MacBook Pro Benchmarks

jfpoole writes "Geek Patrol has benchmarked a MacBook Pro and a PowerBook G4 using Geekbench, their benchmarking utility. It's impressive to see how well the MacBook Pro performs compared to the PowerBook G4 (at least when it comes to Universal Binary performance)." Their benchmarks aren't particularly surprising, and they lack the most important benchmark: Frames Per Second during Molten Core Combat (or as it is more commonly referred to since I made it up 5 seconds ago, the FPSDMCCMark, which is the only number I'm waiting for).

Comments

Feline Poop!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you, all you motherfucking LambdaMOOers, you! That's right, fuck y'all! Damn!

It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[XxtraLarGe]

Having owned a Powerbook G4 for almost a year now, I have no regrets. It's still going to take a while for them to get the kinks out. It's gonna be great when the 2nd revision comes out though!

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[realmolo]

Yeah, yeah.

You're not fooling anyone. We all know that every time you boot your antiquated G4, you think about selling one of your kidneys to buy a new MacBook.

Rationalization is a beatiful thing. ;)

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[iguanarama]

Having owned a Powerbook G4 for almost a year now, I have no regrets. It's still going to take a while for them to get the kinks out. It's gonna be great when the 2nd revision comes out though!

I refer you to the "it's almost the same enclosure as years of Powerbooks, all that hinge stuff is fixed" vs. "new architecture d00d, everything inside has changed, can't you see that????" from previous posts. Personally, I reckon it's a sweet machine and will avoid any major architecture problems, although I reckon some muppet will manage to scratch/break the camera and blame the latch or something to do with opening the laptop. Somehow. :) Buying decision still comes down to whether your apps have been... universalised? dualed? chi balanced?

As an aside... almost first post, carefully dodging the -1 redundant while stating the obvious, and then getting beaten to the punch by 'f y'all' dude. Life is cruel. :)

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[MBCook]

Ditto

I bought one last January when they announced the new updates and I'm quite happy with it. I expect it to last me quite a while if I wait. I may buy the next iteration (I like games and haven't had a great gaming computer in quite a while), but my PowerBook is an excelent machine.

I'm glad I futureproofed it though. 1GB of ram, 1.67 GHz, extra graphics memory, etc.

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[Enrique1218]

You are right with the exception I would bargain away my right lung as well. I like my 9 month Powerbook and all, but those Macbooks look real tempting.

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[cosmo7]

I'm glad I futureproofed it though.

You can't totally future-proof something. I think a better term would be future-resistant.

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[the phantom]

Hell, I would throw in my first born child. My PowerBook is almost two years old now, and the MacBooks are looking really nice.

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[Frumious Wombat]

If your first-born child is the same age, your offer becomes easily understandable...

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[MBCook]

Yeah, that's what I meant. I chose options that would allow it to last as long as possible if I decided to hang onto it for 3+ years like my last laptop.

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[Fred_A]

As much as I hate to admit it, I bought a G4 iBook. Right about when Steve announced Apple would *Switch* (well, they wanted everybody else to switch, they just followed their own advice).

And even though it pains me to admit it here in public, this being /., me being a geek (and I've been a geek for longer than most of you have been alive too), not only am I pertfectly happy with the performance of my machine (actually a G3 would probably have been fine too) but by the time it's old enough to need replacing, I sincerely hope Linux will be up to date on laptop hardware. So I can dump Apple altogether. Because I'm not really all that fond of it.

So what do I do with that iBook ? Well I run Firefox (no, it doesn't look like the other Mac OS apps, what do I care?), CopyWrite (The *only* thing that would keep me using that machine; it exports to RTF though so I'd go back to OOo without trouble) and ssh. All that (mostly) on a WiFi link. Of course (apart from CopyWrite, which is an app I've been thinking of writing for years) I could do all of that on a random laptop without trouble. So why an Apple?

Because :

• It's cheap
• It works (Linux can "just work" but you never know prior to buying the hardware and nowadays I no longer have time to tinker around)
• It has the same or better battery life than a random laptop that Linux would not fully run on (i.e. not sleep with the screen closed, not support the built-in Wi-Fi, etc. And don't give me the "check beforehand bit, you *don't know* what you'll get beforehand. You expect revision B3 of the chipset and you get A2 (unsupported)...
• The "unixy" bits come with the system. Yes, they are weird (the filesystem layout really takes some getting used to), the documentation is incomplete (a bitr like windows in that regard, with a bit of poking in a few websites and the dev documentation you get there eventually)
• To sum it up: It's Unix and it works. All of it. If Sun had made it at that price I would have gotten that but they didn't.

On the other hand, the Unix software often feels out of place, there is little "free" (as in libre) native software (for a Unix user, maybe it feels like heaven for a Windowe person), the interface isn't all that great, the bundled software isn't all that great either (iPhoto is probably the worst offender there, or maybe despite the few hours I spent trying to "get" it, I just didn't), in other words, don't listen to the hype, sliced bread is good, Apple is too, but that's it.

Anyway to get back to the subject at hand, a lot of Linux people (those people who write Debian books, who admin hundreds of Linux machines, who have been running Linux for 6 to 10 years, whop have all their workstations running it at work and at home) have Apple laptops. Just because they are sick of the elusive driver search, of the great parameter poking game.

I talked to a lot of them. Most of them aren't overly fond of the Apple interface. They all grew up with the Unix way of doing things. Things like sloppy focus. Or like virtual desktops. Yet they all got i/PowerBooks. Because that was better than spending ages getting Linux running on whatever hardware was available.

So yes, poke fun at those people who (in your opinion) bought some overpriced hardware, but when I got a *very nice* Vaio laptop, the C1XD PictureBook (you can look it up if you like), you would have been astounded at the number of subsystems that weren't supported in Linux. Still, that machine never had anything but EXT2 partitions. Same with the IBM notebook before it.

So my iBook, at 1200 € might seem overpriced to you (at the time I added a few options, the same machine is about 950 now), however it *works*. It comes with most of the Unix stuff, it sleeps on demand, setting it up took all of five minutes, if I had to choose between it an the *same* machine running Linux (whatever the CPU), I'd pick Linux without a second thought, however Linux isn't there yet. A

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[plj]

We all know that every time you boot your antiquated G4, you think about selling one of your kidneys to buy a new MacBook.

Huh!? I boot my Powerbook every 15-30 days or so, and that's a rare enough event that I couldn't care less whether it takes 1 or 5 minutes.

Last time when I booted it was due to 10.4.5 update. Before that I tested Ubuntu's live DVD, and before that – well, I went and double-clicked an extremely old floppy disk image, without realising that it was actually MFS instead of HFS, but the OS, not supporting such ancient stuff, took it as HFS. Result: kernel panic... but that was not a common event.

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The preview button is a beautiful thing too. Funny post though, poster. Keep up the good work while bringing up the level of your proofreading.

Re:It's nice to see improved benchmarks, but...

[Siker]

Just grab Desktop Manager and you've got virtual desktops as sleek as they get. Helps my productivity a lot while still looking so friggin' cool (with cube switch) that people blink and look again when they see it.

molten core combat

[la htris]

rofl. so true.
not really surprised though, i think the major objection to intel chips for most applications was stability not speed. ditto for the graphics cards. more boxes = more games = more devs on the cards.
props to the amusing summary though.

Re:molten core combat

[Anonymous Coward]

Score 2? Funny?! :|

survive

[Anonymous Coward]

could it survive a first post?

Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

A new product that's an improvement over the model it replaces. Wow! That's news!

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

A new product that's an improvement over the model it replaces. Wow! That's news!

I take it you never owned a Centris or a Performa...

Re:Amazing

[Daniel_Staal]

Or one of the previous couple generations of PowerBooks...

Re:Amazing

[speed_of_light]

Who mods this crap funny anyway?

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny? Please, I'm insightful too. You insensitive clod.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

And it says here you fell directly on the joystick..?

yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

lets see here, what was it again, no firewire 800 for one thing, that's standard on powerbooks, what were the others? a/v jacks?

oh well the point is that vital features were "removed" from the macbook, and they added in a DRM'ed chipset.

DRM nullifies all benchmarks because benchmarks mean nothing if you can't use that power as you wish.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[noewun]

lets see here, what was it again, no firewire 800 for one thing, that's standard on powerbooks

Actually, it's a relatively recent addition to the Powerbook line. My older Powerbook doesn't have it.

oh well the point is that vital features were "removed" from the macbook, and they added in a DRM'ed chipset.

There's no proof Apple's using any of the DRM, so your point is moot.

I'm lusting after one of these puppies, but there's no way the purchase makes sense for me until there's more software available.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

i guess those kexts, the existence of fairplay and the itunes store, the expansion of itunes to video, and the AACS standards are not convincing enough?

Weather or not jobs likes it, these things are being loaded with DRM. I'm a loyal apple user, well used to be, but if this continues my g5 will be the last apple computer i buy.

as for the firewire 800, my friend's 17 inch was bought in 2003(if my chronology is right) and had fw800. 3 years is a long time in the computing world.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Yaztromo]

lets see here, what was it again, no firewire 800 for one thing, that's standard on powerbooks

It was standard on the 15" and 17" models, but has never been available on the 12" model. And somehow, we've survived.

Besides which, for those few who need it, I'd imagine a slot-card for the new MacBook Pro that features FW-800 will be available in the near future.

Yaz.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[DurendalMac]

Firewire 800 never caught on. Those who want it will be able to buy an ExpressCard for it if they really need it. No video out? Funny, you can get DVI/VGA to A/V adapters all over the place, including Apple's own store. Yeah, they really removed all those "vital features". DRM? The only DRM is the one that keeps you from putting OS X on a PC. It doesn't affect the Mac. In short, you're simply a troll. You need to go back under the bridge and stay there.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[NetJunkie]

If you want FW800 get an ExpressCard with it. Have you seen the inside pics of the MacBook? There is *NO* room for any other ports. It's packed full. They dropped the things that the fewest people use. Do people still use AV outs on a notebook? Every projector I've seen in the last several years had DVI/VGA hookups.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[dwm]

>>oh well the point is that vital features were "removed" from the macbook, and
>>they added in a DRM'ed chipset.

>There's no proof Apple's using any of the DRM, so your point is moot.

This is hilarious. They added the chipset so it wouldn't be used? Wow, that's creative.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

why after paying 2600 bucks for a laptop which is supposed to be "sexy" should i then have to get an after market fw800 card that will not only take up the card slot, but add this ugly bulbous protrusion to said macbook and a potential point by which the thing may be accidentally broken or mishandled?

