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.

Comments

I'm selling my neighbors kids to get one of these

[alta]

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?

Cores do not equal power

[Robotron23]

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.

Re:Cores do not equal power

[Alakaboo]

All but the highest-end iMac are dual-core. The lowest-end Mac Pro is quad-core. If someone is going to drop $5K+ on a Mac Pro with 12 cores, they either have money to throw around or they know what they're doing.

Re:Cores do not equal power

[DavidpFitz]

As others have noted here in the past, the number of processing cores do not a powerful computer make.

For sure; but this is aimed at people who are would be rendering video on their desktop or other CPU heavy creative tasks (e.g. Photoshop on massively high resolution images).

This isn't aimed at your average Mac user, or even your 'power-user' - it's aimed at people who need huge amounts of CPU every now and then.

Re:Cores do not equal power

[ironring2006]

If you think you can get by just fine on just a quad-core, then you're not the target market. Simple as that. I get by just fine on my entry level MacMini. There won't be a huge volume of sales of the 12 core systems, but there exists a market (however relatively small) that needs every bit of computing power they can get. They're also the ones willing to invest in the software architechture to get the most out of the hardware.

Re:Cores do not equal power

[yumyum]

A lot of the time with both laptops and PCs the cores are entirely unused.

So? That is more a problem of application programmers than hardware designers.

Since processing is largely a duopoly of AMD and Intel, both have been guilty of marketing their hardware by highlighting the core numbers.

This does not even make sense. Why shouldn't a company tout the fact that they have more cores on a chip than before? And this is Apple's advertising anyway, not AMD/Intel. The price alone would keep most people from buying the high-end, as it always has. However, for my work in radar signal processing using heavily-threaded applications, this machine would be a great addition to my desktop since I would no longer have to run my signal processing streams distributed over several hosts; one host could do the job just fine.

Re:Cores do not equal power

[grub]

I don't think money is much of an issue for the target market. 12 core machines are aimed at the professional market who will use these devices to make money through rendering and other things lots-o-cores excel at.

That's why they're using Xeons, I think these one are around $900-$1K per.

Re:Cores do not equal power

[Daniel Dvorkin]

It depends on how you define "power." If it's in terms of the number of calculations per second the computer is capable of doing, then of course more cores equals more power. The question is whether you're going to be running software that uses that power. The sterotypical "I just want to surf the web and read e-mail" low-end user isn't going to, but then, that guy isn't in the target market for this machine.

In bioinformatics, many of the problem we work on are "embarrassingly parallel," and I can guarantee you that I'd have no problem keeping all 12 cores on this machine busy. But scientists are a tiny niche market, of course. Presumably the new Mac Pro is mainly being pitched, as previous machines in the lines have been, to graphics and video pros. Can Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut use an arbitrarily large number of cores efficiently?

Re:Cores do not equal power

[leenks]

Grand Central Dispatch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch

Re:Cores do not equal power

[aclarke]

I have an 8-core Mac Pro. It's currently running a 4 core Windows 2008 server VM with 6GB of RAM, a dual core Windows 7 VM with 1.2GB of RAM, a couple app servers natively in Mac OS X, an a host of other applications. This machine has replaced my need for separate development and test servers, and gives me power to spare for the rest of my tasks. Yes it cost probably $4-5k once you count in the 13.5TB of drives, etc., but I use it to get work done. I rarely see my CPUs pegged at 100% for a long time, but it does happen.

I had a very nicely specced quad core that I built before I bought my Mac Pro, and the Mac Pro absolutely blows that computer out of the water. When you have real work to do, of the type that the Mac Pro is built for, it's an awesome machine and worth every penny. If you don't need the power, then of course it's more than you need.

Re:Cores do not equal power

[AdmiralXyz]

Three points:

1. More cores means lower clock speed, by necessity, because it means more power consumption, so you have to turn down the frequency to keep the TDP the same. This doesn't mean you have to get cheated out of clock speed though. You will note that Apple is not forcing you to get the 12-core version: 8- and 6- core versions are available at higher speeds.

2. What you need out of the architecture depends on what you're doing. Many Mac Pro customers are doing embarrassingly parallel workloads like 3-D rendering, where increasing your cores increases your performance almost linearly. That's a way better tradeoff then a couple percent of performance from a higher clock rate. Or, if that's not what you're doing, you can get the faster chips, see above.

3. Yeah, architecture matters, but... the architecture's all the same? No matter which core count/frequency you get, they're all Xeon chips, they're all Nehalem. It's not like you have another choice. And for my money, Nehalem is a damn good architecture for workstation/server machines (laptops, less so, but it's still an improvement over Core 2).

Re:Cores do not equal power

[betterunixthanunix]

Can Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut use an arbitrarily large number of cores efficiently?

