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Intel Businesses Apple

MacWorld MacBook Only a Prototype? 219

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-thats-not-surprising dept.
mahju writes "Hard Mac is reporting that Apple's, unoffical, response in Paris to the the lack of information on battery life, is that the MacBook Pro that were demoed at Mac World SF are only prototypes and the final versions are still under development. "
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MacWorld MacBook Only a Prototype? More

MacWorld MacBook Only a Prototype?

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  • Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:13AM (#14538718)
    Um, how on earth is this news?

    Anyone at Macworld 13 days ago could see that the MacBook Pro units on display didn't have proper serial numbers, and it was no secret that they were development units. "Prototypes" is probably a little overboard, but yeah, they were not final, shipping production units.

    Considering that it has always been known that the MacBook Pro wouldn't be shipping for another month or so, and was in fact represented as such, is it any surprise that units displayed a month and a half before the unit started shipping wouldn't yet, well, you know, be shipping units?

    Now if Apple rolls out iTimeMachine at some point in the future, I'll consider eating my words.
    • ...and darned disappointing, at that. Even as a Wintel type, I liked having Apple push for an even-higher-speed Firewire spec, in the hopes that it would filter down to the rest of the world eventually. That they're giving up now and going with strictly hardware Intel can provide... well, it's a disappointment.

      That the units are prototypes -- yes, I agree, no real suprise there.

      • Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news (Score:5, Insightful)

        by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:21AM (#14538783)
        Even as a Wintel type, I liked having Apple push for an even-higher-speed Firewire spec, in the hopes that it would filter down to the rest of the world eventually. That they're giving up now and going with strictly hardware Intel can provide... well, it's a disappointment.

        I agree with you, but this, as you say, is likely a result of Apple going pretty much straight vanilla [appleintelfaq.com] with Intel CPUs and chipsets in its new machines. This can, of course, be a good thing and a bad thing, depending on your perspective.

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @10:02AM (#14539104)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news (Score:5, Insightful)

            by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Monday January 23, 2006 @10:11AM (#14539157)
            Your argument doesn't transfer.

            SCSI was slowly dying from the original Power Macs in 1994 through the first iMac and Blue & White G3, the first machines to ship without it. By that time, Macs were already using internal IDE hard disks and optical drives. It wasn't as if this was some sort of a surprise. Also, SCSI usage was most definitely not increasing; it was decreasing drastically.

            With FireWire, it is *the* transport of choice, and usually the only transport, for all DV and HDV cameras, decks, and other video equipment, and is increasingly used on high end DTV and HDTV equipment and other high end audio/video equipment As long as that is true, and as long as half of iLife depends upon DV transport to get data into the computer and the applications (iMovie, iDVD), FireWire isn't going anywhere. Now, could DV cameras transition to USB 2.0 over the next years? Sure. And if they do, fine. (The integrated iSight in the new Macs is USB, for what it's worth.)

            I'm sure FireWire will eventually, like anything, be replaced by another standard. But for now, it's here to stay for quite some time.

          • Firewire is supposedly the replacement, but it isn't really, no Mac ships with Firewire hard-disks or optical media, it's IDE that's the replacement.

            There's no such thing as a firewire hard-disk or optical media afaik. I've never been able to find a firewire-native drive, which would be way cool for systems with firewire boot. (If you have enough 1394 buses, it doesn't matter so much if you only have FW400; It should pretty much be impossible to saturate 50MB/s bus with less than three hard drives.)

        • Let's wait for Rev 2 to decide (Score:4, Insightful)

          by alexhmit01 ( 104757 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @11:35AM (#14539905)
          I have a MacBook on order. My 3.5 year old Powerbook has been needing an upgrade for about 9 months, but its been hard to justify $3k + 1 week configuring a new machine for only a 50% speed up. So there I was in limbo. Is this the PERFECT Mac laptop? Absolutely not, but its a shipping Intel laptop, "6 months early."

          Look at the Intel line-up. They offer an iMac and a MacBook on Intel, AND EVERYTHING on PowerPC. The video guys have been howling that the MacBook isn't perfect for them without FW800... Well guess what, Rev A isn't for you.

          The pro-graphics/pro-video crowd isn't going to migrate until software has native support... Rosetta won't cut it for them, even Steve Jobs SAID SO in the KEYNOTE... that's an anti-sell.

          However, they needed to get Intel machines out the door. Dev machines are great for big partners who wanted to get an early start, but until hardware ships, you can't QA your product. Your developers COULD have ported the code as needed over the past 6 months, but how do you QA a product without the release version.