Especially when previous generations had this standard. technology is supposed to evolve, not de-volve. That would be like BMW releasing ther great new model of m3, now with twice the horsepower, but no traction control, no stereo, no ipod control, and no rear view mirrors.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[DurendalMac]

The kext issue was a misunderstanding blown out of proportion. The ITMS DRM isn't Apple's idea. They have no choice but to add DRM to appease the record companies. If they don't, then no more ITMS because the labels will pull all the songs out. You have Firewire800, but did you actually USE it? I doubt it. If you need FW800, get an ExpressCard for it. You know why? IT NEVER CAUGHT ON. A few hard drive enclosures use it, but beyond that, nada. You're getting worked up over nothing.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

funny, speak the truth about anything else on slashdot and get +4 insightful, speak the truth about apple doing something wrong and the jobsites descend upon you in droves with their -1 "troll" mods.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[DurendalMac]

WHEN HAVE YOU EVER USED FW800??? Jesus, it was a standard that never caught on! A few FW HD enclosures used it, and that was it. Very few people will feel the need to spring for an ExpressCard. God, it just seems to be yet another non-issue that the Apple bashing trolls are assfucking without end...

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

my friend uses it all the time.

He bought the powerbook for portability, but that doesn't mean he doesnt want space when it's required.

he has 2 lacie super capacity externals which use fw800, and another with fw400. the firewire 800 is leagues better than firewire 400 in throughput, which is important when youre downloading straight to that drive because your audiobooks take up most of the space in your book.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[DurendalMac]

Then he can get an ExpressCard and keep it with the drives if bumping it or having an ugly extrusion is an issue.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by your slashdot ID, you must be new here so this must be new for you. (But its true and others have seen this to be the case as well)

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

maybe they should add the 1cm it would take to make the room? not every innovation requires a reduction in form factor.

btw.. my friend uses express cards for other things, and there are limited slots, he should just abandon whatever else he is doing because apple removed what was standard?

additionally, most people cannot afford a "projection unit". most people have this thing called a tv, which uses coax, component, or svhs.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[tholomyes]

...and the jobsites descend upon you in droves...

What, do Monster.com and Dice.com have permanent moderation privileges here?

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[jkerman]

it HAS a FW400 port. it just doesnt do FW800 mode. its a complete mystery why that feature was so hard to add. it certainly wasnt space.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Yaztromo]

Especially when previous generations had this standard. technology is supposed to evolve, not de-volve.

Look, like it or not very few Mac users have ever used the FW800 port. I have both a 12" PowerBook G4 and a PowerMac G5. I have a few FW400 devices, but not a single FW800 device. If I had FW800 on the PowerBook, about the only use it might be put to would be to transfer very large data files between the PB and the PM.

This certainly isn't the first time Apple (or any other laptop maker for that matter) removed ports from their system. I doubt that even 1% of PowerBook owners use their FW800 ports. The majority will live just fine without it in this generation of systems.

Nobody has ever said that the removal of FW800 in the MacBook Pro line is final. It could still make its appearance in the 17" model (or whatever size might replace the 17" model -- as Apple hasn't announced anything yet, I'm not going to assume anything). It may just be a matter of getting Intel to support FW800 in its board controller chipsets used in the new system. Whatever it is, it's hardly the end of the world for most Mac owners.

Yaz.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[ObiWanKenblowme]

...he should just abandon whatever else he is doing because apple removed what was standard?

Should Apple just base their decisions on whether or not it benefits your friend?

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

yes, he has been a mac user since system 6.

he is at the core of who they are trying to please. He is a power user who wants everything to 'just work' but also wants professonal features from his laptop that the macbook 'pro' will not provide.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[GaryPatterson]

You were probably modded 'troll' because you started on about DRM as if it actually mattered. If you had ended on the point about missing features, you'd probably have been modded up because that's a solid point to make.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

yep, i'm an "apple bashing troll", with my ADC premium membership, my dual 2.7 G5, my dual 1.25 g4, my friends who use mac, my school which uses mac, my cousins who use mac. look at my sig for god sakes man before blurting something like that out =/

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Yaztromo]

Do people still use AV outs on a notebook? Every projector I've seen in the last several years had DVI/VGA hookups.

Get your laptop out of the boardroom once in a while, okay? :). I use composite and S-Video out all the time, often to play videos and video blogs I've downloaded off the net on my TV.

Of course, I do so using the Apple mini-DVI to Composite/S-Video adapter. I don't need a million-and-one ports built into my PowerBook.

Yaz.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Anonymous Coward]

and it is not a solid point that apple is handing you a pair of shackles and telling you "theyre nice shiny and new, put em on and you won't ever have to walk again!"

i'm sorry but despite my affinity for the fruit, i will not follow them into this territory, and believe its an important point to make.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

Have you ever heard of a soldier's discression? In short, in war a soldier has the discression to determine for himself if an order is in conformity with the laws of war or not, and to refuse that order if he believes they do violate those laws. He may be tried, he may be demoted or sent to prision, but the point is a soldier who excercises this is standing up for his principles and actually having a spine, and anyone who doesnt stand up for their principles, who cowtows to someone more powerful but obviously wrong, does not deserve respect.

Apple is toting the DRM line when they dont have to. They are a serious player in the personal computing market, if they refused to tow the line they could easily break this cycle by pointing out the anticompetitive nature of DRM, but they dont because somewhere along the line they lost their spine.

I love their software, and own their PPC platform proudly, but i have lost a great deal of respect and any compulsion to buy their new systems because of this move and am voicing that in my commentary on this product.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Anonymous Coward]

And whine about moderation and get modded down to oblivion.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Yaztromo]

it HAS a FW400 port. it just doesnt do FW800 mode. its a complete mystery why that feature was so hard to add. it certainly wasnt space.

You're right -- it's the fact that no controller chipset from Intel supports FW800 that is the reason.

Apple went with Intel-based systems, including the chipset. Intel, so far as I've been able to determine through their website, has FW400 support in their chipsets, but no FW800. Adding a custom FW800 chip to the system would be non-trivial (as it's more than just space to drop in a chip -- you have to be able to connect it to the system bus somehow).

Yaz.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[damsa]

DRM also prevent a future OSX release from being used on an older Mac. But then again Apple has been doing this for a while. My iMac can no longer run Tiger.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[AHumbleOpinion]

and it is not a solid point that apple is handing you a pair of shackles and telling you "theyre nice shiny and new, put em on and you won't ever have to walk again!"

No, it is not a solid point, it is either (1) a troll or (2) simply gross ignorance. The later warrants -1 as well. The DRM doesn't do jack-sh*t when running Mac OS X on a machine that it supports, Intel based Macs. It is there to prevent Mac OS X from running on generic PC hardware. A reasonable thing for Apple to do.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[linguae]

You were probably modded 'troll' because you started on about DRM as if it actually mattered [emphasis mine]

You're only proving plasmacutter's point about Apple zealots and DRM. DRM does matter. It matters because DRM tells us what we can and cannot do with the software/media that we bought. It matters because we, as in the user, have to give up control of our computers and files when we accept DRM. It matters because if nothing changes within the next few years, we're all going to be using locked down computers. I have lusted for Macs since OS X was released years ago, but since the Intel switch and Apple's stance with DRM, I have lost much of my enthusiasm with Macs and Apple in general. I don't want to buy a machine with TPM chips that may be used for much more evil purposes (such as locking down my media). I want to buy a machine that does what I, the customer wants, not what Apple or Microsoft or the **AA wants. Thankfully I can still buy and build some computers that aren't DRM-encumbered.

DRM matters. That's the bottom line. And I, for one, am not going to give up my freedoms, even for "ease of use" and other minor benefits. Nobody should tell me what I can do with my media, or with a certain OS (points at Apple and OS X), but that's why I don't use that stuff anyway; I prefer to be free instead.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Overly Critical Guy]

Funny, people agree with you and mod you up and you're okay with it, people disagree with you and mod you down, and suddenly it's an Apple conspiracy. Get over it.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[linguae]

What makes you think that Apple (or some Mac software development companies) won't extend the use of that TPM chip to do some other things, such as restrict what type of media you can listen to and watch, lock down your documents so that way they can only be opened with a proprietary document reader that costs $$$, prevent you from doing anything that is "unsupported," etc.? The chip is already inside. Why not extend it to its fullest potential? Plus, the RIAA and MPAA comes up with new tricks every minute; Microsoft, Intel, and even AMD have bought into Trusted Computing; and this year has started the development of computers with those chips.

The AC's point is a valid point. Why would anybody who wants the maximum functionality of their computers want to support DRM of any shape or form? I used to love Apple up until the day that Jobs announced the switch to the x86 platform. The switch just shows that Apple isn't the benevolent, "never-do-any-wrong" company that many people thought that it is. Apple is the silent introducer and proponent of DRM. They don't (and won't) immediately start out with draconian restrictions, they'll just implement it slowly, and people won't notice it until everything is DRM'd.

I hate DRM and I hate trusted computing even more. I refuse to purchase any products that support DRM and trusted computing (and, no, I will not pirate them, either). I'll stick with my open hardware and FOSS software, thank you.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[thatguywhoiam]

If you want FW800 get an ExpressCard with it.

AFAIK, you can't. The cardbus slot that is necessary for FW800 is larger than the one provided on the MacBook. (For now - a smaller card will undoubtably come out.)

Do people still use AV outs on a notebook? Every projector I've seen in the last several years had DVI/VGA hookups.

Are you joking? Every living room I've seen in the last several years has been lacking an LCD projector. Frankly if the MacBook didn't do S-Video/Composite out (and it does), that would have been a dealbreaker for me personally.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[ormandj]

That's not the core of who they are trying to please. They're trying to please the people who have no clue what they are doing on a computer, but know they want one. Meaning 99.99% of the population, which in turn means the majority of the CASH. That is what Apple wants, and that is who they are trying to please. If they have to piss off all 10 mac users who NEED FW800 to get the millions who do not, I say good for them. You're silly to think they give a rats ass more about the "power users." "Power user" where I come from means "jackass know-it-all who drives up support costs." Again, it's all about the money, and the money is in the masses, not the niche. Apple is living in the niche, they are trying to attract the masses. iPod, Mac Mini, etc - it's all baby steps. Moving to Intel for higher yield/production capacity, maybe some more consumer trust (they KNOW Intel), again baby steps. They are working on converting the masses, not the FW800 freaks that will still buy a mac for their next computer regardless of whining like stuck pigs about the lack of the port, wanting 1cm size increases, etc.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you're a moron if you think you got modded "Troll" because you pointed out that Apple had removed FW800 and SVGA outputs (woo, surprise! News to everyone but you, and they're mad about it, and taking it out on you! NOT). What you got modded "Troll" for was saying stupid shit like "DRM nullifies all benchmarks," which is a deliberately inflammatory OPINION. It is by no means a fact, nor can it be called "truth" in any conventional sense of the word. It's your contentious phrasing and attitude that got you that mod. It's phrasing that was clearly designed to inflame and annoy. That, dear friend, is called trolling.

