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Macworld to Bring Updates to Laptop Lines?
An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is reporting on the breathless anticipation that leads up to Macworld every year. Many analysts are hedging their bets that this year will bring a long overdue update to the Mac laptop family. From the article: 'We think the iBook, PowerBook, Mac Mini, and potentially Xserve are areas that are going to move to Intel first,' said Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research."
The keynote is on Tuesday, 10 January, not Monday.
Actually, the article suggests they will update the current G4-based models... "Apple has said it will start selling Intel-based computers by the middle of this year. But many analysts have said for months they expect an earlier introduction of some Macintosh models, particularly ones using the older G4 processor."
Back in those days it was Apple/Motorola slamming the first gen Pentium II versus their first gen Power PC 750 "G3".
The G3 in 233 and 266 MHz flavors was faster than the PII in its 233 and 266 MHz flavors. But eventually the PII was shipping at 450 MHz while Motorola was still churning out 350 MHz G3s. Apple slipped behind and had to use other tactics (more cache, wider busses, etc) to try to compete.
Today Intel has the Pentium M, more specifically, the second generation Pentium M, available with dual cores. Sure looks a lot better than the vaporware that Motorola/Freescale is advertising, or the big and hot IBM PowerPC 970 "G5" or the in-order (poor for multitasking) game console versions of the G5.
I think Apple made the right move, I just wish Intel had a better naming system for their CPUs.
Even though there might not be any new G4 products, there is still a possiblity for G5 notebooks since IBM made an announcement that they had developed multicore and low-power consumption G5 chips, which came right after the announcement that Apple was switching to Intel. Even though we haven't seen the low-power consumption chips, we have seen the dual core chips in the newest power macs. Jobs did say that we would still see new PPC products before the complete switch to Intel.
The PC Vs Mac thing is really Windows Vs Mac OS X.
It's not Linux on a PC Vs Mac, it's not Mac OS on Intel Vs Windows. The PC Vc Mac argument is [these days] a straight out OS grudge - not even relevant to this thread about CPUs.
Only big ligs use sigs.
Just to be more specific, OS X still uses a 32-Bit Gui, so as to ensure compatibility with the thousands of existing apps. Not everything needs 64-bit support and moving to a 64-bit GUI would put OS X in the same boat as Win64, which still lags way behind the WinXP in support. 64-bit addressing can be slower than 32-bit if it's not needed.
"All" applictions under Tiger have access to 64-bit memory addressing and have had access to 64-bit computations since Panther. 64-bit support for OS X is not limited by any means, it's just practical.
Also Windows 64 uses a 32-bit long. Microsoft actually made up their own standard of LL64. OS X uses 64-bit long pointers just like Linux and is based on the industry standard LP64. MS of course chose this direction to maintain compatibily and make it easier for developers to port their legacy code.
- CPU will most likely be upgraded to Intel Yonah Single Core CPU
- FSB will be upgraded (142MHz to ?)
- Default RAM will stay at 512MB
- 802.11G and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR will remain
-Optional HD upgrade might go from 100GB max to 120GB max
- don't know about displays (widescreen ?, 13.3 ?)
- Video RAM BETTER be upgraded to 64MB (32MB isn't enough for games or full Core Image functionality and the iBook has had 32MB for 5 or 6 updates (3 or 4 years!)
- Firewire 400 WILL continue to be on the iBook (lots of people with Digital Video Cameras and iMovie would be useless otherwise)
- Battery life might go from theoretical 6 hours to theoretical 5 hours
- LCDs might be upgraded the same way Powerbook LCDs were, BUT resolution might not change
- Hopefully the iBook will gain an internal iSight like the iMac G5
- The iBook won't get a remote (people would lose it too easily) but it might get a few function keys added/changed to allow easier FrontRow control
- The iBook P4 will look somewhat different just like the iBook changed when the CPU changed from G3 to G4
That would be an iBook that I would be willing to trade up for (I have an early 2004 iBook G4 14" 1GHz)