm not sure) and it's not 'double-pumped' or anything. Also, from what I understand, even if you fed the chip more, there are limitations of the MPX bus and the chip design that would still limit the performance. The 8641 aims to fix those problems by widening the paths both inside and outside the chip.

Re:Still waiting...

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that they will call 8641-based systems G5. They've been pushing G5 systems as 64 bit for a couple of years now. There's no way they could even think about calling 8641 systems 64 bit -- it's still a 32 bit processor.

I agree with you that the 8641 is a better fit for the PowerBook. In fact, I'd buy a dual core e600-based (the e600 is the core in the 8641) system over a single core G5, for the simple reason that clock speed, for me, is the only advantage the G5 has over the G4.

Apple's painted themselves into a corner. It'll be interesting to see how they get out of it. Personally, I hope they use the e600-based CPUs, especially in the laptops, but time will tell.

Re:Still waiting...

[TheNetAvenger]

I advise, you know, a little research and fact-checking before you spout off. A few clues go a very long way.

I suggest you consider who might be on the other end of the conversation before you pretend to be the definitive expert.

I wasn't addressing the technical aspects of the 64/32 world but would love to carry this debate if you feel up to it.

You assessment of the 64bit AMD processors and their performance advantages and equivaqly the G4 and G5 performance miss many aspects of the good and bad of each.

1) Address space - This is very important when we are moving to larger needs for RAM. Unfortunately the G5 paired with OSX is still limited to 16gb. Unlike the AMD which can do full 48bit (and higher) memory address allocation depending on the OS. A specific OS example would be WindowsXP that is not limited to 16gb of RAM on the AMD architecture.

2) The 16/32bit debate days were much like the current 32/64bit debates. The extra bits can cause more overhead, la la la. Sure a finely tuned 16bit application could potentially out perform a 32bit application, but could it do as much as the 32bit application? Even as you stated it isn't just the 'extra' bits that give the 64bit CPUS an edge.

3) You have no account for future growth and direction. This is what stagnated thee 32bit market for several years, as the application and OS vendors (like IBM), couldn't see past the 16bit world. Right now we are again on the edge of a budding market where applications and demands for RAM and the 'extra features' in the 64bit processors are going to be needed and used. And hopefully the industry will be a bit smarter about the transition this time, than they were in the 32bit era.

However if they keep the current mindset, that posts like yours continue to propagate, we will still be using G5s with 32bit OSes, and AMD64s with 32bit versions of Linux and Windows. I for one would love to see the desktop market move in this direction and have truly photorealistic environments, and other unforeseen uses for the 'extra bits' taken advantage of as fast as possible.

So yes, I stand by my statement, I think it is important that we can buy 64bit notebooks, and are NOT limited to ONE mindset that is SET BY ONE COMPANY LIKE APPLE.

Re:Still waiting...

[qa'lth]

My point that the 64bit AMD processor isn't a good judge of the shift to 64bit still stands; more was done than just the 64bit memory addressing/pointers.

Aside from that, the other upgrades are being added to conventional 32bit Freescale core. Like the on-die memory controller. Altivec was already there. It already has a huge register bank.

What else did AMD64 bring, again?

64bit notebooks have been around since long before you could buy your AMD thing. SPARCbooks, Alphabooks, some PA-RISC ones. Even a limited-availablity notebook based on an SGI O2 design. Are they inherently better through having 64 bits?

The move to 64bit is a great move. Letting apps talk to all 8/16GB of main memory is a lovely thing. Just don't confuse AMD fixing the x86 crap and adding a 64bit mode, as 64bit being the major performance boost you seem to think that it was with AMD.

Also, if Apple -could- build a G5 into a laptop, they would. All reports say it's thermally unfeasible at current.

My 386 can address 4gb of memory, theoretically. Would I really want it to? Really? It's a notebook, by the time 16GB+ machines are common, it will be so outdated so as to not even be funny.

Re:Still waiting...

[TheNetAvenger]

64bit notebooks have been around since long before you could buy your AMD thing. SPARCbooks, Alphabooks, some PA-RISC ones. Even a limited-availablity notebook based on an SGI O2 design. Are they inherently better through having 64 bits?

The move to 64bit is a great move. Letting apps talk to all 8/16GB of main memory is a lovely thing. Just don't confuse AMD fixing the x86 crap and adding a 64bit mode, as 64bit being the major performance boost you seem to think that it was with AMD.

Also, if Apple -could- build a G5 into a laptop, they would. All reports say it's thermally unfeasible at current.

My 386 can address 4gb of memory, theoretically. Would I really want it to? Really? It's a notebook, by the time 16GB+ machines are common, it will be so outdated so as to not even be funny.


Again, no one will drop the mindset that 32bit and straight architectural advantages are enough for the future.

That is insane. We will hit the 32bit memory Cap, in fact we ALREADY have for many users. 4GB of addressable space is just not enough. Even the Apple 16gb of address space truly isn't enough.

If you think it is plenty, they maybe you should do a quote like '4gb' of RAM is more than anyone will ever need, and then you can be laughed at in 5-10 years.

Secondly I never said the AMD was the first 64bit notebook, or 64bit portable. As for general market, it maybe is the least expensive and first that is readily available to the non-technical world. But I never even previous made that assessment.

It is sad that Apple has no direction for a full 64bit version of OSX, it is also sad that they have no way or intention of getting a 64bit processor in a portable form factor.

Which is something that notebook makers using the AMD CPU have been able to pull off for quite a while.

Re:Still waiting...

[Anonymous Coward]

> The 16/32bit debate days were much like the current 32/64bit debates.

Note quite.. the 16bit apps were doing lot of things that needed 32-bit long so it required 2 16bit to do that.. so switching to 32bit was natural and made things faster.. switching from 32 bit to 64bit is not needed as the extra 32 bit will be unused most of the time, wasting space and cpu time unless you are doing something specialized like scientific math.

But what about the PowerBooks!?

[Mr. Brian]

I am eagerly awaiting news about a G5 PowerBook. That's what's going to set my heart a flutter. Why was there no information on them in the article?

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[argent]

Because a G5 powerbook is "the mother of all thermal challenges" (direct quote from Apple).

You don't want a G5 powerbook. You want a dual-G4 powerbook. the new Freescale dual-G4 chip breaks the G4 166 MHz system bus bottleneck, *and* gives you dual-core as well. It would breeze past any underclocked G5 Apple could fit in a laptop the size of a Powerbook.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[gsdali]

well said. It's also meant to be thermally very good. 25W @ 2Ghz. On-Board quad gigabit ethernet controllers, PCI-E controllers and dual DDR controllers. It's a great chip and it saves having a few others on the board as well. It ought to make a killer apple sub-notebook.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[Luke-Jr]

Maybe he *does* want a G5 powerbook. G4s are only PPC CPUs, but G5s are PPC-64 CPUs...

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[grungebox]

Um...you don't need to make the exact same comment twice. I think we got the point the first time. Dual-G4 good, gotcha.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[argent]

G4s are only PPC CPUs, but G5s are PPC-64 CPUs...

Unless he's got more than 4G of RAM in that powerbook, all PPC-64 will do is slow him down.

I've been using Alpha almost since it was released, and unless you really need the address space you're better off with 32-bit pointers.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[Chirs]

Maybe he's doing a lot of 64-bit integer math?

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[ArbitraryConstant]

The new Freescale chips aren't out yet, and except for thermal issues they're going to take as much of a redesign as G5s would. Probably more because they don't have any chipsets for them. I seriously doubt Apple is prepared to put that much work into redesigning PowerBooks when IBM will probably have a low-power G5 within the same timeframe. Particularly since much of the power saving work with a laptop chip would be shared with the dual-core chip we know they're going to release.

The question in my mind is whether or not they're going to put the new G4 chips in the other lines. And the answer to that is probably 'no' as well, IMO. Once they have a G5 suitable for laptops, Apple will be able to fit it into all the other lines, and they'll have a PowerPC 980/G6 by that time (end of 2006 or so) to maintain the separation between the lines.

Another consideration is that Apple is going to want to move to an all 64-bit lineup as soon as possible, so they can start EOLing the 32-bit stuff. The new Freescale chips will not be 64-bit (at first).

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...you don't need to make the exact same comment twice. I think we got the point the first time. Dual-G4 good, gotcha.

but its ok for you?

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=146080&t hreshold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=181&mode=thread&pid= 12235561

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[TheRaven64]

The MPC8641D is from FreeScal's System on Chip (SoC) range, and includes more or less everything except GPU (PCIe controller, memory controller, GigE controller) on die. Designing a logic board for it is going to be significantly less of a challenge than designing the existing logic boards - and they've had six months since FreeScale announced the chip to be working on it.

Apple are in no hurry to move to 64-bit. Unlike x86, PowerPC was designed as a 32/64-bit ISA from the start, and so 64-bit code has no benefit at all unless you are addressing more than 4GB of RAM, or doing 64-bit integer arithmetic. In fact, it gives you a performance penalty - pointers are larger, thus taking up more cache space, and load / stores take longer. On x86-64, this is offset by making the architecture marginally less GPR-starved in 64-bit mode. Note that Carbon and Cocoa are still 32-bit, for exactly this reason - Apple don't want people complaining that their G5 is slower than a G4.

IBM have been launching a low-power G5 Real Soon Now(TM) since before the G5 was released, so don't hold your breath on that one. A dual-core G4 would out-perform a single-core G5 (remember the dual 1.42GHz G4 Vs 1.6GHz G5 benchmarks? The dual 1.8GHz G5 was only slightly faster, and that's with the low FSB speed of the current G4s), and performance per watt is what counts in a laptop. If IBM can produce something that will beat a 1.5GHz MPC8641D at 15W, I would be very surprised - we're talking at least a 2.5GHz G5 here, and the current ones are around 45W.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[argent]

The new Freescale chips aren't out yet, and except for thermal issues they're going to take as much of a redesign as G5s would.

That's like saying that apart from the mass murders and war crimes Hitler was a great guy. The thermal issues are huge, and the latency issues are huge... the G5 is a classic Pentium-style long-pipeline model... and the point of a long pipeline is to push ther clock. But, look, the G4 is catching up with the G5 on clock!

The G4, if not for the lousy front end bus, would get more done per clock than the G5... and the new Freescale chips finally get rid of that lousy bus. No, the new G4 could well be faster, clock for clock, than a G5... even before you count in the dual-core chips.

so they can start EOLing the 32-bit stuff

64 bit is not an unmixed win. The only reason the AMD 64 bit stuff gives such a boost is that they could use the 64 bit-ness to get rid of a lot of bad instruction set design. The Power PC doesn't have that problem to resolve.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[FaasNat]

Because a G5 powerbook is "the mother of all thermal challenges" (direct quote from Apple).

Yeah, I can see it now. The new G5 Powerbook -- with built in skillet! :-D

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[WMD_88]

the G5 is a classic Pentium-style long-pipeline model...

The G5 pipeline is 14 stages. That's considered long? Granted, the G4 is only 9...but the Pentium M is around 15 or so, and the P4 was 20, now 31.

G5 a "classic long-pipeline model?" Hardly.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[argent]

The G5 pipeline is 14 stages. That's considered long?

For a RISC processor, that's enormous. Even a 9-stage pipeline is pushing it: MIPS topped out with 8 stages and the Alpha had a 7-stage pipeline. Itanium was considered dubious because of its 10-stage one (not that that was the only thing that hurt the Itanium). The only RISCy processor I've run into with a >10 stage pipeline was the XScale... and its long pipeline REALLY hurt its clock-for-clock performance compared to the StrongARM.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[WMD_88]

Well, do consider that the Pentium 4s are now around 95% RISC, yet they have pipelines much longer than even the G5...

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was that a joke?

All current 32 bit processors do 64 and 128 bit integer and FP math.

"32 bits" only applies to the addressable address space, not the size of ints it can add.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[argent]

Pentium 4s are now around 95% RISC

No they're not. RISC is an architecture design model, not an implementation tool. A P4 is a CISC processor implemented as two or three separate processors pipelined together: there's the first stage that rewrites the CISC code as RISC code, then there's a vertical microcode processor that resembles RISC only in so far as early RISC processors were modelled on vertical microcode machines (the IBM 801 could be said to have been both), then there's the FPU and some post-instruction fixup and the hardware that manages the whole mess.

But having a RISC-like core to do the heavy lifting doesn't make it RISC, any more than having a VLIW-like horizontal microcode core makes the AMD processor VLIW. It's better to say that the P4 is a hardware emulator for the x86 instruction set with a RISC-like processor as part of the emulation. It's not RISC, though, any more than running a software Playstation emulator on a Windows box makes the MIPS RISC processor being emulated into a CISC.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[ArbitraryConstant]

"The MPC8641D is from FreeScal's System on Chip (SoC) range, and includes more or less everything except GPU (PCIe controller, memory controller, GigE controller) on die. Designing a logic board for it is going to be significantly less of a challenge than designing the existing logic boards - and they've had six months since FreeScale announced the chip to be working on it."

I knew that, but I figured Motorola would be making a version of the chip for Apple that didn't have so much of the system logic on the chip. However it's an interesting idea that Apple might be prepared to leverage the rest of the chip as it stands. They could probably get some power savings from doing that as well.

I have my doubts that they'll do it, but it's an interesting idea.

"Apple are in no hurry to move to 64-bit. Unlike x86, PowerPC was designed as a 32/64-bit ISA from the start, and so 64-bit code has no benefit at all unless you are addressing more than 4GB of RAM, or doing 64-bit integer arithmetic. In fact, it gives you a performance penalty - pointers are larger, thus taking up more cache space, and load / stores take longer. On x86-64, this is offset by making the architecture marginally less GPR-starved in 64-bit mode. Note that Carbon and Cocoa are still 32-bit, for exactly this reason - Apple don't want people complaining that their G5 is slower than a G4."

Even if the processor and the OS are 64-bit, it doesn't mean everything has to be. As you say, key parts of the OS will remain 32-bit, even though Tiger is fully 64-bit capable. However, applications can be 64-bit if they need to be, given hardware support. Things like Photoshop will be available in 64-bit versions, and PowerBooks will not be able to leverage this.

People expect PowerBooks to be powerful machines, and that is increasingly not the case. I think the expectation of 64-bitness is at least as important as performance.

"IBM have been launching a low-power G5 Real Soon Now(TM) since before the G5 was released, so don't hold your breath on that one."

Conversely, we know IBM is launching a dual-core G5, and the chances are very good that they would not have been able to do that if they had not made serious progress in keeping the power usage under control.

"A dual-core G4 would out-perform a single-core G5 (remember the dual 1.42GHz G4 Vs 1.6GHz G5 benchmarks? The dual 1.8GHz G5 was only slightly faster, and that's with the low FSB speed of the current G4s), and performance per watt is what counts in a laptop. If IBM can produce something that will beat a 1.5GHz MPC8641D at 15W, I would be very surprised - we're talking at least a 2.5GHz G5 here, and the current ones are around 45W."

If we assume that Apple is willing to take a clock speed hit (say <= 2 ghz for example) and that IBM has made progress in keeping the power usage under control (very likely for dual-core chips), then they may be a lot closer to a viable laptop chip.

