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MacWorld MacBook Only a Prototype?
mahju writes "Hard Mac is reporting that Apple's, unoffical, response in Paris to the the lack of information on battery life, is that the MacBook Pro that were demoed at Mac World SF are only prototypes and the final versions are still under development.
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I take your point, but the Express Card 34 slot provides even faster I/O and allows for dual Firewire 800 on one card. If I had to choose one over the other then I would make the same choice as Apple, particularly as it allows for much improved video options in the future.
If you were at Macworld, and had a chance to check out the MacBook Pro, the fact that putting them to sleep, or removing the battery would lock up the machines was a dead giveaway that they were pre-production units. Not to mention the fact that all the Apple staff on hand were telling attendees, "These are not shipping units, they are pre-production models." According to one Apple employee, the machines were still undergoing battery testing, hence why no one had any information on battery life.
This is standard procedure for Apple. Other vendors do it too, but Apple is a bit worse.
Way back in the pre-Carly days, when HP did engineering, I found HP to be the only vendor for which it was always seemed to be true that if you saw a glossy ad for an interesting product, you could order it and get it delivered. Everyone else played the game of announcing what they hoped would be ready soon and crossing their fingers.
The most egregious Steveism of this kind I can remember occurred in the year that they announced the first G4 PowerMacs. (The G4 processor included the "Altivec" instruction extensions which could produce dramatic speedups in applications specially coded to take advantage of them).
It was in the early fall of 1999, the rumor sites had reported--accurately, it eventually transpired--that Apple was having trouble with their new motherboards and "the G4's" wouldn't ship until calendar 2000.
Steve talked about the G4 processor and repeatedly referred to "these machines." He then proceeded to demonstrate a unit that had a redesigned motherboard ("Sawtooth") with a faster bus, faster video chips, and many other speedups. With an implied smirk at the rumor sites, he said "and these machines are shipping NOW."
The only thing was, the machines that were shipping "now" were not the machines he had just demonstrated, but a machine that used a "Yikes!" motherboard, essentially the previous motherboard with minimal modifications to allow incorporation of a G4 processor. So, his words were literally true (machines with G4 processors were shipping now), but somewhat misleading... they weren't the "machines" he was showing... and performance was broadly comparable to the previous generation of machines, except in a very few applications (Photoshop) that took advantage of Altivec.
Of course, everyone remembers the initial introduction of the Mac... when the machine he unveiled on the stage spoke, using the MacInTalk speech synthesizer... although MacInTalk would not run in the 128K Macs that Apple was actually shipping.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Until it wasn't. Suddenly the iMac comes out, and has no SCSI. Almost immediately the Blue and White G3s come out, sans SCSI (with lip-service paid in the form of an optional plug in card) Firewire is supposedly the replacement, but it isn't really, no Mac ships with Firewire hard-disks or optical media, it's IDE that's the replacement. In the space of months, SCSI goes from being central to the Mac experience to being an optional extra. The system is not directly replaced, it's just dropped. The "External peripheral that needs a large amount of bandwidth" capability is maintained by introducing Firewire, but there's little evidence right now that high-speed USB or high-speed Ethernet couldn't be used in a similar way, especially with SAN becoming increasingly mainstream.
Firewire support being capped at FW400 is a big deal. It represents a net downgrade of the technology, and suggests Apple doesn't see themselves using it, either by choice or by their increasing reliance on Intel, at some point in the future. Unless this is a temporary aberation, brought about by short term needs to get a box, any box, out there, I think it's safe to suggest that Apple isn't planning on further development of the technology.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I knew there was something wrong the minute I pulled the power plug on a MacBook at MacWorld. The Apple employee kept trying to plug it back in. I wanted to read what the estimated battery life would be (it displays right on the screen). I told him that I knew this wasn't a final number, but that I wanted to see what it would estimate. I left the cord out for a minute until the reading settled...
It said 2:37 minutes on a full charge.
Then someone invited us to an iSight videoconference and it dropped to 1:50 (still on a full charge).
The employee didn't tell me that these were pre-production, but he did say the unit was still under testing, including all the thermals that control the fan, and that that would really eat battery. He also said that the screen was much brighter and that would eat more power (and he's right, I had my 1.5Ghz PowerBook with me and took it out for comparison. The MacBook looked almost two times brighter to the eye).
I feel pretty confident that they'll get good battery life in the final unit, but it was odd how they skirted the issue instead of simply announcing that these models weren't good predictors of battery life (all the forums were FILLED with just this topic, and even this story carries it forward, where if they had addressed it, the question would be settled--just wait, it will come).
There's a $19US donggle that adapts DVI to s-video.
A ppleStore?productLearnMore=M9267G/A
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/