In other words, you weren't downmodded for speaking truth, you were downmodded for trolling. See, that's how it works. You troll, you get modded troll, you whine about being modded troll. When you've been here (on Slashdot, on the Earth, and out of your parents' basement) a bit longer, you'll be able to recognize this stuff when you see it, and you'll get better and more subtle at doing it yourself. Till then, you may expect your lame and unsophisticated attempts at annoying others to be met with ridicule and disapproval. I suggest that you don't comment until you get smarter. HAND.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[AHumbleOpinion]

What makes you think that Apple (or some Mac software development companies) won't extend the use of that TPM chip to do some other things, such as restrict what type of media you can listen to and watch, lock down your documents so that way they can only be opened with a proprietary document reader that costs $$$, prevent you from doing anything that is "unsupported," etc.?

What make me think Apple won't do this? Well, mostly it's the fact that I don't have aluminum foil wrapped tightly around my head. ;-)

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[JonathanBoyd]

That's a rather poor analogy. There's nothing illegal about DRM and Fairplay isn't exactly immoral. Neither is Apple a big enough company to boss the record companies around. If they'd said no to DRM, they wouldn't be selling music, simple as that.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

OH keep modding down.. hurts sooo good you enemies of truth.. guess what, i've amassed a great deal of karma to burn pointing out unfair moderation =)

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[DurendalMac]

Utter bullshit! The record industry would LOVE to see all online music downloads die out. Then they wouldn't have to worry about becoming obsolete. Everyone buy CDs again so we can fix the price! Apple doesn't have anywhere near enough clout to bend the record industry to their own will. As it stands, they've got what is probably the least restrictive DRM of any music store with a major label catalogue. The record industry would pull Apple's license in a heartbeat if the DRM was removed from the ITMS tracks.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

yep..

-denying firms and OSS projects the right to adequately compete by restricting my ability to shift music/movies to a format of my choosing is not at all a violation of fair trade and antitrust laws
-treating me like a criminal by denying me my right to govern my own personal property by invading my machine with a super-root presence is not at all immoral

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[DurendalMac]

So I see. However, the sig could just as easily make you out to be a Linux zealot too, ya know.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[shmlco]

"he has 2 lacie super capacity externals which use fw800..."

And two Lacie external drives don't qualify as hideous extensions when attached to a notebook? That combination sounds less than portable...

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[GaryPatterson]

You're only proving plasmacutter's point about Apple zealots and DRM. DRM does matter. It matters because DRM tells us what we can and cannot do with the software/media that we bought. It matters because we, as in the user, have to give up control of our computers and files when we accept DRM. It matters because if nothing changes within the next few years, we're all going to be using locked down computers. I have lusted for Macs since OS X was released years ago, but since the Intel switch and Apple's stance with DRM, I have lost much of my enthusiasm with Macs and Apple in general. I don't want to buy a machine with TPM chips that may be used for much more evil purposes (such as locking down my media). I want to buy a machine that does what I, the customer wants, not what Apple or Microsoft or the **AA wants. Thankfully I can still buy and build some computers that aren't DRM-encumbered.

That's all very nice, but the post I replied to was about why plasmacutter was modded down. It's obvious that it's the bit about the DRM that got him modded down, not his other points which would probably not be modded down if they stood alone.

I think the whole DRM issue is unimportant right now. You think its critical. That's fine - we disagree. But you don't have to go on and on about how you can never buy a Mac now or how Apple somehow abused a trust or whatever.

But the bit that gets my goat is the way you drop the word 'zealot' in there, and then start frothing at the mouth about DRM. Clearly I can accept Apple has faults (and yes - it's not my bestest friend ever!). You seem unable to accept any other points of view about DRM.

There's a zealot here, but it's not I.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

more like people disagree with objective facts, not me, because they are established facts, and instead of modding me "redundant" or "overrated" mod me "troll", as if i'm parading out absurdities.

Their moderation is unfair and an overreactive product of their bias towards apple. It's always my first impulse as a mac user, but i learn to surpress it, they obviously do not.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you feel like your bank treats you like a criminal by keeping your cash locked in a vault, denying you your right to do whatever you want with it? Or when they won't let you withdraw your money without identification?

No? Then shut the fuck up.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[plasmacutter]

I consent to that treatment, and have every right to remove my cash from the bank's control at any time I please.

That is the difference between the bank and DRM.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[poopdeville]

I hope you realize that Apple has successfully negotiated with the RIAA to lessen their Fairplay restrictions. Twice, iirc. They don't care what you do with your machine as long as you keep buying them.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[linguae]

You seem unable to accept any other points of view about DRM./i>

I did my research of DRM many months ago and read various viewpoints about it. After thoroughly researching it, my conclusion is that I don't like DRM at all. My problem with DRM isn't the DRM technologies itself; it's its tie-in with the DMCA and other laws (buying out Congress, extending copyright, etc.), trusted computing, and the content providers' and software developers' push to eliminate fair use.

I'm not a zealot; I am just rationally opposed to DRM. I just get very pissed off when the majority of Apple supporters go from anti-DRM to pro-DRM just because Apple is doing it, as if Apple can never do anything wrong. Or worse, when those same Apple DRM supporters bash Microsoft and the MPAA/RIAA because of DRM. Still, I don't trust DRM and TPM chips at all, and I don't trust anything that cannot be legally cracked and figured out.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Achromatic1978]

downloading straight to that drive

Sign me up for his ISP if he's able to download at faster than 400mbps (minus overhead).

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[MojoStan]

You're right -- it's the fact that no controller chipset from Intel supports FW800 that is the reason.

Does FireWire 800 (800Mbit/s) need to be integrated into the chipset when a 1394a/b controller chip (1 FireWire 800 + 2 FireWire 400 = 1600Mbit/s) can be added to the motherboard using a single PCIe x1 lane (250MByte/s = 2000Mbit/s) from the chipset?

Apple went with Intel-based systems, including the chipset. Intel, so far as I've been able to determine through their website, has FW400 support in their chipsets, but no FW800.

Not "in the chipset," but Intel did add FireWire 800 (1394b) to some of their "mainstream" desktop motherboards. Examples:

• Intel D945BGO motherboard
• Intel D945GPM motherboard

Here's a chipset system diagram for the chipset the MacBook Pro is apparently using:

Intel 945PM Chipset System Diagram

I'll assume Apple currently uses the 4-6 PCIe x1 lanes for AirPort, Gb ethernet, and ExpressCard (2 lanes). If Apple is using the 6-lane version, that should leave two extra x1 lanes for stuff like FireWire.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[R3d M3rcury]

Well, you're sort of right.

FireWire 800 has caught in pretty well for great big/nonportable hard drives. It's been tough to find a small portable hard drive with FireWire 800.

I recently dropped an external hard drive that I used to carry stuff between work and home. Needless to say, it didn't work after I picked it up (hooray for backups). Since my machine at work is an older G4 without FireWire 800 but my computer at home has FireWire 800, I went looking for a hard drive with FireWire 400 & 800 that would be reasonable to carry between work and home.

No dice. The ones that support FireWire 400 & 800 were too big. The ones that were the right size supported FireWire 400 & USB 2.0. Portable hard drives with FireWire 800 were just starting to come on the market when Apple dropped it.

I agree with the poster. When I buy a Professional Macintosh, I don't expect to be nickel and dimed and have to go out and buy a bunch of necessary pieces separately. If I wanted to do that, I'd go buy a Dell at half-price.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[noewun]

i guess those kexts, the existence of fairplay and the itunes store, the expansion of itunes to video, and the AACS standards are not convincing enough?

Well, since none of those have anything to do with the thread topic, namely the possible effect of piracy worries on Apple's open source efforts, no, they're not convincing. There is no evidence whatsoever that there are any DRM hooks in the Darwin kernel. The are .kexts which hook into EFI, but not into the DRM chips. So, all of our examples are about the iTMS, not the OS itself. In fact, all of the things you mentioned are in the OS installed on your, and my, G5. If you can think of a way Apple can sell copyrighted works without some kind of DRM, I'm all ears.

The first Powerbook with Firewire 800 was introduced in April, 2004, late in the machine's life. Now, I'm not happy about the exclusion of Firewire 800 from the MacBooks, but I am going to wait and see what the rest of the Intel-powered line looks like before drawing any real conclusions.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And I, for one, am not going to give up my freedoms, even for "ease of use" and other minor benefits."

Those benefits help the vast majority of computer users. You do realize you represent the vast minority here, right? Most people that own a computer couldn't care less about being able to hack Windows to run on the Mac they just bought so they didn't have to run Windows on it. They don't want to hack EFI, they couldn't tell you what Linux is, and quite frankly are scared to "tool around" anyway, even in the good, inquisitive way so that they at least learn a little about their machine.

They want ease of use, seamless integration with the other apps they use, less viruses, spyware, adware, and complete, one-stop support for hardware and software used, a place to go when you are having issues (to talk to someone... face to face... for free quick fixes, free usage classes, and one-on-one consultation if wanted). Apple has those things. All under one roof which matters a great deal to the vast majority.

I'm sorry, but in the end DRM won't matter enough.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[noewun]

Aw, shit: ignore the part about "the possible effect of piracy worries on Apple's open source efforts". Got my threads all mixed up.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[toddestan]

Actually, the most fun is watching Apple fanboys go from "Firewire rules and USB2 sucks!" to "Who the hell uses Firewire?" because Apple decided not to include FireWire 800 on their newest laptop.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Phroggy]

No dice. The ones that support FireWire 400 & 800 were too big. The ones that were the right size supported FireWire 400 & USB 2.0. Portable hard drives with FireWire 800 were just starting to come on the market when Apple dropped it.

FYI, if a drive supports FW800, it will also work with FW400 if you have an adapter; FW800 is backwards-compatible but uses a different connector (which is a big reason why nobody wants to use it).

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, nobody is forcing you to use iTunes. So there!

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[JonathanBoyd]

denying firms and OSS projects the right to adequately compete by restricting my ability to shift music/movies to a format of my choosing is not at all a violation of fair trade and antitrust laws

DRM for music is not illegal. I certainly haven't seen Apple hauled into court over it. Or anyone else using DRM for music. You do know that you can burn it to CD and re-rip it, don't you? Syure, you lose a bit of quality, but not much. And there's nothing preventing you from moving music encoded yourself. OSS projects ahve no right to be able to play music Apple sells through the iTMS.

treating me like a criminal

Are you posting from a jail cell?/p>

by denying me my right to govern my own personal property by invading my machine with a super-root presence is not at all immoral

You confuse Apple with Sony.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[myspys]

If you want FW800 get an ExpressCard with it.

sure
if you prove to me that one exists!

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[topham]

Firewire400 is still faster than USB 2 when benchmarked for file access.

