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MacWorld MacBook Only a Prototype?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-thats-not-surprising dept.

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. "

17 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by daveschroeder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Um, how on earth is this news?

    Anyone at Macworld 13 days ago could see that the MacBook Pro units on display didn't have proper serial numbers, and it was no secret that they were development units. "Prototypes" is probably a little overboard, but yeah, they were not final, shipping production units.

    Considering that it has always been known that the MacBook Pro wouldn't be shipping for another month or so, and was in fact represented as such, is it any surprise that units displayed a month and a half before the unit started shipping wouldn't yet, well, you know, be shipping units?

    Now if Apple rolls out iTimeMachine at some point in the future, I'll consider eating my words.

    1. Re:Wow by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I believe that these would be more accurately described as "pre-production". If the semantics are important to you, these were definitely NOT "prototypes", with what that term implies. These were essentially finished-goods units. Any speculation on whether or not they should have had battery life specs ready before ship, and guesses as to why they didn't, is just that: speculation and guesses.

  2. I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news by cduffy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...and darned disappointing, at that. Even as a Wintel type, I liked having Apple push for an even-higher-speed Firewire spec, in the hopes that it would filter down to the rest of the world eventually. That they're giving up now and going with strictly hardware Intel can provide... well, it's a disappointment.

    That the units are prototypes -- yes, I agree, no real suprise there.

    1. Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Even as a Wintel type, I liked having Apple push for an even-higher-speed Firewire spec, in the hopes that it would filter down to the rest of the world eventually. That they're giving up now and going with strictly hardware Intel can provide... well, it's a disappointment.

      I agree with you, but this, as you say, is likely a result of Apple going pretty much straight vanilla with Intel CPUs and chipsets in its new machines. This can, of course, be a good thing and a bad thing, depending on your perspective.

    2. Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Your argument doesn't transfer.

      SCSI was slowly dying from the original Power Macs in 1994 through the first iMac and Blue & White G3, the first machines to ship without it. By that time, Macs were already using internal IDE hard disks and optical drives. It wasn't as if this was some sort of a surprise. Also, SCSI usage was most definitely not increasing; it was decreasing drastically.

      With FireWire, it is *the* transport of choice, and usually the only transport, for all DV and HDV cameras, decks, and other video equipment, and is increasingly used on high end DTV and HDTV equipment and other high end audio/video equipment As long as that is true, and as long as half of iLife depends upon DV transport to get data into the computer and the applications (iMovie, iDVD), FireWire isn't going anywhere. Now, could DV cameras transition to USB 2.0 over the next years? Sure. And if they do, fine. (The integrated iSight in the new Macs is USB, for what it's worth.)

      I'm sure FireWire will eventually, like anything, be replaced by another standard. But for now, it's here to stay for quite some time.

    3. Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Insightful
      SCSI was slowly dying from the original Power Macs in 1994 through the first iMac and Blue & White G3, the first machines to ship without it. By that time, Macs were already using internal IDE hard disks and optical drives. It wasn't as if this was some sort of a surprise. Also, SCSI usage was most definitely not increasing; it was decreasing drastically.
      SCSI usage wasn't increasing as percentage of the market, but it was increasing in pure numeric terms. The same is true of Firewire. As I said, the situation is directly comparable.
      With FireWire, it is *the* transport of choice, and usually the only transport, for all DV and HDV cameras, decks, and other video equipment, and is increasingly used on high end DTV and HDTV equipment and other high end audio/video equipment
      As SCSI was for a variety of technologies, including scanners. Just like SCSI, it's replacable. We've already seen USB2 and Gigabit Ethernet + SAN start to encroach on a major chunk of Firewire's market. Firewire, for the most part, is becoming limited to a particular subset of the high-end. That's simply not sustainable. And it's particularly not sustainable if Apple's not going to keep the technology up to date, particularly in an environment in which todays uses are rapidly becoming obsolete.
      I'm sure FireWire will eventually, like anything, be replaced by another standard. But for now, it's here to stay for quite some time.
      Apple is no longer shipping iPods with Firewire cables. The latest flash-based iPods have no support for Firewire whatsoever. The latest Intel-based Macs have specifically dropped Firewire 800 in favour of the older, slower, less competitive FW400 standard. High-speed USB is widely supported on PCs, which means most consumer DV equipment is likely to migrate to it. Some already does.

      If this doesn't scream "Being phased out", I don't know what would.

      Sure, it'll continue to exist on high end workstations. But, you know, SCSI lives on in my employer's server room too, and like I said earlier, Apple made PCI SCSI cards available for long after they, realistically, dropped the standard. While I'm not saying they will, I suspect it'll generate nothing approaching an outcry if, in a year, at the very least the iMac, Mac mini, and iBook-replacement, all shipped without built-in Firewire.

      The FAQ entry is far too optimistic. It's based upon flawed speculation whose grounds are as firm as a similar entry in favour of SCSI in the late nineties. SCSI being dropped was a major surprise at the time, whereas I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of Mac users have never even touched their firewire ports.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    4. Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think not being able to run Classic macintosh applications is much bigger news than not having 800 megabit firewire.

  3. Waiting for clever benchmarks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Another possibility is that while they are ready to ship, the battery life doesn't look too good, and rather than admit that the MacBook is a step back in that respect, they are holding back till they can come up with a new way to measure battery life that will make it look respectable.

