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Apple Unveils New Pro Products
porcupine8 writes "As many had speculated, today Apple unveiled upgrades to their PowerBook and Power Mac lines (although no PowerBook G5). They also introduced a new professional photography application known as Aperture, rounding out their software lineup for creative professionals. Can't wait to find out what they announce next week!"
Finally Apple has upped the resolution on their powerbooks to something more reasonable (at least, reasonable to me - other people have different requirements). Whoops, no, I tell a lie, its only on their 15" and 17" models. The 12" i^HpowerBook is still at 1024x768. If this had been equally increased, I'd be very happy. As it is, the form factor is perfect but the resolution just too limiting for it to be my standard road machine.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
These are some of the most expandible workstations Apple has ever released. 16GB of RAM and a TB of storage makes a killer multimedia editing workstation all around. If you are weary of the Intel switchover, the time to buy is now. The workstations should hold you over well into the second and third revisions of Apple Intel hardware at least.
I hope next week they finally add something to itunes to monitor changes to a directory. thats all I really need at this point
My one take away issue is the fact that a lot of audio card makers are having trouble getting high quality audio out of their PCIe cards. as mentioned here. Everybody else will start cranking out the 8 port SATA 2 cards soon (I don't think they have settled on that standard yet, have they?), looking around i've seen x1 firewire cards, but x4 multiport fw800s cards are sure to be in the works also.
Aperture isn't competing with Photoshop, it's competing with things like this:
PhaseOne's Capture One
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Aperture's feature set is different from Photoshop's, yes, but where they overlap is significant from a photographer's point of view. I'd say that 95% of what I do to photos is now covered by Aperture. I'll still need PS, but as of today it's been relegated to secondary importance, and will be much more easily replaced if something simpler/cheaper/better comes along. For people like graphic designers and digital artists, Aperture may only be a nice accompaniment to PS, but for photographers, this is huge. It's actually quite perfect.
Also now avalable: ECC memory.
No self-respecting workstation went without it (same with the graphics cards), and finally, Apple has true workstations available, not just high end desktops priced like workstations.
Looks to me like Apple showing what can be done with Core Image.
isn't that going to be, uh, slower?
Depends, and less likely than you think. A lot more Mac software seems to be multi processor aware than Windows software. H.264 is dog-slow to encode but the Apple H.264 encoder used by the Quicktime encoder is MP-aware, with this, the speed will nearly double.
I'd say the difference between sluggish and snappy started when the
2.5 duals came out. You could sense a different that the 2.0s were
reasonably quick but the 2.5s' actually had snap.
And with each new version of OS X, the interface speed increased.
That is until Tiger where you can sense the window resizing/opening
was faster than that of Panther but other things were slower and the
beach ball returned for a lot of people.
I talk to many people with 2.5 duals who say that Panther under 2.5
dual was the fastest Mac OS X machine they experienced.
And if you had a better video card (i.e. ATI X800 versus ATI Radeons
below the 9600 XT) you would experience better performance. And a
faster drive also added "snap".
When 10.43 comes out, I'm hoping some of the speed has been restored.
But yeah, it does seem that to equal the old single user Mac OS
cooperative multitasking interface speed, you would need a nine
gigahertz quad cpu, quad core cpu.
Just a thought.
While it may not replace Photoshop in terms of some specific features and purpose, the very things you've listed in your excellent analysis are the things that will make this a Photoshop "injurer". Right now, PS serves two crowds: digital artists and digital photographers. Adobe is going to find themselves losing market share if they don't pick up the pace on PS real quick, thanks to Aperture. Since Canon released Digital Photo Pro, I've been using PS less and less, though DPP falls short in many areas. Aperture sounds like the best combination of Picasa, DPP (or Phase One C1), and Photoshop's digital photography features.
If the two programs continue as they are now, there will always be a place for both Aperture and PS, but PS won't be the king of all digital imagery, only digital art. It will lose the photography world to Apple.
The new dual core will perform better, given the larger caches, on-chip cache-to-cache bus, and faster memory. If it was an Athlon 64, it could have performed worse, because you'd be going from dual independent memory controllers to a shared memory controller, but the G5's have a shared memory bus anyway, even when there are two seperate physical processors.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
i'm looking for a machine to last me for probably two to three years. it's likely i won't switch to the intel platform until the second generation and i bet a lot of other pros are waiting it out as well. ppc is a known quantity and familiarity and predicability are very important when you rely on your computer and third party apps to make a living. so i'll stick on ppc until i KNOW that all the issues are worked out on intel. a quad 2.5 machine is the perfect machine to tide me over until macintel gen 2.