I have a couple of drives hooked up to my G5 with Firewire(400). Th drives have USB2 interfaces as well.

I don't see the big deal about Firewire800. Unless you're running Firewire in a RAID configuration I doubt the difference is enough to warrant it for most users.

As for Firewire800 on a laptop... huh? that's what, 2% of users? And this MacBook Pro isn't even the top of the line product model... ok, it is for the moment, but we all know Apple will be releasing a higher end model as this was targeted at their mid-range power-user.

Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.

[FxChiP]

Apple has to at least maintain some image of trying to do something against the people who can break DRM, or the RIAA will pull the licensing. Which would be bad for all involved.

I hate DRM, don't get me wrong; I really, really want to share quite a few of my songs that I purchased legally from iTunes with friends. But the iTunes Music Store is perfectly reasonable in every other way; $.99 is essentially what you pay per song on a CD anyway (though some are worth considerably less), and I've found songs that I know I would not be able to find anywhere else except at Eide's CD music store (thank God for that place, I love it). If Apple could possibly charge a premium (say two quarters or so) to get an unmanaged, unrestricted copy of the song, I get the feeling they'd make a lot more money.

I know I'd buy it.

Slashdotted while still red

[winkydink]

Before the aricle even went live, the site was slashdotted. I guess the geek patrol got ambushed.

Maybe they should benchmark web servers next.

Re:Slashdotted while still red

[Chrismith]

Maybe they should benchmark web servers next.

They're already doing it. What better stress test than a slashdotting? In a week we'll see another article about which servers exploded and killed half the IT department, and which merely melted and had to be replaced.

Re:Slashdotted while still red

[rbannon]

They're not running Mac OS X. Check it out for yourself.

Free iPod?

Proxy for MC

[benthalus]

I wonder if standing between the bank and auction house in Orgrimmar would be a good proxy for Molten Core combat, as this test can be done much easier, and within seconds of installing WoW on a MacBook (such as one that happens to be on display in a store). And I agree with waiting for the revised models to come out, Apple computers seems to have funny things happen when they are the first edition.

Re:Proxy for MC

[mothoc]

I think standing between the bank and auction house in Ironforge would be a bit more of a trying test. Alliance tends to be more... frivolous with their time there. Mages seem to almost always have multiple blizzard spells going, paladins doing their consecrate thing. Dozens of Night Elfs showing of their mounts (or just dancing to annoy people).

Either way, though, once you get the game installed on the store machine (which will take a half-hour or so anyway), you have to download the monstrous 1.0-1.9 patch (approximately 325MB), and then each of the incremental 1.9.x patches. All told, you''ll have to find a way to distract the sales persons for around 2 hours.

You should go and do this on a Saturday around noon. They'll never notice.

Re:Proxy for MC

[spectral]

or just bring in your own ipod with WoW installed to it and slap it in the dock they already provide for you

Re:Proxy for MC

[Anonymous Coward]

Put the line
set M2Faster "1"
in the config.wtf file, see what that does. Might improve it.

The only problem with WoW lag is if you don't have enough memory for the texture/model cache; then you get swapping, and that's bad.

The Macbook Pro shouldn't have a problem with WoW, at all, CmdrTaco. I hear it works well.

And yeah, use Ironforge, in the biggest realm you can. It'll probably be busier.

Hosted on a G4?

[Critter92]

Apparently Geekpatrol is hosted on a G4 Powerbook. Were it hosted on a Intellitosh it would have survived a bit longer.

Re:Hosted on a G4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot Effect at its' best.

Re:Hosted on a G4?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Congratulations, you just invented a new way to misuse the apostrophe.

Re:Hosted on a G4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations, you just invented a new way to misuse the apostrophe.

Thanks'

Re:Hosted on a G4?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this? "You're still an ass"

Re:Hosted on a G4?

[AnalystX]

Everything is bound to fail on G4. Oh, you mean the Apple hardware and not the television network.

Re:Hosted on a G4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either way, it's still true.

</flamebait> :)

Re:Hosted on a G4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Were it hosted on a Intellitosh

Dumbest. Name. Ever.

I was going to buy a Mac

[bobcat7677]

This article might have pushed me over the edge. But since the server was slashdotted before it even it that main page I never got the chance. Guess I'll have to stick with WinTel hardware now.

Re:I was going to buy a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, another "Slashdotted server, the hardware must be crap" joke! I mean it was old the three billionth time I heard it, yeah, but you've breathed new life into an old classic!

And the captcha word is "reject." How appropriate.

Re:I was going to buy a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

forget buying a Mac, just install OSX on your Dell and save few hundred bucks.
1) buy a dell
2) install OSx86
3) profit!

Re:I was going to buy a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

however Dells are more expensive

http://www.systemshootouts.org/

Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see Apple has finally bought into the "MHz Myth."

Re:Who cares?

[chrismcdirty]

1.83GHz, at a time when Pentium4 processors run somewhere close to 3.80GHz. I think the MHz myth is close to buried. The new myth has to do with power consumption!

Re:Who cares?

[damsa]

Isn't it dual core so its like running two 1.83GHz processors at once? I know you can't add processor amounts to get 3.7.

Re:Who cares?

[chrismcdirty]

Yes, but you must also consider that the newer lines of Intel chips, the single core ones, are also running at lower clock speeds. At least the mobile chips are. I really don't pay much attention to Intel desktop.

L2BWL

[MattHawk]

Molten Core? L2BWL, Noob.

(No, while I play WoW, I'm not actually a raider, but if Blizzard is allowed to condescendingly put L2BWL in a video they distribute about it, I can condescendingly put it in a slashdot post ;) )

Re:L2BWL

[TheRealCoreyHaim]

Actually, your statement does have some validity. FPS in the drake filled AoE room would be a much better benchmark than at any part of MC. :)

comparison against the G4?

[slackaddict]

I thought the new cpu was a G5 replacement.

Re:comparison against the G4?

[Wyatt Earp]

The G5 was never put in a laptop. Since this is a Laptop vs. Laptop shootout, they went with the G4.

Re:comparison against the G4?

[MBCook]

Well, yes the CPU is a G5 replacement in that they used it instead of the G5, and will probably replace the G5 machines with Core Duo machines (as they did with the iMac).

However, there has never been a G5 Powerbook. They are comparing this to the fastest powerbook that was on the market (1.67 GHz or so) because that's what everyone wants to know. Is it faster than the machine it replaced or not.

From the benchmarks I've seen, the answer is an emphatic yes.

Re:comparison against the G4?

[mattkime]

Its a replacement for the G5 in that its the G4's successor - at least in notebooks.

For PowerMac G5 users, no way. The intel is a 32-bit chip which would likely limit me to 2GB of ram. I have 3.5GB in my powermac and wouldn't mind a bit more.

You need the DuoCore to beat the G5. A single core wouldn't touch it.

Re:comparison against the G4?

[MojoStan]

For PowerMac G5 users, no way. The intel is a 32-bit chip which would likely limit me to 2GB of ram.

Just a nitpick: Core Duo's 32-bitness doesn't limit you to 2GB of RAM. Without getting technical:

2^32 = 4,294,967,296

Intel's 945 chipset for Core Duo (which the MacBook Pro and iMac uses) supports up to 4GB.

The PowerMac will undoubtedly wait for the 64-bit Conroe desktop processors or Woodcrest workstation/server processors, which will arrive in July at the earliest.

Re:comparison against the G4?

[Anonymous Coward]

was just gonna say that! Also, Apple's G5 models (64 bit single or dual proc) are actually limited to 4 GB of RAM, due to the way OS X handes addressing!!!!
While you COULD in principle install and address more RAM, you would need to use a third-party OS, such as linux, etc.

Re:comparison against the G4?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. I know Power Macs can do at least 8 GB RAM. What are you smoking?

Why just benched against another Mac?

[Anubis333]

Given that many of the same apps run on both Mac and PC platforms, why don't more people bench Mac vs. PC? I mean we are even talking about virtually the same architecture, the mac is now just another OS running on x86 hardware like Linux et al. I know it's interesting to see how the latest Mac stacks up against last years model, but how bout someone bench the latest Mac against it's contemporaries? The reason this isn't often done is because they usually get thrashed pretty bad, and feathers get ruffled (see: Adobe "PC Preferred" ad campaign, or Apple's SPEC processor benchmarks that were rejected because they were not completely legit). Windows always gets put against Linux, but Mac never seems to get benched against other platforms, and it is much, much closer to PC, as both platforms run many of the same apps. Just my two pennies...

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[idobi]

Because if you benchmark commonly used apps now, it'd be pointless. Windows would win because native versions of Photoshop and a dozen other apps important to mac users are not yet available.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[aftk2]

I agree with you, and as a Mac user, this is kind of frustrating (the occasional disparity between Mac & Windows versions of the same program). However, you might be interested in this: Ableton Live 5.2 Benchmarks. It benchmarks multiple versions of the program, on Windows and OS X with different processors.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[tktk]

These early benchmarks are primarily for Apple fans who want an excuse to buy a new Powerbook. And also those who are interested in gauging the Rosetta performance hit.

I'm sure future benchmarks will pit WinXP + app vs. Mac OS X + app.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Given that many of the same apps run on both Mac and PC platforms, why don't more people bench Mac vs. PC? I mean we are even talking about virtually the same architecture, the mac is now just another OS running on x86 hardware like Linux et al.

Historically it is because there has not been "equivalent" hardware. There have been benchmarks and they have been a mixed bag, and no one knows what is because of hardware, what is because of software, and what is because of the OS.

Now that Intel macs are starting to come out, we can mostly eliminate one of those three variables, the hardware. More-so when people get Windows running on mac hardware or vice versus. Right now though, what are you going to benchmark? It is hard to find hardware close to an intel imac and the macbooks aren't shipping yet. And most of the software anyone is interested in is still running in emulation mode on OS X for intel. Just wait six months and we will be able to compare some native apps on different platforms and the same hardware. This will be very useful for general performance and for finding bottlenecks in OS's and in particular software.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[damsa]

More likely it will be Vista vs OsX app. Ah who am I kidding. Insert meme here.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[cmacb]

"Because if you benchmark commonly used apps now, it'd be pointless."

As pointless as benchmarking the new machine against something they don't sell any more?

The point in benchmarking is usually to decide which machine to buy. Now that Apple is running Intel, the question for many people is going to be reduced to: "Which OS runs more applications I want to use?" Non-Apple Duo laptops are already hitting the market and they will get feature and speed upgrades a lot faster than Apple is used to issuing them.

The real reason for this switch hasn't been made public, which I say because the reasons that have been given don't hold water, and I give Apple the benefit of doubt that there IS actually a reason that holds water. So fa, from what I've read, Dvorak has as good an expanation as anyone. Apple ultimately giving up on software at least makes SOME sense, as much as I detest it.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point in benchmarking is usually to decide which machine to buy.

well, the point here is to see how much marketing made it into Apple's inital improvement claims. not to say that benchmarking against a pc wouldnt be interesting but to claim these benchmarks are without point is a bit far fetched.

