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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.
works out great for me, I get a new computer and get one of those damn kids out of my hair.
Any takers? SHould I put them on craigslist or ebay?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
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.
And all of the expected gestures are here: two-finger scrolling, pinch to zoom, fingertip rotation, and three- and four-finger swipes.
Ah, nope. You missed one.
Put two in craigslist's personals and the rest on eBay. That ought to do it!
"If you see a man on a horse, he is likely an enemy. Kill the man and eat the horse."
Huge multitouch surface. Two-finger scrolling on my Powerbook's trackpad makes it a useful machine for browsing the web without an external mouse attached. That said, my desktop is most likely always going to have an external mouse attached, so I don't know how much usability gain you get from it.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the majority of people on Slashdot actually understand technology.
Scrolling should be a lot nicer. The only couple of things I miss from my MBP are the multitouch scrolling (drag two fingers around to scroll), and the way you could hold down two fingers and click the button to simulate a right click. I've been back using a normal PC touchpad for over a year now but I still like that better than having two trackpad buttons.
A lot of games would still be better with a mouse though IMO, I guess because you use your wrist to control movement while your fingers are free for button control.
which is totally what she said
So .. since all their touch technology derives from FingerWorks [ http://fingerworks.com/ ]. They revived the iGesturePad from 1999 and added a raiser.
Question 1) Do we get to see any of the 60 or so gestures they used to use a decade ago that Apple declined to reuse?
Question 2) Is there a chance that it means the TouchStream LP is coming back in a form I could potentially get for my windows9x+/*nix9x computer again ... without having to pay several hundred on eBay + driver hunts... just several hundred to Apple?
-------------
My hope is that they are answered as followed:
1) Yes
2) Yes, more than a chance, and soon.
Code softly but carry a big magnet.
And enhance the biggest disadvantage of trackpads - RSI.
I really do not want to think on how my hand will feel after 8-10h a day of pinching, zooming and rotating your finger on a touch surface. It is OK on a notebook or a phone once in a while. It will be an absolute ligament killer on a desktop when used in a work environment.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
These have an actual physical click, and tap to click is always off by default on a Mac.
I won't be impressed until I can make a flaming pigeon come out of it.
I didn't know Apple did Trade-ins for non Apple products.
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.
It's brilliant, really. We're just complaining about "unified branding". People are forgetting that the prior marketing disaster was "My". My documents, Myspace, yecch.
"e" was taken and done to death. e-mail, e-zines, etc.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Sure, you have +50% cores (12 instead of 8). Now in terms of productivity, how much are you likely to gain?
I recently tried to spec out a render node for a graphics artist friend of mine. I was trying to convince him that a single CPU mid-range Nehalem based Xeon system might be more cost effective in the long run. His plan was to build a single CPU Extreme Edition Core-i7 system. This was based on Netrender's benchmark utility placing this single CPU system ahead of the dual C2Q systems by a large margin, and even way ahead of dual Nehalem systems.
My logic failed to win the argument. I simply can't spec a dual quad-core Nehalem that can beat a single i7-EE. Even cost over time, it looks more cost effective to build two i7-EE systems instead of a single dual CPU system.
So, to answer the question directly, I would guess my friend is looking at gaining perhaps ~1hr a day in rendering time. That might be huge.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
Here at work I am using one of these Apple touch surface mice. Its the nicest mouse I have used in a very long time. I love the 2D touch scrolling on it.
I guess multi touch would be nice but I cant see this being better than what I have here for the work I do. Maybe for graphics and video work it would come in more handy.
On the other hand this thing would be perfect as an input device for controlling my media sever from my coffee table.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Just use the pinch to zoom to make the target area larger.
As an added bonus you can yell "Enhance!" every time you zoom-in.
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
so he can do a unit test
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
I haven't used a mouse in 6 months, laptop trackpad only. No indications of RSI and my hand and wrist actually feel better than when using a mouse. I for one have wanted a track pad off to the side instead of below my typing surface as it is a more natural movement for me.
