OSNews

how much is a Dell laptop with an intel core duo and built in camera?

Expensive!? Not at all. I paid £1500 for a top end VAIO at the end of 2003. The best specced machine then with 2.8GHz, 512MB, 60GB, 15" x-black screen and GeForce 6200 Go. The macbook is £1429 with dual core chip, 1" thin, camera built in, insane graphics card capable of playing Doom III (My VAIO couldn't), 512MB, 100GB and likely excellent build quality.

You're confusing "a lot of money" with "expensive". For what you get, it's positively cheap. If you don't have £1429, it costs too much for you, that doesn't make it overpriced at all.

There's a slight distinction between being expensive and whether something is a good value or not. 2-2.5k for a laptop may very well seem "too expensive" when he might be looking for an iBook-replacement.

You won't play Doom 3 on that laptop, trust me. A desktop X1600 XT only pulls about 60 FPS in Doom 3 at 1024x768 low details. Factor in the following:

- Mobility version of card
- Higher-resolution screen
- OS X

And chances are you'll get pretty crappy performance.

even if they can pull half that, it would be playable.

Not in any heavier-action scenes. Doom 3 is like that.

I think he means it's costly. Not expensive. And, at $2K, it is costly.

If you think you have it hard, try living in Europe. For a 2K$ machine I have to pay the equivilent of $2,513. And that's just the lower model. The higher model is the equivilent of $3,128!

When I first looked on apple.ch the price on the picture said macbook started at 3600 swiss francs. That looked horrendous because 2000$ = 2561 swiss francs. There were 1000 swiss francs (780 USD) more expensive here! I was getting a bit furious.

Now I just looked again and the picture *changed*! It now starts at 2999 swiss francs (2340 USD), which considering some local taxes and the fact that the swiss always like to pay a bit more is ... let's say reasonable.

Also the french apple.fr changed from 2399 Euros to 2149 Euros ... still nearly 2600 USD but the french have a huge VAT (18.6% versus 7.6% here).

All I can say is lucky you. Over here, apple.no shows a price tag of NOK 18.490,- for the cheaper macbook. That's about USD 2800, including our unbeatable 25% VAT.

/signed

And dual core ! How delicious is that ?
For a performance overview of the new Intel Core Duo chip see : http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2648&p=1

"We continue to see that the Core Duo can offer, clock for clock, overall performance identical to that of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 - without the use of an on-die memory controller. The only remaining exception at this point appears to be 3D games, where the Athlon 64 X2 continues to do quite well, most likely due to its on-die memory controller."

I have a dual processor G5 and I am not a bit jealous. By the time I am ready to replace it early next year the Intel Mac Dual Duals will be out for the G5. Four is much better that 2. :-)

The fact that for most general-purpose code, Apple's fastest computer is now an iMac doesn't bother you?

This is not true.

It has an ATI x1600 GFX card which is much better than the x600.

Way to go apple.

Almost true, firewire 800 is gone. But who's got any devices for that anyway?

Its on the website now

£1,429.00

or

£1,779.00


hhmmm, last one is a bit expensive but still tempting

I'm worried about time availability. I've got a £1700 insurance voucher that expires 28th Feb and I have to get it from Dixons or PCWorld Business. Gah, if I miss out on this machine I'll go spare.

If you have it on order but can't arrive before the 28th Feb surly that will satisfy the terms and conditions, I mean its not like its your fault

They are available to order from apple, why will they care if you don't if you get it a month later then you paid for it?

I think you'd have more luck getting your wife exchanged :-) Seriously I think there's a delay during which you can exchange but it's been more than three weeks since christmas so probably too late.

I for one am still waiting for the nano I got for christmas...

you want to know how to extend your battery's lifetime?

stop draining it to nothing.

my iBook battery died and the dude I bought the new one from (3rd party and a larger capacity) said never let Lithium -ion batteries discharge all the way because it shortens their lifetime.

Never fully discharging it is an exaggeration, but it is best to not perform full discharges on lithium-ion batteries because it expedites the natural deterioration of capacity. Lithium-ion batteries can also be rather fragile with respect to environmental conditions in general, so that's not the only way to kill them.

Just a question? Why does Battery calibration utility always drain to nothing (if your comment would be true)?

With 20 or so notebooks I've had, I can say completely oposite. Only two bateries died on me, exactly those two I've almost never drained. It started with dropping from 5% to 0%. and then difference just got bigger and lifetime shorter.

ummm... the MHz myth refers to the idea that MHz == performance.

you can still compare the performance of chips of a different architecture.

