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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 And at least my shiny new (1 year old) power book doesn't quite feel outdated just yet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!
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.
sigh.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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).
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/
...that the name "MacBook Pro" is also only a prototype...
Signature.
I would agree; the permanent absence of FW800 is news (even though that missed the headline). I just bought a triple-interface HD in hopes that my next 12" Power(Mac?)Book would sport FW800. The studio I work at is outfitted with FW800, and there is a very significant real-world difference between it and the older spec.
This market is likely to be taken over by external SATA, or eSATA. You can read about it here. With no overhead in converting to SATA and a much higher cap to begin with, it is likely to be the solution for external high-performance storage. Firewire is still limited by the fact that both current DV and newer HDV cameras don't need FW800 for live playback. On the low end, USB is the standard for anything for keyboard, mice and everything else (with some competition from the PS/2 port). In short, FW800 is a technology looking for a market and the market just isn't there.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings