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Inside View on Apple WWDC Rumors
AppleLurker writes "In a recent interview with DVD newsroom an Apple employee talks WWDC rumors including the iPhone, Blu-ray, MacPro and the Apple Tablet. More realistic about what not to expect next week when Steve Jobs hits the stage." Apple's next move is always a hotbed of debate leading up to a product release and with all the rumors flying this year all bets are off until we see the checkered flag, so take with the requisite grain of salt.
It's interesting to see the hype and everyone excited about upcoming products lately. For Microsoft, I think it's because they're a de facto "standard" in the desktop and office products spaces. For Apple, it is more like they are known for coming out with very sexy, sleek products that are also easy to use. Too bad some of the free and open source projects don't benefit from this kind of free publicity. I guess you could almost count Firefox as being among the hype machines, but I would bet most of that is user-generated -- people who are fans of Firefox -- as opposed to pundits, industry people, etc.
- Introduction of the Core 2 Duo to the iNtel Mac lineup;
- Conroe will be featured in the iMac and the new PowerMac; Quad capability may or may not be present...
- Merom will be featured in the MacMini, the MacBook, and the MacBook Pro [evidence of meromac]
- Woodcrest MAY be present in the next revision of the XServe and XServe RAID
- Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
- Point releases are traditionally announced at WWDC.
- Point releases usually accompany upgrades.
- Conroe, Merom, and Woodcrest bring x86_64 (EM64T) support, 10.5 should take advantage of it fully.
- A bigger shift to the iMac line.
- A shift to the iPod nano line (they've been killing off stock by giving the freaking things away with new Mac purchases).
- Something less useless than the iPod Hi-Fi.
Everything else is gravy. Don't count on an iPhone, Apple's not ready for that market. I think Motorola may be on hand to announce a sister to the ROKR and SLVR, something akin to the RAZR with a better capacity. And it will synch with iTunes via Bluetooth. We may also see a Bluetooth-enabled iPod. Stock TV Tuner support for the Mac Mini would also be expected, as would SLi/Crossfire for the MacPro.Informatus Technologicus
The NeXT Version of Windows(TM) has been announced at WWDC several times in history. Most recently, Longhorn was announced at WWDC 2005. The result in that instance was a name change and schedule slip.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
More likely is that we'll see updated powermacs and xserves, such that apple completes the intel changeover (promised a year ago), and Leopard. Maybe a "one more thing", say 64-bit support. It's a /developer/ conference, not a consumer show, so expect new stuff that will directly impact developers rather than consumers.
Of course, things like a tablet and iPhone would be nice, but I really doubt it (at least, not yet).
Drop the optical drive? How will you install the OS?
Use a slower processor? Who would buy it?
The whole reason that Windows-based tablets are starting to sell better is that they are now more comparable in performance and features to regular laptops. They have the pen functionality as a bonus. You will notice that there are no major manufacturers making slate-type Tablet PCs anymore, because they were too expensive and lacked the performance capabilities of a convertible-type tablet. The niche is just too small for a very application specific device; similar to the one you describe. Plus, how many tablets have sold to date? I went looking and from what I could find the 1 millionth one was sold in February of 2005, and we may be up to 3 million by now. That's not a lot of machines when you consider Apple sold over a million Macs in the last quarter.
So, to answer your question, it will compete for sales because it will need to be just as capable a device with the added pen functionality. If the numbers (sales and dollars) won't support the product in the mix, there won't be a product from Apple.
> i'm buying a macbook pro though
:)
How exactly does that "fuck Apple". Let me let you in on a little secret -- when you buy a MacBook Pro, you're HELPING Apple
My other car is first.
I just bought one of Dual 2.16 GHz Inetl Core Duo units.
Must say I like it and using it full time now.
Cheers,
Dee
I'd love an Apple tablet
Trouble is, you're rare enough that it's not worth doing. You can be sure that Apple is intensely aware of how the Tablet PCs are selling, and there just isn't that much demand for that form factor. It would take something compellingly different to make it fly, beyond just being a Mac without a keyboard. Now, if Samsung came up with a 300 DPI display or something to go with it, that might do the trick, but I'm not holding my breath for that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple's the company that can make these things work.
They tried. Remember the Newton?
The thing is, anytime Apple launches a new product they gamble not only the development money, but a large portion of their reputation. iPod paid off, Newton didn't, and so forth. When Apple introduced the iPod, there was clearly a market for music players, and they were able to do it far better than the competion. When it comes to making a tablet, the decision must include at least the following considerations: 1) how many people want it: Thousands or millions? 2) Can Apple completely blow the other players away, and make a major technical leap? Apple's handwriting recognition is good, but is it that much better than any of the others? 3) How does it play with the Mac, and enhance the market position of their core products?
You may want such a device, but until millions of people want it, Apple may well be better off working on whatever it is they've already got in the pipeline for the next year and a half.
Heck, I'd love to see Apple sell a true 1080p HD portable projector, but if only five thousand people want it they'd lose money doing it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This particular rumor is from MacOSRumors, not Macrumors. They have very different histories: MacOSRumors has proven again and again to be unreliable, Macrumors on the other hand is usually skeptical of the very things they are posting.
As an engineer who now concentrates on embedded programming, I can emphatically tell you that just because a programming model looks great on a Turing machine, it does not follow that it is useful on machines constrained by the laws of physics. Indeed the motivation for the actor model was the prospect of massivelly parallel systems: i.e. ones that would effectively have NO context switching since each thread is running on a seperate execution unit (and ideally one where message passing is free). NT/x86 would suck almost as badly.
Bullshit.
Calm down man. I'm practically agreeing with you.
Virtual memory isn't implemented any more crudely in x86/NT than it is in OS X/PPC. The "crude" implementation certainly isn't a performance advantage. Indeed, x86 lacks many of the features that other architectures have for implementing fast context switches. For example, a context switch on x86 results in a TLB flush, because x86 lacks support for tagged TLBs.
Well, perhaps this is a matter of taste. I don't think that the kernel is the right place for a window manager. I prefer OS X's true seperation of process address space, rather than NT's "low 2GB reserved for kernel" business. However, I'll grant you that NT's implementation is faster...it's also more prone to catastrophic failure. Yup, mach IPC is slow, but as a fan of the actor model, why should you care ? The point is, you have strong protection between processes. Sometimes you get away with invalid memory access on NT that ALWAYS cause acc-vios on OS X. I really do think that NT's model is more crude, for instance, kernel threads having to worry about the user mode context that they are executing in...just not an issue on OS X...on multiprocessor systems you have to worry MUCH less about which processor you are executing on...sure there's a performance cost, but surely the Mach approach is more elegant and useful to the programmer. How many times have you seen NT code that locks threads to a particular processor ? How many times have I had to do that on OS X ? Zero...
Again, not that this is really a problem on the desktop, but I never claimed that it was. OS X is an excellent desktop OS with very good performance for desktop apps. It just so happens that the performance of the underlying kernel is largely irrelevent for desktop apps, so you can get away with a pretty shitty kernel (which Darwin is), as long as you have good userspace libraries (fast toolkits, etc).
I pretty much agree with you. Although I'm not sure I'd call the kernel shitty, or if it is, it is just shitty in a different way than NT: Darwin: elegant/slow, NT: inelegant/fast
Cheers, and goodnight.