Exactly, and even though it's 100 Mhz slower, the Core Duo (by their benchmarks) is a far better performer than the G5. Still fighting the megahertz myth, for the moment at least.

Hardly surprising that's a better performer - 2 chips versus one!

What's surprising isn't that its better (that's expected), but by how much its better. Intel's laptop CPU beats IBM's workstation CPU by an enormous margin, even on a per-clock basis. SPECint_rate scales very well with the number of cores, so if it had been a 1.9x speedup, that would have been quite expected. But 3.2x? That's something else entirely.

True, but at the same time, they're also saying in their advertisements (and on their site), "hey, this is a great performer, look how well REAL WORLD applications run on it!" - thats all consumers care about, the actual performance of the applications they run.

Quite frankly, the average user couldn't give a donkeys diddle if it could run Ray Tracer .01 second faster or slower, or whether some obscure compressor does something faster or slower.

What consumers want to know, "will those rocky my socks off" - and from what it seems, yes, they'll have to purchase a new pair (of socks).

The SPECint_rate score for the G5 is comical. The 2.0 GHz dual-core Yonah is 3.2x faster, meaning the G5 must've gotten a 10.2 (which jibes with the recorded scores for the PPC 970). That means Yonah is running 8.2 per core per GHz, and the G5 is running 4.9 per core per GHz. That's worse, per-clock, than a Xeon, an Athlon XP, or even an UltraSPARC or the orignal Itanium! In fact, its only barely faster than a regular Pentium 4, and the P4 at least has an enormous clockspeed advantage! It's now quite obvious why developers reported that their Intel dev machines were much faster than even the G5 duals --- they were!

Yes. And so tecno-babble about PPC superiority goes to hell finally. Now it's time to benchmark on market standards. I cannot wait to see :
a) It Windowz can be installed on it and run
b) Linux should work out of the box, but kernel guys will keep up shortly
c) a three boot system, to benchmark

Ouch! Redmond will be embaressed even BEFORE CPU-hogging Vista sees the light of day!

Doubtful... Windows will do better on multiproc machines than Mac OS X because it has finer-grained locking and is fully preemptible, which Mac OS is not. Until relatively recently, OS X was governed by a rather small number of large locks: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2028.html#MacOSXKernelThr...


OS X might have some advantages over Vista, but it's Kernel is not likely to be one of them. NT is pretty hard to beat.

Yeah, I think that the switch to Intel will be a huge boon to the GPUs that will be going into the Macs now. I'm not too well up on this kind of stuff but apparently, ATI used to underclock their video cards for the Macs so they would get a better yield. It was also more expensive to make a graphics card for PPC than x86 because it was such a smaller market and they would also have to be flashed so they would be PPC compatible. Now there's a level playing field for Macs because the graphics cards that go into them are the exact same as the ones that go into all x86 PCs.

Exactly. To me, that seems the single biggest advantage of switching to Intel.

Mactel graphics cards may not be exactly the same as PC ones, because Mac use EFI instead of legacy BIOS. Thus the cards may need an EFI boot ROM.

The X1600 is not a high-performance offering.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-x1600_9.html
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-x1600_5.html

While an improvement on the dysmal offering in the iMac now, it's not anything too remarkable. It should provide decent performance with OS X eye candy, though.

"The X1600 is not a high-performance offering (..) While an improvement on the dysmal offering in the iMac now, it's not anything too remarkable"


You mean to tell me its not "screaming fast"? Could apple be lying?

While it could have been better in the iMac it is still amazing to get it in the new laptop. I can't wait to play with CoreImage on such a beast.

umm... they are not over priced

show me a system that is the same config that goes for far less.

Ill even let you not find one with a built in camera

babe, don't worry, Smartpatrol is a whiner; if Steve Jobs appeared at his house, and gave it to him for free, he would whine about the colour or some other trivial matter as to allow him to hear his own voice.

babe, don't worry, Smartpatrol is a whiner; if Steve Jobs appeared at his house, and gave it to him for free, he would whine about the colour or some other trivial matter as to allow him to hear his own voice.

You must be confusing me with someone else. Since your limited intellect totally missed the basic premise of my post. That being one of the primary benefits of Apple switching to the Intel Platform <wait for it> lower cost PC components and processors compared to the PPC platform. You would think that this would manifest itself in lowering the price of Macintosh Hardware which it obviously didn't. So I will say again the new intel Macs are still over priced like the old ones. Apple would be smart to lower their prices slightly in order to sell more systems and increase their market share. I am sure you wouldn’t like that at all, comfortable with your elitist members only Apple club.