Now that Apple is running Intel, the question for many people is going to be reduced to: "Which OS runs more applications I want to use?" Non-Apple Duo laptops are already hitting the market and they will get feature and speed upgrades a lot faster than Apple is used to issuing them.

what on earth are you talking about? practically noone ever bought apple because it was PowerPC; they bought them because they ran OS X and came in pretty boxes. none of that changed so why would those people suddenly start caring that windows has more applications? it's always had more applications, nothing new there at all.

The real reason for this switch hasn't been made public, which I say because the reasons that have been given don't hold water, and I give Apple the benefit of doubt that there IS actually a reason that holds water.

I take it you have access to information on intels future roadmap that basically noone else has? ignoring the fact that the current intel machines already have better performance per watt... the "public reason for the switch"... perhaps if they bring out an ibook with the shitty performance of a G4 powerbook (as I'm typing this on now) but double the battery life you'd be happy?

So fa, from what I've read, Dvorak has as good an expanation as anyone.

why couldnt you have put that at the start? if youd put "i believe dvorak", right at the start, in bold, i could have stopped reading your delusional rantings right there

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if you benchmark commonly used apps now, it'd be pointless. Windows would win because native versions of Photoshop and a dozen other apps important to mac users are not yet available.

In the past, that hasn't kept apple from benchmarking Altivec-optimized (often by Apple employees) applications against poorly-optimized Windows apps. It was pointless then and now.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[FuturePastNow]

Out of curiosity, I tried running OS X x86 on my desktop (don't yell at me! I own a Mac laptop and I'm going to buy a new one soon.). My PC is mostly Intel hardware; it was a network driver and a video driver away from being fully functional under OS X. Conveniently, I ran the exact same benchmark TFA mentions.

The first two, and indeed most of the benchmarks, were very close:

Windows- cpu (float) mandelbrot (sqrt) 1 thread 872.91 megaflops
OS X- cpu (float) mandelbrot (sqrt) 1 thread 890.36 megaflops

Three of the seventeen benchmarks weren't very close, but that's what I get for using beta software on unsopported hardware:

Windows- cpu (float) mandelbrot (sqrt) 4 threads 1.10 gigaflops
OS X- cpu (float) mandelbrot (sqrt) 4 threads 598.65 megaflops

Windows- cpu (integer) blowfish (cache) 1 thread 70.02 megabytes/sec
OS X- cpu (integer) blowfish (cache) 1 thread 672.46 megabytes/sec

Windows- memory (stdlib) fill 1 thread 1.60 gigabytes/sec
OS X- memory (stdlib) fill 1 thread 3.26 gigabytes/sec

Unfortunately, the lameness filter won't let me copy-and-paste the whole thing here, so you'll have to take my word for it that all the rest of the benchmarks are like the first one, very close but not exactly the same. So, comparing Apples to... er, non-Apples, it looks to me like there isn't much difference.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[aristotle-dude]

Windows- cpu (float) mandelbrot (sqrt) 4 threads 1.10 gigaflops
OS X- cpu (float) mandelbrot (sqrt) 4 threads 598.65 megaflops

Windows- cpu (integer) blowfish (cache) 1 thread 70.02 megabytes/sec
OS X- cpu (integer) blowfish (cache) 1 thread 672.46 megabytes/sec

Windows- memory (stdlib) fill 1 thread 1.60 gigabytes/sec
OS X- memory (stdlib) fill 1 thread 3.26 gigabytes/sec

I think the sqrt test score has something to do with unoptimized/buggy math routines in your unofficial version of OS X. But look at the blowfish test. I would consider a 9.6 times greater throughput to be significant. I also consider a 2 times speed difference on the memory test to be significant as well.

This could spell doom for Windows Photoshop users once a native version of Photoshop comes out for OS X Intel.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[dal20402]

which I say because the reasons that have been given don't hold water

How exactly doesn't "IBM won't build a mobile G5, Freescale won't push our G4 past 1.67 GHz on a 167 MHz FSB, and so our laptops and mini are TOO DAMN SLOW" hold water?

My laptop is a 1.5 GHz PB G4. I love using it because the design and ergonomics are perfect. But it's embarrassingly, painfully slow compared with any higher-end Windows book from the last year or so. Once more apps are native and the 64-bit mobile processor (Merom) is here I'll be thrilled to switch.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree as well on this. I am waiting for benchmarks of the Macbook Pro vs. a comparable AMD Turion laptop or Intel Centrion Laptop running either Windows or Linux, I don't really care. I want to know how this thing compares and if it's really even worth getting one for a small performance laptop.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[cmacb]

"My laptop is a 1.5 GHz PB G4. I love using it because the design and ergonomics are perfect. But it's embarrassingly, painfully slow compared with any higher-end Windows book from the last year or so. Once more apps are native and the 64-bit mobile processor (Merom) is here I'll be thrilled to switch."

I like my 1.5 Ghz PB G4 too. But I didn't buy it because it was the fastest laptop at the time (it wasn't). In fact I didn't even care that much that it was a laptop. I just wanted something that was quiet. it still does the job for me, and if Apple had simply gone to current G4s and upped bus and memory speeds people would be happy with them too. But guess what: If I run Linux on my PB it is blindingly fast. My much older iBook runs Linux faster than the PB runs OS X. As much as I like the look and feel of OS X it is in fact the OS that is the pig. Faster hardware (of any kind) simply makes it seem less of a pig.

My next laptop (now that Apple has taken this path) will probably be either an AMD 64 or one of their new dual processor systems. Both AMD technologies are equal or superior to equivalents from Intel (which has frequently failed to meet their "roadmap" promises lately). Look at the stock charts and you will see that both Apple and Intel are looking for PR stunts to revive their suddenly flat performance (in the market). I'd say the stock analysts could teach the Slashdot and Macrumors crowd a thing or two about what is coming up on these companies "roadmaps".

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same apps are often benchmarked across platforms. Take this example from PC magazine when the G5 was released: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1274230,00.as p

Adobe Photoshop

At these larger image sizes, although the Wintel test times were quite good, both the G4 and G5 computers proved more adept at distort functions like wave and pinch. Moreover, on the Windows system, loading the controls often took a minute or more. If these times are added back to the actual test times, both Macintosh computers would have clearly outperformed the Windows-based computer.

Selective benchmarking, naturally. Kindly disregard the fact that the Windows interface is so much slower. That won't be reported in the official results.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[supabeast!]

"Given that many of the same apps run on both Mac and PC platforms, why don't more people bench Mac vs. PC?"

Because most Mac users don't buy Macs for the hardware. There may have been a few in the last three years who picked up a G5 just to have gobs of RAM to use for crazy HD video editing stuff, but most Mac users run Apple for the OS, and don't really care if the Apple systems are a little slower.

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[tverbeek]

native versions of Photoshop and a dozen other apps important to mac users are not yet available.

This is why I'm far more interested in benchmarks that would compare performance of the MacBook with a PowerBook using actual in-the-flesh applications. Will a dual-2GHz MacBook run an x86-compiled app faster than a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 runs the PPC-compiled version? Well, duh. But what about an (apologies) apples-to-apples comparison of Photoshop CS2 on both 'Books? Which would I rather use while waiting for the Intel-native Photoshop CS3 to ship?

Re:Why just benched against another Mac?

[cmacb]

PS:

The other thing that I think the Apple marketing people have figured out is that Apple no longer has a monopoly on upscale "fashion statement" laptops. Consider these for example:

http://news.com.com/2300-1044_3-6042908-3.html?tag =ne.gall.pg

Long ago Apple actually MADE computer systems, but economics drove them to spec them out to China (mainland, Taiwan, Singapore, etc). Those same economics are squeezing them out of the design business as well, and ultimately (or maybe already) Apples involvement will be no more than as a shopper for what is available wholesale over there, and THAT, my fellow Apple loving friends is what is more behind this move than anything else. At any given time there are hundreds of ready made designs (almost exclusively Intel compatible of course) available that the manufactures will customize only insofar as the external appearance (and only then to a limited extent).

Apple wants to "simplify" its profit making to nothing more than a commissioned sales rep with their own logo. Bye bye firewire or anything else that makes an Apple computer truly unique.

Apple is positioning itself as three more and more independent profit centers: hardware, OS and related software, iTunes (media). As far as I know, each leg of this stool is profitable. But each leg also has foreseeable problems that could make them money losers.

Clearly they are preparing themselves to jettison whichever profit center goes negative first. They have given up on the synergistic effects of the Apple product suite, and are now quite happy to have iTunes run on Windows, OS X to run on non-Apple equipment or Windows run on Apple equipment. This flexibility is a good thing in a way, but can also be a very bad thing which can get rapidly worse as this synergy breaks down.

I just ordered a gig of memory for my PB 1.5 G. This will be my computer for everyday use for another few years I expect. When Apple support for the PowerPC starts to get weak (which I'm afraid could happen really quickly as it becomes a second class citizen) I'll switch over to Linux and get an immediate supercharged effect. In the mean time I'll probably get a fairly fast AMD desktop system for under 1K for gaming, and by the time I'm in the market for another notebook, I'll have my choice of models in fine Corinthian leather graphite, or for all I know, nano-particles.

Lame

[Eightyford]

No altivec. Less space than a Dell. Lame.

Re:Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who weren't around in 2001: a piece of /. history

Re:Lame

[Eightyford]

Troll? Too soon to bring back that cliche, huh. Maybe we need an "Unfunny" mod.

Re:Lame

[Trillan]

Well, it brought a smile to my face at least.

FPS in WOW

[Shishak]

I had a PowerBook G4 1Ghz, 1Gig RAM (all graphics set to lowest setting) and would get insane lag in Ironforge around the AH. I couldn't run my epic horse through that area without ending up in the ditch. I now have a MacBookPro, 2.0 Ghz, 2 Gigs RAM and can run around in IF with 0, none, NADA lag and 30-35 FPS. I have all options turned on and the highest resolution the laptop screen can handle. Crusing around WSG is fun as I don't get lagged to death

The MacBookPro is insanely fast. I'm not a big fan of the magnetic power cord, it seems to fall out too often with just a switch in body position. It is quite a bit hotter on my lap and I have had some random crashes while in WoW. Complete computer lock up, power down, restart to get it working again. (CTRL-ALT+Power)

I haven't gone into MC yet but will hopefully go tonight, we are killing domo so that should be some tasty lag.

All in all, I'm extremely happy with my MacBookPro

Re:FPS in WOW

[xenocide2]

Call it a guess, but now that the auction houses are linked, there's less reasons for everyone to hang out at iron forge all day. Of course, Iron Forge is also pretty heavy on the geometry, but the massive amount of player movement may have contributed to that old lag.