The real question is: who did Apple think was the better alternative when they comitted to the chip they were going to use? They must surely have already done this, and if you look back a year or two ago, Motorola/Freescale was doing a lot worse, and IBM much better. They were convinced IBM would be delivering a 3 ghz G5. In that situation, I probably would have gone with IBM. I think Apple did too.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[WMD_88]

Oh, okay. /me loses argument, heh.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[ArbitraryConstant]

"the G5 is a classic Pentium-style long-pipeline model..."

If by "Pentium-style", you mean "half as long and much wider than a Pentium", then yes. Yes it is.

"and the point of a long pipeline is to push ther clock. But, look, the G4 is catching up with the G5 on clock!"

AFAIK Freescale hopes to get G4s to 2 ghz some time next year...

"64 bit is not an unmixed win."

That's why 64-bit OSes (including Tiger) can run 32-bit code.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[argent]

If by "Pentium-style", you mean "half as long and much wider than a Pentium",

No, I don't mean that. Unless by "Pentium-style" you mean "only Pentium 4" rather than "any Pentium-style processor", you don't mean that either.

The G3 had 4 stages, the G4 started with 4 and ended up with 7 or 9 depending on who you talk to, the G5 up to 25 for MIMD instructions... again depending on how you define "stages". Regardless, the G5 is a "brainiac" long-pipeline multiple-functional unit processor. This means it's more sensitive to pipeline stalls and cache misses, and requires much more power than a simpler design.

And, yes, I think "2 MHz sometime next year" is reasonably close to "3 MHz sometime next year we promise, honest, I know we said 2004, we meant 2005, uh, 2006" given that the G4 gets more work done per stage and thus, for typical code, will probably get more work done per clock IF it can get its bus problems resolved.

See, the G4 vs G5 question has a lot in common with the similar PIII vs P4 debate, except the G4 has had both arms tied behind its back by the crummy memory bus. If Freescale solves that problem, dual-core will just be icing on the cake.

That's why 64-bit OSes (including Tiger) can run 32-bit code.

You're being disengenuous. Tiger is primarily 32-bit, all the graphic code is still 32-bit, and any Cocoa software is 32-bit. It just has the ability to run 64-bit command-line programs, which is more than enough for most 64-bit software: for example, tthe 64-bit software I've been working on on Tru64 (which IS a native 64-bit OS) for most of the past 10 years... most of that is server code.

Getting back to the original point, for a laptop (which is what we're talking about) the ability to run 64-bit code is pointless to all but a tiny minority of the population... mostly software developers who want to test their server code when they're working on their laptop.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[MojoStan]

You don't want a G5 powerbook. You want a dual-G4 powerbook. the new Freescale dual-G4 chip breaks the G4 166 MHz system bus bottleneck, *and* gives you dual-core as well.

I think more people will want a single-G4 iBook that uses the single-core version of Freescale's next-generation, fast bus (up to 667MHz) G4 chip. Yes, a pin-for-pin compatible single-core version has also been announced. If these products ever get released, I think they will make nice low-power alternatives to the Pentium-M/Celeron-M platform.

Here's a nice, short article on about Freescale's next generation G4s: Freescale Discloses Dual-Core PowerPC's Details

From the article:

The MPC8641D device is designed to offer all this performance within a power range that is expected to be 15-25 Watts (typical), according to the company's estimations.

...To minimize chip-level bottlenecks, the MPC8641D processor offers low-latency access to its dual e600 cores through a high-bandwidth integrated MPX bus that is designed to scale to 667MHz.

...In addition to unveiling the MPC8641D processor, Freescale is disclosing development of two additional processors based on the e600 PowerPC core: the highly integrated MPC8641 processor, a pin-for-pin compatible single core implementation of the dual core device...

Shweet.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[ArbitraryConstant]

I think 64-bitness is more important, and you think performance is more imporant. I concede that a dual-core G4 would probably perform better than a single-core G5 given the power constraints of a laptop, but I disagree that that's the primary consideration.

What will determine the outcome is what Apple thinks is important, and what Apple thought the two companies could do at the time that they comitted to their next generation laptop processor, which I believe must have been some time ago.

That interpretation favors the G5, even though IBM has subsequently failed to deliver on their promises. We can infer that Apple didn't know that would happen in 2003, since the broken 3 ghz promise made Jobs look like an idiot. They had to make the decision based on what they knew. What they knew in 2003 was that Motorola had nearly killed them by consistently failing to meet performance requirements, and IBM had just saved them by meeting theirs.

"See, the G4 vs G5 question has a lot in common with the similar PIII vs P4 debate, except the G4 has had both arms tied behind its back by the crummy memory bus.

So did the P3: it had a 133 mhz bus compared to the P4 with a 400 mhz bus.

"You're being disengenuous. Tiger is primarily 32-bit, all the graphic code is still 32-bit, and any Cocoa software is 32-bit. It just has the ability to run 64-bit command-line programs, which is more than enough for most 64-bit software: for example, tthe 64-bit software I've been working on on Tru64 (which IS a native 64-bit OS) for most of the past 10 years... most of that is server code."

Software vendors can write their own graphics libraries or fork off helper processes. The sorts of software that would benefit from that kind of optimization is the sort of software that can ultimately make or break the PowerBook. Stuff like Adobe Photoshop.

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[argent]

I think 64-bitness is more important, and you think performance is more imporant.

I think 64-bitness is only important when it improves performance. And I've been working with real live gotta-be-fast 64-bit software since Apple was still using Nubus, and, well... the performance advantage of 64-bit is much overrated. If you really need 64-bit you know you really need it because you're running into 32-bit limitations.

The 64-bit address registers are the big win, especially for database apps. The 64-bit integer registers are nice, but Altivec already operates on multi-word objects... I'm not sure there's really a lot to gain there. Do you really know about algorithms that are faster in 64-bit mode, or are you guessing?

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[ArbitraryConstant]

"I think 64-bitness is only important when it improves performance."

It improves capabilities too. There's some jobs you just can't reasonably tackle (read: they're a huge PITA) on 32-bit machines no matter how fast.

"I'm not sure there's really a lot to gain there. Do you really know about algorithms that are faster in 64-bit mode, or are you guessing?"

Well encryption should benefit assuming someone optimizes the libraries (and yes I care about this as I use scp a lot), but for the most part I want a bigger address space so I can just throw everything into memory and let the OS worry about swapping it out, instead of the horrible hacks you need to do to juggle things in and out of disk yourself. That is none of the application's business.

I'm not into graphics stuff, but it's not difficult to imagine something like Photoshop benefitting (assuming they roll their own libraries, which I believe they do).

Re:But what about the PowerBooks!?

[argent]

It improves capabilities too. There's some jobs you just can't reasonably tackle (read: they're a huge PITA) on 32-bit machines no matter how fast.

Multiple precision arithmetic libraries that make bignum (both extended and arbitrary precision) calculations trivial have existed since the '60s, and have been integrated into high performance programming languages (eg, Maclisp) since the '70s.

There is absolutely nothing I can think of for which the difference between 32- and 64- bit processing comes down to anything but a performance issue, except for large address spaces. And for GUI applications, Tiger doesn't provide a way to use large address spaces directly... and we're talking about laptops here.

I'm not into graphics stuff, but it's not difficult to imagine something like Photoshop benefitting

I'm only peripherally into graphics stuff, but I am into encryption, and it's hard for me to see anything that 64-bit integer code can do that Altivec can't do better in either area.

No Mac mini upgrade?

[OlivierB]

Looks like all the systems are beefing up the Video Cards to support the latest and the best from Tiger (i.e. at least 64Mb and programmable GPU required to support core image).

As much as I like my Mac mini, I am torn apart wishing they would either#:
a) upgrade their video cars to something like an ATI 9600 with 64 Mb of Ram
b) don't change anything so I won't feel the *URGE* to upgrade to a Higher Spec Mac Mini.

ARgg, Apple has embraced drug dealer like methods; I am now hooked and I won't be able to quench my thirst until something else hits my desk!

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[WIAKywbfatw]

Why would Apple do this? Once you start upping the spec on the Mac Mini too much you start hitting the territory covered by the rest of the Mac range, so it becomes counter-productive (in terms of inventory, etc) to offer a model that few people will want to buy.

Also, the amount of heat generated by an ATI 9600 would be considerably higher than that of the GPU that ships with the Mac Mini at the moment. Given that the Mac Mini has limited heat dissipation capabilities, fitting one with an ATI 9600 might not even be possible without significant redesign to the rest of the unit, which again, would be counter-productive from Apple's point of view.

Maybe in a year from now Apple will introduce Minis with higher spec graphics cards but I doubt we'll see them any time soon, especially as the current design specification is so damn successful.

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

a) upgrade their video cars to something like an ATI 9600 with 64 Mb of Ram

I think an ATI 9600 with 8 Megabytes of RAM is probably a downgrade from an ATI 9200 with 32 Megabytes of RAM.

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[Golias]

The mini is basically a "headless eMac." I bought one to be a high-def HTPC, and it works terrific for that purpose, but every once in a blue moon I wished both the CPU and the video card were a little beefier. (For example, World of Warcraft performance with a GB of RAM is good, but not outstanding.)

If they were to release a $750 or so "headless iMac G5", I would be all over it. The mini would go down to my music studio (with a firewire drive), and the new system would take over my living room.

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a dual-G5 Power Mac as your next upgrade. Personally, I own the faster Mac Mini w/ 512 MB ram and its unbearably slow. I barely even use it. I will probably sell it and get a laptop (which is equally slow, but is at least portable), or get dual-G5. But OS X has yet to really impress me; I have a much better time using Linux.

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[John_Booty]

Also, the amount of heat generated by an ATI 9600 would be considerably higher than that of the GPU that ships with the Mac Mini at the moment.

I don't know the exact thermals involved, but I'm not sure an appropriately-clocked 9600 would necessarily put out too much heat. I have a fanless 9600 in my Shuttle that produces very little heat.

Going from a 9200 to an equivalently-clocked 9600 (or a higher clocked 9600 on a smaller die process?) would give you more performance in the form of a wider data path and more advanced GPU programmability. /speculation

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[Rude Turnip]

Reading its specs, it's more like a headless iBook. Aside from the faster processor, it has the same parts as my 12" iBook G4 800.

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[reconbot]

Wait a second,

You'd like to do either
a) Do something
b) Do nothing

You're going to be really easy to please.

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... Very funny...

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[mrjimorg]

I've been considering getting a mac mini for a while, but whats stopped me is 1- the small standard memory and 2- the older video card. If they beefed up the memory to 512 (I'd probably still pay to upgrade to a gig) and put in a 9600 mobile then I'd be there. The mobile is fairly lower power and they're already using it in their powerbooks. And I wouldn't mind paying $100 extra. $200 if they changed to a G5.

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[Queer Boy]

The Mac mini is the new Mac LC. It's for people who want a Mac but can't really afford one, or who want an extra one for the kids. Although in 2005 it's also great for media.

The mini was never designed to be a great performer. If you look at Apple's history of using components, you will see that the "low end" consumer models get the components that were in the last generation "high end".

My Dual 2GHz G5 came with a Radeon 9600 64MB card. That was the best you could get from Apple in 2003. Having upgraded the G5 line to include better cards, I am sure Apple has an abundance of these components laying around. Hence the usage in the next-gen low-end.

The Mac mini is quite clearly based on the eMac. There have been no upgrades to the eMac. When the eMac gets upgraded, you'll see it in the Mac mini. I wouldn't be surprised at this point if what you saw when you opened an eMac was basically a Mac mini (possibly that's why the extra connectors are there).

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

it's about time they did upgrade the mac mini, i did a quick build of an attractive small i86-64 PC today and ended up with a price of £500: Athlon 64 3000+ = £90 Foxconn nF4 mATX = £50 2 x 512MB PC3200 = £70 nVidia 6600 128MB = £80 Silverstone LC-11 = £95 Dual-Layer DVD-R = £35 250GB SATA drive = £80 i know people say that you can't compare windows hardware with an Apple [i]system[/i], but: 2GHz 64bitCPU 1GB of PC3200 memory DX9.0c video with 8 pixel pipes and 128MB all nVidia core system components endless storage space looks pretty to boot looks pretty bad for the mac mini. i am a fan of the concept, i just feel that Apple have got to get a grip on improving technologies. we are talking: 1.6GHz G5 512MB PC3200 as standard ATI X700 128MB 160GB SATA drive with these the mac-mini could compete.

Re:No Mac mini upgrade?

[WIAKywbfatw]

Your Shuttle still has far more internal space and far more air for heat to dissipate in than a Mac Mini. Again, even if it were technically possible - and I'm not saying that it isn't, only that it might not be - there's still the fact that it a Mac Mini with improved graphics probably wouldn't be popular enough from Apple's point of view to justify making one right now.

1.42GHz emacs

[EphemeralPhart]

With my new 1.42GHz emacs I'll code the smoke out Mr. Poopypants vi zealot over in the corner the.., oh, wait..

eMacs?

[Anonymous Coward]

But that is a totally different operating system! Oh, wait ...

Re:eMacs?

[tbone1]

But emacs is a pretty good operating system. It could use a good editor, though ...

(And yes, I know that that joke is three days older than dirt. So am I.)

the video editor in me is twitching and dreaming

[J Barnes]

iDrool.

August...

[Anonymous Coward]

something special will happen in terms of smaller form factor mac's ( im not talking about the mini either) - lets just say better not put it near your nads unless you want roasted testicles. Then I didnt tell you that :)

OT: annoying ad

[Bob The Cowboy]

OK. Did anyone else get a REALLY fucking annoying ad on this story? One about MS and a map of the US? I rolled over it with my mouse and a couple seconds later a truck appeared on the ad and honked its horn very loudly, twice.

I've got little problem with /.'s advertising, but this is the type of ad that would make me install adblock.

Bill

Re:OT: annoying ad

[commodoresloat]

What are these "ads" you speak of?

--a Camino user with a very long /etc/hosts file

Re:OT: annoying ad

[Anonymous Coward]

What are these "ads" you speak of?

Damned if I know...

-- privoxy everywhere

Re:OT: annoying ad

[mrjimorg]

I dont think its slashdot. I wouldn't be surprised if someone got something nasty on your system. You might want to see if the spykiller programs can find anything.

Re:OT: annoying ad

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? SpyWare on a Mac? I don't believe it!
Oh, it's a windows pc..

Re:OT: annoying ad

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen/heard that one, too. It prompted me to start blocking all the ads. I've no problem with ad-supported sites so long as they don't allow annoyances like this.

Re:OT: annoying ad

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah ... a truck sounds its horn ... if I hear it one more time I am blocking ads on /.

Re:OT: annoying ad

[Anonymous Coward]

It is from /. and it is a MS ad (as the parent sez.) truck blows its horn.

YES!!

[commodoresloat]

Bring back the eMate plastic clamshell casing, stick a G4 in it, and sell it for $350. I love the eMate, but I can't figure out any way to get the information I type on it into my Mac. So it collects dust these days.... The form factor is perfect. Sure, they can make it white instead of ugly dark green (personally I like the green), but if Apple comes out with something of that form factor at a reasonable price, I will buy 2 of them!!

Re:YES!!

[himself]

>
> Bring back the eMate plastic clamshell casing, stick a G4 in it, and sell it for $350.
>
*teenybopper squeal* Oh please oh please oh please!!

(Whoops, gotta go get a dry chair from the conference room. Be right back...)

Re:YES!!

[b1t r0t]

Actually it's not perfect. Its keyboard is like 10% smaller than normal. And the handle is too small for adult hands. A scaled up eMate design, well that would be pretty close to the original iBook, wouldn't it?

Anyhow, I'd love Apple to put handles on laptops (like the original iBook) or at least screw holes capable of attaching a handle (I had a strap handle for the PB 1xx series like this).

Cold Atoms

[vurg]

Yes, but can it make frozen light?

document tracing technologies

[Fox_1]

Two eMac models, code-named Q86J
I remember reading about different techniques to track leaks of top secret documents from the CIA, one method was to use synonyms of different words in each copy of the document and see if the leaks used the same synonyms in their materials. While I doubt the code-name is an example of this, I wonder in Apple's quest to track it's leaks what kind of internal tracking/security features it's using for documents about new products.

Re:document tracing technologies

[argent]

While I doubt the code-name is an example of this

Why?

Re:document tracing technologies

[jcuffe]

The canary trap IIRC. Tom Clancy made a big deal about that with his main character throughout most of his novels. Apparently the way it works was to make many different copies of the documents, using a program to vary the punctuation and word choice. It's a remarkably elegant solution, and if Apple isn't doing this now, I don't know what the hell their problem is.

Re:document tracing technologies

[tbjw]

We see so many Apple leaks these days, and many of them simply serve to increse the hype before a release or announcement (remember the MacWorld Keynote leaks) that I'm beginning to think Apple are deliberately leaking some of this material.

I could be wrong.

Re:document tracing technologies

[jcuffe]

Well, given the choice between deciding that either there has to be some purpose or that the people at Apple are flaming morons, I'd say it's a safe bet to go with the former... I mean, boatloads of cash aren't usually wrong.

Re:document tracing technologies

[Fox_1]

Well it'd be pretty confusing if everybody at the office was using different code names for the same project, and there aren't a lot a lost of synonyms for Q86J.

Re:document tracing technologies

[Cryptnotic]

there aren't a lot a lost of synonyms for Q86J.

There aren't? If they send out 30 copies of the document, they can just use 30 different code names: Q86J, B23L, M32T, P78N, et cetera. When it shows up on ThinkSecret, they then know who leaked the document.

Internally, the code name could be something that doesn't get out at all.

Re:document tracing technologies

[BitGeek]

I've been in exactly this situation. I used to work for Compaq. I knew the product by one code name, my boss used a different one when talking to her boss. Her boss used a third when talking to his boss, and the board knew it by yet a fourth code name. Each variation of the product had its own code name as well. Furthermore, the hardware people and the software people on this product used different sets of code names- so when talking to my peers I had to use another term for it than when talking to my boss.

Granted, I pretty quickly learned all five code names because its damn hard to use two different names and keep straight which name to use with which person.

But this was in the early 90s. That QJ86 looks like an identifier that narrows the leak to a group... or it could be that the leaker made it up to avoid being discovered, and that's just a redherring and Apple has no product with a code name like that.

Re:document tracing technologies

[Fox_1]

sure sure, that would work great to track leaks from external recipients of internal apple documents, but I was talking about people and documents internal to the company. If I was an employee of Apple leaking info I wouldn't use a unique codename that was only on docs I had, I'd use the general internal codename that everybody else uses.
Internally, the code name could be something that doesn't get out at all
That's what I was talking about - operating on the premise that Q86J was an internal code name. The structure of it seems to indicate it's some sort of unique identifier - other identifiers wouldn't be synonyms, they would also be unique. Could you imagine the conversation:
so how's work coming on Q86J?
huh? you mean M32T right?
uhh, no I think I mean P78N, you know, also called B23L.

Re:document tracing technologies

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm beginning to think Apple are deliberately leaking some of this material.

Generally, companies that want to hype products have this thing called a marketing department that is tasked with hyping products.

Also note that rumor sites have a habit of reporting false information. There was a ton of negative hype when the iPod mini was released because it cost more than the rumor sites had "predicted". Some people actually believed that Apple had jacked up the price to exploit buyers.

I understand why you might think this though.
The documented cases of leaked insider information (i.e., the specific instances that Apple is suing over presently) have all occured shortly before major events like WWDC, MacWorld, and NAB, and consistently include bullet-point marketing specs.

However, you have to keep in mind that these events are huge, and involve a lot of people having access to just-about-to-be-released information. The instant Steve gets off stage, there are suddenly a million banners and posters with the new product, and of course rows of the new thing on display for people to come and play with, and a lot of spiky-haired Apple guys who know all the specs already. The number of people that learn about the new products only a few days in advance must number in the hundreds.

My money is on some small time grunt in Apple's conference marketing crew -- I'm sure they're kept in the dark most of the time, but they've got to be briefed well before hand.

Micro ATX G5, BYOKDM

[Anonymous Coward]

The exclusion of keyboard, display and mouse makes the Mac Mini a great value, and the forced repurchase of KD&M makes the iMac a bad value. Customers accept it with laptops for the sake of compactness, but not desktops. Apple should bring out a Micro ATX desktop with the same specs of the iMac G5, but it should be as easy to open and swap the components as a Shuttle PC, and let you BYOKDM. Apple could probably sell it for $900, making it a great machine to go between the Mac Mini and Power Mac.

Re:Micro ATX G5, BYOKDM

[WombatControl]

The reason we're not seeing a Mac mini G5 or a PowerBook G5 is because the G5 chip has some severe thermal issues. You could have either, but in both cases you'd need a massive fan to keep the chip cool. The iMac is about the limit of how tightly you can cram a G5 into a case without worrying about the thing overheating and turning your machine into a desktop hibachi.

You're really not gaining much with 64-bit quite yet. Even with Tiger, the Cocoa and Carbon libraries are still 32-bit, meaning that unless you have someone writing a 64-bit backend that interfaces with the 32-bit UI, most apps won't take advantage of the extra address space. In fact, for some applications, 64-bit addressing actually slows things down - why allocate a pointer that's 64-bits wide unless you need to do so?

Re:Micro ATX G5, BYOKDM

[Anonymous Coward]

A Micro ATX case, while a small fraction of the size of a tower, is still several times as big as a Mac Mini. Shuttle puts high-wattage Pentium 4s and Athlon 64s in them, along with nearly top-end graphics cards. And if a G5 is too hot, how about the multi-core G4s people are talking about here?

Re:Micro ATX G5, BYOKDM

[Vlastyn]

I'd also add here that the G5 in the iMac barely works as is; if you notice on these systems, they are set to "Automatic" Processor performance, which according to my benchmarks runs at about half the speed it's capable of. When you change it to the maximum setting, the fans spin up and it gets much hotter inside- I'm talking about 65C+ HD temperature and 75C CPU, while mostly idle.

This is also the reason for the noise/fan complaints; because the case is so small, Apple was forced to use small fans running at a high RPM to cool the system, thus creating an annoying buzzy model airplane noise. Drives a lot of people crazy. Then again, many users don't even notice, so it goes both ways.

Re:Micro ATX G5, BYOKDM

[Em Adespoton]

That's odd; in my upgrade cycle, I usually find I want to upgrade my monitor, keyboard and mouse around the same time I want to upgrade my graphics card and CPU. This makes the iMac a great value for me, as they're selling the thing for not too much more than their monitor by itself. Now if only Apple had a 2-button plus scrollwheel option in their bundles....

Re:Micro ATX G5, BYOKDM

[Anonymous Coward]

"... A Micro ATX case, while a small fraction of the size of a tower, is still several times as big as a Mac Mini...."

Don't forget about the micro ITX or Nano (comming) boards. Pretty close to Mac mini.

Need an excuse

[Bender0x7D1]

so I can tell my wife we -need- to get a new iMac (clutter is bad)...

Re:Need an excuse

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is an excuse. Tell your wife you need a new iMac since your old one has too small a hard drive and does not support H.264 porn in its full HD glory.

Re:Pfft, why?

[rospahr]

How into linux are you? Linux runs on so many platforms, PPC being one of them.

iMac G5

[NEOtaku17]

Good day fot iMac G5 buyers. They have finally put in a graphics card that can play modern games(Radeon 9600 with 128MB of video RAM)

Re:iMac G5

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of...

Re:iMac G5

[Anonymous Coward]

They have finally put in a graphics card that can play modern games

Great! Now all they need is some modern games to play.

Re:iMac G5

[toddestan]

The ATI 9600Pro is adequate for the current crop of games, atleast on my 2Ghz PC driving a 1600x1200 display. At the rate PC games get ported over to the Mac, my guess is the ATI 9600 will be fine in the iMac for several years to come.

Re:iMac G5

[otis wildflower]

Depends on your definition of modern.

Modern for the Mac typically means 6-18 months behind Windows, and for those games yeah the 9600 should be adequate for standard gaming resolutions.

However, for Doom3, not so much (and D3, WoW, and a few other internally-ported games are available now for OS X).

Also, Apple's penchant for flat panels, and especially large ones, also makes lesser vidcards more painful. If I get a 1920x1200 cinema display, I want to run it native, and I want to run games on it. Even without any FSAA, 1920x1200 is pretty intensive for FPSes, and I would get only ~25-30fps at that res with FX5900 on UT2004 Linux...

It continues to annoy me that Apple can't offer better BTO options for its non-Powermac lines. Why not just pick a notebook video card format (like MXM or whatever) and put it into all their non-Powermac lines? Then offer BTO boards like the 6800go that could go in a mini, powerbook, or iMac? Is the BOM and formfactor _that_ horrible?

Re:iMac G5

[Bilestoad]

Well it could, if any were available. Doom 3 you say? It's a year old.

When will Apple do something about attracting game developers to the platform? I understand it's Jobs himself who doesn't think games are important but they must see there's a lot of market there and it's hurting sales in family situations where kids have a big say in what kind of computer gets bought.

Re:iMac G5

[Anonymous Coward]

"...Modern for the Mac typically means 6-18 months behind Windows..."

I didn't know Microsoft made hardware (except mice, key boards, etc which don't improve game performance). Games, games... games. Yes, there is *no* other use for a computer except for games. I just love that young reasoning.

Re:iMac G5

[kajoob]

Now all they have to do is release modern games for OSX and we're set!

Re:iMac G5

[Queer Boy]

At this point with the introduction of the Mac mini, the iMac G5 is a high end machine. It is not what the original iMac was. If you can skip the display you can get a PowerMac G5 tower for only $200 more. Apple needs to address the issue and put better components into it. I think they need to go one step beyond and put a Radeon 9800 with 128MB in the new iMacs instead of a 9600 with 64MB.

Re:iMac G5

[Anonymous Coward]

They have finally put in a graphics card that can play modern games(Radeon 9600 with 128MB of video RAM)

Another way of saying they went from last generation's entry-level GPU (GeForce FX 5200) to this generation's entry-level GPU (the Radeon X300 is based on the Radeon 9600 core).

This is still a good thing, though.

Re:iMac G5

[Francis85]

I'd hope they allow iMacs with Radeon 9600s to use a secondary display as a second monitor, and not just a clone of the primary display. I'd be seriously considering one if they did.. although a PowerBook would be damn attractive... hmmmm... decisions decisions

wrong "bump"

[commodoresloat]

That's the wrong kind of "bump." A "bump" of speed is a small amount of speed snorted off a key, a rolled up dollar bill, a small spoon, or even a fingernail. "Bumps" are a good way to extend the party without having to go in the nasty back room with all the tweakers huddled over the coffee table.

Re:wrong "bump"

[Mr.Progressive]

A "bump" of speed is a small amount of speed snorted off a key, a rolled up dollar bill, a small spoon, or even a fingernail.

you forgot "a hooker's ass"

Re:Pfft, why?

[ghoti]

What's keeping you from installing Linux on a PowerBook/iBook? There are a bunch of distributions for PPC, and they even have decent hardware support.

Re:Pfft, why?

[slimak]

You do realize that you can run Linux on Apple hardware, right? In fact i think that Linus Torvalds (you may have heard of him) does this.

Re:Pfft, why?

[Svippy]

I don't know, I use only use applications made for Linux ( cannot do that at school ), but I am still a bit in the 'learning' stage.

But I have heard some Linux Distros has been made for Apple Computers, but really, PCs are much better because of the various amounts of hardware.

Main problem with Apple is that you need the offers from them, and not from some sort of company that happened to make hardware.

Pity.

Huh?

[commodoresloat]

You would have bought windows again if not for a tiny processor speed bump on the macs? Of course, once you turn on your new Mac you'll see the real reason to switch.... OS X, not sheer processor speed.

Re:Huh?

[toddestan]

Especially interesting since the rumors say nothing about Apple's line of notebook computers, which is what I would assume the original poster would purchase.

Re:Huh?

[m_dob]

I would assume the original poster would purchase No - the new iMac G5 will ensure a smooth experience, with its boosted-up video memory and Tiger, all in a small form factor. When I realised I really don't move my laptop around all that much, an iMac and an iPaq seemed the optimal combination.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... who in the world would want to get done with work faster so they can go have fun... But... as long as it looks nice while doing it's thing slowly... well then, that's OK!

Re:Huh?

[clickster]

You would have bought windows again if not for a tiny processor speed bump on the macs?

Not to mention a FSB bump up and the possibility of dual-processors that are dual-core. Come on. Talk about geek braggin rights.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...ah, nevermind.

Re:Huh?

[jaydonnell]

There is more to getting work gone than processor speed. For example, Let's have a code off. I'll give you a computer twice as fast as mine, but you have to code in C and I'll code in php. Our task is to make a message board.

This is an extreme example, but it illustrates that productivity is more than processing power.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

once you turn on your new Mac you'll see the real reason to switch.... OS X

That is "nice" and all, but I already have a free copy of BSD for my PC.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD on a PC? it ain't even close... Mac OS X on PPC.... ...its cluebat time, dummy!

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

In that hands of novice, it ain't even close. In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, it's better, cheaper, easier to configure, etc.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

It ain't even close either way... I run both every day and there is no comparison for newbies / hard core geek. If you think this you, do not use them both in a real production environment. Mac OS X Server has everything that FreeBSD has except it runs on superior hardware and makes a Great Desktop...

Re:Pfft, why?

[ttys00]

Linux runs on many architectures. You can run Linux on Apple hardware if you want - after all, Linus does.

Re:Pfft, why?

[Svippy]

Yes, I do realize that.

I have just never been into Apple Computers, and I think that if you should a hardware/computer type for your Linux, you should go for PCs, since most Linux distros are written and mainly working with those.

Re:Pfft, why?

[EEPS]

If I were to buy a laptop, it would not be an Apple Computer, cause I can't see why I should have one that would only run MacOS, when I am more into Linux. But I gotta admit they do look good, but question is; ain't they going to be a bit heavy?

