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Apple Businesses

G4 Powerbooks Predicted For January 2001 211

Posted by timothy from the by-which-point-transmeta-etc-etc dept.
Spittoon pointed out this ZDNet article claiming that development proceeds apace on G4 portables for Apple's PowerBook line, and that if all goes well, they'll be shown off at Macworld Expo in January. I could live with ads claiming that "The new PowerBook is a supercomputer" in exchange for knocking a couple notes off the price of a G3 PowerBook ;) Slot-loaded CD / DVD drives are long overdue in notebooks, anyhow, so I hope at least that part of the story pans out.
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G4 Powerbooks Predicted For January 2001 More

G4 Powerbooks Predicted For January 2001

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  • Re:How does the mac keep developers? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We often ask ourselves the same thing: why would anyone other than a student develop for Unix? Why would anyone develop for Windows when they could work on the real thing? 'To each his own' is why.

  • Re:How does the mac keep developers? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I keep asking myself how the mac, with its limited install base, keeps developers? In its heydey, when its technology and UI was superior, that was one thing. But the huge gap is gone, and I wonder why people spend so much time doing mac ports of software instead of *bsd and linux ports.

    Odd question.

    With an estimated installed base of between 15 and 20 million users (larger than the installed user base for Linux and *BSD combined), Mac developers have a substantial potential market. And unlike most Linux/*BSD users, Mac users are actually willing to pay money for quality software.

    One could just as well ask "why develop for the Mac rather than the much larger Windows marketplace?" The answer to that is also easy. Cleaner API, much less competition, and MUCH lower support costs (mainly due to the overly-maligned proprietary nature of Apple's hardware, resulting in exponentially fewer hardware variations to deal with).

  • Re:Slot loaded DVD nice, but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The slot-loaded DVD drive is a nice idea, but I wonder if it's sound engineering-wise. There's already a great number of users who have "mistaken" slot-loaded drives for other devices (a friend of mine, freshman year of college, stuck her floppy disk in the slot drive of a CD-ROM).

    Did you ever stick your floppy in her slot drive?

  • Mac, dammit! Mac, Mac, Mac. MACs are for ethernet.

    Whenever I see a CV with someone claiming MAC experience, in the bin it goes...

  • ...was Star Trek 4. The story goes that the makers of the movie went to Commodore to get an Amiga 1000 to be the computer that Scotty used. Commodore demonstrated their usual savvy by telling Paramount they could buy one, just like anyone else.

    Enter Apple, who had the smarts to work the product placement.

  • As already pointed out numerous times in this thread and others, you are not stuck with a 1-button mouse. I honestly don't believe you didn't know you could add any number of styles of USB mice with multiple buttons.

    I believe what he's trying to say is, the built-in trackpad only has one button, and to get multiple buttons you have to plug in an external mouse - not very convenient when the laptop is actually sitting in your lap.

    But I digress. My real problem with this post is that you say you would "definately" get a slightly out-of-date Powerbook, if it wasn't for the mouse issue. Can the mouse issue really be that important as to change your view of using a certain OS?

    Mac OS works just fine with one button (although much better with two), but other operating systems (Linux especially) are somewhat crippled.

    --

  • OS X relies very heavily on the G4's AltiVec unit. A G3 will run OS X. But many of the functions are radically slower.

    Umm, I think perhaps "relies on" is a bit too strong a term. It's optimised for the G4, but will run fine on a G3 as well, from what I've heard. Remember, a G3 is still VERY fast, and if Mac OS X had enough overhead to suck all the power out of a G3, we'd be in serious trouble. It's based on BSD; it's supposed to be efficient. The graphics take a bit of processing, yes, but not THAT much.

    --

  • I'll take a super-thin Toshiba any day of the week over a toilet-seat-lookin' thing like the iBook. :)
    _____
  • The thing is, Intel and AMD, and everyone else making CPUs know that 1000MHz *is* technically possible. The more tech savvy people know that there's really no reason why PPC chips should not be able to achieve these speeds, if Moto is "on the ball" and responding to competitive pressures. Instead the PR folks respond to competitive pressures by resting on their laurels; the whole "twice as fast" "RISC vs. CISC" argument.

    The implication is that they're not trying their best. Moto switching over to all wintel systems for internal use implies the same.

    Now, at home I have a 233 Beige, OC-ed to 300. It's run like a champ for two years OC-ed. At work, I've been using a P 233. I recently got upgraded to a PIII 600, and I tell ya, it's nice to have a machine at work that's almost as fast as the one I use at home - and that's the truth.

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
  • I think you'll be disappointed.

    OS X relies very heavily on the G4's AltiVec unit. A G3 will run OS X. But many of the functions are radically slower.

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
  • I think Apple's been waiting on the G4e chip out of Motorola, who are being slow, again, as usual, thanks to the satanic influence of Bill Walker, Intel's evil double-agent at Motorola.

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!

  • The mac port of Diablo II has already shipped.

  • dodald said:
    I know it says for iMac but the new drives should support them the same way.


    It should -- one of the ways Apple has cut costs is by using identical components (e.g. slot load DVD drives) across as many machines as possible.

    The link [apple.com] referenced above. (view the source)
  • They advertise alot also...

    For years, Apple advertising was nonexistent. Users screamed at them for years to spend some of their huge pile of cash on ads. They finally came to their senses.

    Can you think of any movie that had a laptop in it that wasn't a mac?