Re:FPS in WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

Domo on a Thursday? Yuck. Thursdays are nasty enough without having to crowd control 8 adds.

Re:FPS in WOW

[thatguywhoiam]

I had a PowerBook G4 1Ghz, 1Gig RAM (all graphics set to lowest setting) and would get insane lag in Ironforge around the AH. I couldn't run my epic horse through that area without ending up in the ditch. I now have a MacBookPro, 2.0 Ghz, 2 Gigs RAM and can run around in IF with 0, none, NADA lag and 30-35 FPS. I have all options turned on and the highest resolution the laptop screen can handle. Crusing around WSG is fun as I don't get lagged to death

I'm sure the new MacBook helps - lucky bastard - but for WoW, the issue is probably a network one. If I pop open CPU and bandwidth monitors on my dual G5 while playing WoW (windowed), the CPUs are only hitting 50-65%, and the packets are numerous but small. WoW is just not that intensive a game. I would guess that a combination of non-bus-chocked laptop (MacBook - the G4 laptop's biggest weakness was that weak ass bus), and improvements to both WoW's client and backend infrastructure (they've added dozens of new servers).

Re:FPS in WOW

[bnenning]

If I pop open CPU and bandwidth monitors on my dual G5 while playing WoW (windowed), the CPUs are only hitting 50-65%

Is WoW multithreaded? Most games aren't, and that would indicate that it's effectively taking 100% of 1 CPU.

Re:FPS in WOW

[Mike Peel]

What's the battery life of the MacBook Pro like? I've yet to hear anything but speculation there so far...

Re:FPS in WOW

[the_maddman]

Ding ding ding!!! We have a winner!! You'd get even better performance if you can force WoW to run on a single CPU instead of hopping back and forth.

Re:FPS in WOW

[supabeast!]

Blizzard should really release a "jam packed ironforge auction house" benchmarking tool. It's been over a year since WoW came out, and that place is STILL the most trying thing any game can throw at a computer.

Re:FPS in WOW

[Evro]

Nice offhand comment about the "epic horse."

Re:FPS in WOW

[dan the person]

Wow!

You got a machine with 200% the amount of ram as your old one.
200% as many processors
where both processors run at 200% the speed
and with a no doubt vastly faster graphics chip, with more and faster graphics ram ( can't give an exact figure, as a 1Ghz Powerbook could refer to various different models )

and it's faster!

Re:FPS in WOW

[thatguywhoiam]

Is WoW multithreaded? Most games aren't, and that would indicate that it's effectively taking 100% of 1 CPU.

They answered this on the Mac forum on worldofwarcraft.com - although I haven't checked lately. According to Blizzard the Mac client is multithreaded, but in a shallow implementation. Basically it splits the video tasks to one CPU and audio/networking to another. So the answer is yes, although only in the most basic way.

Re:FPS in WOW

[prichardson]

A Brief Note:

Lag refers to network latency. Symptoms include everyone walking in straight lines, monsters not attacking you, and things like that.

Slowdown refers to the things you describe. This is when your computer just isn't beefy enough to render all those cute little triangles. Symptoms are a severe drop in framerate.

Please! Don't use incorrect terminology. It dilutes our language, and we all have to live with it.

Re:FPS in WOW

[Anthracks]

In off hours, yes, IF is much better than it used to be (and conversely, Stormwind is worse than it used to be). But at peak time, going anywhere near the auction house in either city is a total slideshow on my system. The main benefit I've seen is that even at peak time, the AH itself is more responsive. It used to take over 5 minutes on my server between the time you clicked "search" and when a list of items returned on some nights, now it's down to about 15-20 seconds at worst.

Molten Core? BWL is worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see FPS of a typical fight through the supression room in Blackwing Lair.

Apple innovation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple and innovation?

Apple is regarded by its supporters to be an innovative and forward looking company. They claim Apple invented most things from the GUI to Desktop publishing. Almost always the supporters make the innovation claims with restrictions like "in the field of personal computing", "over the entire product line", "affordable solution" or "as a standard feature". They also like to blur your vision when equaling "popularized" and "introducing" with "inventing". Apple supporters always maximizes the importance of Apples involvement in an innovation (even if it's very slim) and at the same time downplay any other companies involvement.

Case in point "USB":
When the supporters speak about how innovative Apple is they talk about how iMac was the first computer utilizing USB. This is arguable, but if you tell them they counterattack with something like "over the entire product line". And now they are correct. In reality Apple had absolutely nothing to do with the technical creation of USB. Intel invented USB as an answer to Apples pay-per-port licensing of firewire. Apple was one of the first companies to use USB but strictly (or not so strictly) speaking that isn't innovation. They just used an of the shelf product that where developed on the PC market.

The same can be said for a lot of products Apple supporters claim Apple invented, of course with "additional restrictions" (see above). Some of these innovations are: Audio, SCSI, Ethernet, long file names and Floppy drives. In reality Apple invented none of those products.

A nice place for looking at these "innovations" is an older wikipedia page describing the Macintosh on which of course Mac users gone totally mad in describing the Macintosh as a very innovative platform. Almost all of claimed innovations are in fact just off the shelf parts licensed from other companies or already old products used in a slightly different manner by Apple. The wikipedia page has since been revised and is now more in line with what Macintosh actually brought to the table of computing.

It is however true that Apple are fast at picking up new technologies invented outside Apple and as a result the Macintosh is a faster evolving platform than the PC. This is a design decision made by Apple to keep the Macintosh computer interesting and "fresh". This however has some lowdowns. Every five year or so the Macintosh developers and users have to adapt to a completely new platform or a new operation system (68k->PPC, legacy Mac OS->OS X, PPC->x86, soon x86->x86-64). In the PC world this would be suicide, too much money are tied up in legacy technologies. Macintosh are mostly used by home users and small companies who don't need a homogenous environment, or have so few computers and programs they can invest in new technology every so often. The PC platform is used by everybody, small and large. It would be almost impossible to "twist and turn" the Apple way. Intel tried to introduce Itanuium for 64bit computing but in the end had to back down to a backward compatible x86 solution.

Conclusion:
All things considered, when the dust has settled. After decades of innovation and jumping between CPU families and platforms the Macintosh has transformed into nothing less than an ordinary PC, at least in hardware and mostly in software. Linux x86 booted within a month of the x86 Macintosh release using the standard EFI bootloader and Gentoo Linux distribution. Windows vista will probably boot out of the box on the Macintosh without Microsoft putting any effort in testing on the platform. On all important fronts the innovation by Apple has been nothing short of a straight copy of the PC platform. O

Damn

[wackymacs]

Damn! I thought the MacBook Pro was going to be slower than the PowerBook G4...

That's all fine and good, BUT...

[Rude Turnip]

Can anyone confirm if it will also run Windows XP? If I can use this to run Windows at work and OS X at home, I'll be all over one of these machines like hot grits on Natalie Portman.

Re:That's all fine and good, BUT...

[johndesmarais]

Simple answer: No. Complex answer: Possibly, but not worth the effort involved in making it work. Mac's use EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) rather than a BIOS. Windows XP requires a BIOS. Windows Vista (XP's successor), in theory at least, may run on an Intel Mac; and Apple says it won't do anything to prevent folks from doing so.

Re:That's all fine and good, BUT...

[Paradise Pete]

Can anyone confirm if it will also run Windows XP?

Apparently not, at least not yet. But since it would make them extraordinarily more marketable to people currently running Windows that I can't imagine it not happening eventually.

Re:That's all fine and good, BUT...

[Stormwatch]

You don't have to use Windows to use Windows apps. You just need a compatibility layer - look into Wine.

Re:That's all fine and good, BUT...

[willy_me]

QEMU will allow you to run Windows on MacOSX inside a "virtual" computer. Granted, it's not as fast as running Windows natively but when using the QEMU Accellerator it is reported to only suffer a 1-2x speed slowdown.

Check out the QEMU webpage here
A nice GUI interface for OSX is here
And another GUI interface is here

Considering that the majority of the time one will be able to run native OSX apps, the QEMU solution looks pretty good.

Willy

Re:That's all fine and good, BUT...

[nickos]

But some (all?) EFI implementations can emulate a BIOS (like the Gateway Media Center) so this may be a moot point...

Re:That's all fine and good, BUT...

[tigersha]

The EFI implementation from apple does not emulate the BIOS

Media PCs

[brunes69]

I know lots of people (including me) who routinely plug their laptop into the TV to watch a movie they just downloaded.

Re:Media PCs

[DurendalMac]

DVI/VGA -> RCA/Svideo adapters are plentiful and pretty cheap.

Impressive

[wlvdc]

Those benchmarks are impressive, but I agree, an MC or ZF raid would be a better test.
Now we only need better Blizz performance, at least in Europe. 182ms and rising...

Re:Impressive

[lowmagnet]

You mean ZG? ZF isn't that taxing at all.

I'm waiting for rev2 also...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd buy a macbook now (would be a nice upgrade for my 1.25 ghZ mac with 512mb ram) but it seems all too likely that the next rev will include legacy bios support, opening the door for windows and linux. Ommitting it from rev1 was a big miss IMO.

Re:I'm waiting for rev2 also...

[ickoonite]

...it seems all too likely that the next rev will include legacy bios support...

Really? Where'd you hear that? Because that would make a lot of sense, building a totally new legacy-free laptop just like Macs have been for years (ADB excepted :P) and then going back for Rev B and putting the legacy crap in. Yeah, that really makes sense.

Idiot.

iqu :|

Re:I'm waiting for rev2 also...

[rthille]

I can almost guarantee you that new intel macs will not support legacy bios. EFI is the new 'bios', and macs will never bother to support the old cruft.

Re:I'm waiting for rev2 also...

[Trillan]

"All too likely"? How about "not likely at all"?

Re:I'm waiting for rev2 also...

[ne0n]

1) add useless BIOS to clutter up the nice legacy-free design
2) ???
3) Profit!

:p

Re:I'm waiting for rev2 also...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there is profit. Windows and Linux compatibility is guaranteed to draw enough users to make it worth the minimal development costs. Intel already says that the motherboard design includes an optional module for bios.

I'd like to see WoW on there.

[xutopia]

Just to see how well it would run... Cause honestly it's the only thing worth benchmarking for me.

Re:Proxy for MC - Missing Bits

[Nom du Keyboard]

I agree with waiting for the revised models to come out, Apple computers seems to have funny things happen when they are the first edition.

You mean like missing half their bits?

Yonah is a 32-bit Intel processor. No 64-bit extensions.

