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Apple Launches New Magical Trackpad, 12 Core Macs
theappwhisperer writes "The Magic Trackpad is basically a larger version of the MacBook Pro touchpad, with 80% more surface area for all your swiping and pinching. The entire surface acts as a button, so it's also a possible mouse replacement. And all of the expected gestures are here: two-finger scrolling, pinch to zoom, fingertip rotation, and three- and four-finger swipes. You can enable and disable gestures at your discretion from System Preferences." They also launched 12-core Mac Pros coming in August.
Honestly, I find this "magic" marketing strategy to be a complete turnoff.
Palm trees and 8
As others have noted here in the past, the number of processing cores do not a powerful computer make. A lot of the time with both laptops and PCs the cores are entirely unused. You could get a finely made quad-core which is standard fare nowadays, and have it work much faster than a six or dozen core system like these Mac pros.
Since processing is largely a duopoly of AMD and Intel, both have been guilty of marketing their hardware by highlighting the core numbers. Yet it's the architecture, pressure under strain, among other things that actually equate to performance.
No desk space required ... but it will probably retain most of the disadvantages of other trackpads while adding a bit more usability.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the majority of people on Slashdot actually understand technology.
Hey, I'm a Apple Fanboy but this is just a screw job. No SATA III, No USB 3.0 ????
I need a good platform for my 3D work and was hoping that there might be something making the new MacPro's worth waiting for but not this.
Just priced a nice Win 7 system from Newegg and me thinks for work I'm switching back. This is just absurd.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Well, what about the 12-core Mac? I mean, the only people who are really going to be able to make use of that kind of power are the same type of people who look at Mac OS X as a friendly Unix that can run Matlab AND Photoshop, probably heavy on the Matlab. Maybe 3D animators, but I've known a few of those, and they were pretty on the ball in general. I mean, I see a 12-core Mac Pro and think back to the Mac Pro we had mixed in with the HP and Sun workstations in the FEL control room when I did an internship back in 2002, I don't think "web designer" or "philosophy major." Just saying.
Just to be sure, the technology required to track fingers is much different than the one required to track a stylus, in power, complexity and components. For one thing, the stylus requires pressure or conductive contact, while the finger requires capacitive contact.
Think about this, if it is all the same, how come phones are now including touch-screens instead of the old, tried-and-true stylus like the PDAs of yore? Perhaps it's because the technology has improved enough, and its cost lowered enough as to be practical.
To say that a finger-trackpack would not be good for editing images just because older tools did not do it, is as short-sighted as saying touch-sensitive screens on phones are useless because they didn't used occur in smartphones before.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Except I think the 'e' in "eMac" stood for "education" rather than "electronic." It would be odd if Apple had sold the "internet" Mac for years before building an electronic Mac.
More like that what geeks think aren't that essential to selling computers. It's a bit like selling cars to race drivers (professional workers) or car mechanics (support people). They probably have some very different thoughts about cars than we do, and think the car commercials are quite silly. But the car companies don't care because there's a huge market of soccer moms and dads that need it for their commute and driving kids around. Just like there's a huge market of people that aren't very interested in computers but want to get stuff done using one. Even when it comes to choosing platform the fact that your geek prefers Linux/OpenOffice/Firefox/GIMP doesn't necessarily make it a good idea if your people are all experienced Windows/MS Office/IE/Photoshop users.
Funny enough, if you try bringing your product to Linux you get nothing but hate burn. Try reading the comments to uTorrent coming to Linux and see what I mean. It's 95% "we don't want no closed source shit, too little too late, $torrent-app rules, fuck off". This despite being quite probably the best and certainly the most popular client on Windows, and lots of people might look more favorably on Linux if they didn't have to learn a new application. "Here's Linux, ditch all your old software, but trust me all that G/K stuff is much better" is a WTF to everyone but OSS zealots. For a platform that supposedly promotes choice, it's amazing how militantly hostile some are to giving you one.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In a sense, the Mac Pro is the only "UNIX workstation" on the market today. There are tower machines made by Sun and IBM which can be used as such, but not sold as this.
Supposedly, Autodesk is going to start getting their mainstream version of AutoCAD on OS X RSN.
Of course, the question is why a Mac Pro over another x86 machine such as a Dell Precision? Multiple reasons:
1: OS X tends to have lower latency than Windows out of the box (you can disable services in Windows to help things). This, combined with the fact that Macs do not need a CPU and I/O draining antivirus program resident 24/7 means that a Mac Pro can outperform a similarly configured Windows machine.
2: Known quantity. Application makers have a far smaller number of combinations of machines and graphic cards they need to test and support.
3: Piracy. Mac users tend to pirate a lot less, so there will be more paid seats sold.
4: Support. At this level, it is assumed that the workstations come with premium support, so it isn't like the consumer market where Apple just puts the other PC vendors to shame. However, it does help having one vendor sell and support the OS and hardware.
5: Education. Professors used to buy UNIX workstations because they needed them for SPSS, Maple, and other tasks. Because Apple gives a discount for universities, this means that Mac Pros will end up in the statistical computing labs.
6: Security. This is debatable, but it can be said that UNIX is more secure than Windows, although the difference narrows if the Windows admin knows what he or she is doing. Since high end workstations tend to work on items that are crucial trade secrets, having solid security is a must.
7: Resale value. Mac Pros are priced competitively with other workstation class machines, so having the machines worth more when they are changed out at the end of an amortization cycle doesn't hurt.
because $6k is for a 12-core machine, not a 4-core machine ?
because the *software* is better ?
because you'd be throwing away all that in-house expertise ?
Or, maybe it's not for you. Your call, I couldn't really care less. I just don't think that $40 for a USB-3 port or two is any justification for that decision.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
What exactly is the benefit of this over a conventional mouse?
For most of us there isn't much benefit over using a mouse. I think the real point of this thing is to train Mac users to use multitouch. Apple thinks multitouch is the next big thing in human-computer interaction and they are training us in baby steps to use it in progressively more complicated ways. If they change too quickly no one will be able to figure out all the various gestures and the touch idea will flop. First they added 2nd finger right click on the notebook trackpads then the iPhone touch UI, then added more gestures to trackpads again, then the iPad and now with this thing, multitouch for desktops. This is probably an intermediate step to something else. I don't know what the end result will look like but I'm guessing they know where they want to go and we're not there yet.
I did IT at an Ad Agency. I remember recommending we upgrade the art guys to 24 inch iMacs. These guys just used Photoshop and Illustrator all day, and the iMacs, at the time around $2K, were the perfect thing for them. When I took this plan to my boss, the final decision maker, he made me go with some crazy Pro setup instead- I think with displays the machines cost about $4K each, just for Photoshop and Illustrator.
Why?
Because they were more expensive, which equaled "better" in his eyes. You can't forget there are a lot of stupid people out there with a lot of money, and just figure that higher cost equals better product... Hell, look at Apple's entire product line- way more expensive than compatible Dell or HP products (though I do agree the Apple is higher quality.)