          This is a KEY release... 1) developers now have to get their asses in gear and finish the migration, because Intel gear is here. 2) development houses have shipping hardware to test against, and 3) developers have real gear to work with.

          So many Mac developers carry Powerbooks. Having the iMac and MacBook gives developers machines to work on and QA teams machines to test on. The PowerMac hasn't been upgrades and won't for a while... Why? Until Adobe/Macromedia, Quark, and Apple's pro-divisions upgrade their software, there is no reason for pros to migrate. Also, the dual-dual G5s are REALLY REALLY fast, and compete with the top end of the Intel world. Until Intel ships their 64-bit versions of these chips, there isn't a reason to switch.

          I wouldn't be overly shocked if FW800 goes away (with addon cards for those with the gear), but until a USB 3 can provide the bandwidth, the video guys aren't going to be happy. However, I also wouldn't be shocked at a MacBook rev in 6 months, introducing the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines, with the former being mostly stock Intel to replace the iBook, and the latter having the high end gear that the video guys need.

          However, I need a MacBook NOW. All my internal applications are currently PPC only, and we need to start the transition. As our apps are for internal use, it didn't seem important to rush the job with the dev machines, we figured Rev A gets us going, and with Rev B of the Intel machines, we'll switch. We already migrated our internal machines from iMacs (in the G4 era) to Mac Minis w/ Apple Monitors, so that if we decide to NOT support dual-platforms, we can cheaply forklift each station at $500/station.

          But no shipping Intel hardware means nobody doing the ports and QAs that you video guys want done BEFORE YOUR hardware is released.

          Remember, those of us that program for OS X need to get our machines BEFORE YOU, or there is NO SOFTWARE for you to run on your new video machines. :)

          Alex

      • Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news (Score:5, Interesting)

        by xusr ( 947781 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:24AM (#14538806)
        I would agree; the permanent absence of FW800 is news (even though that missed the headline). I just bought a triple-interface HD in hopes that my next 12" Power(Mac?)Book would sport FW800. The studio I work at is outfitted with FW800, and there is a very significant real-world difference between it and the older spec.

        sigh.

        • Is one SATA? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) *
          If one of the interfaces on your triple-interface HD is SATA, then you are better off with the choice apple made - because an ExpressCard SATA card is going to be much faster than Firewire 800.

          If pretty much the only thing people were using Firewire 800 for was discs then why not replace that standard with a much faster alternative?

        • Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @12:23PM (#14540528) Homepage
          I would agree; the permanent absence of FW800 is news (even though that missed the headline). I just bought a triple-interface HD in hopes that my next 12" Power(Mac?)Book would sport FW800. The studio I work at is outfitted with FW800, and there is a very significant real-world difference between it and the older spec.

          This market is likely to be taken over by external SATA, or eSATA. You can read about it here [sata-io.org]. With no overhead in converting to SATA and a much higher cap to begin with, it is likely to be the solution for external high-performance storage. Firewire is still limited by the fact that both current DV and newer HDV cameras don't need FW800 for live playback. On the low end, USB is the standard for anything for keyboard, mice and everything else (with some competition from the PS/2 port). In short, FW800 is a technology looking for a market and the market just isn't there.
        • There are companies that sell Firewire 800 adapters that you can plug in through the Express slot, which will run at full Firewire 800 speed. Firewire 800 was probably left out of the MacBook Pro for space and cost reasons.

      • Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news (Score:5, Informative)

        by minimunchkin ( 838824 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:24AM (#14538809)
        I take your point, but the Express Card 34 slot provides even faster I/O and allows for dual Firewire 800 on one card. If I had to choose one over the other then I would make the same choice as Apple, particularly as it allows for much improved video options in the future.
      • I should also note that while FireWire 800 appears to be dead or at least resting (or perhaps available via an ExpressCard/34 card) with regard to the Intel-based Macs that have been announced to date, FireWire as a standard won't be going anywhere for a while [appleintelfaq.com].
        • FireWire as a standard won't be going anywhere for a while

          When I first read that, I thought you meant "FireWire is dead in the water"... now I see you meant the opposite... but I wonder which answer you are getting mod points for. :)

          I agree that FireWire will be around for some time, just because of FW target disk mode, and the point-to-point nature of it (as opposed to USB's master-slave).