Arbitrarily large numbers of cores? No, not a chance, certainly not on a shared memory architecture like the system in question. 12 cores is probably going to be OK, but when you pass 16 cores you'll start to notice the memory bottleneck; once you are at 64 cores you are basically at the limit of usefulness for shared memory architectures, and you have to be careful about memory access patterns or your software will be slower. Even "embarrassingly parallel" can suffer if the memory access patterns are bad.

There is a reason that almost all of the supercomputers in use today use some sort of NUMA or distributed memory architecture.

Re:Cores do not equal power

[0100010001010011]

Exactly. Say a very good artist makes $50/hour. Cost to his company (Health insurance, his desk, power to his desk, 401k, taxes) is roughly double that: $100/hour.

If one of these new duodeccore processor computers is $12k. As soon as it saves the user from 120 hours of rendering, it's paid for itself. I can easily see someone hitting that in a year. Between opening a 20MP RAW to saving, to applying filters, etc.

Now these machines aren't going to be used for just a single year. Figure 3 year life span, at which point it's resold for $2,000 and the user is upgraded to the viginticore.

The 'machine' cost $10,000. They can subtract depreciation from taxes. Saved countless hours (one second at a time) of their artists.

/ These numbers are made up to be round. I have no clue what graphic artists make, so don't get on my case about that. Adjust numbers accordingly. //I also don't know Latin. I just copied wiki.

Re:Cores do not equal power

[V!NCENT]

In case you missed it:
Mac OS X 10.5's entire userspace app collection is agressively multi-threaded. Even the e-mail client runs multiple threads. Browsers like Google Chrome and now Firefox are multithreaded. Not to mention the tons of processes that take up lots of time if serialised. Now couple that with the driver for you graphics card that compiles on the fly and runs on the CPU and you might get the picture.

In case nobody does: multiple cores prevents everything from slowing basically everything down. Not to mention the multi-thread potential of eventually stuff like ray tracers and whatnot. But oh well... my clue train needs to be driven to some other place. *choo-choo*

BTW which idiots modded that guy insightful? -_-

Re:Cores do not equal power

[0100010001010011]

If only Apple would finally get around to inventing something cool for OS X to do that. It'd make it so much easier for the developer. Knowing Apple they'd probably make it so that it was really simple. Like a few lines of code.

It'd be even more awesome if they could make it open source so that other operating systems could have a chance to use it.

One can dream, right?

Expected gestures

[jeffmeden]

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.

Re:Expected gestures

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I think that gesture is handled by iSight.

Re:More magic?

[ari_j]

More of a turn-off than i-everything? Honestly, if you're going to pick an Apple product naming issue to complain about, 'magic' is always going to be striving for the silver medal.

Re:So...

[ari_j]

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.

Re:Any sufficiently advanced technology...

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the majority of people on Slashdot actually understand technology.

I guess here's cross post to this one...

[Kalidor]

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.

Re:So...

[arivanov]

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.

Re:Surface as button.

[Anonymous Coward]

These have an actual physical click, and tap to click is always off by default on a Mac.

Re:More magic?

[mini me]

You don't have to make love to the product. If the product is useful to you, buy it. If not, do not buy it. Who cares what marketing has to say?

Re:I'm selling my neighbors kids to get one of the

[Monkeedude1212]

I didn't know Apple did Trade-ins for non Apple products.

Re:More magic?

[Monkeedude1212]

You don't have to make love to the product.

You would if my app wasn't rejected.

Re:Any sufficiently advanced technology...

[bsDaemon]

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.

Re:Agreed. That +50% comes out of nowhere.

[ground.zero.612]

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.

Re:So...

[Altus]

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.

Re:More magic?

[Sturm]

At least they didn't call it,

iMagic.

Re:More magic?

[jgagnon]

Does a Fleshlight run iOS? I know it works with an ARM processor... ;)

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Any sufficiently advanced technology...

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Any sufficiently advanced technology...

[mlts]

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.

Flash 10.1 supports the new hardware

[Y-Crate]

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%

Re:More magic?

[Volguus Zildrohar]

For the love of God, don't tell us anything about storage or capacity.

Oh for [insert deity]'s sake

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:Oh for [insert deity]'s sake

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:Any sufficiently advanced technology...

[molnarcs]

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).

Re:More magic?

[amicusNYCL]

Honestly, I find this "magic" marketing strategy to be a complete turnoff.

Agreed. I use the term magic when someone asks me how or why something I did worked, and it's complicated enough that I don't want to explain it. I say it's magic, we smile at each other, and each of us knows that it's complicated enough to avoid an explanation (if they say they really want to know, of course I'll explain it).

I also use it when I have enough contempt for the person that I don't think they would understand even if I tried to explain it.

So yeah, it's definitely a turn off when I see a company like Apple using it as a marketing strategy. It's like they assume we're stupid, and that's the only thing we can understand. But like someone else mentioned, I guess technical people are not Apple's target market. Sort of strange, but there it is.