Yeah, expensive - that explains why Apple Mac shipments are *only* growing at 25% per year - yeah, I understand, what a pathetic failure Steve is, maybe he should retire and hand it over to SmartPatrol, the local arm chair CEO and all knowing guru to enlightenment.

Edited 2006-01-12 07:50

Oh, and btw, people still whine about Dells 'high prices' - its people wanting something damn cheap, then whining when their wizz bang half baked computer falls to pieces because the vendor chose to source their components from half a dozen dodgy dealerships with shoddy records.

Sorry mate, you purchase a Mac for the FULL, god forbid this term, 'experience' - I like the fact that I can leap from update to update, from version to version without a care in the world. I have a large selection of software I can choose from, from vendors providing good support.

Compare that to the generic PC world of being stuck with Windows - and forget about Linux, its a joke on the desktop - crappy hardware support, no software vendor support and lets not forget the never ending jihad between different developers and their immature "I'm taking my marbles and going home' everytime someone in a opensource project doesn't agree with them.

So yes, you can go generic PC and put up with the pain and missery, and hell, if you're into a good dosage of S&M, then good on you - some here, however, have a life, a job, and numerous other non-IT related stuff that we focus out attention on.

Oh, and btw, people still whine about Dells 'high prices' - its people wanting something damn cheap, then whining when their wizz bang half baked computer falls to pieces because the vendor chose to source their components from half a dozen dodgy dealerships with shoddy records.

You get what you pay for just like anything.

Sorry mate, you purchase a Mac for the FULL, god forbid this term, 'experience' - I like the fact that I can leap from update to update, from version to version without a care in the world. I have a large selection of software I can choose from, from vendors providing good support.

Point release is hardly a version change if i you are making some kind of obscure Mac OS vs. Windows Comparison.

Compare that to the generic PC world of being stuck with Windows - and forget about Linux, its a joke on the desktop - crappy hardware support, no software vendor support and lets not forget the never ending jihad between different developers and their immature "I'm taking my marbles and going home' everytime someone in a opensource project doesn't agree with them.

So you love your Mac good for you still doesn't make you right. I love my Mac too.

So yes, you can go generic PC and put up with the pain and missery, and hell, if you're into a good dosage of S&M, then good on you - some here, however, have a life, a job, and numerous other non-IT related stuff that we focus out attention on.

Each to his own i have very few issues with the countless White box PC's I have built over the last eight years. Just becasue you can't sucesfully build a PC doesn't mean everyone has the same difficulty.

Some people make their living in Corporate IT and actually know what they are talking about.

Some people make their living in Corporate IT and actually know what they are talking about.

Babe, who said anything about corporate IT? If it is the corporate world, I would use neither Mac or Windows - it would be a centralised processing setup with SUN Ray appliances.

Sounds like someone saw a Powerbook user on the bus and became extremely jealous.

Or maybe just a console fanboy. Yeah, he definitely sounds like one.

Heh, I share your sentiments. They can do nice design, why they couldn't figure out better name? It sounds like a $2 ISP offer.

Agreed. MacBook Pro? Am I supposed to say that to people out loud and not feel stupider for it? Even Probook would have sounded better than that.

proBook... ProBook... Probook. lol

In any case, I agree that it does sound much better than "MacBook Pro".

I would have liked to see them name it FireBook in remembrance of FireWire which seems to be slipping from computing consciousness. SInce I heard that Apple hired a couple of Sony industrial design engineers, I think they could take it a step further with a red pigmented carbon fiber chassis as an option.

Despite this off-the-wall alternative (I would like carbon fiber notebooks), Apple could have picked a better name.

I agree... the Powerbook name has ALWAYS meant the laptops. Why not call it the PowerBook CD (for Core Duo) or even PowerBook ICE (for Intel Core Edition)... yeah... ICE... I like that!

As I've been saying for awhile now, "Apple will do what Apple will do."

All we can do is stick around or walk away.

What does the iBook name mean then? PC's??

You are bitter because of the Intel CPU that can boot XP. The new MacBook is a way faster Laptop than anything with a G5 in it. I could care about the name. Give me the performance!

So will the Intel "iBook" be called MacBook Consumer...?

It will be called whatever they want it. Maybe they will call it MacBook 360 just for you.

And enjoy the sparkling mediocrity that is ATi's Linux support.

3D isnt everything. from what i recall, the open source xorg driver is quite useable

http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R7.0/doc/html/radeon.4.html

There's no RV5xx listed there, so it seems doubtful.

At this point, giving up 3D also means hampering the performance or availability of all of the pointless eye-candy people expect from their future computing experiences.

