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."

Comments

Burn baby Burn

[Anonymous Coward]

If only I could get a hold of the old Mac commercials when they slam on the Intel Processors

Re:Burn baby Burn

[goombah99]

Clueless comment. If you watched the last Apple meeting they played they commerical before they brought in the intel speakers. It was their humble pie. In a way it was a compliment to intel too. Intel did have a heat problem and look at all the new processors: low power.

Now lets look at the CES show with it's tepid announcements. Google-pak? well okay make it easy for the unwashed to have a standard set of apps all the technorati have. Of course those or better have always come on apples so we can forgive all the apple owners with the WTF look on their faces. And some TV show downloads? hmmm whoopeee. What are they going to play them on, an Achos pocket brick? And then there's a flock of dull over prices ipod wanabees, that got scooped by the Nano and cant even compete on price.

In any case tommorrow all apple has to do to blow the pants off everyone is to announce, feature length movies available .mac starting tommorrow, and the intel processors availabel in march on ibooks and mac minis. For the pro-crowd they just need to stretch their pro-video and maybe throw in some eye candy like 32 inch displays or intel plasma display. Maybe announce a toshiba SED by august (probably not though). Apple wont announce much other pro stuff since that usually comes at the developers conf later in the year.

This year CES made it easy. everything at CES is so far behind the curve and unintegrated apple hardly has to do more than what people already expect and everyone will be happy. This is the first year there's no breathless anticipation. (though I'm mighty curious about the intels, since I'm a pro-user I'm not expecting anything for me this go-around).

No G4 laptops or desktops - that is my prediction

[IntelliAdmin]

The article suggests that they will introduce new G4 based models. I find this highly unlikely. They will need to push their new Intel Line. I suspect they will reveal new Intel Based laptops, and as always a surprise that rocks the world from Mr Jobs himself

Here's hoping...

[WigginX]

My money is on the Apple Tablet being unveiled. ... but maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Dual boot laptop

[shut_up_man]

I had considered a Mac last time I was shopping for a laptop, but I couldn't get past the facts that:

a) I can't work on Microsoft products like SQL Server on a Mac
b) The Mac only has a few games, compared to the PC

If these Intel Mac laptops arrive, and they really can be dual booted into XP, these two problems go away. I could easily see myself getting a Powerbook and using OSX for all my daily fiddling, and then booting into Windows when I needed to. /me crosses fingers...

Re:Dual boot laptop

[shut_up_man]

Actually I hadn't heard of either (thanks for the info) but I was thinking more about using the laptop as a complete dev environment, with SQL server running on it as well. That way I could do SQL Server / .NET / ASP work without having to cart around a mini sized server box. If it's a greenfields project, I will choose MySQL / PHP hands down, but a good percentage of my work is maintenance or modifications of Microsoft stuff, which means having Windows somewhere along the line.

Laptop Standard

[superpulpsicle]

If iPod is the defacto standard for music players, it's going to be difficult to raise the iBook to be the laptop standard. Everywhere I look companies are too heavily invested into Dell and other big name PC laptops. But I'd like to see Jobs try and win this one.

Waiting for the big dissapointment...

[EuroChild]

While, granted, there are a whole lot of rumors flying around about intel macs, what if there is no intel update? AFAIK, Apple have never stated that they would move to intel this early. So what will this do to apple, not only to the fans (myself included) but to the greater public, if we see another tiny bump to the laptop lines? Apple stand to loose a lot of face should they not be able to deliver...

Re:second gen Pentium M

[Cadallin]

Eh? Firstly, the new G5's available from IBM are much lower in power consumption. A G5 powerbook could have happened very easily after June '05, and Secondly that Pentium M you are touting has more in common with that Pentium II you just trashed than any other processor design. Intel has gone back to their old Pentium Pro Architecture. Meanwhile, in POWER land, POWER5 and POWER5+ based POWERPC processors could have succeeded the G5, (A POWER4 based design).

All of the current top3 Supercomputers in the world are POWER5 IBM designs. The intel transition was a mistake IMO. Intel doesn't have any solid plans for the future of x86, they're just going to keep using process advances to cram more PII cores on a chip, until they end up with an x86 based NIAGRA clone

Re:second gen Pentium M

[Cadallin]

I understand the argument there, but I'm inclined to think that the game consoles stealing IBM's attention is a bit of a red herring. I think the real reasons are:

1. Marketing (Most people won't look any further than a CPU's clockspeed to evaluate it's "performance," even though this is often a weak indicator at best)

2. Steve's ego, and his anger at IBM for failing to deliver as promised. (Even though EVERYONE had a disasterous time with the 90nm transition. Nobody was really prepared to deal with the immense increase in heat dissipation, and if you'll remember, even Intel stalled during this period)

3. I think it's very like Intel made Apple "an offer they couldn't refuse," (especially keeping in mind point 2) The PC platform is stagnating really badly, and there aren't any Apps really driving the sale of higher performance desktops, Intel NEEDED Apple, as they are the only ones pushing in this direction. I think Apple probably got some OBSCENE discounts for agreeing to become an Intel shop.

Re:second gen Pentium M

[chrish]

You guys are missing an important fact.

Besides the "flagship" desktop/latpop chips, Intel makes a boat-load of embedded chips.

Apple sells a boat-load of embedded systems (iPod).

If Apple can get major discounts on embedded CPUs for their top-selling hardware, their margins will go way up.