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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.
"
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.
This would also explain why:
...
1. Only the 15 inch model was released (not the 12 or 17 inch version)
2. You can still buy the entire range of G4 laptops
3. The release date was February whilst the iMac was immediately available.
Makes sense - I think apple wanted to make a splash at MacWorld and the laptop wasn't quite ready yet.
I wouldn't be surprised if the entire MacBook range actually ships simultaneously, even if they are announced separately.
Of course, they were announcing six months ahead of schedule, so they aren't really that far behind. And at least my shiny new (1 year old) power book doesn't quite feel outdated just yet
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
In "Holy Grail"..
LAUNCELOT: Look, my liege!
ARTHUR: Camelot!
GALAHAD: Camelot!
LAUNCELOT: Camelot!
PATSY: It's only a model.
ARTHUR: Shhh!
...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.
Apple... introduce a machine before it's ready to ship? That never happens! I'm shocked. And appalled. How dare they!
;)
*looks at my mini... aww that was obviously released immediately*
All my sarcasm being said and done, I don't think anybody looked at the 15" MacBook (god I hate that name) and thought it was anything beyond a rush job. Probably a very good machine, and something I'd buy if I had the money, but it's nothing earth shattering in terms of design or anything like that - it just *shouts* "we needed to do something about our powerbooks, and we needed to get as many x86 boxes out as soon as possible."
Oh, and "we wanted to spite the rumors sites"
-Daniel
I'm not a manufacturing expert, but I would think that taking a machine from prototype to production would be more than a month's work. If they're still in development, then I would expect the shipping models to be *much* later than a month late.
The assembly line has to be geared up before any production can take place. How long does that take after the design is finalised?
I can't see how a model could still be in development and yet ship as a completed unit in a month.
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.
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
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?
Now if Apple rolls out iTimeMachine at some point in the future, I'll consider eating my words.
Actually the iTimeMachine was rolled out already, several times in the past and then back to the future.
It has that power.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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!
There was a video floating around where Jobs is showing the Macbook to Andy Grove and Paul Otellini. They're at the Apple booth in Macworld. In that video, Jobs doesn't hem and haw when Grove asks "how long does the battery last?" Jobs says "about the same" which I assume he means "about the same as the G4."
An irony about the video is Otellini looks ghastly ill while Jobs and Grove, who have both survived cancer, look the picture of health. Perhaps it was the lighting or perhaps Otellini needs to hit the gym.
FireWire 800 is backwards compatible electronically with FireWire 400, but everyone who sells adaptors charges an insane amount for them (a FW800->400 cable cost about three times as much as a three-port FW800 card last time I looked). I wouldn't say there is 'no demand'. I have a couple of LaCie disks that are chained together with FW800. They connect to my PowerBook via a single FW800 cable, and it is noticeably faster than using FW400 (which they support, but only by limiting me to a single disk, since they only have one FW400 port). If they had included a FW800->400 convertor for each FW800 port though, I agree that would have been better.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
The original Jobs Mac demo didn't use MacInTalk, it actually used a very early Mac port of Mark Barton's Software Automatic Mouth. SAM ran fine on 64K Apple II systems, and my guess is the Mac version worked ok with 128K. The reason the original Mac demo took up so much RAM is because of its fancy graphics running from RAM. Not too shabby for being written in a few days and they probably could have made it work on a 128K Mac by having it load each segment of the demo graphics from disk as needed.
Speak takes up 36 KB of disk space and can talk quite well on a 128K Mac. Give it a whirl.
Browsing the usenet, I see several comments from Mac 128K users that have played with MacInTalk, so it seems to work with that limited RAM. Perhaps the final released version of MacInTalk was a further optimized version of the SAM port?
There have been many suggestions that Steve's keynote at the Expo wasn't the one that he really intended to give as other things had to be withdrawn at the last moment.
So instead of a new Mac mini, video download service and new iPod shuffle, were the gaps left in the keynote filled with a very leisurely stroll through iLife 06 and a preview of the forthcoming MacBook ?
The MacBook certainly comes across as being a product that wasn't originally intended to be announced at that time.
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).
Hard to say as it obviously isn't shipping yet, but Apple used to mention this capability in the specs... MacBook, not so much...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
There's a $19US donggle that adapts DVI to s-video.
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...that the name "MacBook Pro" is also only a prototype...
Signature.
The MacBook Pro Rev A is probably not a good buy because of these reasons: - 32 bit x86, which will be replaced in near future - Rosetta is necessary for most application, which makes the old PowerBooks better for most usage - There are battery issues, maybe others we don't know about I believe it is better to wait for a rev B, so they have better time to fix the problems and port the applications. Have a nice day :-)
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?
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
I was able to run some real-world benchmarks on the preproduction MacBooks at MacWorld and wrote this MacBook Pro Performance Analysis. I compared the new laptops to previous G4/G5 systems and found that the new MacBooks are indeed faster than most previous systems. Nobody expected the old G4 PowerBook to come out on top but I was surprised how well the new Core Duo performed.
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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
1. Develop protoype
2. Demo prototype
3. ?
4. Profit
Isn't this, what every, hardware, and, software company has always, done?
-- SIGFPE
I predicted that one of the first casualties of the Intel-Apple relationship would be Firewire since Intel has fought Firewire in favor of their standard, USB--despite its inferiority in I/O overhead. So I have written a few times in various forums that the Intel relationship with Apple would see increased pressure on Apple to give in and result in a gradual abandonment of Firewire. Many people vehemently disagreed with me. However, we are now seeing the first evidence that I may, unfortunately, be right. Buried in the news about the Macbook Pro was this: "The disappearance of FW800 has also been discussed: Apple said it would have required them toi build a specific FW800 card (Intel does not support it), and that they had no plans for it". If the lack of glue chip support doomed Firewire 800 on the laptops, then might it not doom it on the desktop systems of the future as well since Intel's glue chips will be just as important there as well? Surely Apple is not going to use up a PCI-X slot just for a Firewire 800 card at an added price. I have not seen anything from Apple guarranteeing Firewire support for the future unless I missed it. So I think this may be the beginning of the end for Firewire. I am sure Intel will produce the next generation of USB chips at the 800 speed or better and with Firewire stuck at 400, that will be the death knell for it. I'll be betting that way though I don't like it.