ATi releases drivers for Linux, they're just mediocre compared to what nVidia offers. There doesn't seem like a lot of point shelling out a lot of money for an iMac if your Linux experience suffers when running Linux, if doing so is your intended goal. You'd have to really like the form-factor.

thing is, im just as home in the console as on the gui.
so for me, eyecandy is less of a issue.

and i like the idea of having a whole computer inside the screen. given the shuttle and similar solutions i wonder why noone have gone the route.

Gateway used to do just that. If they stopped, it was probably because they didn't sell or they had a difficult time cooling a Pentium 4 within such a small space.

hmm, maybe so. the cpu that apple are using is a laptop one right?

still, would be fun to be able to buy a similar solution but as a bearebone-like system. one that uses the mxm latop graphical modules and laptop cpus.

FW800 killed itself by not being connector-compatible with FW400. Compatibility is the most important thing in this industry.

Agreed, compatibility may be one of the most important things in the industry. The way it's achieved is far from being the best one though. As for the firewire thing. Just one question: with intel making processors for Apple *and* being the main baker of USB what did you expect to happen to firewire? Firewire is faster and generally better than USB by leaps and bounts - i am sure you are aware of that and how much intel and MS have done anything they could to kill firewire. Even so firewire has become the standard in so many areas. Even so firewire 800 tears apart it's USB (wanabe) counterpart in any benchmark. And suddenly Apple remembers `compatibility' ... riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Don't you think that something suspicious is going on here? Why would apple refer to compatibility so vigorously here and so romantically when it comes to dumping the far superior G-series of processors for the dead-horse-being-floged x86 ones? And please, please don't buy the `benchmarks'. The G5 processor (with all the little funding it had for it's development) is cooler, more efficient and cheaper to produce than any x86 processor. A little more funding on it would put it an other 10 ages ahead for the Yonah to reach it. And please don't say that the switch was a decision that Apple took. It was something that more or less other companies forced the Apple to do. And i think it's connected directly to drm. Connect the dots eugenia. Connect the dots. We get c and d class technology here for a reason. Please, don't buy into the stuff that a manager/CEO/you name it says. You can understand what `our product is Ok - buy it' means when it comes from a CEO. I mean do you really believe Jobs believes what he says on processors?

P.S.: Sorry for the rant but I think that there is nothing to cheer about with the moves that apple was (indirectly) *forced* to take. Nothing at all. Sorry.

Of course your wrong. If compatability was the most important thing digicams wouldn't all be firewire they would be USB. FW 400 is still faster than USB 2 in most cases btw.

apple was forced to go intel? WTF? How would that work? You have anything to back this claim up? How can intel force Apple to do anything? This makes no sense...

The switch was 1) economies of scale - intel motherboards are commodities 2) IBM couldn't make a low wattage, fast laptop chip. Intel does.

You don't seem to have got what happened: IBM decided to stop spending millions of cash to do custom development for a _small_ and _niche_ customer that afterwards whined all the time and never bought the promised volumes.

So Apple had to choose another chip. Simple as that.

But Apple will never admit it.

NO, that happened in your own personal little dream world

If IBM had produced a G5 laptop chip, Apple would still be using PowerPC

Right, Apple switched just because of the G5 laptop issue. Steve didn't actually want to switch half a decade earlier, and he didn't switch now because he was sick of Apple spending enormous energy and money chasing the x86 world, and only achieving parity once in a blue moon. They certainly didn't switch because IBM's future PowerPC plans make no sense on the desktop, seeing as they are comprised of high-clockrate, low IPC designs optimized for floating-point (at the expense of integer performance!) and massive thread-level parallelism, neither of which are of paramount importance ont he desktop.

If IBM had made a laptop G5, and Apple had stayed PowerPC, Apple would be screwed. Look at the per-clock estimates of the Power6. This CPU, which won't be released until well into 2007, is estimated to perform, at 4 GHz, only marginally better in SPECint than the current fastest Opteron. Now, using the fact that a PPC970 is 75% as fast as a POWER4 (due to smaller caches, narrower busses, etc), we can estimate that a POWER6-based desktop chip would perform, at 4GHz, much like a 2.4 GHz Opteron. Very impressive for a chip that won't couldn't even be released for a year and a half, huh?

Let's face the truth: desktop PPC fell prey to economics of scale. Intel and AMD, combined, are simply more willing and able to tackle the desktop market than are IBM and Motorola. It makes no sense for Apple to continue spending money chasing x86, when AMD and Intel are perfectly happy to do all of their R&D for them.

I wonder if early adopters are going to suffer the problems of a new design that seems to be happeing more and more with Apple products. Glad i can't afford one now i will wait until the first versions are cleaned out and get maybe a rev 2 or 3

Well all the problems with the secondary hardware have been resolved, like the exploding powersupply and squeeking fans. It looks to me the big change is the motherboard and since that's likely to be manufactured by intel how bad can the quality be ?