    Apple is extremely good about getting placement in movies and TV shows. There are also a ton of Mac fanatics in the entertainment industry and they'd be happy to use them regardless. Same for the advertising industry -- most ads depicting a generic computer screen are showing MacOS or use Mac elements. You'll frequently see CompUSA ads where the Windows systems appear to have MacOS running in the monitor.
  • I'm a long-time PC bigot and user of multibutton mice and I had no trouble adjusting to the ctrl-click method when I was forced to work on a desktop mac. If you've used a single button mac mouse more than a bit and still find it annoying, there's no arguing with that, but if you're just expecting it to be annoying, give it a try.

    Now, those laptop keyboards on the other hand. Arrrgh! It would take me a long time to get used to one of those. Does anyone know if the Fn key on, say, a PowerBook, is xmodmappable or somehow "special"?
    --

  • Take the decor and appearance of the G4 cube, squash it down flat and now say it with me: VAIO Killer.
  • I was looking through the article, but mabye I missed it. Will these be G4e or the current line up but speed bumped G4 processors?

    Either way they need to get those processors running faster. They can add multiple chips in desktops to get things up to competition when MacOS X is viable, but they're not likely gonna have that option (multiple CPUs) in laptops. Too much power used.



  • This might do pretty well:

    http://www.sgi.com/flatpanel/

    1600x1024 resolution, exceptional quality by all accounts.

    D

    ----
  • The other posters answered this pretty well: the Mac has a lot more users that Linux/*BSD and they're more willing to pay money. But there's another reason as well: *nix is not a consumer platform.

    I'm a CS major, and it still took me a weekend to get Linux working on my Mac, and another to get it to use the network properly. Granted, I'm a relative newby at this sort of thing, but if takes me two weekends, then 90% of computer users aren't going to be willing to use it at all.

    Perhaps PC distros are better, but you still have to drop into a shell once in a while. When Red Hat comes out with a distro that allows a one-click install, and which has simple graphical configuration tools for all elements of the system, then it'll have some chance of capturing the broader consumer market. Even then, someone will have to unify the numerous window managers, graphical toolkits, and other libraries so users don't have to compile them themselves. And someone will have to write and enforce a set of consistent UI guidelines so that different apps work the same and don't confuse users.

    In short, someone would have to do for Linux what Apple is now doing for BSD.

    Since Linux is a hobbyist platform dedicated to development by volunteers and insistent on open source for everything, I can't see this happening. The tedious gruntwork of creating a complete, consistent, elegant desktop as Apple is doing with OS X isn't something that very many volunteers are going to want to do. And even if Red Hat or someone pays someone to do that, there is still the issue of interface consistency. Many existing Liinux apps are interface nightmares by Mac/Windoze standards. In order to make a viable consumer release many of these will have to be majorly re-written to conform to a common standard. Again, I can't see this happening.

    So Linux makes a great low-end server and a decent hobbyist OS. It's not about to eclipse either Mac OS or Windows as a consumer desktop OS, though. I honestly don't think the hackers who write Linux understand what consumers want in their computers, and until they do, they aren't going to attract many non-geek users.
  • I keep asking myself how the mac, with its limited install base, keeps developers?

    Do the math: 20% of a huge market is a large market. Get it? There is more installed base on MacOS than on Linux, so you could just as well ask how Linux keeps developers. Why do you think there are few Macs in total just because the environments you know of have few?

  • Actually, the current generation of powerbooks is pretty angular, having yet to fall prey to the new Apple stylings. Probably this case will, and that'll be the first one for the PowerBook line.
  • Yes, I believe we all understand that. "We" being people who post to slashdot.

    The trouble is that the public doesn't understand it, and so there's a war going on for MHz regardless of whether it actually matters or not.
  • It's thanks to savvy marketing that Apple has managed to resurrect itself into the viable computer company it is today. Apple was all but dead in the water without the facelift and aggressive media attention that Apple has managed to garner.

    If anything, it's a lesson to other developers that you have to keep your system alive and kicking in the minds of consumers if you're going to attract the kind of support you're going to need to maintain momentum. Apple's super-cool surprise announcements don't hurt either. It's an example I wish the oft-beleagured, probably cursed Amiga Inc. will be able to follow -- though they have significantly more catching up to do. :^)

    When it come to marketing, corporate development would seem to have the edge over open development models like that from which Linux springs. Will the big players (RedHat, Corel, etc...) prove this assumption wrong?

  • If Apple was truly interested in the enterprise market they would take their big tough market capitalization and buy SGI. Seriously -- Apple is enough about graphics that its a logical business combination, and it would give Apple much more leverage into the the traditionally UNIX oriented high-end visualization markets. With a little work, they could get OS X running on SGI workstations (if its as cool and modular as they claim).

    The other thing they could do to be big tough enterprise guys is port OS X to the RS/6000 line. It should be much easier to port to the Power3 CPU than porting it to MIPS, albeit its really only a server solution and not a personal workstation for your art directors.

    I think the lack of an enterprise server solution is a hindrance to Apple. There really isn't an Apple-specific (or even an *Apple-designed*) enterprise server solution. On Apple HW, its desktop CPUs with maybe some tack-on RAID. On other hardware, its just an afterthought.

  • The Matrix. Opening scene with Trinity typing away at a laptop. Definetly not a mac, resembled an IBM thinkpad or similiar if my memory serves me correctly.
  • And change from a sturdy laptop to a piece of shit made in Japan?
    Sorry, but the VAIO is the only laptop which doesn't survive normal use for longer than 4 month's.
    My Apple powerbook still works after 2 years.
  • When there was a discussion about slot loading small CDs & DVDs before, (when the Sony Mavica camera with the 3" CD was brought up), the site that was linked to had a picture of "special expander donuts" [imaging-resource.com]. If you had one handy, you'd be set.
  • To answer your question of what happens if you stack 3 inches of paper on top of the PowerMacCube -- It automatically shuts off if it gets too hot in the cube.
  • C'mon guys. This is like predicting that people will be older in 6 months
  • Yup. Has been for quite some time.
    Check out LinuxPPC [linuxppc.com] for one distro.

    spreer
  • IIRC, the ONLY difference (besides clock speed) between a G3 and a G4 is the AltiVec unit. So, if you remove that, then there is no point, as you said.
  • Yes. I am posting right from a G4 running Linux. www.linuxppc.com [linuxppc.com]
  • While a nice idea, it's causing problems for those credit card sized-CDs and I don't really want to see them implemented on the PowerBook. My other concern is the extra power (albeit slight) that it takes to load and eject a CD from a slot-loading rig.