Um, if you are so into linux, you should know that you can run linux on a mac, and quite well. Even Linus torvalds himself uses a mac now. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/09/ 1314250&tid=181&tid=106

Now that's a tough one

[Anonymous Coward]

Should we drool about how great Apple is, how great the new products are going to be, that you won't find anything comparable from any other company, that Apple just freaking rules?

Or should we be enraged about thinksecret once again publishing these highly sensitive trade secrects? Surely Apple should sue them to hell and back and take the right of journalists to protect their sources with it in the process.

Re:Now that's a tough one

[MoneyT]

Once again, speculation != publishing NDA covered information and trade secrets.

I'm happy

[nashy-nunu]

I'm happy with a iMac 1.8 or "Good" I need it chat, email, and web surfing. That should give me more than enough.

Re:I'm happy

[TheRaven64]

For about the same price, you could get a Mac Mini and a 20" screen. For what you are doing, it would be fast enough (my PowerBook is only a 1.5GHz G4, and it only really struggles with some video editing tasks and large compiles). If you find you need something faster, you can either wait until the Minis get a speed bump[1], or upgrade to a PowerMac, without having to replace the screen.

[1]I suspect that Apple will want to go dual-core as soon as possible. The iBook and eMac are likely to be the only single processor machines, with the PowerBook and Minis getting dual-core G4s, and the iMac and PowerMac getting dual-core G5s (with the PowerMac getting 2 of them - hence the focus on fine-grained locking in the Tiger kernel).

Just be thankful...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Just be thankful that we don't have PCI Extreme. Yet.

Re:Just be thankful...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am just waiting for PCI-1nsAn3

This is good

[darien]

It's got to be good for Apple's marketing that their MHz ratings are properly competing with modern PCs nowadays. The whole "MHz myth" argument always sounded a bit weak, even though I knew intellectually that it was a fair point.

Re:This is good

[crottsma]

Are you sure you knew intellectually that it was a fair point? I mean, I've come to know many things non-intellectually during my life time.

Re:This is good

[i41Overlord]

It's got to be good for Apple's marketing that their MHz ratings are properly competing with modern PCs nowadays.

Properly competing with modern PC's? I'm not one of those "Mhz RuleZ" guys, but as far as your comment about Mhz goes, their Mhz ratings are definitely not competing with modern PC's. They've been falling further behind. The P4 2.8 chip was out 3 years ago, in 2002. They're up to 3.8 ghz now.

Like I said, I know Mhz isn't everything and I know that different chips perform differently at the same clock speed, but as far as marketing and Mhz numbers go, Apple is definitely not keeping pace.

(They're also not keeping pace in raw processing power, either, as the highest-end G5 performs about on par with a mid range Athlon64.

Re:This is good

[Anonymous Coward]

But they're not. Even if 2.8MHZ is the new top speed that's well short of what PCs are doing (and have been for some time) and if they fail to release dual core CPU models they will be behind there as well. Was it 2002 that I had a P4 2.4C running at 3.0? Seems so long ago now. Of course the best Apple could do then was dual 1GHz G4, so they have caught up somewhat but not all the way.

(and a bunch of cherry-picked Photoshop benchmarks don't convince anyone these days. The reason to be using a Mac is the OS, which just keeps getting better.)

Re:This is good

[ad0gg]

Uhh.. P4s are pushing 3.8ghz and apple is coming out with 2.8ghz. On the laptop side of things, Pentium M's(which are faster per clock cycle than a g4 or g5) are at 2.13ghz while G4s are at 1.67ghz.

Re:This is good

[eluusive]

AMD-64 currently smashes P4s in benchmarks. What clock frequency are those again? Oh yeah 2.8

Re:This is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it depends what you compare with. The Athlon64 4000+ is only running at 2.4 GHz. Although I suspect that it performs even better than a G5 at 2.8 GHz.

Re:This is good

[ad0gg]

Umm did you read the parent post? We are talking about Mhz not about processing power.

Re:This is good

[HoserHead]

It's not just a "fair point," it's completely true. The clock rate of a processor means NOTHING with regard to speed comparisons. Absolutely nothing.

The only time you can compare clock rate is when you're comparing two processors of the same architecture. That means Pentium 4 vs Pentium 4, PowerPC 970 vs PowerPC 970. Everything else is completely and utterly meaningless.

(I've speculated that I could probably spec out a (super, super, superscalar) processor that ran at 10 MHz that outperformed the latest 3 GHz processors. That's probably wrong--I'd be killed by branch misprediction--but the point remains.)

Re:This is good

[BitGeek]

Ironically, you say this and then use benchmarks that effectively measure megahertz to say the raw processing power is not keeping up.

Frankly, the reality is, for any kind of serious work, there are no machines out there that are as fast as the PowerPC G5 series.

Apple has been ahead in performance since moving to the PowerPC. But people are in denial of it because they have some sort of machismo wrapped up in thinking their machine is faster (And there's more non-powerpc users out there than powerpc users.)

Re:This is good

[eluusive]

Did YOU?

It's got to be good for Apple's marketing that their MHz ratings are properly competing with modern PCs nowadays

Or are AMDs not modern PC processors?

Re:This is good

[ad0gg]

Are you 12? Seriously, the post was talking about PowerPC chips catching up to the mhz ratings of PCs. My post stated intel p4's are running at 3.8 ghz, to counter his arguement that PowerPCs are catching up in mhz. And you chimed in saying AMD smashes P4, how does that have to do with anything in the thead?

Re:This is good

[myov]

I've always wondered...

Couldn't Apple do something like the DX2's? Double clock, tell marketing that machine is faster, even though the chip runs at half that speed?

Of course, when it gets out eventually it would just be proof of the Mhz myth (see? We can make it go any speed we want!)

Re:This is good

[Anonymous Coward]

You've misunderstood the DX/2 nomenclature. What it indicated was that the chip ran at twice the speed of the clock, triggering a cycle on both the rising edge and falling edge of the clock. A 486DX/2 66MHz didn't run at 33MHz, the *clock* ran at 33MHz, the CPU ran at 66MHz, just like the name said.

Re:This is good

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe I have to intervene here.

1. modern AMD chips run at 2.8GHz
2. modern AMD chips are modern PC chips
3. the new PowerPCs will run at 2.8GHz
4. ergo, the new PowerPCs run at a similar clock frequency to modern PC chips

Satisfied?

Re:This is good

[doktor-hladnjak]

Moreover, it doesn't even necessarily mean that much inside a given architecture, especially these days with entire system performance often being more dependent on cache, memory, disk and in certain cases GPU.

Re:This is good

[drsmithy]

Couldn't Apple do something like the DX2's? Double clock, tell marketing that machine is faster, even though the chip runs at half that speed?

Just about every chip made since, well, the DX2s has been "like the DX2s" (ie: the CPU and bus speed are not 1:1)...

Whats the big deal??

[ABCC]

and eMacs to 1.42GHz

huh? my emacs runs at 1.66 Mhz on a 4 year old athlon, why should i be impressed with this??

Re:Whats the big deal??

[thuh Freak]

Cuz its 3 orders of magnitude faster?

Re:Whats the big deal??

[discogravy]

because unlike emacs, these eMacs have a nice GUI and include vi :)

Re:Whats the big deal??

[Sandor at the Zoo]

my emacs runs at 1.66 Mhz on a 4 year old athlon

Wow, emacs drags a 4-year-old athlon down to 1.66 Mhz? My TRS-80 Model I ran faster than that.

Now I know why I use vi, when I'm not using BBEdit.

For the humor impaired: :-)

Re:Pfft, why?

[vafancolo]

Less hardware equals better drivers. Additionally, mention one feature expansion that won't work on a mac (not bound to vendor, bound to functionality).

Re:Pfft, why?

[delire]

Agreed, I had very pleasant experiences with Linux on the PPC architecture. Ubuntu went onto 10 emacs in under 30 minutes, the install was a no-brainer. Everything worked out of the box save the Airport (of course).

I went on with wiping OSX and loading Ubuntu on a G4 tower recently. Interestingly I noticed big speed-ups in 3D applications (with Quake3 as my benchmark), compared to performance on the native OSX platform. Blender and Alias Wavefront's Maya also performed much better in Linux; thoroughly reccommended if you want to squeeze some juice out of your hardware, especially in 3D applications.

If only IBM would add PPC laptops to their Thinkpad range..

Good for the ones listed, BUT...

[IdJit]

Looks like the Mac mini will miss out on this one.

This is mainly because the mini is primarily a 'switch' machine, not a power-user's box. A good intro for the PC folks curious enough to try a Mac, but not so committed as to spring for the more powerful systems.

Re:Good for the ones listed, BUT...

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the mini came out about, what, 3 months ago?

hard drive conundrum

[Zapraki]

Checking out these specs, one thing I noticed were the hard drives:

Power Mac G5s
Dual-2GHz: 160GB
Dual-2.3GHz, Dual-2.7GHz: 250GB

iMac G5s
1.8GHz: 160GB
2.0 GHz: 160GB or 250GB

eMacs
Combo Drive: 80GB
SuperDrive: 160GB

If I am not mistaken, these are all with one single hard drive.

Imho, it seems like a generally better practice to have, say, two separate 100GB hard drives than one 200GB one - even if it's more expensive.

Granted, I'm a non-Mac person so I'm not very familiar with the ins-and-outs of MacOS file management. But for Windows/Linux I like having actual separate hard drives, not just partitions. One smallish drive for OSes (or 2+, one for each), one massive drive for multimedia (^_^), and another drive for all the other stuff, like work/school/programming or whathaveyou. Or, depending, maybe just partitions on one drive for all that data (only so many slots).

But anyhow, my main point, isn't there a reliability issue with having only one (relatively) massive harddrive? Wouldn't you be better off having multiple, smaller harddrives? Or would you just backup all your data on separate, external mediums anyways?

I'm interested to know what Mac users think.

Re:hard drive conundrum

[Carthag]

Well the iMacs and eMacs can only fit one drive, so there's no option there.

But yeah, it's more reliable with more drives, that's pretty much a given. They're probably only shipping one drive in the PowerMacs to keep their margins.

I have a sort of hate/love relationship with my multiple drives (4 at the moment). On the one hand, it's nice to only lose a little data when one dies (and they do that, oh yes) and you can salvage some onto another. On the other hand, there's the added strain on my poor hands when I have to hold down CMD when moving stuff between say the download drive and the media drive.

Re:hard drive conundrum

[menace3society]

HFS+ is designed for use on a single partition. Reliability is a minor issue compared to some of the more interesting things that can be done as long as you don't change disk volumes, including moving a file while it's being written to. If you want, you can get it with a smaller disk and buy another--frankly I'd suggest getting the small disk and buying a larger one third-party for less anyway, but that's just me.

Re:hard drive conundrum

[thuh Freak]

I always recommend to mac users not to partition their drives. There is little gained from partitioning in OSX; The only place I've noticed partitioning to be really useful is with Linux. Its nice and all, to separate different kinds of data onto different partitions. But, in my experience, a partition will inevitably run out of space and then you have to (a) cross partition boundaries or (b) nix the drive and start again. (a) just goes against the whole idea of partitioning, and (b) is way too much work for most people w/o backups.

As for backups, I think its preferable to have external media: drive or discs. that way when/if the computer melts/implodes, you can still have that media. But, I tend to live on the edge. When a drive fails (which happens pretty often for me) I rely on my brain to replenish everything. It's annoying, but I can usually rewrite all my important stuff from my head.

Re:hard drive conundrum

[javaxman]

Or would you just backup all your data on separate, external mediums anyways?

This is the typical way to go.

Think "Firewire standard".

The PowerMacs are the only models that have more than one internal drive bay anyway, so multiple internal drives are only possible in those models. At least in theory, you should store your backup drive offsite or in a firesafe, anyway, right? No, I don't do that, but I could and should. In the long run, multiple small drives don't do you any good unless you back them up or put them in an apropriate RAID array anyway. One large internal drive and one large external drive is the way to go.

The PowerMacs are easy to open up, and the clever little drive bays are easy to take a drive in and out of ( no screws! ), so using one of the SATA drive slots to host a second backup drive would only present one downside vs. and external firewire drive: you'd have to power down the machine. For me, though, that'd be enough... using a Firewire drive for backup, or for a portable media storage drive, works very well, and actually presents a few advantages over internal drives.

Re:hard drive conundrum

[zpok]

For (personal) backup purposes, I don't think you can beat a fast Firewire drive. It's portability alone makes it worth it. I have a 120GB that does its thing every afternoon...

Re:hard drive conundrum

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it should have multiple drives but your reasoning is wrong.

They should have multiple drives set up in a RAID stripe for performance reasons. Two fast SATA drives in a RAID0 array in incredibly fast. It's what I use on my Opteron 250 machine and let me tell you, it screams.

Re:hard drive conundrum

[kilfarsnar]

As a general rule, I use at least two drives. I have three in my G4 PowerMac at the moment. What I love about multiple drives on the Mac is that you can install a system on more than one and boot to it if one drive fails. Yes, this can be done on a PC, but not without fussing with the boot.ini file and the like, IIRC. On a Mac it is quite easy to boot into a different system; either through the control panel, or by having it search available drives for bootable systems!

Re:hard drive conundrum

[tomstdenis]

Gimmme a B. Gimme an I. Gimme an O. Gimme a S!

BIOS!

You can get a PC to boot anything, just change the boot priority...

Tom

Re:hard drive conundrum

[Queer Boy]

Granted, I'm a non-Mac person so I'm not very familiar with the ins-and-outs of MacOS file management.

Familiarise yourself. If you're at all interested in technical abilities of computers it's pretty interesting what the HFS+ and HFSX file systems are capable of doing.

It's pretty insignificant in Mac OS X if you have one or seven drives, your whole world revolves around your user space (REAL user space, not a file system littered with user space here and there). I have all third party applications, extensions, fonts and the like all in my user folder because the system never touches it. Which means my world is not thrown askew whenever I have to upgrade the OS.

Re:hard drive conundrum

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: symlink. OK, it's actually two, but whatever. Whenever my partitions run out of space, rather than reimage my drives, I just go and use symlinks to create complicated redistributions of my disk space. One partition works better for desktop users who don't want to worry about managing all that, but if you're doing server stuff, you definitely want to have the added piece of mind that some crazed user who busts through the quota limits isn't going to bring down your sshd because your /var partition ran out of space or something.

Re:hard drive conundrum

[Ibanez]

Consider Apple's philosophy, particularly regarding the single mouse button. Whether you like it or not, they've stuck to that philosophy, and I think they'll do the same here.

Think of the average user. What's less confusing, one drive or two? I think this is a much more valid point than one or two button mice. I can't really debate their philosophy on the mice, but I still feel you'd have a stronger argument with multiple hard drives.

Blake

Holy cow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is offering incremental upgrades to its hardware. My world: rocked. Thank you ThinkSecret for this phenomenal scoop and thank you Slashdot for allowing us to discuss the ramifications of this earth-shaking event.