      • .and darned disappointing, at that. Even as a Wintel type, I liked having Apple push for an even-higher-speed Firewire spec, in the hopes that it would filter down to the rest of the world eventually. That they're giving up now and going with strictly hardware Intel can provide... well, it's a disappointment.

        and all for what? because (quoting the article) it required Apple to build a specific board?

        that's absolutely pathetic. suddenly, they've shipped everything out to Intel and can't even design a little b

      • I liked having Apple push for an even-higher-speed Firewire spec
        No no no... we already have 95% of everything converted over to a single interface, and it's USB, not firewire. Why mess that up now? I certainly wouldn't mind a USB3 (with backwards compatibility of course)... but even so, it isn't the bottleneck to most of my devices.

      • Re: The problem with FW800 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by drhamad ( 868567 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:48AM (#14539012)
        FW is a great spec - both in 400 & 800 varieties. It's FAST - we all know that. However, Intel was smart with USB. Beyond bundling it with all their boards, I mean. They made USB2 the same connector and backwards compatible with USB1.1. I assume that there was simply no way to do that with FW800/400, but that's what is killing it. It's simply too hard to include 2 different connectors on one board, especially when the 2nd connector (800) is totally incompatible with anything previous, there's no demand for it (that's faster than most devices could run) and there's few devices out that would run on it, even if they are fast enough.

        Those connectors needed to be backwards compatible.

        • Re: The problem with FW800 (Score:5, Interesting)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @10:10AM (#14539156) Journal
          FireWire 800 is backwards compatible electronically with FireWire 400, but everyone who sells adaptors charges an insane amount for them (a FW800->400 cable cost about three times as much as a three-port FW800 card last time I looked). I wouldn't say there is 'no demand'. I have a couple of LaCie disks that are chained together with FW800. They connect to my PowerBook via a single FW800 cable, and it is noticeably faster than using FW400 (which they support, but only by limiting me to a single disk, since they only have one FW400 port). If they had included a FW800->400 convertor for each FW800 port though, I agree that would have been better.
          • You could use a FW400 hub. I have one that connects to my PB. I have my old Gen3 iPod hooked up to it, as well as a cable for the video camera. I also use a FW800 hub for my two external 250GB LaCie drives. I use a USB2 hub for the Gen5 iPod and my wireless mouse, with 2 ports left open (one of which will be for the imminent digital camera).
        • They could of just used a FW800 jack - you can run 400's on the bus, but the bus then clocks down to 400 across the bus in your chain.

      • Remember ADB-Apple desktop bus; this was the "ultimate" connection for desktop devices (ones that were slower and didn't need SCSI). It was used for mice and I think one or two vendors had ADB modem.

        Rule of thumbs: 1) don't trust proprietary hardware standards
        2) Wait until a standard is picked up by Wintel machines before investing heavily in devices
        • I think you need to adjust your first rule: ADB was no more proprietary than PS/2. IBM simply chose/made the PS/2 interface and decided not to go with the more versatile ADB like Apple and Sun did.

          Your second rule of thumb is actually the one that came into play. The first one is worthless, and stems from a lack of understanding of what "standard" and "proprietary" mean.

      • Re:I think the lack of high-speed firewire is news (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I think not being able to run Classic macintosh applications is much bigger news than not having 800 megabit firewire.
      • The main reasoning for lack of FW800 on the Macbooks is due to the fact that it consumes more power than FW400. Remember one of the big
        reasons for going to Intel was
        power consumption.

        If you require an FW800 interface for
        this computer, at least one hardware manufacturer has announced an
        interface card for this purpose.

      • See how the card slot is no longer a CardBus slot, but an ExpressCard slot? CardBus was PCI-based, ExpressCard is PCIe-based. The old laptops used PCI, and the new ones use PCIe.

        It is my belief that there just isn't a PCIe-based FW800 interface chip available yet.
      • This could simply be an engineering decision. They are already performing a pretty drastic architecture switch, why complicate things by trying to make Intel an expert in FW right off the bat?

        A better strategy might be to limit the variables on both the R&D and production ends by letting Intel provide hardware it is comfortable with and mating it with software Apple is comfortable with. If it all works out, then you can reintroduce the neglected hardware.

    • Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ford Prefect ( 8777 )
      Considering that it has always been known that the MacBook Pro wouldn't be shipping for another month or so, and was in fact represented as such, is it any surprise that units displayed a month and a half before the unit started shipping wouldn't yet, well, you know, be shipping units?

      I was foolish, and gave in to the marketing and ordered a MacBook Pro. (Oh, but the thrill of being an early adopter!)