So now I can close my screen, use only my external monitor, and use a wireless keyboard and trackpad. No wires or moving parts on my desktop.
Why do cheaper Imacs have more base ram? But only have ATI Radeon HD 5750 with 1GB in the $2000 system 27" screen and apple wants to push games on mac os x?
For some reason many PC laptops ship with touchpads that are quite customizable but include customized drivers that disable much of the functionality and customization that the hardware normally supports.
If your PC laptop has a touchpad made by Synaptics (which many do) you may be able to get multitouch scrolling by downloading the latest driver from here. Even if you have an older Synaptics device that doesn't support multitouch you should still be able to set up a "scroll zone" at the edges of the pad which allows you to scroll using a single finger. I have done this on many Dell and HP laptops and it works great.
Depends, how much is your time worth? I worked as an IT guy for a medium sized production house that switched from a mix of PC's and Macs to all macs back in 2002 - 2004. It saved them something like $100,000 in salary costs per year because the 3 MCSE's on staff were let go. All they did was update anti-virus and then clean all the malware & viruses off the machines the AV missed.
In 2005/2006 I left the company and did some freelance editing & 3D (lightwave) work for other videographers I knew in the area. These were mostly smaller shops that maybe had a couple jobs a year that had such requirements. Between the lot of them, it was enough work to keep me busy and earning a good living while studying for the LSAT. I used a Quad Core G5 with 8GB of Ram that set me back about $12k at the time for monitor and everything. Why? FCP & Shake were big reasons. But the other reason had to do with time. I think an equivalent Windows based PC would have been around $9K and I even bought my RAM aftermarket from Crucial for the G5. I studied for the LSAT while projects were rendering. So even if I was not in front of the computer, it was still making me money. I would set some projects to render over night. So while I was sleeping, the machine was working.
Given the performance hit of AV + 3 - 4 hours of down time per week for scanning + another 2 - 3 hours a month cleaning all the crap the AV missed would cost me something like $1200 per month in opportunity loss. And I had the work to keep the machines running. In fact I bought a few Mac Mini's to use as full time rendering nodes.
Then there would have been large software purchases to switch to PC. I was used to FCP & Shake and would have had to spend $$$$ to purchase windows equivalents and then spend more time learning the new programs.....
Lot more to think about there than just the initial cost of a machine and E-peen factors of who has the latest and greatest video card.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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.
Some thread hit on rendering use. However, there is also vast amounts of simulation use. For example, COMSOL Multiphysics (http://www.comsol.com/products/multiphysics/). Also, in the academic world is it easier to buy new computers on grants than upgrade old ones. The "old" computers typically get moved to computer controlled tools (when the tool computer dies).
I run Maya, FCP, Adobe Master Suite. I am a one person shop. I've gone back and forth between Win and Mac for the past 25 years and very knowledgeable on both systems. I have Shake but it is dead. Apple bought it and killed it. I compose using Toxik which comes with Maya. Most, if not all, available plug-ins for Maya run under Windows. Only some run under Mac. A critical one I currently use only runs under windows. I currently run under bootcamp so I can use that plug-in. Rendering time, especially in HD is a HUGE factor for my workflow. The speed difference between Premier Pro running their Mercury engine on a NVidia card vs FCP plodding along on my Mac is somewhere between 15 to 20 X. This is not trivial. Premier Pro is not quite as nice as FCP. I've used both and I know what they both can do but at that much price/performance tradeoff you can't ignore it.
As far as scanning, I have AV on my WIn 7 side but I don't get email or surf the web on Windows except to get upgrades and support. I know where to go and what to do and not do. I can scan at night and there is no impact to me.
Mac's are nice but quite frankly, the writing is appearing on the wall. I really don't think Apple much cares about that desktop market. The % of sales and profit to Apple is in the round off error of their annual report. If I was Job's I'd have killed it a while a go. I'm a Fan of Macs but in the end I need to get my work done. I'm not going to get Mac's just because their Mac's. They need to justify their existence to my bottom line and my production workflow. At the current direction and price-point I'm saying there needs to be some serious consideration of alternative options.
I love Linux but I've done the VM and Wine bit and it's a joke when it comes to real 3D and video production. I have to run native and I have to have all my apps available to me all the time and I don't want it across a gaggle of machines. I use Linux servers for farm rendering and that works great. For desktop apps, no.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Adobe has assured its customers that Flash 10.1 will be able to "...make full use of the new machines. Flash will be able to utilize 100% of the 12 core hardware without fail. That's the reliability customers have come to expect from Adobe."
Boot Camp users running Windows will have to deal with "compatibility issues" that might limit utilization to a mere 15-25%
If you've just spent $6k on a new Mac Pro, and you *really* need USB-3, just spend another $40 and plug the card in. It's a Mac Pro. It has expansion ports. Use them and feel happy.
... and if you want e-sata, just buy an extender cable for the two extra on-board sata channels in the Mac Pro. That'll cost you the princely sum of $19.
Sure, you can argue it ought to have come with them (and I'd agree, for what it's worth) but the cost of implementing it yourself is hardly the end of the world.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Ah, dont tease him, HTML doesnt count anyway.. unless you wrote the http-deamon hosting it yourself, on punchcard, uphill both ways, in ten feet of snow..
People, what a bunch of bastards
1: OS X tends to have lower latency than Windows out of the box (you can disable services in Windows to help things). This, combined with the fact that Macs do not need a CPU and I/O draining antivirus program resident 24/7 means that a Mac Pro can outperform a similarly configured Windows machine.
I agree with most of your points except this. I have an antivirus (Microsoft Security Essentials) on my netbook, barely notice it's presence on my netbook. I also disabled all services (Windows 7 Home Premium), more for psychological (I don't like crap running I don't need) than any measurable gain. We are talking about a single Atom processor here - so do you think this would make a difference on a 12-core monster processor? Yeah, you may gain a few millisecond render time here and there, and well it can add up to a few seconds (maybe even a minute!!!) over a year... but seriously, this is not exactly a huge advantage ;)
As for reason #3 I think that's more an argument for why not. #7 I'm not sure, you can buy a G5 Mac Pro now for 200$, that's a fraction of the original price. The loss seems to me pretty much on par with (over 90%) PCs. I also wonder about your latency claim - I don't dispute it, I just don't know what to think... do you have any proof? The only benchmarks I saw comparing the three platforms (PC/Linux PC/Win7 Mac/OsX) was on phoronix, and I don't trust them too much (but the mac box lost on almost all benchmarks).
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.
Microsoft Security Essentials in pure virus scanner mode is no problem.
But when it is in active mode, scanning data from the network, etc. It does slow down your machine. I had it running when playing EVE Online, and every second the frame rate/update rate would drop a bit, it was very noticeable. When I turned of the active part, it ran smooth again.
Just FYI, Windows 7 has full multi-touch support. (Doesn't guarantee your applications will use it sensibly, but it's there.)
Comment of the year
For one thing, the stylus requires pressure or conductive contact, while the finger requires capacitive contact.
I'm sort of nitpicking here, but neither of these are quite true. You can have active styluses that don't require any contact at all, and for fingers you can have non-capacitive touch screens that work by pressure. Indeed, such touch screens have a significant benefit: you can use them with gloves. (You can't do this with, say, the iPhone, unless you buy special gloves.) You can use them with simpler styluses.
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 play devil's advocate, I would say it's not so much because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for image editing, but rather because the technology has improved enough to make it a good solution for most tasks you'd expect to do on a phone.
(In fact, my phone, the Nokia N900, actually comes with a stylus. It doesn't get much use, but it does get some. For instance, I've got a Boggle game on it -- if I use my fingers to select the squares, I block a lot of the view.)
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.
But it's not really any more silly than saying that, because touch-sensitive screens on phones are now commonplace, that technology would be good for image editing.
If you want a more convincing argument you could see what people have to say about using the Macbook's touchpad for that sort of work -- I have no idea what you'd find.
They needed this a couple of years ago. Too many OS X applications fail to recognize and support gestures.
