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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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?
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?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Grand Central Dispatch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch
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.
www.clarke.ca
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).
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
I didn't know Apple did Trade-ins for non Apple products.
You don't have to make love to the product.
You would if my app wasn't rejected.
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.
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.
Palm trees and 8
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
At least they didn't call it,
iMagic.
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.
Does a Fleshlight run iOS? I know it works with an ARM processor... ;)
Remember to maintain your supply of
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? -_-
Here be signatures
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.
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.
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%
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).