      Estimated shipping date for the UK: February 15th. So, just over a month between the announcement and the ma

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

        by daveschroeder ( 516195 ) * on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:54AM (#14539049)
        I believe that these would be more accurately described as "pre-production". If the semantics are important to you, these were definitely NOT "prototypes", with what that term implies. These were essentially finished-goods units. Any speculation on whether or not they should have had battery life specs ready before ship, and guesses as to why they didn't, is just that: speculation and guesses.
        • I think you're right -- they're undoubtedly using the transition from pre-production to production to iron out a few last kinks. It's quite possible that some of these will have impact on the battery life. If that's the case, better not to say anything now than to give a wrong answer. If the answer ends up too low, you risk giving your product a bad reputation. If it's too high, you'll be accused of padding your numbers or outright lying for marketing purposes.

      • Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 )

        But it does appear that Apple is less in control of its destiny than it's been in the past

        Please tell me at what point since '95 has Apple been "in control of it's destiny."

        I kid, but seriously--they were first jerked around by Moto--Apple was notorious for shipping behind the curve systems because Moto failed to keep up. This seriously hurt Apple. Next, Apple tried again with IBM--who also failed to keep up with the market.

        While Apple may not be able to dictate all of the technology that they can ship

      • You'd expect, for example, one month before they're due to ship, Apple would know enough about the final design to give us some idea of battery life on the things.

        Nail on the head there. That was the suspicious detail. The elements of the press that are actually still reporting (as opposed to parroting press releases with a smidge of blog-level speculation or spin like the whinging about the MacBook name) did mention the omission, too. That whiff was in the air.

        We have good reason to be skeptical about

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)

      by catwh0re ( 540371 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:45AM (#14538993)
      Factually Apple can not be showing a "prototype" and have a world wide availability in less than a month later. Yes they were samples from the factory(not prototypes which look far worse), but the truth about battery life is simply this: It's a new type of battery (as used in the iPod) so they actually don't have any proper idea about the life of it. Remember apple have had a lot of issues with consumers demanding refunds/exchange because batteries didn't live as long as expected. At this stage they know one thing: it should be about the same. Whether or not it's less or more will take a lot of consumer review.
    • Now if Apple rolls out iTimeMachine at some point in the future, I'll consider eating my words.

      Actually the iTimeMachine was rolled out already, several times in the past and then back to the future.

      It has that power.

    • Re:Wow (Score:2)

      by drix ( 4602 )
      Um, how on earth is this news?

      Well, I didn't know it. Maybe that's because I wasn't at MacWorld 13 days ago. Pull your head out of your ass.

  • Explains alot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mgv ( 198488 ) * <Nospam.01.slash2dot@velt m a n.org> on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:15AM (#14538727) Homepage Journal
    This would also explain why:

    1. Only the 15 inch model was released (not the 12 or 17 inch version)
    2. You can still buy the entire range of G4 laptops
    3. The release date was February whilst the iMac was immediately available.

    Makes sense - I think apple wanted to make a splash at MacWorld and the laptop wasn't quite ready yet.

    I wouldn't be surprised if the entire MacBook range actually ships simultaneously, even if they are announced separately.

    Of course, they were announcing six months ahead of schedule, so they aren't really that far behind. And at least my shiny new (1 year old) power book doesn't quite feel outdated just yet ...

    Michael

    • Re:Explains alot (Score:5, Funny)

      by peetola ( 700206 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:18AM (#14538744) Homepage
      And at least my shiny new (1 year old) power book doesn't quite feel outdated just yet ...

      Wait for it... wait for it... Ok, now it's outdated.

      It takes less and less time these days.
      • Uhm, you mean it takes _more_ time? My current PC is, what, 4 or 5 years old. Sure - it has been upgraded several times till only a case and monitor are left of original config, but still - I guess in its original config (1GHz CPU, 256 RAM etc...) it would be still quite useable even today. These days it's no comparison to mid 90s rush when 1-2 year old PCs were basically garbage. But ok, Macs are not PCs, so may be it's different there.

        • Re:Explains alot (Score:3, Interesting)

          by WhiteWolf666 ( 145211 )
          Macs actually generally age better than PCs, but this transition to intel breaks that. I'm not sure if it will break it indefinitely.

          Universal binaries will only be produced for so long, and the performance difference in the architectures will probably doom PowerPC within a year or two.
      • It takes less and less time these days.

        It does. Though have to admit I go with philosphy that your computer is already outdatted by the time you get it out of the shop.
      • > Wait for it... wait for it... Ok, now it's outdated.

        The iPod too (from http://snltranscripts.jt.org/05/05fupdate.phtml )

        Amy Poehler: Wait, that iPod was only out for like five seconds.