Why? Because they were only supported on the MacBooks. Why bother if half the Mac universe can't use them?
Now Apple's desktops can finally catch up to the functionality that their notebooks have had for years.
In fact, this really should be the DEFAULT option for iMacs, Mac minis, and Pros. Reply
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
CPU (pick one):
2 x AMD Opteron 6168 (1.9GHz) - $760 x 2 = $1520
2 x AMD Opteron 6172 (2.1GHz) - $1000 x 2 = $2000
2 x AMD Opteron 6174 (2.2GHz) - $1300 x 2 = $2600
Motherboard:
ASUS KGPE-D16 Dual Socket G34 - $439
Everything else is cheap.
"His name was James Damore."
They are bad apples, so it is more of a recall.
Disk images. Use them. You can make a case-sensitive disk image on a case-insensitive filesystem and vice versa. Presto, you can now use your UNIX software and OS X software. Not the most convenient way to do it, but it does work for most things.
And OS X is certified UNIX. There was no lie there whatsoever.
Actually, Apple already posted Windows drivers for the trackpad for 32bit and 64bit.
They're labeled as BootCamp, but I guess they'd work on any PC (haven't tried it of course).
If you want to run linux that's fine. I run lots of linux machines myself, where OS X is not an appropriate choice for a variety of reasons. But if you want to be take seriously you can't complain that OS X isn't UNIX-y enough based on the default choice of a case-preserving file system.
A) It's trivial to add another, case-sensitive partition to your system. The standard Apple tools allow this without even the need to seek a command line or a secondary boot disk.
B) Even if you're too lazy to resize your partitions, you can use disk images to simulate partitions. They mount just like regular partitions and again can be easily created and auto-mounted at login with the stock toolset.
C) While there are some apps that have lazy case conventions for file names, none of the base system does. So you can move the OS to a case-sensitive filesystem and just keep a case-preserving one around for "bad" apps that can't handle it (I'm looking at you Adobe). This one requires a reboot, but can still be done without a second boot disk, and without running the OS installer -- just copy the files around and resize the partitions. Or with a third-party tool and a separate boot disk you can convert in-place without copying anything.
D) All of the bad apps can be fixed with a simple rename or symlink to allow the file to be accessed be the expected name. It's sometimes a hassle to figure out what the file name is, but it's easy to fix once you do.
E) All major desktop OSes have had either case-insensitive or case-persrving file systems for decades -- DOS, Windows, OS/2, Mac OS, Mac OS X -- case sensitivity is not going to become the default in any desktop OS because it would confuse *most* computer users. Heck, many of the major file-sharing protocols, including those in use on UNIX systems, don't even *support* case-sensitive file names.
and it's absurd for you not to consider 1/3 of the equipment in a price comparison.
A) Its not 1/3rd of the price. That would be $1100 worth of equipment.
B) I didnt ignore it. I just didnt detail it.
C) absurd is the inclusion of a $50 firewire card, and a $100 OS, for a server.
The bulk of the cost is in the CPU's and Motherboard, and I still had as much as $1340 of headroom. You don't like that fact, thats fine. But dont try to muddy the waters... we are comparing a 24 core AMD server vs an 8 core Intel server sold by Apple for $3300. AMD wins massively on performance in this comparison. AMD also wins on price.
I also have to question the value of the 12-core CPUs from AMD. They have advantages in certain applications, but even in fairly high parallel use environments like VM hosting, Intel's 6-core versions do at least as well, and support a higher clock speed for better single-thread performance.
Really? You dont bother to worry about price anymore? Those 6 core chips that actually compete with AMD's 12 core chips in "high parallel use enrivonments", are significantly more expensive, which is the point. A Mac Pro is a server built on Intel, but AMD is the performance king of the servers at every price point they offer, and thats before the Apple tax.
We'll see what Apples price will be for their 12 core server. My guess is around $4000 considering the difference in price between Intel's 4 core and 6 core server offerings. It will be a huge ripoff.
"His name was James Damore."