Edit: changing the otherboard will actually solve a problem with some of the original iMacs which was leaking capacitors. (assuming the new motherboard hasn't got the same problme :-)

Edited 2006-01-10 19:46

Well all the problems with the secondary hardware have been resolved, like the exploding powersupply and squeeking fans. It looks to me the big change is the motherboard and since that's likely to be manufactured by intel how bad can the quality be ?

the iMac may be ok but what about the MacBook Pro? Of course time will tell hoepfully it goes off without a hitch.

Macbook Pro is pretty close to the current Powerbooks with different mobos and processors.

Smart Mac users wait a month before buying a new line and check Macintouch.com frequently, keeping in mind that people with problems write in more often than happy customers. That site, BTW, did a nice user-reported reliability survey of various models recently.

Of all the users I know a lot would love to at least try a mac but refuse to do so for two reasons:

a) that one little app that requires windows (virtualpc is unbearbly slow unless you have a very high end machine, and even then...)

b) games, games, games. I had 500$ dollars to buy a computer for my nephew this christmas. I could have got her a (use) mac mini and she certainly would have loved it. But she would have to forget about so many games...

If you can just dual boot to run that special app or that special game, that would just rock.

VPC will be pretty good for non-gaming scenarious because it will all be directly executing in x86 assembly without translation now. Probably MSFT will just port over their VPC for Windows execution engine.

"Excellent Job Apple!!!
This laptop is extremely super capable; I advice normal computer users to wait for "MacBook Home" which will save them alot of money. Be aware MacBook Pro is over powerful for normal users, it is just for power users and professionals."

oh oh, brainwash -alert

Edited 2006-01-10 22:52

"MacBook Home" sounds good, but I think Apple will leave off the "Home" part because having a Home and Pro is too much like XP Home and XP Pro. I also think MacBook Con, for consumer, will not be used.

They'll just take your $2000 when they release the computers you want, then. They weren't ready, and never claimed to be releasing their entire line of computers now or at once. It would have entailed considerable intentional crippling for Apple to sell their low-end with Intel processors that were considerably faster than those available in their high-end. An iBook with Yonah but no replacement for the Powerbook? A $500 Mini with a Yonah that defeats the iMac handily? Come on, be real.

you could figure out exactly why.

The single core Yonah comes out in about 1-2 months. These are the CPU's that will be used in the Mac Mini and the iBook or MacBook (non-pro), or whatever it's called.

I think Apple is waiting for the single core Yonah instead of just using Pentium M's so they get SSE3 across the entire product line.

- Kelson

Agreed. I'd bet that single-cores will go into the mini and at least the two lower-end ibook replacements. I'd also bet that the PowerMac G5 won't be replaced until the conroe/morem CPUs are available at the end of the year. I also think they'll need something that fills the gap of the 12" powerbook, so there will either be a dual-core iBook replacement at the high end of that line, or another MacBook Pro later with some slight enhancements over the iBooks, but basically the same. As for the mini, it might be dual-core as well if it becomes the media center mac that everyone's been claiming, because Intel's viiv platform prescribes a core-duo as part of the chipset. I also hope that the retain the dedicated graphics solution when they do announce the iBook and mini replacements instead of integrating Intel's GMA onboard stuff. Not only would that suck for graphics, but it wouldn't accelerate their Core-imaging library either.

As long as Vista or XP will run on these things, my next machine will be a dual-core mac.

Also, MacBook is a retarded name. I don't understand how something so ugly can come out of the Apple camp. Somebody's sleeping on the job.

HMMM. I wonder if a measly single core Yonah will look pathetic vs a G4? I expect it will. We may soon be able to run the benchmarks.

The Intel Core Duo is 4.5x faster for integer and 5.1x faster for floating-point than the G4. Even with one core, it's still well over twice as fast as the G4.

Since my measly single-core Dothan doesn't look pathetic compared to the G4, that seems rather unlikely.

I feel your pain. I wanted to get my wife a new iBook.

What exactly is sitting behind your monitor that is more exciting to look at? The larger frame width ("big stripe" : whatever that means) at the bottom would drive you crazy? Wow.

I actually agree. I think the chunky white section below the screen makes it pretty ugly. As far as design goes, I think the 'lampshade' model was better executed.

I bet they benchmarked it against a Thinkpad with XP! Grin!

Steve actually sported a Thinkpad (running NeXTSTEP) before his return to Apple.