New Mac iBook

[Kiriwas]

I've had my new Mac iBook (my first Apple purchase) for a little over a month now. My old compaq (750 MHz) laptop died finally from the compaq white screen of death and I needed a replacement. I'm still at University so money is tight; I wanted the PowerMac but the iMac was much more in my range (1300). The one thing I've noticed about it is that you never really notice lag from the processor... BUT... if you don't have like a gig of ram, you can get a lot of lag while multitasking (think all 4 Office apps, firefox, X11 and a couple terminals). Fortunately, adding ram is easier than I thought, and aftermarket ram for them is pretty cheap. Overall, I will probably be saving up for a new G5 desktop whenever I can afford it. I'm hooked!

Re:New Mac iBook

[unclethursday]

I have 640 MB RAM in my 1 GHz iBook, and I don't notice much lag when multitasking, unless I'm multitasking video apps and have Firefox or Safari open to pages with a lot of JAVA or Flash going on in them.

Still, I don't use MS Office on it, AppleWorks does my word processing tasks fine (I rarely have need for spreadsheets or powerpoint-type presentations).

Now, if I try and use Final Cut Pro 4 to re-compress video... well, then my whole system lags... but that's because I'm on an iBook and not a PowerBook or PowerMac.

Re:New Mac iBook

[Digital Pizza]

In my own, completely unscientific observation, OSX really seems to speed up when RAM reaches 640MB. In my old iMac G3 (where speed improvements are very noticeable) going from 512Mb to 640Mb made a noticeable difference. No surprise, then, that your iBook runs well.

Re:New Mac iBook

[evilviper]

BUT... if you don't have like a gig of ram, you can get a lot of lag while multitasking

Thank you very much! I will be sure to add that to the list of reason I don't want to get a Mac, which I give out every week when someone tells me I should buy one...

Re:New Mac iBook

[Queer Boy]

I wanted the PowerMac but the iMac was much more in my range (1300). The one thing I've noticed about it is that you never really notice lag from the processor... BUT... if you don't have like a gig of ram, you can get a lot of lag while multitasking

Hard drives are slow compared to RAM. When you run out of real RAM you have to use virtual memory which is on a hard drive. The iMac has a slow hard drive. This is an issue every system that uses virtual memory has, it's unrelated to whether it's Apple or Microsoft or Linux, whether it's a PowerMac an iMac or an SGI O3. You either need more RAM or a faster hard drive.

Keep in mind...

[Robotron23]

Its wise to remember that for the foreseeable future , Apple are part of a highly competitive market which is constantly evolving. Granted these upgrades seem too hasty, but public opinion on corporate strategy is the last thing on Apple executives minds at the moment.

Despite legislative action against Apple, they'd sooner evolve and release their products and leave any legal wranglings (as it really isn't much more than a wrangling in my opinion) to their lawyers. Its the basic code of the corporation; make as much profit as possible, while morals tend to restrict this policy, just like individuals, company morals differ greatly.

graphics

[biker44442004]

according to nvidia website, ge force 5200 and 5200 ultra only support opengl 1.5 and earlier. tiger has a new version of open gl i believe, so they have to upgrade the gpu's.

iMac + KVM ?

[CaptainPinko]

I'm really torn between deciding to get a Mac Mini and an iMac. I'd like the additional power and LCD screen the iMac provides. Problem is that I will still continue to use the Dell I currently own (hey, it was a gift, couldn't exactly say 'no') for various things such as testing web pages in IE, rading something up in VS.Net, a few games etc. With a Mac Mini I could use a KVM to switch between the two systems seemlessly. So my question is there anyway I could hook up an iMac as an external monitor to another computer? Considering I'm using a CRT and was thinking of replacing it anyway this would be ideal.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[As Seen On TV]

No.

(Why beat around the bush?)

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. I ran into the same situation at work when they gave me an eMac to play with. I ended up tucking the eMac away and running both computers through a KVM switch. VNC/equivalent could be an option, but not for games obviously.

If you've got the desk space, keep the CRT and use dual monitors for your iMac with the CRT also hooked up to the Dell through the switch. Best of both worlds.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[GizmoToy]

No, there is no current way to enable the iMac to act as an external monitor. That's the way it goes. Most laptops can't function as external monitors either. Personally, I think that would be a great feature, but what do I know.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[Sixtus]

Best thing you can do is this:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherpr oducts.aspx?pid=remotedesktopclient

Works well, including sound, and you can put your noisy dell some place else (assuming fast ethernet, maybe link them via firewire, fastest port on the mac, cheap addon for the pc).

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's the sort of thing you want, and you want more than a mini, get the lowend PowerMac instead. Same price as a iMac, and you can use any display you like.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[akira69]

Perhaps you can hack it? I just replaced a midplane on my imac, and inside, there's a connector for the monitor. It LOOKS like it could be just standard VGA pin-count wise (albiet a different shape). I bet if you cracked open the imac, disconnected the monitor from the motherboard and wired it up to a KVM and back, you could get it to work. Good luck finding the correct connectors though!

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[gh5046]

Keep in mind you need XP professional to use remote desktop like that, Home Edition only supports it when you initiate a request from the windows system. Kind of defeats the purpose of using remote desktop if you want to take the monitor off the Dell.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[javaxman]

I'm really torn between deciding to get a Mac Mini and an iMac.

If you can afford an iMac, but are happy with the monitor you have, why not get a PowerMac ? The price difference isn't huge, you're talking about a couple hundred bucks between the base iMac and base PowerMac.

The reasons for getting the mini would be space and cost. If those aren't critical factors, or aren't as important as performance you should be looking at the G5 machines.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[TheRaven64]

My advice, if you can afford the iMac, would be to go for the Mac Mini (with at least 512MB of RAM) and a 20" Cinema Display (we've got a 20" and a 23" one here. The screens are both stunning, but the 23" one's enclosure looks quite fat and ugly to my eyes), and see how you like OS X. If you like it, and decide the Mini isn't powerful enough (it's almost as fast as the top-of-the-line PowerBooks, so you might be surprised), then consider replacing it with a PowerMac G5 some time down the road (or a dual-core Mac Mini, if such a thing appears). If you decide you don't like OS X, then the Mini is small and quiet enough to be an always-on server somewhere, and you've got yourself a nice monitor for the Dell.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[davidpb145]

Try using VNC or Micro$oft Remote Desktop.... They even have a Micro$oft remote desktop client for Mac... as long as you have XP on the Dell.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[CaptainPinko]

but are happy with the monitor you have

Nope, not even close. :P This CRT is a piece of shit and it behaves very oddly (like randomly turning itself off and on). The way I got the idea to consider buy an iMac was because I was trying to decide whether I should get an LCD or Mac Mini first. This current monitor is definitely gonna get the boot sooner rather than later... how much sooner is the issue.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[CaptainPinko]

Both of them will be plugged into the same Linksys WRT 54G Router so speed of the connection won't be an issue. Now, could I play games through this connection (Sorry if this is a stupid question it but seems like the XP could render the game using it's gfx card and then send the screen image to the Mac.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[eluusive]

http://www.iogear.com/main.php?loc=product&Item=GC S1714&PHPSESSID=9a7235723e2ef09b19f8cd89e391a77e

This is (at least a year ago with I bought one) the only "USB" KVM that supports USB keyboards and mice, and supports hot keys. Accept no substitute, or you will be disappointed. (There are others for cheaper that take PS/2 in, and have USB outputs to the computer.)

I own this, it works great. Unfortunately due to supposed "trademark issues" the device can't spoof the USB signatures of your keyboard and mouse. Thus, you will lose function of extra buttons on the keybord (because the basic USB HID driver will be used)

You can get the 2 port one for a little cheaper if you just have 2 machines. I have only 2, but I like having the other ports incase I'm fixing someone elses machine at my place.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[ThatsNotFunny]

No, however you can network the two computers together and use a remote desktop protocol such as VNC to control the Dell from the Mac. The Dell will simply appear as a window in OS X.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[eluusive]

Ignore my post, I thought he wanted to get a Mac mini. No wonder is resquest seemed so odd. I'm having the same problem. I wish the iMac accepted video imput. I'm just going to get me a G5 tower instead :)

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[adam1101]

If you decide to go with MS Remote Desktop on XP-Pro you might want to try this patch, it allows multiple concurrent users (like on Win2003/Citrix/Unix). It's replacing some system files by DLLs from a beta XP SP2, so use at your own risk, but for me it has worked flawlessly.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[Enrique1218]

Forget games. The latency between a monitor and a video is a thousands of times better than the latency between two network computers. The frame rate would be terrible. Remote Desktop is more ideal for simple tasks that don't require rapid redraw on a monitor. I usually used it for administration tasks only.

Re:iMac + KVM ?

[spyder913]

Good luck playing games over RDP (can't use d3d) or VNC (looks like crap)

For everything else they are great though.

Powerbooks are smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

The eMate is larger than a 12" Powerbook G4 or 12" iBook. Get one of those instead.

12" Powerbook G4:
10.9 x 8.6 x 1.18

eMate:
12.0 x 11.4 x 2.1

(granted, the eMate weighs 4.0 lbs to the Powerbook's 4.6lbs)

Re:Powerbooks are smaller

[commodoresloat]

yes weight is more important than size here. Also price -- show me a powerbook g4 for $350!! Of course the original eMate was $800.... The other factor that is important (to me) is the plastic case. I have dropped eMate on concrete with no damage other than cosmetic. I wouldn't try that with a powerbook g4 even though I know it could probably take some abuse.

Re:Powerbooks are smaller

[Zaak]

The other factor that is important (to me) is the plastic case. I have dropped eMate on concrete with no damage other than cosmetic.

The other thing about the emate was that it had no moving parts. No floppy drive, no cdrom, no hard drive. With no moving parts, everything can be "strapped down" so a fall doesn't hurt too much.

TTFN

Pepper Pad

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you want a Pepper Pad

Re:Macs for everyone.

[Imazalil]

Yes, please attach some chrome, neon strobes, and some super loud fans, I want my computer to feel just like my chainsaw! I am a real man! hear me (and my computer) roar!

What's the difference?

[Run4yourlives]

Seriously...

The only reason I'd consider a RAID for a personal desktop (as opposed to a server - to which fault tolerance becomes a whorthwhile issue) is speed.

I've never known Mac's to be hurting for HDD transfer speed in the same way windows boxes do... they tend to lag in RAM instead.

Even with mirroring, I wouldn't consider that safe back up, so "external" backups are still a must.

Great Scott!

[fishmasta]

I believe you mean the flux capacitor issue. Get those babies up to 88 mph and they just fall apart on you.

They won't get too excited about them

[ArbitraryConstant]

They won't get too excited about clock speed until they can replace the G4 chips, at least in the PowerBooks.

Re:Power Book- Apple's response

[redherring22]

Apple once again reiterated that putting a G5 in a Powerbook is the 'mother of all technical hurdles' at their earnings conference call the other day. Unless they're just saying that as a smokescreen (and who knows w/ them), don't expect a G5 PB any time soon...

Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[WhiteWolf666]

If I buy a powermac now, will I be able to return it , and purchase one of the newer models in two weeks?

This news is making me hurt! I've been considering purchasing one, as I've got a big project coming up, and my PowerBook is just not quick enough for my liking (Bryce). Literally TEN MINUTES AGO I made the decision to purchase it (planning to go to the apple store after work).

Then I check slashdot. Great. Just frigging great.

And the project is due in a week and a half.

What to do, what to do.... Argh...

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[Blitzenn]

" If I buy a powermac now... ...Then I check slashdot. Great. Just frigging great. "

In two weeks I hear Apple will be announcing an even newer model. It will be called the "Big Mac". In a deviation from past policy, Apple will allow customization to occur at order time with the additions of special S.A.U.C.E. (Simple And Usable Custom Enhancements) and even P.I.C.(k)L(e).S. (Peculiarly Integrated Custom Louvers and Shades). You might meet your deadline as these new machines will be available from Apple's new franchise stores and their drive-thru windows (uh, I mean the glass kind).

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[bombadillo]

"And the project is due in a week and a half.

What to do, what to do.... Argh...

For starters you could quit pratting around reading \. and start the project.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[WhiteWolf666]

Honestly, I've got a 30 second scene thats rendering right now.

*chug*

*chug*

*chug*

Probably over two hours to go.

That would be 15-20 minutes with a nice tower.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[javaxman]

If I buy a powermac now, will I be able to return it , and purchase one of the newer models in two weeks?

Yea, because every company works that way. Har. I'm sure you're in agony because you realize how ridiculous that would be.

On the other hand, it depends on what the supply in the pipeline is like. You might just get lucky. It happens.

We ordered a couple of single-processor G5s a while ago. After about a week, we noticed that the ship date had been extended by two weeks. Then we were contacted and told that they weren't shipping the model we'd ordered. Instead, we were getting dual G5 machines, the single ones had been discontinued. Bummer, huh?

You sure can't count on that, though.

Really, though, what's the ship time on a machine _right_now_ ? You need to go to a physical store and walk out with a machine? Will it be good enough to do the job? You need it right now?

Just get it. This isn't some stupendous amazing upgrade or anything. Your machine will still be fantastic. In your position, I might briefly consider trying to rent a machine, but that might not be possible, and might just be too expensive anyway. You shouldn't stress over a less than 10% performance bump. These machines will be _announced_ at NAB anyway, they may not ship for some time.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[Colol]

If I buy a powermac now, will I be able to return it , and purchase one of the newer models in two weeks?

If ThinkSecret isn't talking out its ass, you could -- but keep in mind almost anyone willing to sell you that computer, including Apple, is going to charge you a restock fee (not to mention 2 weeks is pushing the limit of many resellers' return policies).

If you need a Power Mac so badly, just buy one. The speed bumps aren't all that significant if they truly exist, so you wouldn't be missing much. And in the off chance that you order directly from Apple and new systems appear Real Soon Now, they've been known to hold orders and fill them with new merchandise.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[WhiteWolf666]

Not just the performance bump, I'm guessing they're also shipping them with Tiger :(

Seems pretty crappy to go and buy a new powermac, and then have new models on the shelves in TWO WEEKS, with a ~$125 os update, and a bit of extra speed, and a bit of extra ram, and a bit faster graphics card.....

Painful.... :(

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[WhiteWolf666]

Sorry for the second reply. Gonna ask Apple if I can get a free Tiger update if I buy now.

If not, then I'm not buying. If so, then I'll buy, and the extra 90 gigs can go to heck :)

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[WhiteWolf666]

Hmm....

Think they'll give me a free/cheap (~$10.00) Tiger update, too? :)

Yes, I know, I'm being a cheap bastard, if I'm considering buying a ~2.5k$ machine, but its the principle of the thing.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[aschneid]

Anybody buying a Mac after April 12th (the announcement of Tiger) can get the upgrade for free (+$9.95 media fees). It's on their website.

I will say, I'm in the same conundrum as you. I've been holding off buying a PowerMac G5 (dual 2.5) until the Tiger announcement...now I've gotta hold off to see what the new hardware is going to be.

I don't necessarily care about the hardware bumps (I was maxing the 2.5 GHz out) but I'm thinking the machine I was going to get will be a little cheaper now.