    I'm pretty sure that a G4 is going to use a bit more power, so Apple's got its work cut out to make the batteries as long lasting as my 500MHz G3 PowerBook.

    Only time will tell. I really hope something comes out soon. Apple's getting their ass handed to them in the MHz wars.

    --Bernie
  • I would have to say vis a vis the Photoshop question: the Mac is great for it. Colour correction is a big bonus, and MacOS is set up to implement it as cleanly as possible. It is built from the OS up. Add the fact that Adobe started on the Mac and only the Mac for its first few years and the answer becomes obvious: Adobe is dedicated to the Mac platform, The users are dedicated to Photoshop, so it is reasonable to assume the users have become dedicated to MacOs through the use of Photoshop. Rinse and Repeat. This is a good reason to always have a market for Apple so long as Adobe is around. I don't see Adobe having any problems in the near future in keeping afloat.
  • Yeah, and Apple only makes iMacs. Re-read the article.

  • I'm not sure how likely 600MHz and 700MHz chips are by early 2001. This article [theregister.co.uk] at The Register suggests that Motorola are struggling to deliver speed increments, forcing Apple to pull the dual-G4 move.

    The G5 they mention sounds interesting...

    "The schedule may also affect Motorola's G5 chip, its first multi-core CPU, which is believed to contain four G4s operating in close harmony to generate four times the performance of a single chip at a given clock speed. With the cores so tightly coupled, users should get all the benefit of four-way multiprocessing without the usual CPU management overhead"

  • While Apple has a smaller market share than Windows there are still 26 - 30 million Mac users worldwide maybe even more by now. There are a lot of niche developers that appear to make a nice living off of the Mac (Mac related) market. Cassady & Greene and The Omni Group are a couple of examples. C&G writes darned good software to boot. Look at Adobe. Mac users are a significant % of their customer base. I want to say I have heard the number as high as 40%, but may be wrong. It may all come down to a similar question "Why do people write software that is given away free?" Maybe some developers write for the Mac cause they simply love the platform.
  • Actually, any Mac with Open Firmware can boot Linux without Mac OS. That's every single PCI Power Mac, as far as I know.

    --
  • On a purely technical side, Apple has written an introduction for Windows programmers. [apple.com]
  • Why don't you find another PC oriented 22" LCD? Whats the big deal about the Apple one? Besides how cool it looks...

    There weren't any other 22" LCD screens as of last year. That's why the Cinema Display was such a big deal. Has that changed?

    - Scott
    ------
    Scott Stevenson
  • maybe that 6th spot is a pda. i might be wrong but they still own all the newton tech. and people seem to like those palm pilot thingees.

    maybe it's a personal internet appliance????

    i know i'd buy one.
  • Apple has new colors I wouldn't mind seeing in a consumer OS now.

    Ruby - Blood Red
    Indigo - Dark Blueish Purple
    Sage - Dark Forest Green
    Snow - Frosty White
    Graphite - Charcoal Grey

    And the Towers and Cubes are Silver.
    Good riddence to fruity colors.
    --
  • Best Buy did the same thing here in Portland, Oregon in this past week's Sunday ad.
  • A few years ago, Apple had some dismal share of new PC sales, like 6% vs 90% for Wintel machines and 4% for *nix-on-Intel machines.
    Their new products are pretty sexy, and the G4's seem pretty nice for alot of high-end desk applications.
    Does anyone know what Apple's share of the market is now?

  • Of course there is, as many others in this thread have noticed, but, be warned:

    You'll have to partition. Which is fine, however, if you use MacOS there are no programs that I am aware of that can partition without destroying all the data you have on said disk, and which would involve reinstalling MacOS as well.

    If I'm wrong, someone please correct me. I bought a copy of LinuxPPC, but I didn't, uhm, realize what I was getting into. (I'm new with MacOS, somewhat new with Linux.)

    Something about my iBook NOT being able to run MacOS is just wrong . . . I WANT to learn how they all work.

    later

    dan

  • Re:How does the mac keep developers? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Some developers would rather kill themselves than contemplate working on a non-Mac system."

    We lose more developers that way...... ;)

    Tom
  • The problem with slot load is that you can't use mini-CD or buisness card CD etc... as far as i can remember the will fly inside the drive and may break it! :-(

    Did they change that?

    ---
  • I think Apple's G4 advertising campaign was pushing the fact that anything over 1 GFlop was considered a supercomputer (And hence, a non-exportable munition) by the US Government.

    So that's the definition the guy is talking about - The government was saying that 1 GFlop was not exportable because it was a supercomputer, and now they've upped that number.
  • Yes, I know MHz can be meaningless.

    But last I heard, PowerPCs weren't nearly as hot as Apple made them out to be. Remember long ago when Slashdot covered a set of benchmarks that discovered that the whole "G3 is twice as fast as a PII" was utter bullshit except for one or two special circumstances?