Quote: "At that point, you're comparing two machines with similar build qualities. The Mac comes with backlit keyboard, built-in camera and the magnetic power connector. The T60 comes with 3G/EDGE/whatever, is slightly lighter and has a 3-year warranty as standard. Unless you desperately need any of these, there's no real reason to go for one over the other."

Yes, but one comes with Mac OS X which you can supposedly duel boot with Windows. The other comes with Windows and can't run Mac OS X. So ... two thumbs up for Apple and two thumbs pointing sideways for Leveno. Of course you can wipe out Windows and install Linux on the latter.

So, tehy WILL have 2.1 GHz core duo.

hmm... what is the availability of that chip right now?

want to bet that Apple will be bumping the powerbooks next quarter or so?

A new Mini would not have brought anything innovative to the proverbial table, either. It would have simply met the price/form-factor that you wanted.

Well, if the rumors had been true about the Mini being a digital entertainment hub, then it certainly would have been something new. A Mini with a mere chip swap wasn't what the hype was about.

There are two USB ports -- one on each side. Due to how much there is built into the MacBooks, there's less need for as many USB ports. Wireless mouse? Bluetooth. Webcam? iSight. External hard drive? Firewire (superior over USB 2.0 for constant, massive data transfers).

Apple's intention is not for you to install Linux or Windows on it, so no, it doesn't "need" two mouse buttons. That's just a requirement of Windows/Linux. OS X deals with one mouse button.

Justifying fewer ports is funny. Maybe if they had none, you would have found it even better. There are USB keys, hardware USB dongles, USB printers, MP3 players, etc all kinds of things people need to use. Can't se how giving more ports would be a bad thing?

And let's not go into the mouse buttons, that seems to be quietly going the "Intel is slow" way...now that two button mice (configured as one button) have become standard with iMacs.

I have two USB ports on my iBook, and I have never found it a limiting factor.

I've had a wireless mouse receiver and USB drive plugged in at one point, and that's the most I've ever needed. If you need 3+ USB ports, for USB hardware dongles, printers, and "all kinds of things people need to use", perhaps you should be looking at desktop-replacement "notebooks", or desktops in general?

Who the hell walks around with their USB printer plugged in? One Firewire and two USB is plenty for 95% of users.

And where does one find a "desktop replacement Mac notebook"?

My gripe is that saying two USB ports is better than three or pulling out a number like 95% is pretty remarkable. I realise I am not typical user because I have an extra keyboard and mouse attached to my laptop half the time but I am not going there. Around my workplace, a lot of people use softwares that need hardware dongles that block one of the usb ports. Add to that a mouse and you are left with nothing.

And while I have a network printer both at work and at home, I have still not succeeded in getting the Powerbook to recognize the printer server at home so it only leaves me the option of hooking up the printer through a USB connection, which requires pulling out the mouse. In the real world, people do print from a laptop, you know, even if they don't carry the printer around, jeez.

Having two buttons is useful even in OS X and apple ship a two button mouse with all current desktop Macs, so why not put two buttons on a notebook?
Although, in my experiance, ctrl-clicking is not that much of a hassle on a notebook, where it can be done with one hand (compared to requiring both hands on a desktop), but still, it would be nice to have a two button *Book.

If it were done aesthetically, I don't see why not. If it was done as two visible buttons, it would detract from the simplistic design of them.

This might be news to you, but you COULD add the Apple two-button "supermouse" externally to the laptop by USB.

IMHO: one button is plenty.

http://macworld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/mw/index.html

thanks

How is it faster at same clock?

Same reason an Athlon64 bitchslaps a P4 at a GHZ slower...

I'm so tempted by the new Macs... but I just got a 12" PB last like March or May

it's 2-3 times faster than the powerbook.

sure you can get a hp, i have one, but it has no iApps and not as good customer service and support as Apple.

It sounds like you don't need a mac anyways.

Yes, the difference is the software.

But then, it's the software that is most important, because that is what you use all day long. I don't sit there staring at my CPU or HD, or navigating the chips on the RAM modules. It's the OS & Applications that matter most, because that is what you interact with.

- Kelson

So can my Thinkpad T42. Battery life does depend on what you're doing. Running an optical drive constantly, or playing a 3D FPS will both drain batteries rather quickly.

The price for you includes your VAT, doesn't it? Then the higher prices Apple charges in foreign markets, which might simply be a matter of low-volume sales.

Keynote is now online here!
http://macworld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/mw/index.html

I want to DL it and not Stream it.

I expect that that's what Intel provided to them. I'd prefer a Photoshop bake-off, or something more relevant to the real world.

At least I don't have listen to people DEFENDING Spec anymore.