No but it runs Linux

[Foofoobar]

A couple people already installed a version of Linux and got it working with a command line (No X Windows). Thought this was posted here a couple days ago. Don't you read Slashdot every 2 minutes like the rest of us?

battery life

[Tibor the Hun]

anyone have any numbers on battery life?
3 hours? 5? DVD playing? airport on/off?
because, that's, you know kinda important when it comes to laptops...

Re:battery life

[1336.5]

my friend just got his yesterday and he gets 3.5 hours with wireless on, near 5 with it off.

not too bad but it needs 5 with wireless.

Taco! Enough with the Molten Core references!

[thatguywhoiam]

Seems like (nearly) every time a Mac/Intel story pops up, CmdrTaco chimes in with some comment on WoW/Molten Core.

Dear Apple: Slashdot needs to review 5 of these indefinitely. Thank you XOXO ;) Seriously, i'm waiting for someone to give good benchmarks on these- especially testing for Warcraft. Now that it has a new Universal Binary I can't wait to see how it holds up against a modern windows machine.

'Not only did the new iMac wipe the floor with the old model in their tests, but using MacWorld's own test methodology would allow MacSpeedZone to conclude that the new Intel iMac is almost as fast as a PowerMac Quad G5.' I see only one way to solve this: Give me one. I'll run WoW on it, and decide.

I'm still waiting for the most important benchmark: frames per second in molten core combat.

We get it. You use your Mac for WoW.

Re:Taco! Enough with the Molten Core references!

[Anonymous Coward]

Beats doing any editing on /., doesn't it?

Re:Taco! Enough with the Molten Core references!

[mkiwi]

Seems like (nearly) every time a Mac/Intel story pops up, CmdrTaco chimes in with some comment on WoW/Molten Core.

Yup, Taco is definately addicted to that game. Once I played WoW, but being a Level 60 Restoration Druid will wear you out :( Being a healer is hard work and there's lots of it that needs to be done. There's always someone who needed a healer at 3 o'clock in the morning even after I had started playing at 7am the previous morning. I have a ludicriously fast system and never experienced lag in WoW, even when faced with pvp at ogrimmar. I have a PowerMac G5 Dual 2.0Ghz (original) with a LOT of RAM and I have Ultra320 SCSI hard disks that go upwards of 270MB/s (that's MB, not Mb).

What I'm trying to get at is that processor is not the entire machine. The MacBook Pro has a significantly better graphics card than its predecessor as well as a faster hard drive and processor. We focus so much on the processor speed that sometimes it blinds us to the other things that effect a computer's performance. All in all, the MacBook Pro seems to be a great upgrade, especially when Adobe and Microsoft come out with Universal Applications. I'd get one if I hadn't pimped out my PowerMac G5 so much T.t <-- crying face.

Re:Taco! Enough with the Molten Core references!

[SilentChris]

Next he's going to write a long rant saying how upset, emotionally disturbed, and just plain pissed he is that they changed the Powerbook's name.

Re:Taco! Enough with the Molten Core references!

[thatguywhoiam]

All in all, the MacBook Pro seems to be a great upgrade, especially when Adobe and Microsoft come out with Universal Applications. I'd get one if I hadn't pimped out my PowerMac G5 so much T.t crying face.

I wouldn't sweat it - those Adobe apps will not show up till 2007.

Re:Taco! Enough with the Molten Core references!

[thatguywhoiam]

Next he's going to write a long rant saying how upset, emotionally disturbed, and just plain pissed he is that they changed the Powerbook's name.

No kidding. Its so unfair. Especially when Apple led him to believe that the machine was called PowerBook for 15 years before the pulled the psychic rug out from under him. I don't know how he gets up in the morning.

Re:Proxy for MC - Missing Bits

[DA-MAN]

You mean like missing half their bits?

No, the G4 is a 32-bit processor as well. Remember Apple never released a G5 laptop, and we are talking about laptops here. Had this been about the G5 iMac vs. the Intel iMac, you probably would have had a point though . . .

WoW...

[netkid91]

And here come the WoW nerds, which account for most of the /. readers(not me, I play EQ) saying WoW is the TRUE benchmark. Seriously, EQ for OS X and WoW for OS X seem like the best benchmarks to me, go for it, but I don't care.

FireWire 800 Was Stupid

[ImaNihilist]

There is something that some of you forget about FW800. FireWire 800 was a mistake to begin with. There is no FireWire chipset that I know of that sits on the PCIe bus. That means, that if FW800 is on the PCI bus, it almost completely saturates the entire bus ITSELF. It was pointless. Until someone comes out with a FW controller that sits on the PCIe bus, FW800 is best left to something like ExressCard 54.

In theory, a FW 800 Express Card should be superior to FW800 built onto the PCI bus.

When the next generation of FW controllers come out that sit on the PCIe bus, then it will make sense. FW800 is just a little to early. Soon.

Re:FireWire 800 Was Stupid

[Tycho]

Small correction: There are PCIe FW 800 cards however, they use a PCI FW chipset and a PCI to PCIe bridge chip. I have no idea though if the PCI to PCIe bridge supports a 64-bit length. If the PCI to PCIe bridge only supported a 32-bit length it would be sort of stupid as full speed FW 800 would saturate the bus. Then again there are native PCIe FW 400 cards so native PCIe FW 800 cards can't be that far off.

Re:FireWire 800 Was Stupid

[rthille]

Umm, PCI-X 64bit 133MHz will give you 1Gbyte/second, or, about 10 times the 100MByte/second that FW800 burns.

Re:FireWire 800 Was Stupid

[illumin8]

That means, that if FW800 is on the PCI bus, it almost completely saturates the entire bus ITSELF.

Not true. The bandwidth of a 33mhz./32 bit PCI bus is roughly ~128 MB per second. The bandwidth of a FW800 interface is roughly ~82 MB a second. That's not complete saturation, and we're talking about the lowliest PCI bus available.

Throw it on a PCI 66 mhz./64 bit interface with ~ 512MB a second of throughput, or even better yet, a PCI-X 133 mhz./64 bit interface with ~ 1GB a second of bandwidth and you're not even scratching the surface of your available PCI bandwidth.

Re:FireWire 800 Was Stupid

[PayPaI]

Where do you get 82? (33*(32/8)) = 132 800 / 8 = 100 132MBytes/sec on standard PCI, 100MBytes/sec on FW800.

Desperate Need For Validation

[Anonymous Coward]

It is really sad to watch the Mac community desperately keep coming up with these 'see! we were'nt given the boot by IBM. we WANTED to change to x86' benchmark stories.

I don't know what the hell you guys are going to be like when Apple dumps the x86 hardware and goes software only. Don't act surprised, you know it's coming...

Re:Desperate Need For Validation

[rdoger6424]

why? is mac switching to windows, John Dvorak?

"no firewire 800" Thank you Apple, didn't need it

[AHumbleOpinion]

... no firewire 800 for one thing ...

Thank you Apple. I prefer not paying for things I do not need, SCSI in the old days, FW800 today. The few pros who need it can add it.

Re:"no firewire 800" Thank you Apple, didn't need

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh don't worry, you are still paying for it. You just aren't getting it.

Re:"no firewire 800" Thank you Apple, didn't need

[AHumbleOpinion]

Oh don't worry, you are still paying for it. You just aren't getting it.

Doubtful, the Intel Macs would probably be a little more expensive if they had FW800 support. Assuming that it is even an option. I'm not sure who is manufacturing Apple's motherboards but I'm not sure if Intel manufactured boards ever got to FW800.

Re: Old Mac Incompatible with New OS

[santiago]

That's not DRM. That's dropping support for older models because eventually the cost of keeping drivers up-to-date for old hardware surpasses the goodwill Apple generates by letting you run a fresh new OS you won't be buying anyway on an ancient computer you're clearly not spending money on.

shutup taco you fag

[Anonymous Coward]

nobody cares about your gay warcraft crap

Re: Old Mac Incompatible with New OS

[damsa]

That would be DRM. Because it is restricting what I can do with my computer. Right now I can install Tiger on my iMac by editting one line in the install file. In the future I no longer can do that if Apple restricts it with DRM.

Re:battery life- about the same- more benchmarks

[acomj]

Macworld unscientific test (dvd playing) put the g4 at 4 minutes longer battery than the mac book pro.

They also have some benchmarks

http://www.macworld.com/2006/02/firstlooks/macbook firstlook/index.php

I suspect batterlife will varry depending if your running a native intel app vs a rosetta interpreted (ppc) app.

My MacBook Pro Benchmarks

[craigtheguru]

I also performed some MacBook Pro benchmarks on the MacBook Pros introduced at Macworld and my results may be of interest. While the report only includes a 1.83 GHz MacBook Pro, it does include comparisons to G4 PowerBooks and a Dual G5 PowerMac.

MacBook Pro Performance Analysis

Yes. Intel Mac can Run Windows XP..

[ChrisA90278]

The Windows install disks don't install directly but you can get Linux to boot on an Intel Mac. This should be no surprze because Linux is open source and you can modify it to do what ever you want. OK so Linux is running, next you install VMware and create one or more virtual machines. Next you go get that Windows XP install CD and "it works" Next switch the virtual screen to full screen mode and you can't tell the rsult from "real windows". VMWare is NOT an emulator it best to think of VMware as a kind of "sandbox". OK so the procedure is not effortless but the end result is exactly what was desired.

Here is the link

http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/misc/vmware/

Re: Old Mac Incompatible with New OS

[JonathanBoyd]

Just because you can instal it, doesn't mean that it's going to work right. It's not DRM, it's dropping support. Your rights aren't being managed.

Re: Old Mac Incompatible with New OS

[damsa]

We are talking about future macs and future support. The poster above stated DRM is there so only OSX wouldn't be installed on non Apple hardware. However I postulated a theory that along with shutting out installations on PCs, Apple is also likely shut down installations on Macs they no longer want to support.

addendum: then the wouldnt be selling music...

[plasmacutter]

ok.. so they won't be selling music.. and the soldier in this analogy won't be a leutenent anymore, or won't be honorably discharged, but he stood up for his principles and will be a better man for it, and maybe in the process saved the lives of innocent kosovars or vietnamese civiliians.

Re: Old Mac Incompatible with New OS

[Durandal64]

Under logic, a video game whose installer won't run on a system with anything less than a GeForce FX-series card is "DRMed".

DRM has to do with enforcing copyright protections. Apple didn't drop support for older machine models because of copyright; they did it because it's a pain in the ass to support them.

WOW is GPU, not CPU intensive

[DECS]

WOW plays poorly on G4 Macs because they have outdated graphics cards compared to gamer PCs.

A 2003 Dual 2 GHz G5 will play WOW poorly if you have a vanilla video card, but not because of the G5. In fact, if you watch processor use while the game is "challenged," you'll notice that with dual G5s, the CPUs are running about 60%. Turn one off and the processor redlines, but the gameplay doesn't change drastically. Put in a higher end PCI card, and it plays like a totally different machine.