    PIIIs were an incremental increase over the PII, and last I checked, the G4 was only an incremental increase over the G3 if you didn't take into account AltiVec. So the speed comparison of the two probably still remains similar. Hence a 1 GHz PIII is going to beat a 500 MHz G4 by a significant amount. It's not going to be the 2x performance increase that the clock speed says, but it will be quite significant. Throw the Athlon in there, which has a tendency to kill the PIII at a given clock rate in floating-point performance, and those G4s start looking anemic even to someone who thinks seriously about the situation.

    And next is where the "Processor MHz isn't everything" idea works against Apple. Given that the PowerMacs and PCs have the same memory bus width (Both use SDRAM and neither have a requirement of memory being installed as matched pairs), when it comes to memory bandwidth, FSB MHz means everything. When most PCs moved from 100 to 133 MHz FSB is when Apple finally started moving to 100 MHz. And the Athlon has 100 MHz DDR for an effective FSB clock of 200 MHz... Although unfortunately, that's limited by the RAM running at only 133. (I haven't seen on-motherboard cache since L2 was moved from the mobo to the CPU.)
  • Just wait 'til you see the upcoming 'Infrared' and 'Ultraviolet.' Oh sure, they look black to humans, but they're different blacks ;)
  • Apple's wide-screen Mercury notebook will reportedly be sleeker, lighter and feature a hip, new look. Did we mention fast?

    Uh Oh, did they say Reportedly? I expect ZDNet to be getting a Cease and Desist letter from the determined lawyers over at Apple any time now.

    The word "Reportedly" appears 5 times. The word "Sources" ALSO appears 5 times. The article states that "Apple did not immediately answer phone calls requesting comment on the reports."

    Notice all of these "sources" are unidentified?

    This article sure looks like it's churning rumors. READY THE LEGAL STAFF, MEN!

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • Mac users are much more likely to pay for software than Linux users. The audience is more affluent, and it's used to paying for what it gets.

    I predict success for MacOS X, mainly because they've rejiggered things like Carbon to make it easy to port applications to it. The "cool factor" of Aqua is hard to ignore, too.

    I think the Mac has a good chance of attracting a sizable crop of new adherents with X and the spiffy new systems. The biggest problem at this point is continued high pricing. An eMachine costs around $ 450, plus a $ 120 monitor is $570. $799 is still a far cry from that, especially with the dearth of dealer discounts I've noticed in Mac-land.

    D

    ----
  • An emachine certainly does have lower perceived quality than an iMac, and it's not as designer-friendly, but most people nowadays are just looking for the cheapest possible solution.

    One major reason people choose Windows over the Mac, incidentally, is that the software is loads easier to pirate due to the large numbers of Windows users. I was quite surprised to find that out, being someone who doesn't think much of software theft. But tis true.

    D

    ----
  • Yes, I knew that, and that's one of the major control mechanisms you can use.

    But even if you give Netscape, say, 50mb, it will use it all and force you to reboot. (You can normally switch to other applications and save first, though).

    I don't know if IE is any better - it's likely to be coded more cleanly, but MS is legendary for leaky programs, so I wouldn't bet on it being an improvement.

    D

    ----
  • Maybe people are just shocked to see colours other than white and grey on a computer?

    From the screenshots, I thought it was really appealing. I'll admit the dock seems to take an appalling amount of screen space, but since I normally run at 1280x1024 resolution it would probably work just fine for me in practice.

    D

    ----
  • Have you been able to play with a pre-release of MacOS X? I'd be curious to hear what you think.

    The interesting thing about MacOS 8 (I haven't tried 9 yet) is that most of the crashes occur because programs run out of their pre-allocated memory supply. If you keep a wary eye on RAM consumption, MacOS is more reliable than Windows. If you don't, I'd say it's about the same.

    It's a primitive solution, granted, but it does keep the user in more control than Windows does.

    That aside, only SGI has a more appealing interface than MacOS in my mind. Enlightenment would be pretty nice if they could fix those god-awful fonts. And no, I don't have 5 hours to figure out how to use better fonts; it should just be built into a distribution.

    D

    ----
  • When I used X there, I meant it as a shorthand for MacOS X - I'm aware that MacOS isn't X-Windows.

    When I was at Fry's last night, I also noticed that an e-machine is a bit more expensive than I thought - so I think the iMac might be more price-competitive than I said previously.

    D

    ----
  • Either way they need to get those processors running faster.

    My understanding was that the apparent gap in clock speeds was due to Apple using a different clocking scheme than Intel.

    Benchmarks would provide a more reliable comparison of performance between the platforms. Unfortunately, Apple hasn't submitted SPECmarks in quite a while.

    Now that MacOS X is out, it should be straightforward for a third party to compile the SPECmarks with a compiler optimized for the platform (gcc is almost certainly sub-optimal due to lack of specs).
  • I would encourage you to look at the history of computing for about the last forty years.

    After you get done with that, you'll realize that something better, faster, and cheaper is always about six months down the road.

    Thus, quit waiting when something you can afford fits your needs, and buy it. Otherwise you'll be waiting forever.
  • An emachine certainly does have lower perceived quality than an iMac, and it's not as designer-friendly, but most people nowadays are just looking for the cheapest possible solution.

    Oh, come on now. I'm not sure that has ever really been true, unless you make that last statement "People are just looking for the cheapest possible solution to their problem." And, in that case, it's easy enough to see how different computers turn out to be the cheapest solution to somebody's problem, even if it isn't your own. Moreover the history of Apple is pretty simple when viewed in this way: when they have provided good solutions to people's problems, they had healthy margins and moved lots of boxes (whether iMacs, or Mac IIsi's or what have you). When their solutions have sucked (Mac IIvx, anybody?), they're in danger of losing the company.