        Steve Jobs: Five seconds too long! It was too big! Ridicules, old, obsolete! But guess what, I'm very proud to introduce, and I'm thrilled about this, the new iPod Invisa.

        (He 'pulls' something out but he is really not holding anything)

        Amy Poehler: Okay, wait a minute Steve Jobs, I don't even think you're really holding an
    • ...that hasn't already been explained.

      Makes sense - I think apple wanted to make a splash at MacWorld and the laptop wasn't quite ready yet.

      And they've done this with other products so many times at other Macworld and WWDC keynotes that I've lost track.

      I guess I'm just at a loss for how this is possibly interesting, considering it's kind of obvious that they weren't shipping units, considering they're not, well, shipping yet, and because Apple has preannounced products myriad times before.
    • 2. You can still buy the entire range of G4 laptops

      Actually, I think (and would hope) it is because right now the universal application support is seriously lacking. I don't even think there's a version of Photoshop that's universal, and Rosetta is described by Apple themselves as not to be used for production/professional application software. Basically, all Apple Pro applications won't work with Rosetta, and they say there "will" be a universal version of Logic available for owners of the current one. Tha
    • iMac immediately available my ass. Placed a visit to my local Apple store, 2 grand cash-in-hand to purchase the 20" iMac Intel Duo, with 1GB of RAM (1x1GB), and they told me that it would be _atleast_ five weeks. Been saving for something like this since the pipedream of a G5 PowerBook was mentioned (I'm the owner of a 12" 1.5GHz PowerBook). Just put a little bit away each quarter, finally had enough. Nope! No machine!

      Bullcrap, I say.
      • iMacs are immediately available. Your local Apple store may just suck. Order from Amazon --- they've got a $150 discount on 20" iMacs, and they're showing 24 hour shipping dates.

      • Re:Explains Alot (Score:2, Informative)

        by jaoswald ( 63789 )
        The key thing is the 1x1GB custom memory configuration.

        If you are willing to take the 512 MB (1x512) configuration, you can get it shipped from the Apple Store online in 24 hours.

    • Re:Explains alot (Score:2, Informative)

      by David Munch ( 939296 )
      2. You can still buy the entire range of G4 laptops
      At Apple's financial conference last wednesday, Steve-J announced that the G4 laptops/iMac G5 is only available as long as stock lasts, which probably wont be long since Apple has a 2-4 weeks stock on both.
      unoffical, response in Paris to the the lack of information on battery life
      At the same conference, Steve-J also said that the MacBook should have comparable battery-life to the PBG4, which would mean ~5,5 hours, according to Apple tech notes.
    • Well, you'll still be able to buy G4 laptops after the MacBook Pro is released.

      The Core Duo-based iMac is released (I have one), and they're still selling the PowerPC-based iMacs. The price on either model is identical; it's just a question of whether you want perfect backwards compatibility or perfect forwards compatibility.

      Just the same, the PowerBooks will continue to be sold up through the end of the year. (That's when Jobs says the transition will be "complete," presumably meaning in terms of the Appl
    • It's very unlikely they'll release the whole line. The 15" TiBook was the first to be introduced--the 12" and 17" models came later, in aluminum. Then, after a *really* long time, they finally made the 15" aluminum, too. Don't look for the other MacBooks (God, what a crappy name) until summer.
    • "And at least my shiny new (1 year old) power book doesn't quite feel outdated just yet ..."

      With a G4 in it, it was outdated the moment you opened the box.
  • In "Holy Grail"..

    LAUNCELOT: Look, my liege!
    ARTHUR: Camelot!
    GALAHAD: Camelot!
    LAUNCELOT: Camelot!
    PATSY: It's only a model.
    ARTHUR: Shhh!

  • Shocking (Score:3, Funny)

    by drhamad ( 868567 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:20AM (#14538772)
    Apple... introduce a machine before it's ready to ship? That never happens! I'm shocked. And appalled. How dare they!

    *looks at my mini... aww that was obviously released immediately*

    All my sarcasm being said and done, I don't think anybody looked at the 15" MacBook (god I hate that name) and thought it was anything beyond a rush job. Probably a very good machine, and something I'd buy if I had the money, but it's nothing earth shattering in terms of design or anything like that - it just *shouts* "we needed to do something about our powerbooks, and we needed to get as many x86 boxes out as soon as possible."

    Oh, and "we wanted to spite the rumors sites" ;)

  • Story Seems Dubious To Me... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GaryPatterson ( 852699 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:35AM (#14538899)
    I'm not a manufacturing expert, but I would think that taking a machine from prototype to production would be more than a month's work. If they're still in development, then I would expect the shipping models to be *much* later than a month late.