The last revision of G5 Macs have PCIe, and better video cards. The Intel Macs have the same stuff or better. It's no surprise that WOW plays better with a much better video card.

The G5/Core Duo are not being compared when you pit them against each other playing WOW; it's pretty much just the video card difference.

Re:WOW is GPU, not CPU intensive

[Anonymous Coward]

The processor 'redlines' because it is in a single-threaded tight loop of running game code, sending data to the GPU and polling input devices. Unless the process actually goes to sleep you will always see 100% usage. You see ~50-60% with two CPUs because that's the usage for both CPUs, but most video games can only use one CPU. Even when it needs to wait for the GPU it will just skip rendering and continue spinning polling inputs and running the game code. So CPU usage as reported by the operating system tells you nothing of how in-game performance is being limited.

Re:WOW is GPU, not CPU intensive

[Anonymous Coward]

This turns out not to be the case.

Comparing a 2GHz iMac G5 with a 2GHz iMac-CoreDuo, we see that the iMac-CoreDuo has four times the L2 cache and maybe about half the main memory latency on cache misses. It really adds up. Even if you disable one of the Intel-CPU cores to try and make a fair fight.

WoW has almost always been CPU limited on the Mac; the new Macs have much better CPU's and memory controllers. One can see that it's rather tough to run a totally fair test - there's no X1600/RV530 card for G5 available, and no way to plug in a G5-class video card into the new Intel machines, but believe you me, the change in CPU and RAM throughput is significant going from the previous iMac G5 to the new iMac.

(signed, one of the Mac WoW developers)

Re:WOW is GPU, not CPU intensive

[Anonymous Coward]

That may be true for many games, but in the case of WoW, my experience on a dual G5 is that looking at the process in top(1), it has 19 threads (IIRC), and the CPU usage varies within a range of about 20-120%.

This is with a decent graphics card (X800).

Yes

[flyinwhitey]

"yep, i'm an 'apple bashing troll'" We agree. The good news is, now that you've admitted your problem, you can move on to solving it.

Re:Yes. Intel Mac can Run Windows XP..

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of defeats the purpose of buying Mac, though, if you have to run Linux to do it. You can't have your Windows stuff running alongside your iLife etc. People want to run XP alongside Mac OS X, not Linux. If they wanted to do it this way, they'd buy a new CoreDuo notebook from someone else and save themselves about $2,000 in Apple Taxes.

drm ignorance

[Kombinat]

The ignorance of the drm really scares me. It makes clear that the silent tactic of introducing socalled trusted computing step by step actually works. I really would like to love Apple and get one of the MacBookPros but no way I spend money on this. People, take care, but maybe its to late already. What do you need to wake up? How about 'trusted' harddisk? https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/groups/stora ge/Storage_Use_Case_Whitepaper_v07.pdf

Re:Yes. Intel Mac can Run Windows XP..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm hoping VMware will develop a version of Workstation for OS X now that the processors are x86. That'd be pure bliss.

Re:Yes. Intel Mac can Run Windows XP..

[John Muir]

Damn, I was about to post that link!

Once those guys distribute what they've done, then all intrepid Intel Mac users need is the torrent and an XP cd to have a fast working (if not trivial to set up) copy of the evil on their otherwise tasty machines.

Next up: Vista.

Benchmarks are useless

[Arandir]

Benchmarks are useless, and this one doubly so. One great thing about the Mac is that it does lots of stuff OUTSIDE the processor. My 1.42Ghz PPC iBook is dog slow compared to new PCs, if all you're measuring is CPU speed, and it's video card is an embarrassing "mobility" chipset. Yet it's smooth and responsive even in the middle of a lengthy compile with multiple applications open and running.

Benchmarks measure the edges of the envelope where users rarely visit. If you're not doing serious number crunching or running last week's must-have video game, you don't need to worry about benchmarks. It's like worrying about the top speed of an Italian Sports car, when you're never going to drive it faster than 100 Kph. In other words, if you're content with the size of your penis you can safely ignore benchmarks.

Re:Yes. Intel Mac can Run Windows XP..

[ChrisA90278]

I agree entirely. WHat's really needed is VMware or QEMU hosted on Mac OSX, or "Vitual PC" to be available. This will happen in time. But or some reason many people seem to really think they want to dual boot and run either OSX or Win XP. Lots of people in this camp. One example is the guy who posted to origenal comment here. We says he is 100% MS Windows at work but at home he is 100% Mac. He does not need to mix. As for myself, I'm comming to the Apple Mac as a long time UNIX/Linux user. (I've never had a use for MS Windows.) and I find the Mac does everytrhing the my Solaris and Linux system do but adds a nice desktop UI.

God... shut up about WoW, Taco

[lewp]

I'm in MC right now, and the joke is getting old to me. I can only imagine what it must be like for the people who don't play. You like WoW, we get it, now shut up about it.

FPSDMCCMark is fine for my Powerbook...

[DA_MAN_DA_MYTH]

It's just running from the damn AH to the mailbox in Ironforge that sucks, falling off the bridge and having to run around to get back sucks. 256MB, video card and 1GB memory standard (on the bigger model) should help this out

I dont understand...

[1336.5]

There is a benchmark that shows a dual core processor is faster than a single core processor that is 3 years older?

This nonsense is why jobs are being outsourced... in the name of common sense.

Re:battery life- about the same- more benchmarks

[prockcore]

Macworld unscientific test (dvd playing) put the g4 at 4 minutes longer battery than the mac book pro.

Except that the G4 they tested against was used. Battery life changes over time.. testing a brand new laptop against a 1 year old laptop is useless.

Its fast

[Anonymous Coward]

I just got the Macbook 2ghz. its interesting looking at the benchmarks. i'll just say this: this is the fastest computer i have every used, mac or pc.

- Java runs fast (Intellij IDEA) - blows away my computer at work
- Safari is blazing - the contrast is like when i was going from 56k modem to a dsl line in 1997
- CItrix Client using MS Remote Desktop (to remotely log into work) is fast (i think under rosetta too)
- DeerPark (alpha Firefox Universal Bin) is fast, but occasionally hiccups.
- boot time is insane
- magsafe - seems pretty strong, and its actually hard to pull out normally, but easy to pull out with a quick motion.

Feel free to wait for revision 2, or whatever, but so far (3 whole days!) this machine is solid.

You can thank drm for Vista not running on macs

[Billly Gates]

Assuming the rumor is true that Microsoft uses the TPM keys in conjection with Apple and Dell to prevent teh Vista beta's from operating.

The particular ID for the key has to be trusted for the drm to work. Kind of scary if you ask me and I would be quite pissed if I bought the new mac wanting to buy windows only to have a single line of code use the built in drm to prevent me from using my machine to full potential

Re:Proxy for MC - Missing Bits

[toddestan]

No, the G4 is a 32-bit processor as well. Remember Apple never released a G5 laptop, and we are talking about laptops here. Had this been about the G5 iMac vs. the Intel iMac, you probably would have had a point though . . .

It may still of been a mistake for Apple to release 32bit x86 machines, as Apple (and people who make software for Apples) are going to have to support 32bit x86 for years to come, along with 32bit PPC, 64bit PPC, and 64bit x86. My guess is that the 32bit x86 Apple machines are going to be relatively short lived, thus Apple could of skipped having to support that particular platform just by waiting a little longer. As another bonus, if the only version of OSX-x86 out there was 64bit, they would of effectively locked out many generic PCs from running it just from the simple fact that most generic PCs are still 32bit.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn communists.

Re:Yes. Intel Mac can Run Windows XP..

[Phroggy]

Dual-booting would work much better for games, which don't generally run as well inside a virtual environment like VMWare or VirtualPC.

Re: Old Mac Incompatible with New OS

[toddestan]

There is a big difference between letting you install something on older hardware with no support, and coming up with artifical restrictions to keep people from installing it on older hardware. Right now Apple seems to like to do stuff like "Oh, no FireWire ports? Then no 10.4 for you!" It's not hard to imagine them using the DRM to do the exact same thing.

Re:Proxy for MC - Missing Bits

[DA-MAN]

My guess is that the 32bit x86 Apple machines are going to be relatively short lived, thus Apple could of skipped having to support that particular platform just by waiting a little longer. As another bonus, if the only version of OSX-x86 out there was 64bit, they would of effectively locked out many generic PCs from running it just from the simple fact that most generic PCs are still 32bit.

My guess is that they went all 32-bit because Tiger was all 32-bit, with certain parts in 64-bit as well.

It may not have been feasible to transition to Intel, then transition to full 64-bit in time for the change. Besides Intel's 64-bit offerings just aren't up to snuff.

Re:battery life- about the same- more benchmarks

[dr.badass]

Battery life changes over time.. testing a brand new laptop against a 1 year old laptop is useless.,

Which is exactly why people shouldn't complain to much about lack of published battery life estimates. As long as it's not really bad or really good, it's really unimportant.

In other words....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Linux is better than Apple, I'd pick Linux in a heartbeat, except I don't because it sucks!

Shame on you, you closet Apple fanboy! Yeah, I see through you, you yellow-bellied ninny. I fart in your general direction!

Re: Old Mac Incompatible with New OS

[JonathanBoyd]

We are talking about future macs and future support.

/i refer you to this line:
DRM also prevent a future OSX release from being used on an older Mac.

Re: Old Mac Incompatible with New OS

[damsa]

People are parsing my sentence wrong or more likely I wasn't more clear. The original comment I was commenting was this. The only DRM is the one that keeps you from putting OS X on a PC. My comment is, Apple can also use DRM also to prevent OS X from being installed on a older Mac. Meaning a Mac that is sold today is an older mac in two or three years. The MacBook Pro has DRM in a few years Apple will want to stop support. This DRM in the future can be used to lock out future releases of OS X. Apple in the past has prevented people from installing an OS that was otherwise compatible because they didn't want to offer support or they wanted to sell more Macs. In the future I can see Apple using DRM to enforce this.

Both soon blown out of the water by passing...

[sethstorm]

T60's. Whatever you do with it after you get it is up to you. Load up whatever you were wanting, even if you wanted OSX86 up and running.

With it's non-integrated graphics (ATI X1400/FireGL V5200), Molten Core ought to be a walk in the park. As for the *book Pro, the Intel GMA 900 isnt what it's cracked up to be and isnt the kind of thing you would wish anyone to have.

Re:Both soon blown out of the water by passing...

[ShawnP]

Funny, the ATI X1600 with 256mb of memory doesn't look like a Intel 900 chip... Apple MacBookPro

SP

Re:Proxy for MC - Missing Bits

[XTbushwakko]

I read somewhere that the yonah actually had 64-bit extensions, but intel didnt advertise it. and there was the whole discussion about it being strange that intel would advertise it.. google it perhaps

all about molten core combat

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the reference, its a good way to show FPS. =)