    Nothing ever comes down to just price, but price for what you want. I really wanted a fanless computer that you didn't feel the need to hide in a public space, that my kids liked, and that I could run Linux on when the spirit moved me. Hmm, sounds like an iMac to me. :-)

  • MHz may be meaningless to geeks, but geeks don't make up the bulk of the buying public.

    MHz *is* important, and it's often a deciding factor. People go into a store, see an iBook for $1600 with a 350MHz G3 or a Pentium III 500/600 for about the same price. They're going to choose which they think gives them more for their money.

    You can spout technical terms at them, but they'll either not get it, or they'll yawn, walk away, and go get the Pentium notebook. The ones that do get it are very intelligent people, though :-)

    So, Apple needs to find a way to get Motorola and IBM on the stick making slightly faster processors, especially for desktop machines, because power requirements there don't really matter.

    I know they'll figure it out eventually.

    --Bernie
  • Sources said the company has not determined whether the trackpad will support Apple's forthcoming handwriting-recognition software, code-named Rosetta Stone.

    It doesn't sound "forthcoming" so much as "rereleased". The handwriting recognition included with NewtonOS 2.0 was code-named "Rosetta", I would assume this is the same thing. But I hadn't heard Apple was planning on reusing Newton technology anytime soon! Does anyone have any info on this? Will I finally be able to replace my MP2K? :)
  • But the huge gap is gone, and I wonder why people spend so much time doing mac ports of software instead of *bsd and linux ports.

    Funny comparison, really.

    The Mac market is huge. It isn't as big as the PC market, yes, but that's like saying that ten million dollars is chump change because someone else has a billion dollars. There's a much different user make-up, too. Linux and bsd people tend to be fiddlers and tinkerers and idealists. Macs tend to get bought by people who don't obsess about operating systems and don't mind paying for software.
  • Last bond movie, the gal was using a laptop running Win2k professional beta. As was I, so I leaned over to my friend to ask why I , if a beta tester as well, wasn't meeting those kinds of chicks. hmmph

    matt
  • The only problem with your argument is that the reasons people have to buy the upper model Macintoshes are the exact places where the G4 is 2x+ as fast, namely photoshop and codec work. This is where the better pipleines, cashe, and the Altivec/VelocityEngine unit comes into play. So for those who are going to be doing accurate comparisons in real world experience, the Macs are faster.

    Now in heavy database work you might get differnt reselys, but this is an area dominated by the big chips, and both the PPC and Intel chips are going to be trounced by the Alphas, MIPS, etc...

    Now if you are a dedicated gamer, then yes Intel is a better/faster platform. But this is not what most professionals are looking for.

    A couple of notes, you talk a lot about FSB as if it were an advantage for the Intel camp, but the PPC arcitecutre has been using an on-card cashe that does most of thiswork since the G3, running at wither 1/2 or in synch with the procesor. So if you were going to look for an equivelint number, you would have to say that PPC trounces Intel here, and the cache sizes are generally bigger as well. And the whole memory bandwidth issue is way more complicated then PC100 vs. PC133, you also have to look at burst latency, cache hit/miss, and what sort of process you are looking at... not nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
  • I believe the reason that CD-RW isn't commonplace in the laptop market is due to the power usage of a CD-RW's laser. Many CD-Rs in a desktop computer have fans in them to help cool the mechanisms inside the drive due to the high heat output from the laser. As far as desktops go Ricoch(sp!) makes a combo DVD/CD-R/RW drive, but its only IDE and will set you back ~$270. IIRC Dell offers a removable CD-RW drive in their Inspiron 5xxx line of computers for a few hundred bucks, but I'm sure that you can't just burn cds for hours on end with one battery.
  • This is and will always be a problem. If you keep waiting for the next big thing to come along, you will never buy a computer ;-)

    My advice to you is to take a look at your needs right now and decide if it is worth the purchase price to go ahead and buy a PowerBook or iBook or wait another 6 or 7 months and re-evaluate your situation.

    You said that the lack of expandability of the iBook is keeping you from purchasing one of the current models? What expandability options are you looking for that you could not get as an external USB device?

    I recently bought one of the 400 Mhz model PowerBooks. It's a great computer, will run OSX and will last me for quite a while. I would not consider it to be "on the way out" technology-wise, but I fully expect that Apple will replace it with a newer and cooler model at some point.

    I guess that you just have to consider your current needs and base your decision on the present situation. If your current hardware is adequate then by all means, wait until the next announcement, but if your current hardware is inadequate and you have the money, then go ahead and purchase something.

  • I discussed this mysterious 6th square in the previous /. thread [slashdot.org]. My personal suspicion is that the space should correspond to the ultra-compact but professional-powered G4 Cube -- e.g. subnotebook.

    Something that the Excite News article completely failed to discuss is power consumption. The G4 is of course a miser compared to P3 or Athlon, but it puts out way more heat than a G3. Perhaps you could make a PowerBook G4 without the AltiVec unit, but in that case what would be the point?


  • I keep asking myself how the mac, with its limited install base, keeps developers? In its heydey, when its technology and UI was superior, that was one thing. But the huge gap is gone, and I wonder why people spend so much time doing mac ports of software instead of *bsd and linux ports. It's often been pointed out how things like C# can go down the tubes because they can't get developer critical mass. I wonder how the mac keeps it going? Anyone out there a Mac developer? Is it just an easy port? A roommate of mine used to develop simultaneously with codewarrior, but those were simple apps...
  • "If you are a Photoshop user, then the multi-G4 Mac is a pretty awesome system. For other apps, a Pentium III is probably going to be faster."

    Except for maybe Quake 3 [maccentral.com]! That will probably rock nearly as well as Q3 for BeOS will on the (perpetualy) forthcoming dual Athlons.