Andrew

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[javaxman]

Sorry for the second reply. Gonna ask Apple if I can get a free Tiger update if I buy now.

Not sure which post to reply too... heh.

Anyway, in the past they have given folks who bought within a certain time period a slight discount on an upgrade, but it's not a sure thing. I mean, they haven't even announced yet, these are 'just rumors'. The only reason they might be able to give you an answer is they've actually announced a ship date for OS X 10.4.

If you can live without a new machine, it's always good to wait, and if Tiger feels like a big deal to you, then by all means wait anyway, just for Tiger if not for new models.

Er, jus curious, what's the big feature you're looking for in Tiger ? As a programmer, I'm all excited about Core Data, Core Image and JDK 1.5, but for end-users, I'm not sure I see the big Tiger must-have feature. Spotlight sounds cool, but 'Find' already works pretty well, and Dashboard just doesn't excite me ( or I'd be using Konfabulator ). Of course, knowing you'll eventually get 10.4 anyway and deciding to wait two more weeks to get it *included* is fairly reasonable...

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[Halo1]

The speed bumps aren't all that significant if they truly exist

It depends on whether they are PPC970MP's or not. Going from 2 1.8 GHz single core to 2 2.0 GHz dual core processors is quite a jump. Of course, the price will probably be adjusted accordingly (I doubt that would be another "more power for less money" type of upgrade).

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[Drakonian]

Then I check slashdot. Great. Just frigging great.

Hmmm... here's an idea. You could stop complaining about finding out new information and having a choice in the matter. If you hadn't found out, you would have bought a current one, had the new one come out in a few weeks then have been outraged.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[Col Bat Guano]

Even if Apple announce the product, there is no telling when it will ship. Go and hire a mac for the next forthnight and buy a new one when it comes out.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be 1 minute with a 3.8GHz Pentium.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[child_of_mercy]

Any machines bought from now will get the tiger upgrade free when it ships.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[mikrorechner]

For starters you could quit pratting around reading \. and start the project.

\.? What's that supposed to be?

I'm sure you meant .\, /.'s evil twin.

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[WhiteWolf666]

Two big possibilities in Tiger:

A) Spotlight sounds good, to me.

B) Tiger, I believe, is native 64-bit. I dunno about on Mac OS X, but my Athlon64 number crunches significantly faster (10-15%) in 64-bit mode with 64-bit apps.

I understand this may have something to do with more register space, but I suspect that Tiger may experience the same sort of performance increase on a G5, especially if I can find 'Tiger-enhanced' whatever that means (64-bit) versions of my apps.

Also,
C) I'm a compulsive upgrader, and I'd feel stupid buying the upgrade two weeks from now :)

Re:Buy a powermac now, upgrade in 2 weeks?

[WhiteWolf666]

1 minute for ~900 frames?

Of a complex scene? With lots of imported .DXFs from Cad?

I'm skeptical :)

Plus, I like working on the mac. I've got several Athlons, and an Athlon64 in the house, and I still like working on my mac :)

Coral Link...web site is sloooo

[Danathar]

http://www.thinksecret.com.nyud.net:8090/news/0504 macs.html

PCI-X, PCI-E PCI-Express

[miller701]

No no no. It isn't confusing at all. This is from the same people that brought you EMS and XMS memory back in the Win 3.x days

And still a worthless video card..

[LordJezo]

256MB DDR SDRAM ATI Radeon 9650 video card??? Give me a break. It's supposed to be a high end system.

Re:And still a worthless video card..

[otis wildflower]

Absolutely.

When did nVidia go and piss Apple off?

I guess the wait will continue for the PCI express (SLI-able) Macs. The sad irony is that the Mac market stands to gain more from the bidirectional nature of PCIe (just imagine integrated GPU acceleration within the coreimage and corevideo libs for rendering effects for stuff like film/tv CGI, photoshop, etc..) than Windows boxes, and yet they persist with AGP (and crap AGP cards at that!).

When oh when will Apple go PCIe with 2 (or more!) x16 slots?

Re:And still a worthless video card..

[Enrique1218]

Yeah, I agree. For a $2000+ system, no person would be unreasonable to expect PCIe and an x600 or nvidia 6600 at least. The 9600 is too old for a pro system. Apple should definitely jump on the PCIe bandwagon at least. However, on a brighter, ATI has released X800 AGP for PowerMac. So, at least the latest is available.

Re:And still a worthless video card..

[WMD_88]

I like Apple staying with AGP 8x. The current cards do not even begin to tax the 8x slot...and we want to change to a whole different video slot?

Hopefully I'm not the only one who finds the PCI Express debacle absurd.

Re:And still a worthless video card..

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I don't care what slot the video card uses.. I just want a better video card, period.

The 9600 series is a mid-range card from the last generation. You'd think that they could put in a better card for a high end system.

Re:And still a worthless video card..

[h0tblack]

It's the mention of the 9650 that makes me extremely wary of these specs. Wasn't 9650 a rumoured name for a mobile part? (The Radeon Mobility 9700)

Re:And still a worthless video card..

[otis wildflower]

I like Apple staying with AGP 8x. The current cards do not even begin to tax the 8x slot...and we want to change to a whole different video slot?

Hopefully I'm not the only one who finds the PCI Express debacle absurd.

To quote my own post in reply:

The sad irony is that the Mac market stands to gain more from the bidirectional nature of PCIe (just imagine integrated GPU acceleration within the coreimage and corevideo libs for rendering effects for stuff like film/tv CGI, photoshop, etc..) than Windows boxes

PCIe is superior because it's bidirectional. Bidirectionality is not needed for gaming or general display purposes, but would be necessary to harness GPUs for rendering purposes. Rendering visual media in various forms happens to be Apple's core market for Powermacs.

In theory, you could do render-like computation (like, say, fluid dynamics or some other scientific stuff) in GPU as well, but the big winners at this point would be all those FCP, Shake, Photoshop et al. power users who could offload renders to GPU then have the results copied back.

Re:Pfft, why?

[As Seen On TV]

How well does it run Photoshop and iMovie?

(D'oh.)

increased chance of failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Imho, it seems like a generally better practice to have, say, two separate 100GB hard drives than one 200GB one - even if it's more expensive.

[snip]

Wouldn't you be better off having multiple, smaller harddrives?

Not if you use them in the way your are implying. All that would achieve is doubling your chances of a hard drive failure!

Re:Macs for everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your chainsaw has neon strobes? Where may I purchase one of these?

Re:Pfft, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

How well does it run Photoshop and iMovie?

(D'oh.)


That would have been an honest question (considering the existance of Mac-on-Linux), if not for the last line. I know you're an Apple shill and all, but people who run Linux on a Mac don't really give a shit about Photoshop and iMovie.

Re:Mac mini G5 = The Hot Plate

[Macrat]

You'd be able to cook breakfast on it. Or at least warm your cup of coffee. ;-)

best thing about this.... RAM

[tyler083]

the best thing about this has to be the default amount of RAM. currently the iMac's only come with 256. And Apple is damn'd expensive with upgrading this (yes, I know you can buy 3rd party and install it yourself). Think Secret is reporting that the entire iMac line will start with 512... i can only hope it is one dimm

Re:best thing about this.... RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't be 1 stick for the dual Powermac line. The memory needs to be installed in pairs, so it'll likely be 2x256.

Re:best thing about this.... RAM

[javaxman]

Think Secret is reporting that the entire iMac line will start with 512... i can only hope it is one dimm

If this is true, it's the best business decision at Apple since the iPod. I sincerely hope it's true, and if it is, I won't care how they do it. Making a G5 look slow due to disk swapping is just pathetic, and they can't be saving that much money by going with 256MB anymore. Two 256MB would be fine with me, though it probably won't be how they do it. I mean, what's the price difference between one 256MB stick and two 512MB sticks, even at retail?

They probably want to throw down 512MB default configuration machines at this point anyway, since everyone has been giving them a hard time about the 256MB configuration. Just check out any Mac mini review you care to find, or any other Apple hardware review- they almost all say "256MB is not really enough" at some point.

Re:best thing about this.... RAM

[adam1101]

Even worse, the $1999 PM G5 is equiped with 256MB Ram! Granted, Ram is cheap and easy to replace/upgrade, and I suspect nobody runs it with the stock 256MB, but still... It just feels so wrong that the $1999 Apple Pro desktop solution is equiped with the same amount of Ram as a $250 Dell Dimension.

Re:best thing about this.... RAM

[phillymjs]

It was reported quite a while ago on one or more of the Mac news sites that with the advent of Tiger, Apple would be bumping the base RAM config of all their machines to 512MB, so no surprise there.

~Philly

Re:best thing about this.... RAM

[bhamm]

Think Secret is reporting that the entire iMac line will start with 512... i can only hope it is one dimm

i can tell you that the last powerbook revision indeed has all powerbooks with a single 512 chip.. so maybe (hopefully) they'll take this across their other models (ibook, towers, etc)

VNC

[acomj]

Maybe a VNC client instead ro access the PC from the Mac. Just and idea.??

How about

[Pope]

Original Famous Ray's Pizza? Famous Ray's Original Pizza?

Anyway, I'm in the market for a new Power Mac now that my Sawtooth is over 5 years old, and though after a number of upgrades (processor, video card, optical+hard drives) it does everything I need/want it to, it's time to get a new machine. A dual 2.0 on the low end is basically perfect for me.

I'm Holding Out For...

[Anonymous Coward]

A fanless, G5 Mac mini with high-end video. I'll just sit here and wait... and wait...

2 drives halves your MTBF

[micron]

If you look at it statistically, you have better MTBF on a single drive, than you do on two...

for example, 1 drive = 500,000 hrs mtbf

1/500,000 + 1/500,000 = 2/500,000 or 1/250,000

so two drives give your a MTBF or 250,000 hrs for your drive subsystem.

Also given, MTBF is more useful for calculating the amount of failures that you will see over a large population of drives as opposed to your single machine experience.

Using things such as RAID does not put a dent in your drive MTBF, but it does make a huge difference in your data preservation!

Re:2 drives halves your MTBF

[Jahz]

Just to perfectly clear for everyone, a hard drive's tested Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) MEANS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN REALITY!!

For the end user, purchasing a hard drive with an MTBF of 500,000 hours indicates that you have a 50% chance of disk drive failure in under 500k hours, and a 50% chance of drive failure after 500k hours. In other words, if a hard drive sells 1,000 units, and half of the drives die in an hour, while the other half last 1 million hours, the MBTF is 500,000 hours. Useful, eh?

Also its worth noting that manufacturers test the MBTF by putting a few dozen (or more) drives into a giant over and stressing them to the max. They will fail in a reletively short time. That time is averaged and modified to "reflect" real world usage. It is useful only for drive manufacturers (for risk management estimates etc...)

Re:2 drives halves your MTBF

[Anonymous Coward]

somebody mod this guy down!

If you start 10000 drives running at the same time we should expect the average life to be the published MTBF. However, the drives should die in some kind of bell curve distribution centered near the MTBF. By integrating along the normalized curve from zero to T we get the probability that the drive will have died by T, call it p(T). With two drives, the chance that at least one will have failed should be 2p(T). but the chance that both failed is p(T)^2.

Re:Pfft, why?

[ABaumann]

What kind of "various amounts of hardware" are you talking about in an argument that was started about laptops?

armchair engineering

[SuperBanana]

As impressive as the system was, there's something (irrational) in my mind that just gets nervous about things like that. I'm worried that the... juice... will leak out onto the mobo.

The motherboard is vertical and like many components these days, has a conformal coating.

Furthmore, do you really think Apple and Delphi would be stupid enough to use conductive coolant?(no) Does the system pass UL & CE safety standards, among others? (yes).

Re:armchair engineering

[thatguywhoiam]

Furthmore, do you really think Apple and Delphi would be stupid enough...

No, of course not. See my other response on this thread for my answer.

One Word

[rathehun]

OS X.

Oops - Thats technically two.

Re:One Word

[mechsoph]

I'd say Broadcom drivers, personally.

Or rather the lack thereof.

Re:Pfft, why?

[delire]

Photoshop fine, with a wrapper http://codeweavers.com/, though I far prefer Gimp for all my design and image processing. iMovie? i don't know what that is, though iTunes runs fine apparently.. most Linux users use gtkpod http://gtkpod.sourceforge.net/ as an iTunes replacement however.

Re:Pfft, why?

[zpok]

Nope, not heavy, actually among the lighter portables you'll find. Also without the hopeless add-ons most windows portables have. It's either integrated or for sale by a third party supplier. And in case you haven't read it already, Linus is currently using Linux on a G5, no reason why you shouldn't...

Re:Macs for everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

"... I hope Apple releases a product for heterosexual men...."

Do you have a issues with your own sexual orientation? Apple's products are for hetersexual men. The only ones that take issue with it as being "gay" are the closet cases who don't want to be reminded of what they are.

Re:Pfft, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD PARENT UP +5 FUNNY

Mac Mini?

[SamSeaborn]

When's the Mac Mini due for an update ala the new eMac? (I'm serious.)

When's the G5 Mac Mini due? (I'm only half-serious.)

Sam

Re:Mac Mini?

[argent]

When's the Mac Mini due for an update

Maybe by Thanksgiving? It's only been out since January... Apple doesn't do refreshes that fast.

Re:Mac Mini?

[sy161e]

I have a feeling the mini might be updated too. After Tiger's annoucnement (12th), I ordered the 1.42 GHz mini with Airport Extreme.

The order's still open, and says it will ship "On or before 4/22". If the upgrade is imminent, perhaps my order will be upgraded while it's still open, as Apple is known to do.

Re:Macs for everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget to make the computer big, fat and ugly too.

Dual cores all the way

[Enrique1218]

I am in the market for a new market for a new Macintosh. However, since I am poor, I would like Apple to put dual cores or dual processors in every damn system they make. Don't hold back. Just think of it, dual processor eMac. See Dell top that!!! Have mercy on me please, I can't afford a PowerMac in this economy!!! Rant done, I crawl back to my shanty.

Re:Dual cores all the way

[Anonymous Coward]

Well considering that Dell will be selling dual-cored machines shortly and within a year 90% of their line will be dual core it'll be more like Apple trying to keep up with the PC industry again.

Re:Dual cores all the way

[Enrique1218]

Don't speak your blasphemy here. Apple always leads. INFIDEL!!!

Re:Dual cores all the way

[10Ghz]

What I would like to see is this:

Low-end PowerMac: 1x 2Ghz Multithreading (two threads) G5 with integrated mem-controller.

IBM knows multithreading so they can do it. And while it's not as good as real SMP/multicore is, it's relatively cheap as far as transistors are concerned. SMP/multicore doubles the number of transistors and give about 70-80% benefit in SMP-aware apps. Multithreading adds something like 10% more transistors and gives 20-40% improvement in SMP-aware apps.

Integrated mem-controller is not rocket-science, and it would give the PowerMac alot more effective bandwidth (since FSB is not used for accessing the RAM, the FSB can be dedicated to other uses) and alot lower latencies.

The "middle-ground" PowerMac: 1x multithreading, dualcore G5 at 2.4Ghz with integrated mem-controller.

