Apple Planning Intel iBook Debut for January?

axonis writes "Apple is planning to release its first entry-level iBook laptops with Intel processors next January at Macworld Expo in San Francisco, highly reliable sources have confirmed to Think Secret." From the article: "Apple will almost certainly tap Intel's forthcoming Yonah processor for the iBooks, a successor to the company's Pentium M. It is unknown whether Apple will go with a dual-core version of the processor, slated for release in January, or a single-core version, which Intel announced in August would be delivered shortly after the dual-core version. The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks."

Comments

Re:How many?

[ciroknight]

"enough". Apple's been silently distrubiting updates as fat-binaries. It's very likely you won't notice, or even care for that matter, but I'm sure in a few [weeks/months/years] someone will have a binary stripper to remove the unnessicary part of the Universal Binary.

I think Apple just gave mid summer as an estimate to give the developers of 3rd party applications more time, as well as themselves if they needed it. Now they've figured out that the developers were quick to transition, everyone's bitting at the chops, and delaying it any longer seems to be a bad idea. Can't wait to get my hands on one.

Re:How many?

[jcr]

I'm sure in a few [weeks/months/years] someone will have a binary stripper to remove the unnessicary part of the Universal Binary.

This has been in NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X all along. See /usr/bin/lipo on any Mac OS X machine.

-jcr

Re:How many?

[larkost]

Where are you getting these "quite clear" positions?

Adobe was prominently on stage for the announcement of Apple moving to Intel and promised their eventual support. They did say that there was going to be a bit of work because they were still a PowerPlant house, but they were going to make the transition.

And that does not take into account the recent announcement from Metroworks that they were going to make a PowerPlant Mac/Intel version of their compiler after all. That could make the transition much easier. I would still rather that they moved over to an XCode project, but that might not be convenient with the requirement that this build quickly on both MacOS X and Windows from the same codebase (it is of course possible... I am talking about convenient).

Now Apple has released a few great products recently, and in the video space they are directly competing with Adobe... although most people would say that they are more accurately competing against Avid... But in the image space: I can't think of any product that Adobe makes that compares with Aperture... unless you talk about the image browser in Photoshop, and that is really stretching things. Aperture is going to sell more copies of Photoshop.

Re:How many?

[Golias]

You want to run Photoshop on an iBook?

I run Photoshop all the time on the current iBook.

Some filters take a few extra seconds to apply, but it works great.

No need to be all bold-type incredulous, sport.

Re:Is the G4 really that good?

[pohl]

Yeah, the G4 really is a nice little laptop processor if you can feed it instructions and data fast enough. Sadly, most G4 machines were unable to do this consistently because of the bus and the type of memory modules. The latest iteration of the PowerBooks made an improvement in this regard. The processor isn't much faster than the last rev, but these machines feel much faster, probably because of the increased bandwidth between the processor and memory. For audio applications like GarageBand, the AltiVec unit really increases the effective instructions-per-clock. The way they've offloaded a lot of work onto the GPU has helped to extend the life of the G4 too.

I'm sure they've run out of ways to squeeze more out of it, though.

Could very likely?!?

[Guspaz]

The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks.

Could very likely? That's quite a bit of uncertainty.

The Pentium M is roughly performance-equivalent to an Athlon64 of the same clockspeed (The PM is still a bit weak in the multimedia department, but Yonah is expected to fix that. The statement holds true for gaming, at least). Assuming that the dual core Yonah ships at the same max speed as current Dothan processors, that means 2.26GHz. That's roughly an Athlon64 X2 4400+. The PowerBook ships with a single 1.67GHz G4. I think it is safe to say that the processor "definately destroys performance-wise" rather than "could very likely deliver performance greater than".

Re:Is the G4 really that good?

[Phillup]

I think what they are trying to say is that the intel system, running emulation, might deliver performance greater than a G4 running native apps.

'Course... that's a wild ass guess.

But, it "fits" the facts a lot better.

Especially when you consider that right off the bat there will still be a lot of non-native software. People really will expect to install a lot of their *current* software.