  • I'm not sure what model they use, but where I work I have a half dozen slot loading iMacs to support and the only problem I've had with them is figuring out how to force eject a CD (sorta poke a paper clip, the shepard's staff of mac techs, where one would normaly poke it on a tray load CD... you have to kinda guess).

    My pioneer car stereo works like a charm too, except it skips when I hit a bump while turning... probably the Tokikos' (performance struts) fault rather than the CD player ;)

  • This is technically true, but newer kernels don't seem to support direct OF booting at all. They want you to use BootX or a OF bootloader like yaboot.
  • If you're running a "new world" (anything non-beige) Mac, you no longer need MacOS at all to boot Linux.
  • If I remember correctly, the PowerBook G3's weren't very hot on your lap because of their low power consumption. And, if I'm correct on this also, the G4 does use more power than the G3. My (late) AT&T laptop was HOT all the time. I hope not to see the samething in the G4, esp. when I think back the cube. Apparently, they get so hot that if you cover the holes on top, they'll shutdown in 15 minutes because of overheating. I wonder how they plan to fix that problem on the G4 laptops.

  • Wasn't Pismo the PBook they released that has firewire? I'm pretty sure the Pismo codename had to do with the newer black Pbooks.

    That's the majority of conventional wisdom, as alluded to above ... and Apple subtly encourages, to the extent of doctoring technotes on the PB 1999 Series, to keep attention deflected from the REAL Pismo. Some people have posted the truth, including the oft-maligned Ryan Meader [macosrumors.com], but they are generally not believed.

    Here's a not-so-subtle hint: If you want to know what Pismo styling is like, check out the power adapter on the PB 1999s. Funky, eh? Now imagine a 3/4" 3.5 lb. PB like that. Mmmmmm. Sluuuuurp ;)

  • My understanding was that the apparent gap in clock speeds was due to Apple using a different clocking scheme than Intel.

    No, the clock speed of a chip is a quantative measure. A synchronous chip runs at its quoted speed (unless you overclock it :-). What you may be thinking about is the fact that a 500MHz PowerPC may be a lot faster or slower than a 500MHz Pentium. This is certainly true, leading us to conclude that clock speeds are a very poor measurement of actual performance.

    Benchmarks would provide a more reliable comparison of performance between the platforms. Unfortunately, Apple hasn't submitted SPECmarks in quite a while.

    Well, benchmarks like SPECmarks are only slightly better indicators of real world performance than raw CPU clock speeds. The only real way to compare is to try running the actual applications you need to use on both platforms. If you are a Photoshop user, then the multi-G4 Mac is a pretty awesome system. For other apps, a Pentium III is probably going to be faster.

  • is that most of the crashes occur because programs run out of their pre-allocated memory supply.

    You do know you can change the memory allocation, right? Just get info on the app, follow the popup to "memory" and type the numbers you want in the boxes. Quark comes with a preferred alloc of 9000... and my first post-install task is to up it to 30000.

    If you have memory problems with your finder, you can change that too by firing up resedit, opening the finder and then opening the SIZE resource. The memory alloc is waaaay down at the bottom of the window.

  • Some sense at last.

    The rumor that Apple will put a G4 into a laptop Real Soon Now is not news... it's almost inevitable, as the logical progression of the product line. I might as well put up a web news site and proclaim that Gnome is expected to adopt the drag-and-drop paradigm that Macs and Windows have been using for text manipulation.

    Now, any hard news about a subnotebook... that would be interesting. However, given that the Cube was one of the first rumors that the MacGossip sites have gotten right in a long, long time (and that was not until the week before the announcement), I would not hold my breath waiting for them to come up with any real dish on what the Cupertino campus is up to.

  • We've been covering [macslash.com] this story on MacSlash [macslash.com] all day, and we've gotten some interesting comments. Check it out, and leave some comments yourself.

    --

  • Heh - I saw a CompUSA ad the other day with a Palm IIIc color screen grafted onto a Palm Vx - talk about deceptive advertising!

    I would have complained but they would have come back and said "we are not responsible for mistakes"... yeah, right.

  • I'm amazed at how slowly laptops have adopted CDRW as a standardized device. Seems to make sense to me... no need for a zip and can drastically increase the desktop's current storage workspace. BTW, DVD/CDRW would be nice.
  • Is there a Linux kernel that's functional on G4's, or anyone working on it?

  • Re:Slot-loading CDs... (Score:3)

    by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:08AM (#903594) Homepage Journal
    My iBook's battery can run a screen bright enough to use as a flashlight for four hours straight (longer if I turn it down); I don't think the energy required for loading and ejecting CDs is significant. Worrying about that would be like wearing less when you go driving so your car gets better gas mileage due to carrying less weight. Sure, in theory it will, but it doesn't matter.

  • Re:How does the mac keep developers? (Score:3)

    by HeghmoH ( 13204 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:03AM (#903595) Homepage Journal
    It's not just a simple port, but it's not nearly as hard as making the program from scratch, particularly if it's a game. Since games often have so little to do with the OS anyway, it's easier to translate the little interaction it does have. Most Mac game ports these days are the work of only one programmer over a few months. The art is already done. Advertising is much cheaper, since you don't have to reach as many people. Sales are low compared to the Windows world, but plenty to get by.

    As far as original apps go, from what I've heard it's no easier or harder than making an original app for Windows. The good side is that there's less competition, and more room for a little guy to get in and sell something. Also, there is a large base of established developers. If the MacOS were to appear out of nothing tomorrow, it would probably fall flat for lack of support, but there's no chicken-and-egg problem here. The egg was created long ago.