  4. Re: The problem with FW800 by drhamad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FW is a great spec - both in 400 & 800 varieties. It's FAST - we all know that. However, Intel was smart with USB. Beyond bundling it with all their boards, I mean. They made USB2 the same connector and backwards compatible with USB1.1. I assume that there was simply no way to do that with FW800/400, but that's what is killing it. It's simply too hard to include 2 different connectors on one board, especially when the 2nd connector (800) is totally incompatible with anything previous, there's no demand for it (that's faster than most devices could run) and there's few devices out that would run on it, even if they are fast enough.

    Those connectors needed to be backwards compatible.

    --
    -Daniel
  5. Re:How was it presented to the faithful? by daveschroeder · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How was it presented to the "faithful"?

    There was nothing "implied".

    The MacBook Pro was announced in the keynote, and Jobs said to the "faithful" that it wasn't available yet and would be shipping in February. I.e., not shipping yet. I.e., no *shipping* units available yet. Did he *specifically* say they were "prototypes" or development units on display? No, but 1.) I think that a rational person can infer that, since they're not *shipping* yet and won't be for another month or month and a half (at the time), and 2.) Why does it matter?

  6. Prototype by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The bigest prototype in this Intelswitch is Apple pushing 32bit X86 as if it was a new architecture with years of room ahead of it.

    Everyone else is moving away from 32 bit x86 in favour of 64bit. Apple will soon have another big switch to lookforward too. My guess is x86-32 on Apple will be VERY short and buying one of these Macbooks will in the long run a pretty bad choice if you intend to run Macintosh software on it.

  7. Estimated battery life by phooka.de · · Score: 2, Insightful

    2:30 or 1:50... estimated how?

    They take a look at how many mA/h are left in the battery, how much the machine has to do at the moment and apply a magic formula to come up with the number, IIRC. Without that formula (which they don't have if they're still testing battery life), the time displayed will be bogus. It would have been more interesting to know if the estimate dropped at a rate of a second per (real time) second, of more or of less than that. If it showed 2:30 for a couple of minutes... need I say more?

  8. Let's wait for Rev 2 to decide by alexhmit01 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have a MacBook on order. My 3.5 year old Powerbook has been needing an upgrade for about 9 months, but its been hard to justify $3k + 1 week configuring a new machine for only a 50% speed up. So there I was in limbo. Is this the PERFECT Mac laptop? Absolutely not, but its a shipping Intel laptop, "6 months early."

    Look at the Intel line-up. They offer an iMac and a MacBook on Intel, AND EVERYTHING on PowerPC. The video guys have been howling that the MacBook isn't perfect for them without FW800... Well guess what, Rev A isn't for you.

    The pro-graphics/pro-video crowd isn't going to migrate until software has native support... Rosetta won't cut it for them, even Steve Jobs SAID SO in the KEYNOTE... that's an anti-sell.

    However, they needed to get Intel machines out the door. Dev machines are great for big partners who wanted to get an early start, but until hardware ships, you can't QA your product. Your developers COULD have ported the code as needed over the past 6 months, but how do you QA a product without the release version.

    This is a KEY release... 1) developers now have to get their asses in gear and finish the migration, because Intel gear is here. 2) development houses have shipping hardware to test against, and 3) developers have real gear to work with.

    So many Mac developers carry Powerbooks. Having the iMac and MacBook gives developers machines to work on and QA teams machines to test on. The PowerMac hasn't been upgrades and won't for a while... Why? Until Adobe/Macromedia, Quark, and Apple's pro-divisions upgrade their software, there is no reason for pros to migrate. Also, the dual-dual G5s are REALLY REALLY fast, and compete with the top end of the Intel world. Until Intel ships their 64-bit versions of these chips, there isn't a reason to switch.

    I wouldn't be overly shocked if FW800 goes away (with addon cards for those with the gear), but until a USB 3 can provide the bandwidth, the video guys aren't going to be happy. However, I also wouldn't be shocked at a MacBook rev in 6 months, introducing the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines, with the former being mostly stock Intel to replace the iBook, and the latter having the high end gear that the video guys need.

    However, I need a MacBook NOW. All my internal applications are currently PPC only, and we need to start the transition. As our apps are for internal use, it didn't seem important to rush the job with the dev machines, we figured Rev A gets us going, and with Rev B of the Intel machines, we'll switch. We already migrated our internal machines from iMacs (in the G4 era) to Mac Minis w/ Apple Monitors, so that if we decide to NOT support dual-platforms, we can cheaply forklift each station at $500/station.

    But no shipping Intel hardware means nobody doing the ports and QAs that you video guys want done BEFORE YOUR hardware is released.

    Remember, those of us that program for OS X need to get our machines BEFORE YOU, or there is NO SOFTWARE for you to run on your new video machines. :)

    Alex

  9. Should Stay Prototypes by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Maybe they can stay prototypes (think of it like the Google eternal betas) until they can get true 64-bit processors in them, rather than the current 32-bit CPU's currently shown. Does Apple really want to be supporting a 32-bit Intel OSX for the next however many years?

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
  10. Re:Story Seems Dubious To Me... by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think the better word would be "pre-production" model.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  11. Is one SATA? by SuperKendall · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If one of the interfaces on your triple-interface HD is SATA, then you are better off with the choice apple made - because an ExpressCard SATA card is going to be much faster than Firewire 800.

    If pretty much the only thing people were using Firewire 800 for was discs then why not replace that standard with a much faster alternative?

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  12. In, what way, does this differ, from the, usual? by SIGFPE · · Score: 2, Insightful

    1. Develop protoype
    2. Demo prototype
    3. ?
    4. Profit

    Isn't this, what every, hardware, and, software company has always, done?

    --
    -- SIGFPE