    The assembly line has to be geared up before any production can take place. How long does that take after the design is finalised?

    I can't see how a model could still be in development and yet ship as a completed unit in a month.
    • Agreed. This is why using "prototype" is a bit extreme. However, details and testing can still be done, even as parts are prepared for production. They won't be making major changes at this point, but even after they start working with the factories they can revise certain things, continue QA, switch out certain things (for instance, if the batter suddenly shows some massive flaw, there is no massive design change to be done, simply a different part they'd need to put in in final assembly - and 1 part (t

    • Re:Story Seems Dubious To Me... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @11:49AM (#14540069) Homepage Journal
      I think the better word would be "pre-production" model.
    • I disagree. I did some work for a medical device designer and the firmware and low-level software routines that control cooling, backlighting, and CPU sleep states is tricky stuff. The hardware might be fully-baked, but the firmware that controls all the stuff might need final tweaking, and that would have a HUGE impact on power consumption. Apple doesn't want to give you the numbers from their 'full-speed, full-fan, both-cores-on' firmware revision because they probably look really bad. The final result wi

  • Obvious (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:47AM (#14539008)
    If you were at Macworld, and had a chance to check out the MacBook Pro, the fact that putting them to sleep, or removing the battery would lock up the machines was a dead giveaway that they were pre-production units. Not to mention the fact that all the Apple staff on hand were telling attendees, "These are not shipping units, they are pre-production models." According to one Apple employee, the machines were still undergoing battery testing, hence why no one had any information on battery life.
    • Apple's shipped quite a few units that can lock up in sleep mode. My first mac, an iMac DV 400, would lock up constantly in sleep mode after upgrading it to 9.1-9.21 and later with 10.1. Eventually by late in 10.1.x, i was able to use it again. Similarly, my iBook locked up with several revisions of 10.3 although usually the problem seems to be related to third party drivers and kernel modules. ATI drivers and Logitech mouse drivers seemed to cause most of my ibook trouble. (ibook g4 800mhz)

      I hope the

  • Yeah, typical Apple... other vendors too... (Score:4, Informative)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:58AM (#14539075) Homepage
    This is standard procedure for Apple. Other vendors do it too, but Apple is a bit worse.

    Way back in the pre-Carly days, when HP did engineering, I found HP to be the only vendor for which it was always seemed to be true that if you saw a glossy ad for an interesting product, you could order it and get it delivered. Everyone else played the game of announcing what they hoped would be ready soon and crossing their fingers.

    The most egregious Steveism of this kind I can remember occurred in the year that they announced the first G4 PowerMacs. (The G4 processor included the "Altivec" instruction extensions which could produce dramatic speedups in applications specially coded to take advantage of them).

    It was in the early fall of 1999, the rumor sites had reported--accurately, it eventually transpired--that Apple was having trouble with their new motherboards and "the G4's" wouldn't ship until calendar 2000.

    Steve talked about the G4 processor and repeatedly referred to "these machines." He then proceeded to demonstrate a unit that had a redesigned motherboard ("Sawtooth") with a faster bus, faster video chips, and many other speedups. With an implied smirk at the rumor sites, he said "and these machines are shipping NOW."

    The only thing was, the machines that were shipping "now" were not the machines he had just demonstrated, but a machine that used a "Yikes!" motherboard, essentially the previous motherboard with minimal modifications to allow incorporation of a G4 processor. So, his words were literally true (machines with G4 processors were shipping now), but somewhat misleading... they weren't the "machines" he was showing... and performance was broadly comparable to the previous generation of machines, except in a very few applications (Photoshop) that took advantage of Altivec.

    Of course, everyone remembers the initial introduction of the Mac... when the machine he unveiled on the stage spoke, using the MacInTalk speech synthesizer... although MacInTalk would not run in the 128K Macs that Apple was actually shipping.

    • 128K MacInTalk... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @10:20AM (#14539225) Homepage
      The original Jobs Mac demo didn't use MacInTalk, it actually used a very early Mac port of Mark Barton's Software Automatic Mouth. SAM ran fine on 64K Apple II systems, and my guess is the Mac version worked ok with 128K. The reason the original Mac demo took up so much RAM is because of its fancy graphics running from RAM. Not too shabby for being written in a few days and they probably could have made it work on a 128K Mac by having it load each segment of the demo graphics from disk as needed.

      Speak [mac.com] takes up 36 KB of disk space and can talk quite well on a 128K Mac. Give it a whirl.