    Lastly, there's the fanatic factor. You can't forget that when dealing with Macs. Some developers would rather kill themselves than contemplate working on a non-Mac system.

  • Re:Linux? (Score:3)

    by PenguinX ( 18932 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:01AM (#903596) Homepage
    Check out

    http://www.linuxppc.com

    http://www.linuxppc.org

    http://www.penguinppc.org

  • Re:Slot Load (Score:3)

    by larkost ( 79011 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @11:27AM (#903597)
    Apple System Profiler reports that the slot-loading CD-ROM drive on this iMac is from Matshita, product ID is CD-ROM CR-1750 revision 0A0C.

  • Re:I'm not going to buy this. (Score:3)

    by LordNimon ( 85072 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:05AM (#903598)
    Diablo 2 is available for the Mac.

    Lots of two-button mice are available that work great with a Mac.

    In other words, I'm glad to see that you no longer have any reason not to buy a G4 laptop when it comes out. :-)
    --

  • Streamlined (Score:3)

    by gardenhose ( 85937 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:00AM (#903599)
    From the article:

    Apple reportedly will clothe the system in a new chassis that is more streamlined than the current generation of G3 PowerBooks.

    More streamlined? Jeez, I hope it doesn't hurt anybody. Pretty soon all Apple products will either be completely round or 2-dimensional.

  • Slot Load (Score:3)

    by linuxonceleron ( 87032 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:02AM (#903600) Homepage
    I've used 2 slot load devices in my (short) lifetime, a Sony CD player in a car and a Pioneer DVD drive in my computer. The Sony CD player is horrendous, the motor which pulls the disc in broke on the 4 of them which my family had before we just gave up. To load a CD, you have to first put a cd in, then ram another cd in to push it onto the spindle, about 1/8 of the time, this results in 2 cds being stuck in the machine, which means having to take the entire reciever apart. My Pioneer drive has been the complete opposite, I've had it for 8 months, and it loads smooth, rips quickly, and is nearly silent. Also, the folks at Pioneer were smart enough to engineer a flap in for the inside of the drive so you can't accidentally get 2 discs stuck in there. Anyone know who OEMs the drives for Apple (I know the iMac uses slot load, and the G4 Cube IIRC)

  • Re:How does the mac keep developers? (Score:3)

    by jamesoutlaw ( 87295 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:02AM (#903601) Homepage
    It's a simple answer: there are tens of millions of MacOS users around the world. Those people are willing to buy software and, as a result, there are companies who will develop and sell software.

  • Re:I'm not going to buy this. (Score:3)

    by Mononoke ( 88668 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:29AM (#903602) Homepage Journal
    Of course, it would be really stupid to use it as a server, since convection cooling only works if the thing is sitting on a table and totally unobstructed.

    The article was talking about laptops. Why would you rack-mount laptops and use them as servers?

    Of course, there's not a bat's chance in hell I'll buy it, because (AFAIK) it won't play Diablo 2

    Yes, it will. And does.

    and I tried to use Cakewalk for Mac once, but that one-button thing kept causing me to delete my songs.

    Then you sound like the perfect customer for the new no-button mouse. Even less chance of clicking on the wrong thing. ^_^

    I think we can all rest safe in the knowledge that some random manufacturer will close this thing and stick in IBM-compatible components within the next two years.

    Lets see...the iMac is now 2 years old. PC manufacturers tried to clone it. They all failed. Some for legal reasons, and some because the clone they came up with wasn't worth buying. Anyhow, it would be interesting to see a passively cooled IBM compatible that was smaller than a file cabinet. I doubt it could be done, though.


    --

  • More info on future PowerBooks (Score:3)

    by Brighten ( 93641 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:11AM (#903603)
    Mac OS Rumors [macosrumors.com] is predicting two new models:
    • A subnotebook with a G3 at up to 700 MHz and a 14.1" 1024x768 LCD, available March/April 2001
    • A PowerBook G4 with a 600 MHz+ G4e, 15.3" 1280x1024 LCD, available January 2001
    See their article [macosrumors.com] for more specifics.

  • Re:The sixth square? (Score:3)

    by Snocone ( 158524 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @09:15AM (#903604) Homepage
    What's coming, it's speculated, is some form of subnotebook or tablet.

    That space is for Pismo, which is not the 1999 Powerbook G3 as everyone thinks. It's a superslim notebook enclosure, all curvy and sexy but pretty much what you'd imagine the Elle MacPherson [geocities.com] version of the PBG3 would look like. About the only nifty innovation is that there's speakers in little forward-pointing 'ears' on either side of the screen that give this sucker really remarkable sound for a portable.

    I'm eagerly anticipating this... watch Seybold very, very, carefully :)

    Actually, it was supposed to be introduced in Japan this spring, the Japanese being the kind to have a collective orgasm at the sight of this thing. Heat problems have put Pismo on indefinite hold until a suitably cool processor can be found, since of COURSE they couldn't POSSIBLY compromise on the design. That would be like SO not Apple :)

  • Re:How does the mac keep developers? (Score:3)

    by Snocone ( 158524 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @09:01AM (#903605) Homepage
    I keep asking myself how the mac, with its limited install base, keeps developers?

    Perhaps you could intersperse that by asking your obviously cretinous self how Ferrari, with its limited install base, keeps parts suppliers?

    I wonder why people spend so much time doing mac ports of software instead of *bsd and linux ports.

    Well, personally, it's because I get $125/hr (and could probably get more if I insisted on it) for doing Mac ports and nobody's offering me that for *bsd and linux ports. But perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places. Illuminate me if so.

    Anyone out there a Mac developer?