This would give nice speed-boost when compared to to the low-end PowerMac, and it would be considerably faster than the fastest PowerMac there is right now.

The hi-end PowerMac: 2x multithreading, dualcore G5's at 2.8Ghz with integrated mem-controllers.

This would effectively double the bandwidth of the system when compared to the other PowerMacs. It could handle 8 threads simultaneously (2 CPU's, two cores per CPU, two threads per core), compared to 4 and 2 on the other PM's.

Of course, each system would also have PCI-express. The integrated mem-controllers could be DDR2-variety.

Assuming they could bring the heat down a bit on the CPU's, I think what I propose could be doable. The hi-end model might require liquid-cooling (like the current hi-end PM does) though.

Powerbook G5

[uzor]

/unimpressed.

Wake me when they announce the Powerbook G5.

Until then, meh.

Re:Powerbook G5

[argent]

Mod parent redundant. :)

No, really, a Powerbook G5 with 90 minutes of battery life is a dumb idea. I want to see the dual-core G4. We all want to see the dual-core G4. Only trolls are still going on about the Powerbook G5... I hope they don't convince Apple to try it anyway...

Re:Powerbook G5

[uzor]

Not trying to troll. Realistically, the dual G4 would be next in line on the upgrade path for the notebooks, but to be honest, none of the people I know would ever need to use it longer than that on battery. The only place that you'd need more is on long flights, and for the kind of work that is most likely (watching DVDs), throttle everything down to low power usage mode, if you need more bat time.

Re:Powerbook G5

[argent]

none of the people I know would ever need to use it longer than that on battery

You've never been at a conference or in an airport lounge hunting for an open power point so you can get an extra half hour of work done before your talk. There's a lot of people for whom having enough slack so they can get through the morning session without a recharge is a really really big deal.

Re:Powerbook G5

[Anonymous Coward]

none of the people I know would ever need to use it longer than that on battery.

Wow. Take a spec from something made by Apple, and then claim that is all everyone would ever want and need and anyone that does not agree with that view is somehow strange or a troll. I hear the same with the battery on the iPod, the size of the iPod, Apple DRM, the space available on the iPod, possible additions to the iPod (FM, video, and others), the songs available in iTunes, the speed of the Apple processors, the software available for the Mac, the peripherals available... The list goes on and on and on. How about seperating yourself from the strange mental attachment you have with the company Apple that you actually think you are part of the company and actually look at what you would really want and what they could be, not what Apple believes should be "good enough". I've have NEVER heard anyone rip on another person because they think they should offer more battery life. Don't you think everyone would benefit from that?

I second this!

[MarcQuadra]

I can say that I've used several VNC implementations and Microsoft's RDC for Mac, and MSRDC rocks the house. I find that it's almost as snappy as 'the real thing' when you disable the XP fancypants appearances and use a W9X theme.

I do Mac and PC support at work, so I have to have a PC handy to run virus scans on NTFS drives (god bless firewire enclosures!). Our ticketing system also runs on PC only. Since I switched from VNC to RDP, I've been enjoying work more, opening and closing tickets is much snappier.

VNC is great, but if you must remote in to a Windows box, RDP is really a much better way to go. I hate the idea too, but it's profoud enough of a difference to ooutweigh my 'use open stuff' policy.

Don't get a KVM, run RDP. You'll have a better time watching your Windows box from a nice iMac screen anyway.

Tiger has OpenGL 1.5

[Colol]

The Tiger specs at Apple.com state full OpenGL 1.5 support as a feature, so this is not an issue.

An argument against an Apple subnotebook

[amichalo]

(DISCLAIMER: I am an Apple user at home and would love an Apple 'treo-type' device for myself)

Apple recognizes that their three audiences are:
(1) Video/graphics pros,
(2) education,
(3) and home users.
(Yeah there are others and all those segments are growing with the exception of gamers but lets focus on the main ones.)

Apple only has so many R&D dollars, even with $7B in the bank. They have to focus on what their audience wants and will pay for.

So what does the demand look like?
(1) Video/graphics pros are using PowerBooks in the field. They need access to a large 17" screen for editing so a sub-notebook really doesn't appeal.
(2) Education has no need for this. My highschool made headlines back when they piloted a program to equip all incoming freshmen with Palm Pilots. The program was not a success, more of a distraction.
(3) Home users just don't need this type of device any more than they need a Treo today.

The real market for sub-notebooks is the business world where the Blackberry and Treo dominate the market. Apple would have a major hurdle to get corporate IT to support a third (and this time "Apple" - tisk tisk) device.

All that said, I return to my disclaimer that I would personally really love an Apple sub-notebook with celular and Wi-fi that I could use as an iPod for music, share photos, and use Ink Well to interface to PDA functions with. But 'iDoubt' the market is full of folks like me.

Re:An argument against an Apple subnotebook

[evilviper]

highschool made headlines back when they piloted a program to equip all incoming freshmen with Palm Pilots. The program was not a success, more of a distraction.

For a handheld to be useful, it needs a full keyboard, and a pretty good office suite.

I tried a WinCE device I got cheap, and it was just hellish trying to use it for any real work. Learning my lesson, I bought a Psion 5 which has a full keyboard, great office programs, and can print directly to any serial/IR printer. My PDA efforts went from useless toy to invaluable piece of equipment immediately.

Re:An argument against an Apple subnotebook

[sean23007]

You're forgetting an important part of the education market. College. College students would love these things, and they already buy a lot of Macs. The Mini is going over extremely well with college students, as it easily fits onto a cramped dorm room desk and looks cool. What if you then told them they could have an equal amount of get-laid-potential that they could carry around in their pocket? They'd buy it. Immediately.

Actually in all seriousness, it'd be fantastic to be able to take notes on one of these things, and knowing Apple's battery life abilities, this kind of thing would be the first thing to make that feasible if you have a long day. The reason they haven't done it is probably that they can't figure out how to cram a big enough battery into it. Just wait.

Re:An argument against an Apple subnotebook

[cybpunks3]

Well gee, the worst thing in the world for Apple would be to try to expand their market instead of having such a defeatist attitude and selling to their existing market.

With that kind of attitude they never would have made the iPod in the first place, let alone the Mac Mini.

Re:An argument against an Apple subnotebook

[amichalo]

To expand into a new market takes strategic thinking and product positioning. Apple has laid ttheir strategy - "The Digital Hub" - and has identified their game plan - Digital Music, then Digital Video.

A PDA/Sub-notebook is a distraction and dilutes the Apple image in the market place. Face it - Music is cool, movies are cool, to do lists and scheduluers - not cool.

They both make knives for the Swiss Army ...

[balamw]

They have both made knives for the Swiss Army since the late 19th century. This describes what I recall as the case.

The Compromise of 1908

The company from which Wenger emerged had been a supplier to the Swiss Army as early as 1893, and its competitor, Victorinox, since 1890. Wenger is in the French-speaking Jura region, and its competitor is in the German-speaking canton of Schwyz. To avoid friction between the two cantons, the Swiss government decided in 1908 to use each supplier for half of its requirements. So while Victorinox can lay claim to be the "original", Wenger can state that its Swiss Army Knives are the "genuine". In any case, both have been manufacturing Swiss Army Knives for over 100 years and both must meet identical specifications laid down by the army.

B

Re:They both make knives for the Swiss Army ...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no Schwyz. It's Schweiz.

Re:They both make knives for the Swiss Army ...

[Anonymous Coward]

actually there is a Schwyz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_of_Schwyz that's one of the three former canton of switzerland, the one from wich come the swiss flag.

Re:They both make knives for the Swiss Army ...

[Steve Cowan]

both have been manufacturing Swiss Army Knives for over 100 years and both must meet identical specifications laid down by the army.

Just what kind of army specifies that they need a corkscrew?

Re:They both make knives for the Swiss Army ...

[slim-t]

Just what kind of army specifies that they need a corkscrew?

Apparently if a country is neutral... they have an army with a lot of time to drink wine.

Re:They both make knives for the Swiss Army ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jura has only been a canton since the '70s. Before that Delemont (Delsburg), was in Canton Bern, which is mostly
German speaking.

Re:They both make knives for the Swiss Army ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just what kind of army specifies that they need a corkscrew?

The kind that puts people in places where they don't know if the water is safe to drink.

In some areas, water isn't safe for humans. In these places, it's common to drink wine instead. Hence, a corkscrew might just save your life.

G5 Mac Mini

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple should have made the mini just a little bigger, with two memory slots, 3.5" hard drives, and a G5 (if possible).

I hate this attitude

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wow, I'm curious to know what kind of needs you have that would justify this..."

Speed is its own justification.

The *only* people who seem to argue against more speed are people defending Apple's inability to deliver a G5 notebook.

The phrase "it's fast enough for meeeeee" is a phrase that makes me ill.

Re:Macs for everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

I pity you. You're really missing out.

Straight men love Apple products ... because (straight) women do. Walk into a Starbucks with a Powerbook or an iPod and the chicks are on you like white on rice. Nobody ever got laid for carrying a Dell.

I think you would realize a substantial increase in sex if you bought an Apple.

Not for Powerbooks...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Apple is still loosely applying themselves to the Good/Better/Best lineup"

Very loosely. Powerbooks range all the way from "pretty mediocre" all the way up to "almost not mediocre".

Maybe if the 15" could be purchased for $999, I'd consider it. But there's nothing very compelling in the PB line. Oh well, thank heavens the Pismo is still working.

They need to do *something*

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now, the PB line is the 2nd slowest in the Apple lineup.

Who pays >$2,000 for a G4 in 2005?

More Speed!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! Now I can buy a Mac that is only 3/4 as slow, and 2x more expensive, than a PC counterpart! And even better, it will be indistinguishable from the lamp sitting next to it!

Trade secrets vs. Pure Speculation?

[TangoCharlie]

There have been lots of rumours circulating about the upcoming NAB conference and Apple hardware updates... but I think most of these have probably been no more than wishful thinking by the Mac fan boys. It may be that Apple _will_ announce new hardware (Antares?!!) at NAB, but I don't think much (any?!) of the speculation has any basis in fact.

Anyway, can a rumour site be sued for publishing unsubstaniated claims from another rumour site?

Does it matter if the guesses are correct?

Anyway, if Apple announces new dual core dual cpu machines all well-and good. I'm rather happy with my Mac mini (and the fact that it's virtually silent!! :-)

Re:iMac + VNC ?

[argent]

At work I use a program called OSX2X that lets me control a Mac and a PC screen next to each other from the same mouse and keyboard, using VNC server on the PC side but only sending keyboard and mouse updates and not transferring screen contents.

Re:Macs for everyone.

[crottsma]

Actually, I do recall my geeky friend getting lots of attention from attractive women right after investing two thousand bucks into a new PowerBook. Oh wait, my bad, that never happened.

"Hi ladies, would you like to touch my iPod?"

the very best part

[iggymanz]

about this is that all the "mac lifestyle" folks will dump their obsolete gear to us eBay used-system bottomfeeders, as they find their l337 systems are no longer the coolest.

Re:speaking of macs

[Anonymous Coward]

YEah I'll buy it. $5.

Old pilots' saying...

[caveat]

Two engines...is twice as much to go wrong. KISS.

incorrect.

[i41Overlord]

Ironically, you say this and then use benchmarks that effectively measure megahertz to say the raw processing power is not keeping up.

Not true. I'm not basing their performance off their frequency, I'm basing their performance off their proven power in benchmarks. The AMD chips in these benchmarks also runs at a lower clock speed than the Intel chips, yet they are faster than both the P4 and G5.

Frankly, the reality is, for any kind of serious work, there are no machines out there that are as fast as the PowerPC G5 series.

The fastest Intel and AMD chips outperform the top of the line G5's. See how the G5 machines compare to the Intel and AMD machines: http://www.systemshootouts.org/processors.html

Apple has been ahead in performance since moving to the PowerPC. But people are in denial of it because they have some sort of machismo wrapped up in thinking their machine is faster (And there's more non-powerpc users out there than powerpc users.)

Apple has *not* been ahead in performance since moving to the PowerPC. They weren't even close until the G5 came around. And even now, they're close but still not able to compete with the high end Athlon64's. No legitimate hardware tester would come to this conclusion, not even an Apple fan. Only the least technical and hardest-core Mac zealot would knowingly turn his head away from reality and keep on believing that his machine is faster when other chips have proven themselves to be faster.

Take a look at this link http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/31867.html

Since the time that this article was written, AMD and Intel have released multiple increased speed grades, while the G5 has only just now been able to increase in one small speed grade.

And please don't attempt to tell me that this is a Pro-AMD, anti-Mac website saying this, since the site is a Macintosh-fan site.

There are some objective Mac fans out there, but there are too many people who are so into it that it has become a religion for them, and trying to convince them that the G5 can't compete with a high-end Athlon64 is like trying to convince them that their God doesn't exist. As soon as you show them conclusive evidence shooting down their belief, they'll close their eyes and let blind faith take over... and at that point, there is no reasoning with them.

Re:incorrect.

[lakeland]

I don't think this is apple's doing. What has happened is that in tech circles, AMD has got the upper hand and so we take their specs seriously.

The top AMD is, what, 2.6GHz? Compared to intel at 4GHz. We've come to accept that AMD's 2.6GHz is faster than intel's 4GHz, and from there it isn't hard to believe that IBM is approximately equal to AMD per MHz. But I don't think it was apple fanboy posts that demonstrated this, I think it was watching A64 machines run rings around intel.

Incidentially, I was doing some work on a 970 last week and it ran faster than my (32 bit) athlon at twice the clock. I haven't had time to look at why, but I suspect the compiler noticed I was doing stuff with vectors and managed to get it all as a single altivec instruction, but on the athlon it was unable to represent it as a single SSE2 instruction.

Re:incorrect.

[i41Overlord]

The top AMD is, what, 2.6GHz? Compared to intel at 4GHz. We've come to accept that AMD's 2.6GHz is faster than intel's 4GHz, and from there it isn't hard to believe that IBM is approximately equal to AMD per MHz

I agree about the AMD outperforming the Intel chips, but I think it's a really big jump to assume that the G5 performs the same as the Athlon 64 on a clock-for-clock basis. They're close, but both the A64 and newer P4's have the lead over the G5, with the top of the line G5's being similar in performance to chips a step or two down from top of the line from AMD/Intel.

Re:incorrect.

[lakeland]

Well, I've only used two G5 machines; my wife's iMac at 1.8GHz and what was a decent mainframe a couple years ago with 16GB of RAM and very fast SCSI RAID, but only 1GHz.

Comparing them to the athlon is always awkward. but the lowest end athlon (my machine) is 1.8GHz and feels about as fast as my wife's machine. Some things are faster, others slower. The research machine at 1GHz generally outperforms the 1.8GHz machine, at least with what I do on it. So clock-for-clock that's doing pretty well compared to the athlon.

However, these anecdotal comparisons relate to the kind of tests I do (training neural networks, singular value decomposition, lots of hash-table lookups/ram access). For my stuff, intel does awfully, a 1200+ (what is that, 600MHz?) outperforms a 2 GHz intel. No doubt people doing different things would get different figures.