      Browsing the usenet, I see several comments from Mac 128K users that have played with MacInTalk, so it seems to work with that limited RAM. Perhaps the final released version of MacInTalk was a further optimized version of the SAM port?
    • The G4 processor included the "Altivec" instruction extensions which could produce dramatic speedups in applications specially coded to take advantage of them

      Wasn't Altivec the Velocity Engine in those days?

      the machines that were shipping "now" were not the machines he had just demonstrated, but a machine that used a "Yikes!" motherboard

      Didn't realize that Steve was showing off his benchmark machine? You know, the one that runs Apple benchmarks faster than anyone else can ever achieve.

  • Otellini, Grove, and Jobs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jmichaelg ( 148257 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:59AM (#14539087) Journal
    There was a video floating around where Jobs is showing the Macbook to Andy Grove and Paul Otellini. They're at the Apple booth in Macworld. In that video, Jobs doesn't hem and haw when Grove asks "how long does the battery last?" Jobs says "about the same" which I assume he means "about the same as the G4."

    An irony about the video is Otellini looks ghastly ill while Jobs and Grove, who have both survived cancer, look the picture of health. Perhaps it was the lighting or perhaps Otellini needs to hit the gym.
    • or perhaps we'll find out what went down behind the scenes when Otellini writes his autobiography.
    • Well, to be fair, Jobs had a really benign pancreatic endocrine tumor (people with ductal tumors tend to live less than 1 year). Grove had prostate cancer. I can't find a source detailing what grade it was, but he did have a prostatectomy. Assuming that it was low grade, he's practically cured. More people die of heart disease than the types of cancer Jobs and Grove had.

  • Prototype (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The bigest prototype in this Intelswitch is Apple pushing 32bit X86 as if it was a new architecture with years of room ahead of it.

    Everyone else is moving away from 32 bit x86 in favour of 64bit. Apple will soon have another big switch to lookforward too. My guess is x86-32 on Apple will be VERY short and buying one of these Macbooks will in the long run a pretty bad choice if you intend to run Macintosh software on it.
    • Most software doesn't need to be 64-bit, and 64-bit machines can offer backwards compatibility.

      "My guess is x86-32 on Apple will be VERY short and buying one of these Macbooks will in the long run a pretty bad choice if you intend to run Macintosh software on it."

      There's no way they'll have a 64-bit version of the OS out any time soon, so even if they're shipping 64-bit hardware it's not going to be taken advantage of. The earliest 64-bit OS I can imagine would be an interim release of 10.5 like they did fo

    • Re:Prototype (Score:3, Informative)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
      The switch from 32 bit to 64 bit isn't really so major. Apple already did it with the G5 and is doing again (in reverse) with the Intel machines. MS managed to go from 16-bit to 32 and now to 64 with no hiccups.

      The difference is that 64-bit is a strict superset of 32-bit so all your 32-bit software will run.

      You're quite correct though that any 64-bit software will probably have trouble on 32-bit machines. Regular software doesn't tend to upgrade very fast though. I suspect 32-bit Macs (and PCs) have qui

  • Were the MacBooks really intended for the Expo ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AlanAudio ( 946295 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @10:25AM (#14539262)
    There have been many suggestions that Steve's keynote at the Expo wasn't the one that he really intended to give as other things had to be withdrawn at the last moment.

    So instead of a new Mac mini, video download service and new iPod shuffle, were the gaps left in the keynote filled with a very leisurely stroll through iLife 06 and a preview of the forthcoming MacBook ?

    The MacBook certainly comes across as being a product that wasn't originally intended to be announced at that time.

  • I tried the battery at MacWorld, it was horrible (Score:5, Informative)

    by pbooktebo ( 699003 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @10:26AM (#14539277)
    I knew there was something wrong the minute I pulled the power plug on a MacBook at MacWorld. The Apple employee kept trying to plug it back in. I wanted to read what the estimated battery life would be (it displays right on the screen). I told him that I knew this wasn't a final number, but that I wanted to see what it would estimate. I left the cord out for a minute until the reading settled...

    It said 2:37 minutes on a full charge.

    Then someone invited us to an iSight videoconference and it dropped to 1:50 (still on a full charge).

    The employee didn't tell me that these were pre-production, but he did say the unit was still under testing, including all the thermals that control the fan, and that that would really eat battery. He also said that the screen was much brighter and that would eat more power (and he's right, I had my 1.5Ghz PowerBook with me and took it out for comparison. The MacBook looked almost two times brighter to the eye).