    Since Inside Mac was photcopies delivered in 3-ring binders, baby. You don't get more old school than that.

    Is it just an easy port?

    Depends how well-factored the code is, like any other port pretty much. In general it's not terribly difficult.

  • The sixth square? (Score:3)

    by 11223 ( 201561 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @07:55AM (#903606)
    At MWNY, Jobs showed the product grid expanding from a 4 squared grid to a 6 squared grid - the cube fills one slot, but what goes in the other? Obviously some form of notebook.

    That said, I think that the G4 powerbook will not be in the sixth square - the black units will simply move to the G4. What's coming, it's speculated, is some form of subnotebook or tablet. I'm eagerly anticipating this... watch Seybold very, very, carefully :) Jobs is on a roll.

  • How can they make it even thinner? (Score:3)

    by Sheepdot ( 211478 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:00AM (#903607) Journal
    Apple reportedly will clothe the system in a new chassis that is more streamlined than the current generation of G3 PowerBooks.

    Good god, I was impressed with the iBook size and weight, often weighing less than an iBible. I wonder what the official name will be, iSheet?

    Err wait, I just said that out loud and it doesn't sound like an attractive name.

  • Re:How does the mac keep developers? (Score:4)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:32AM (#903608) Journal
    I wonder why people spend so much time doing mac ports of software instead of *bsd and linux ports.

    No mystery -- they can make money with the Mac port!

    In the MacOS market, you have:
    • Users who buy lots of software
    • Nearly 100% of the systems run only MacOS
    • A high percentage of boxes in home or multi-purpose use
    • The opportunity to grab a large marketshare of a particularly loyal segment of users

    As opposed to:
    • Users who expect everything for free
    • Lots of servers and firewalls
    • Most of the rest are dual-boot systems
    • The opportunity to be reviled for not making your software GPL and to GPL it only to be publically crucified when Bruce Perens thinks he's found some miniscule license violation

  • Mac development is fairly clean. (Score:5)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:11AM (#903609)
    I wonder how the mac keeps it going? Anyone out there a Mac developer? Is it just an easy port?

    I've done minor development under MacOS, Windows, and Linux.

    In my experience, the MacOS development environment is just cleaner. APIs "feel" neater, simpler, and more cleanly packaged, and the developer help pages on Apple's site are extremely useful.

    Under Windows, the API has a fair bit of bloat and isn't as neat, and digging through the help files is annoying as all heck, because they aren't sanely organized and often skimp on important details.

    Under Linux, I'll spend a few days of research to write a few hours' worth of code. There isn't any unified API - there are several competing APIs for window managers, and a patchwork of micro-APIs for other aspects of the system. It's great fun to dig into, but it's not a cakewalk.

    Just my personal experiences and opinions.

  • Clocking 101. (Score:5)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:27AM (#903610)
    No, the clock speed of a chip is a quantative measure. A synchronous chip runs at its quoted speed (unless you overclock it :-)

    "Clock speed" means different things on different architectures, as there are *different ways* of clocking a chip.

    You can have a single square-wave clock (single-phase). This is a bugger to design logic for, because eliminating race conditions is difficult, but allows you to push your circuits a little harder because you don't have to worry about keeping non-overlapping multi-phase clocks non-overlapping.

    You can have two non-overlapping square-wave clocks with a duty cycle lower than 50% each (two-phase clocking). This makes functional units *much* easier to design, but you have to add enough padding between pulses on alternate clocks that clock skew won't cause them to overlap anywhere.

    You can have four non-overlapping square-wave clocks with a duty cycle lower than 25% each (four-phase clocking). This is very hairy to design logic for, but if you can pull it off, the resulting logic is a bit more forgiving on timing constraints and can be clocked a bit faster than might otherwise be possible.

    Now, this is relevant because the shortest possible pulse _length_ under any clocking scheme is roughly constant, but the number of pulses per full clock cycle is the number of phases. If I can make clock pulses 0.5 nanoseconds long, a single-phase clocked system would be running at 1 GHz, while a two-phase clocking system would be running at 500 MHz, and a four-phase clocking system would be running at 250 MHz - while doing the same amount of work.

    So, comparing the clock speeds on two architectures that use different clocking methods islike comparing apples and oranges. It just doesn't work. Compare performance instead.

  • Re:How does the mac keep developers? (Score:5)

    by The Cunctator ( 15267 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2000 @08:14AM (#903611) Homepage
    A lot of it quite honestly comes down to psychology rather than rationality. There are enough developers who enjoy being Mac users that they want to develop for the Mac as well. A case in point is the game industry, where developers very much want to make Mac games even though the company's support for them is imperfect at best (even though there are big problems now, mainly in Apple's level of secrecy, it's a lot better than back in the day when Apple actively dicouraged game development because they didn't want companies to think of the Mac as a toy).

    Another reason is the same reason that anyone supports niche markets--there's good money to be made. Microsoft's Mac Office products give them huge profits. The Apple userbase is a pretty nice subsection of computer users: loyal, affluent, experimental. Apple users generally reward quality products.

    You wondered why people spend so much time doing mac ports instead of *bsd and linux ports. There's a lot more money to be made, especially in the consumer arena, porting to mac instead of the freenixes. The freenixes may be awesome, but they have a much smaller share of the consumer market and people who use them are less likely to pay for software than the average mac user.

    My suspicion is that there's more porting of server-type software (see IBM, SGI, etc.) to Linux than there is to Mac. The audiences are different.

    That said, Apple has had and still has problems getting developers because of their size (or lack of it). Apple's all-in-one hardware+software package is both its greatest benefit and biggest problem for developers. The transition to OS X will definitely be a very interesting test, as a successful transition is very much dependent on developer support.

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