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MacWorld Keynote Announces x86 iMac & Laptop
Steve Jobs began giving his keynote at 9am local time, PST. The action was posted live at MacRumorsLive, and Engadget. From the Engadget liveblog: "How many [iPods] did we sell last quarter? Some of the estimates were getting astronomical - 8 million, 9 million. I'm really pleased to announce that last quarter we sold 14 million iPods .. that is over a hundred every minute, 24/7 throughout the quarter. And it still wasnt enough. We've now sold over 42 million iPods -- as you can see the curve is going up again" MacWorld and Ars Technica has coverage as well. The shiniest news: MacBook Pro. iSight, Front Row; $1999 1.67 Core Duo; 667 DDR bus, Radeon x1600; $2499 1.83GHz. Intel chip.
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro
Dropped FW 800 and cardbus.
Worth noting that the CardBus slot has been replaced with a ExpressCard/34 slot.
Actually, they said they would not go out of their way to stop you, they never said they would support it or make it easy.
It looks just like my G4 Powerbook. What's so different?
That extra $550 can be measured in five things:
Size and weight(which translates to engineering and design), since the Gateway is 1.3" thick and 6lb and the MacBook is 1" thick and 5.6lb
Dual link DVI; the Gateway only has VGA and s-video, while the MacBook can power the new Dell or the old Apple 30" LCD.
Software: The MacBook comes with iLife, OS X, iChat, etc
Hardware: The MacBook comes with a 640x480 30fps build in video camera
QA: I think Apple notebooks are slightly more reliable than Gateway... but feel free to buy the Gateway if that extra $100 savings means that much to you
All five things together work to roughly $110 per point, don't you think?
GPL Deconstructed
A: Clock for clock the G5 is faster than the Pentium 4 architecture, so you were told the truth.
B: Clock for clock the Pentium M based Core Duo chip is faster than the G5. So again the truth.
Mix in some marketing (aka exagerations) and you have your situation.
Statement A: was meaningless because the P4 architecture always ran at a much faster clock speed which made it faster in actual use. So Intel in practical terms has pretty much always been faster.
It helps to ignore marketing and think for yourself what you want.
I never bought a Mac before but I might get one this year becasue I like the new architecture. I am waiting on a new Mini. I hope it uses the new Core Duo and runs cool and quiet. I hope they aren't putting the core solo in the mini as I would have to keep waiting...
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has implemented some kind of unique encrypted handshaking between the OS X installer and the hardware so that only Apple's OS can be installed on it, so that they can avoid receiving support calls from people who put Windows on Apple hardware. Keep in mind that even if they refuse to provide support for such a configuration, the bulk of a support call's cost is in the customer placing the call in the first place. If someone calls only to be told "we don't support that", that has already cost Apple a good bit of money.
They won't support that, but they declared already that they will do nothing to prevent it. After Apple Intel FAQ:
After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that.
According to this newly updated page at Apple's Dev site, the new Macs use EFI.