    I feel pretty confident that they'll get good battery life in the final unit, but it was odd how they skirted the issue instead of simply announcing that these models weren't good predictors of battery life (all the forums were FILLED with just this topic, and even this story carries it forward, where if they had addressed it, the question would be settled--just wait, it will come).

    • 2:30 or 1:50... estimated how?

      They take a look at how many mA/h are left in the battery, how much the machine has to do at the moment and apply a magic formula to come up with the number, IIRC. Without that formula (which they don't have if they're still testing battery life), the time displayed will be bogus. It would have been more interesting to know if the estimate dropped at a rate of a second per (real time) second, of more or of less than that. If it showed 2:30 for a couple of minutes... need I say
      • I wonder how much real-word testing they do to develop the magic formula and how much the magic formula takes into account the actual usage of the machine during its current session.

        It would be nice if the magic formula took into account the actual history of the machine in question, kind of a battery consumption/usage log that was more personalized about how the specific user actually uses it.

        • The battery usage seems to be a "if you continue using your computer like this, you have x minutes left" gauge. Which is very handy. You can turn down the brightness, turn off Bluetooth, etc. and the battery indicator updates fairly quickly. On my Powerbook at least it seems to be in the ballpark too.

  • MacBook s-video/composite? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @10:34AM (#14539334)
    Anyone have any info on whether or not the MacBook has a dongle for s-video and composite video out, like earlier PowerBooks? I only saw VGA and DVI-out in the specs. This is somewhat alarming; I would consider no analog video out a dealbreaker, personally. What kind of proper laptop doesn't do AV?

    Hard to say as it obviously isn't shipping yet, but Apple used to mention this capability in the specs... MacBook, not so much...

  • I hope... (Score:5, Funny)

    by atomm1024 ( 570507 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @10:42AM (#14539386)
    ...that the name "MacBook Pro" is also only a prototype...
  • The Intel Macs should have excellent virtualization given their chips. Does anybody know what the plans are for VMware, Virtual PC, QEMU/Qvm86, and/or Xen on the new Macs?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The MacBook Pro Rev A is probably not a good buy because of these reasons: - 32 bit x86, which will be replaced in near future - Rosetta is necessary for most application, which makes the old PowerBooks better for most usage - There are battery issues, maybe others we don't know about I believe it is better to wait for a rev B, so they have better time to fix the problems and port the applications. Have a nice day :-)
  • I was able to run some real-world benchmarks on the preproduction MacBooks at MacWorld and wrote this MacBook Pro Performance Analysis [craigtheguru.com]. I compared the new laptops to previous G4/G5 systems and found that the new MacBooks are indeed faster than most previous systems. Nobody expected the old G4 PowerBook to come out on top but I was surprised how well the new Core Duo performed.
  • Maybe they can stay prototypes (think of it like the Google eternal betas) until they can get true 64-bit processors in them, rather than the current 32-bit CPU's currently shown. Does Apple really want to be supporting a 32-bit Intel OSX for the next however many years?
    • They didn't have a choice.

      They didn't have a 64-bit OS ready, so even if they launched on 64-bit hardware they'd still have to support the applications for a long time. Later versions of the OS could upgrade to 64-bit, but they wouldn't have been able to avoid the legacy support for applications.

      Also, G4s were completely outclassed as it was. Another 9 months of that when everyone else had just gotten another core would have killed their laptop sales. The cost of dealing with 32-bit will probably be less th

  • In, what way, does this differ, from the, usual? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SIGFPE ( 97527 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @12:26PM (#14540567) Homepage
    1. Develop protoype
    2. Demo prototype
    3. ?
    4. Profit

    Isn't this, what every, hardware, and, software company has always, done?

  • From a newsweek article article
    After his keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs spoke to Newsweek's Steven Levy

    Levy: How is battery life with the MacBook?

    Jobs: About the same--this with a dual processor! Each processor is as fast as a G5, and the battery life will be the same as [the previous PowerBook's] G4.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10853916/site/newsweek / [msn.com]

    For what its worth, digital camera companies send out "review" copies pre-production cameras. Usually close to the final production version with some problems
  • I know that a lot of people have older PowerBooks (Like under 1ghz) that are iching to upgrade. But getting Rev 1 of the MacBook would only lead to disapointment and fustration. Although Apple tends to be better then most at Rev 1, products, there are often a lot of things that customers want that are not in it, I say if you are 500mhz (I am at 667mhz) or faster Wait another year, let apple Polish out any of the issues, Let apps like Photoshop, VirtualPC, Office, and Apples Pro-Apps get ported to intel, a

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