Regardless, my point is that Intel tried to push the MHz myth since that is how they sold chips. AMD has convinced the tech community that the MHz myth really is a myth and so when you hear apple arguing the same thing it is easier to believe than it would be without AMD.

Re:incorrect.

[cybpunks3]

I don't think I'd want a 4GHZ CPU because the fans required to keep it cool would sound like a jet engine.

Mainstream desktop CPUs are not really getting that much faster lately because of these heat issues. That's the whole rationale for dual-core. To go parallel instead of just clocking faster.

Re:Macs for everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because we all know that all non-apple PCs are the size of a SUV, and don't come in small or custom cases.

At least for the most part they don't look like something from apple, now that would be *ugly*!

Re:speaking of macs

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not the person making the offer, but are you including S&H?

$5.00 with S&H, that sounds like a good deal. It is nice to know the real worth of a low end apple laptop minus the screen, keyboard, mouse, hype, etc.

Re:Pfft, why?

[Em Adespoton]

I didn't know CodeWeavers wrote anything for the PPC architecture... seems to me the Mac-On-Linux argument works better.

Then again, if the parent doesn't know about iMovie/iDVD, he's probably never used OS X/PPC hardware, so any arguments would be silly.

elegant countermeasure...

[Cryptnotic]

...To hide the source, you could then run your document through a similar program that varies punctuation and word choice.

Re:elegant countermeasure...

[jcuffe]

It's usually used with journalists, whose whole integrity issue is making sure they don't distort the facts. Also, the people receiving these documents are usually suits who don't really think about that possibility.

Re:Will they purposefully limit the 2GHz systems?

[Psykechan]

Some of the current Powermacs have PCI-X. The 2GHz and 2.5GHz do but both 1.8s don't.

I'm concerned that they will cut PCI-X from the 2GHz systems like they did with the 1.8DualProcs.

The older 1.8DP had 8GB max RAM and PCI-X (1x133,2x100). When they "upgraded" them in July '04, the new ones had 4GB max RAM and 3 plain ol' 66MHz PCI.

Apple will want everyone to go for the top end so they will probably cripple the mid range. Look for the 2GHz systems to be missing something.

What's this K *D* M crap, anyway?

[smithmc]

The industry has been using the term "KVM" for "keyboard-video-mouse" for years and years. Never in my life have I seen a "KDM switch"; it's "K V M", and everybody knows it that way. Why did Apple change this? Just to be soooo different? It's like when IBM calls them "planars" and "hardfiles" instead of "motherboards" and "hard drives"; it's just annoying.

Re:What's this K *D* M crap, anyway?

[wootest]

Steve Jobs coined the term at the keynote where it was introduced: he said that "The Mac mini is BYODKM; Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard and Mouse". So to start with, it's "DKM", and furthermore, "Bring your own keyboard, video, mouse" wouldn't have made a lot of sense. He didn't use it at all to refer to KVM switches, just to the fact that the Mac mini doesn't ship with display, keyboard nor mouse, and in fact the Mac mini accessory page includes a Belkin KVM switch, clearly using the correct term for the correct purpose.

Re:Pfft, why?

[delire]

You're right, I don't know whether CodeWeavers do support the PPC architecture, I was answering hastily to the more general question of Photoshop on the Linux platform. Currently I have a Linux/G4 at my disposal which is garnering my interest in the hardware. I also know many people running Linux on their PB's; the PPC as an install target has alot of momentum which will only improve performance and base compatibility. The only time I'm in contact with OSX itself however is when I have to teach on the platform, something I don't find very easy.

Actually, wouldn't that be...

[SuperKendall]

A VIDell?

No way Emacs and VI products are coming out of the same company. The employees would constantly be keying each others cars in the lot and poisoning the coffee.

yeah, but what if ...

[mehgul]

the leak is Phil Schiller, or another high level executive ?

After all, who knows ? And really, that'd be damn funny.

Meaningfullness of MTBF

[micron]

You are not entirely correct here.

I will agree that for the average user, MTBF does not mean a whole lot. No single drive is going to last 100+ years!

There are some of us that run server farms of 20,000 drives or more. When you calculate the MTBF across the farm, and then compare how many drives you fail in a week, the numbers are pretty close.

This factors in for how many techs I am going to need to keep up with drive replacements.

So saying that MTBF has absolutely nothing to do with reality is in itself, a myth.

Re:Meaningfullness of MTBF

[Jahz]

By "end user" I was not referring to admins (especially not to Large Installation System Administrators...Lisa's if you will..).

That was not clear. You are correct.

Re:Macs for everyone.

[Enrique1218]

"... I hope Apple releases a product for heterosexual men...." Amen, Your arguement is illogical. Just because you like it doesn't mean all men who own macs are gay.

iAnus port?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the also upgrade the iAnus port! More lubrication capacity would be at the top of my list.

Slight Quibble

[Anonymous Coward]

Your probability is a little off, even though your overall point remains valid as far as I know (but I'm not too familiar with MTBF ratings or how they're calculated).

You calculated the probability using the incorrect assumption that event A (drive 1 failing) and event B (drive 2 failing) are mutually exclusive, i.e. that it's impossible for both drives to fail, only one or the other. You forgot to subtract the intersection of the 2 events (the probability that both events occur). A Venn diagram would help here, but I'm not very good at ASCII art. The proper way to calculate the union of 2 events is:

p(A U B) = p(A) + p(B) - p(A intersect B)

since the events are independent (we'll assume that one of the drives failing or not doesn't affect the probability that the other drive will fail):

p(A intersect B)= p(A)p(B)

so p(A U B) = p(A) + p(B) - p(A)p(B)

so you're off by (1/500000)^2

As I said, it's a slight quibble, but I hate to see such a reckless disregard for the statistical method :)

Re:Slight Quibble

[micron]

Your point is valid and correct.

I will plead "laziness inspired by explanation to management" on this one.

I have so much fun just explaining adding fractions together to my management, that I have gotten lazy and not included the other components of the case.

This issue of MTBF comes up when I am trying to justify how many spare units to keep in stock.

Re:Slight Quibble

[Anonymous Coward]

Your plea is accepted and you are sentenced to time served. Don't worry about it man, I'm an AC so I'm sure your statistical honor remains intact with the greater /. community. I just thought I'd point it out since factual minutiae is what we here are good at, right?

Re:Pfft, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

True. But good luck using recompiling any closed-source software... Come to think of it, can you even get 3D acceleration with any worthwhile cards?

Oh Puh-lease! This is NOT news...

[GrahamCox]

This is a warmed over RUMOUR. It's not NEWS. For fuck's sake, let's not let Slashdot become just another Mac rumours site - god knows there's enough of them already. This isn't even original, I read this a couple of days ago elsewhere. These are not specs, they're speculations.

Look, I'm a Mac guy, I occasionally look at the rumour sites like everyone else, but I come to Slashdot because it's not full of one-sided Mac fanboyism. Sure, there's a hell of a lot of ignorance spouted, but at least there are different perspectives on things, and I like that. If I want to read rumours, I'll go to the rumour sites. If I want to read actual released specs of newly announced Macs, I'll go to Apple.com when they are officially released. Neither of these are Slashdot's role. This is a bad article, pointlessly posted, and it just a waste of space. Please, let's restrain ourselves - stop posting every damn tidbit about Macs just because they are flavour of the month at the moment. Keep focused, dammit! The worthwhile articles ar srtaing to get drowned in teh noise, and that doesn't serve anyone's interests.

Maybe i should hold off...

[dtk13]

Hmmm... I was thinking of investing in a new mac for graphic/sound editing but maybe I should hold off. This new stuff from apple sounds very cool!

PS

[argent]

Just to add to the confusion, here's what APPLE says about the pipelines:

A much longer execution pipeline (up to 23 stages vs. 7 stages for the G4).

That doesn't sound like "twice as long" as the G4 or "half as long" as the Pentium 4 to *me*.

Re:Macs for everyone.

[Anonymous Coward]

No no, if it doesn't look like a homosexual built it, it's ugly.

Apple Laptop Keyboards Unsuitable for Unix Users

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.

I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need, not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.

Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.

Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.

There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.

Apple provides a technical note on how to remap the keyboard, but provides no solution to the hardware problems caused by the design of the ADB keyboard. This tech note helps foreign language users, but does nothing for the CapsLock/Ctrl problem.

Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 15 years. I expect that trend to continue. (Also note that my Apple contact indicated that Macs would never ship with a 3-button mouse, even though Apple intended to port almost all X-window software and deliver it either on a CD/DVD or installed directly on each Mac's hard drive. How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X programs that often require 3 buttons?)

Apple has now lost three opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.

Please note that this is not a troll. I am not trying to anger Mac enthusiasts. Indeed, I am one

Wrong, asshole!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear anonymous annoying fucking douchebag,

The PowerBooks released in 2005 HAVE USB KEYBOARDS BUILT IN.

If you weren't so busy posting your whiny fucking rant all over the net every hour, maybe you would have heard about it!

I cannot find corroboration of this anywhere on the web at the moment, but I distinctly remember reading about it when the 2005 machines were released-- because my first thought after reading it was, "Oh, good! Now that fucking dick whiner will buy a Powerbook and shut the fuck up!" But I guess your dumb ass didn't get the memo.

Re:Wrong, asshole!

[Guy Harris]

The PowerBooks released in 2005 HAVE USB KEYBOARDS BUILT IN.

And, besides, the Tiger new features list includes

Remappable Modifier Keys
Remap modifiers such as control and caps lock for compatibility with Windows and UNIX keyboard conventions.

Dunno if it works on ADB keyboards, though.

But the posting to which you're responding is flamebait (I don't know whether it's posted enough to count as a crapflood), so it's probably best ignored.

What I got for 700 from Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly my 1.25 Ghz G4 512/80/Super drive I got from Apple for 700 USD in their refurb sale in Dec is still 40-50 USD from being only 15% slower than their 'new' models coming out in 1 month. I find it facinated, and thankful that apple is able to push out such minor upgrades and keep their prices up, their stock inflated and the continuence of the Steve Jobs Bukkake flowing on their collective customer faces. I find it funny, haha.

Just me? My Macs are fast enough

[MarkWatson]

I use three macs for my business: dual 1GHz G4 (coding), old 400MHz G4 (web server), and an old 600MHz G3 iBook (travel and 'deck time').

Seriously, for software design and coding, how much speed do you need? I would rather spend computer upgrade money taking my wife on an extra vacation.

My Dad does lots of video editing and 3D animation - he needs the speed and upgrades often. But for most users, older hardware with software upgrades matter more (I can't wait to get Tiger on my development Mac).

It would seem that this rumours site is now down

[lordandrei]

This may finally have been the straw that broke Apple's back. The domain resolves, the server pings, but the site is not serving web pages at the moment. Interesting.

stand corrected

[biker44442004]

i stand corrected. not that better gpu's are a bad thing....even though i got my imac under 2 months ago..timing is everything.

Off topic - used mac prices

[SocietyoftheFist]

I'm not going to "switch" but I'd like to add a Mac to my Windows, Linux and Solaris collective. A Mac Mini with 512megs of ram and 1.25GHz G4 would cost me under $600 so why is it that you find used G4 towers with less memory and cpu power for more than that? I mean seriously I'm finding 733 G4s for $100 more than that. It is utterly ridiculous.

Re:Off topic - used mac prices

[norkakn]

Expandability for one thing. If you were to stick a RME card into that 733 you'd have an awesome audio workstation. That being said, if you stuck a MOTU into a mini you'd also have an awesome audio workstation.

Re:Macs for everyone.

[wootest]

It's great that you're so bigoted and insecure in yourself that you take up applying sexual labels and stereotypes to products you have a problem with, because it gives a clear signal to the rest of us that you're unable to review something based on its merits rather than the values you apply to it yourself and that we therefore can safely ignore your bullshit.

Nothing to see here, please move along.

Government Access and Trade Secrets

[Monx]

Now why would trade secrets be protected so extensively when journalists are free to publish governments secrets

In a democracy, citizens have a recognized right to know what their government is doing. Why would this extend to design details of products developed by a corporation of which you are not a significant owner? Should journalists be free to publish video from inside your house that was obtained illegally by your plumber?

Look, I'm all for more corporate reform. I've done work for organizations that want to limit corporate power and have written an article on the subject. However, confusing the rights of citizens to access government information with access to trade secrets just doesn't make any sense. It sounds like the argument that trade secret disclosure should be protected just like whistle blowing, even when the secrets are not causing harm to anyone.

Re:Government Access and Trade Secrets

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off, Corporate whore.

eMac 8x Drive

[miller701]

Is the 8x drive on the most recent eMac the same drive?

I bought one about 9 months ago, and that would be SO NICE!

Re:eMac 8x Drive

[MoonBuggy]

If it reports as the 117D in the system profiler then it's probably dual layer. If it reports as the 107D it probably isn't.

Run it through again!

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

So basically, to hide the fact that you are the canary, run the document through a very similar process. Would enough leftover original changes make a statistical difference?

Re:Run it through again!

[jcuffe]

The entire system is heavily reliant on the people not knowing that there are various different copies of the document. The differences can be as subtle as using a dash instead of a colon, placing a comma elsewhere in a sentence, misspelled words, etc. Therefore, any change in the document would render it more or less untraceable. The method's only strength is its simplicity and subtlety.

Leaks at Apple

[Charles Jo]

Leaks at Apple
Published: April 16, 2005
By Charles Jo
Staff Writer, CharlesJo.com

There has been a lot of discussion on tech sites about Apple going
after Mac rumor sites which posted supposedly leaked information. I
believe all corporations -- big and small -- should be concerned about
any leak of proprietary informations, especially if they have the
potential threat of hurting revenue and profit. That said, without
having any inside contacts at Apple, let me look into my crystal ball
and divine future announcements from Apple for those of you who have
not figured it out yet:

1. Apple will introduce boxes and laptops that will have faster CPUs,
faster busses, and fatter hard disk drives.
2. Apple will introduce software updates and/or new software.
3. Apple may introduce neat, pricey monitors, keyboards and other
peripherals.
4. If Steve Jobs is making the announcement, he will be sporting a
dark turtleneck with blue jeans, drinking 1+ bottles of water, Keynote,
appear to be in his 40s or 50s but still sound like an 18 year old.

News that would be interesting is if Apple reversed the trend and
suddenly decided to make slower computers with smaller disk drives
across the board and charged more for such products. Retro.

Source:
http://www.charlesjo.com/newsletterissu e?newslette rIssueEntityId=250
www.charlesjo.com | We are captives of our own imaginations so let's
dream big.

Send comments to: charles@charlesjo.com
charles AT charlesjo DOT com

Think Secret and the Hegelian Dialectic

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant smokescreen tactic by the Thinksecret legal defense team. Cook up a batch of fake dope on the new powermac specs, get it all wrong, and then use that as evidence that you really don't have any inside sources worth mentioning, anyway.
Any accurate predictions of the past were pure luck, based on Ouija boards, voodoo, and tea leaf smoking pseudo-Macstrodamus punks on IRC. Bush gets away with starting a war using this defense... why not ???