Grin!

Photoshop is a crappy measure of anything except Photoshop performance. It doesn't run the same code on both platforms. That's fine if you use Photoshop, but if you use other programs, its a fairly meaningless comparison of processor speed. SPEC, in contrast, runs identical real world code (gcc and gzip, among other things) on each platform. This isolates CPU + compiler performance, without bringing into question how much effort went into a particular port of the program.

Apple used SPEC before with the introduction of the G5 (and comparing it with GCC/Intel rather than actual submissions to SPEC) when it suited their purposes. When it could not remain competitive it fell out of favor again. I don't put any value in Apple's own benchmarks, myself. In this case they're relying on Intel's own compiler instead of GCC.

I look forward to real benchmarks by third-parties and any officially-submitted SPEC scores Apple provides.

And you believe that?

The T60 is quoted with a battery life of up to over 7 hours, depending on the battery options. I doubt you'd see that in the wild, but I doubt you'd see 6 hours in normal use on the Mac either. Once you're using the same chipset and the same processors, it becomes harder to find ways of shaving off power consumption.

Once you're using the same chipset and the same processors, it becomes harder to find ways of shaving off power consumption.

True enough, but proper integration of the OS with the hardware could make a difference. Power management on Windows is still a mess, mostly due to dodgy third-party drivers.

All computers have a BIOS of some sort. However, they don't normal PC BIOSes which are dreadfully outdated, scrolling up it says it uses EFI which you can read about here: http://www.deviceforge.com/articles/AT9479223305.html

"Ha,jobs ate his words, back in 1982 apple was running an ad with a snail with the intel pentium 2 logo on it. intel knew it was a matter of time apple would come to them."

--
I don't think Steve Jobs could have done that seeing that the pentium chip line did not materialize until 1993.

I don't think Steve Jobs could have done that seeing that the pentium chip line did not materialize until 1993.

That, and the fact that, lets face it, IBM and Motorola were the main contributors; from a business perspective, considering the size of both companies, would it be reasonable to assume that Intel could leap so far ahead of the competition as to make the PowerPC irrelevant? of course not - Steve went with the best solution at the time, and that was PowerPC.

The PowerPC only started to become long in the tooth in the last 5-6 years, so it I hardly see it fair to blame Steve for something that would have made sense 15 years ago, but no longer does.

Uhu, doesn't it mean that MS had to swallow their socks and compile their stuff on GCC?

No. SJ said during the keynote speech that they were using Intel's compilers. Stands to reason, since they are now using Intel CPUs. Intel's compilers are known to produce much faster code on Intel CPUs than GCC.

Disagree.

They are differentiated by enhanced function: 1) much higher security 2) Much higher reliability 2) Much lower support costs 4) Better applications (eg Final Cut Pro, etc. I also think Firefox is better on the Mac ( I use FF for XP and OSX daily 5) People tell me the programming tools are much better on teh Mac (Cocoa/OPENSTEP).

1) much higher security

Is not a functionality of OS X, but just a consequence of low market share. In terms of OS-level security functions, OS X and Windows are pretty much equal (support for encryption, file premissions, protected memory).

2) Much higher reliability

In how far?

And that is the fundamental stupid part of your hypothesis - the whole IDEA of charging a premium is for the design AND for the integration between the operating system and hardware - THAT and THAT ALONE gives MacOS X the edge over Windows.

Whilst Microsoft is trying to juggle supporting every reinteration of an x86 PC, Apple on the other hand know EXACTLY what is in a Mac, they know that it won't change, therefore, they can extensively test knowing that there will be a consistant outcome.

If anything, the benefit to Apple, in the end will be the benefit of economies of scale which Intel has, in regards to processor supply - the ability to supply IN VOLUME and ON TIME, the latest and greatest chips, and it also gives Apple more resources to now spend on their operating system and hardware design rather than worrying about mundane things like chipset design, which quite frankly, is not a customer attention grabbing product differentiator anyway.

"the whole IDEA of charging a premium is for the design AND for the integration between the operating system and hardware - THAT and THAT ALONE gives MacOS X the edge over Windows"

Maybe. People keep saying this. Though its not at all clear that "integration" means anything here. Yes, there are drivers in both OS X and XP and Linux. But it is not clear that an nVidia card is "more integrated" with a Mac than with a Dell, or with Mandriva, or even what that would mean. They work or they don't. I am for instance now working at a Dell running Debian, with a Radeon graphics card, a Seagate drive, some Crucial memory, and an Intel processor. I think the optical is by Toshiba. Right next to me is an iMac running the usual stuff, very similar in fact. I'm not aware of any special relationship either has to its hardware that is different from what the other has.

However, that is not the argument. The argument was not about running OS X on different hardware.

The argument was that the real opportunity they now have is to sell the hardware with a different OS, and the prediction was, that within a year, they will end up doing it.

Maybe. People keep saying this. Though its not at all clear that "integration" means anything here. Yes, there are drivers in both OS X and XP and Linux. But it is not clear that an nVidia card is "more integrated" with a Mac than with a Dell, or with Mandriva, or even what that would mean. They work or they don't. I am for instance now working at a Dell running Debian, with a Radeon graphics card, a Seagate drive, some Crucial memory, and an Intel processor. I think the optical is by Toshiba. Right next to me is an iMac running the usual stuff, very similar in fact. I'm not aware of any special relationship either has to its hardware that is different from what the other has.

*shakes head* I shouldn't need to explain something this basic to a person I *assume* has atleast intermediate IT knowledge (why the hell else would a person hang around a site like osnews.com for?)

Each video card vendor will have a GPU from Nvidia, but each will have its own quirks to give it a performance 'edge' over the competition - in the case of Nvidia, they have to try and balance up supporting ALL those quirks - Apple on the other hand know what they've done, there is only one interation of, say the Nvidia 5200FX out there, meaning, there won't be any unexpected surprises out there.

Lets go onto the chipset; there is Via, SiS, AMD, Intel, BroadCom (Formally known as ServerWorks) - all these have their OWN quirks, to boost performance, provide better reliability etc. etc. and again, Microsoft has to support these quirks, coupled that with a video card quirks, there HAVE been instances of incompatibility - several years ago, there was incompatibility between Nvidia video cards and a range of Gigabyte motherboards, for example.

I'm sure you get the message pretty easily. With Apple at the helm they KNOW what products they've shipped, what hardware has been included with them, the possible bugs, quirks, and work arounds required - it would be NO different to Microsoft developing an embedded operating system for their XBox, and knowing that the OS will only ever run on that particular piece of hardware.

As for selling a computer with a different operating system, WHY?! to whose benefit? thats just bloody stupid! its right up there with SUN selling servers preloaded with Windows 2003.

The Mac is the COMPLETE platform, the operating system AND the hardware workign together in harmony, just as the reliability of a DEC VAX machine was DIRECTLY derived from the fact that the hardware and operating system departments worked together to provide a TOTAL, OUT OF THE BOX solution to the end user - with NO unexpected surprises.

It's not. 32bit glory.

How does this jive with Apple's goal of making OS X 64 bit clean? Isn't this planned obselence for the new MacBook and iMac when 64 bit OS X comes out? When will that be?

The snails were about the G3/G4 versus the Pentium II. The PII won back then too, according to measures like SPEC, but back then, Apple folks tried to denounce the perfectly good benchmark every way they could.

The interesting thing about the Intel switch is that now a lot of Mac folks are playing it off as "x86 got dramatically better, and now is beating PowerPC." Yet, if you look in the x86 world, nobody is super-excited about Yonah. In terms of performance per core, Yonah simply achieves parity with the years old Pentium-M and the Opteron. The simple truth is that x86 has been ahead of PowerPC, on the desktop, for quite a long time. Whether it was the G3's crappy FPU, the G4's crappy FPU and slow memory bus, or the G5's crappy integer performance, the desktop PowerPC chips of the last decade have all had extremely glaring microarchitectural flaws, not to mention a generally lagging clock-speed.

The lagging clock speed was the killer; you can only make up for so much by using RISC.

You don't make up much at all by using RISC. That's the basic fallacy that people have to get over. You save a little bit of die space, a few stages in the pipeline, and allow some better register allocation. On the other hand, your code density takes a dive, along with your i-cache hit rate.

The performance differences between the Gx and x86 chips aren't due to RISC vs CISC. The G4's FPU performance is bad not because its RISC, but because it's got a single FPU pipeline. The G5's integer performance isn't bad because its RISC, but because its got a long pipeline, only two integer units, and two-cycle latency for simple instructions. Conversely, the G5's floating-point performance isn't great because its RISC, but beceause its got two symmetric FPU pipes each of which are capable of a multiply-add per cycle.

In the end, it comes down to the design of the CPU. PowerPC vs x86 is irrelevent.

In terms of performance per core, Yonah simply achieves parity with the years old Pentium-M

Yep, and that's because Yonah really is "just" a dual-core Pentium-M with a beefed-up SSE unit. Not that the Pentium-M isn't a very decent chip anyway, but the new processor names and the hype to go with them should really have waited for the new micro-arch debuting in the summer.