During yet another press event, Apple introduced new PowerMacs and PowerBooks as well as a new photo application called Aperture. The fastest new PowerMac holds two dual-core G5 processors at 2.5Ghz each, while the two lower-end models have one dual-core G5 at 2.0 or 2.3Ghz. The dual-core G5s have 1MB L2 cache per core. The 15″ and 17″ PowerBooks now have 1440×960 and 1680×1050 resolutions. Aperture is post-production photo software built for professional photographers.
First post be-ach!
that’s an interesting decision. would some hardware-savvy osnewsie care to speculate whether or not this is an indication of motherboard compatibility with g5 CPUs and any intel upgrades that might come down the line?
Uhm, no. Future motherboards are going to be manufactured by Intel. IIRC.
lazarus, that doesn’t answer my question – care to elaborate?
Zero chance of that. G5’s have a different socket from Intel’s chips. The signalling is different too.
Mmmm….fast things…nice. Can you spell P-O-W-E-R?
Before anybody starts trolling – these changes are evolutionary, not revolutionary. If you were expecting them to release new powerbooks with mega specs and a G5 you need to get a grip of reality.
Quad CPU G5s workstations are expensive, but in an industry where time is money, having up to 76GFlops available could earn the cost back in time saved.
All else being equal, would a single 970MP really be faster than two equally-clocked 970FX’s? Also, does anyone think that the motherboard on that new single-cpu G5 has an empty slot so I could eventually make it a quad?
I know nobody physically has these machines, but maybe someone with a lot of CPU/Apple experience can shed light on this!
-Eric
All else being equal, would a single 970MP really be faster than two equally-clocked 970FX’s?
Not really, but it’s not intended to be. (The L2 cache is bigger, which should give a small performance improvement.)
Also, does anyone think that the motherboard on that new single-cpu G5 has an empty slot so I could eventually make it a quad?
I strongly doubt it; Apple doesn’t care about upgrades.
“Future motherboards are going to be manufactured by Intel.”
In what universe?!
Are Dell’s or HP’s motherboards manufactured by Intel? No.
Apple’s future motherboards are going to be manufactured by Apple’s manufacturing partners like Asustek, Quanta or whoever will be.
In fact, Intel does make the motherboards for Dell and HP. HP will be a little more industrious than Dell and tweak the BIOS and maybe add one or two custom chips, but basically the whole design spec comes from INTC, the board, chips, BIOS, etc are all from INTC.
Actually, my HP has an ATI motherboard chipset… but then it does have an AMD proccessor…
I dunno about HP, but I remember that my last Dell (300MHz PII, LOL) had a slightly-modified Intel Seattle motherboard.
Actually Intel makes most Dell motherboards. It’s part of Dell’s deal with Intel that gets them P4s and Xeons for vastly less than anyone else can get them for.
Intel doesn’t manifacture only CPUs, it’s one of the biggest semiconductor manifacturer in the world and it’s products ranges of course to motherboards too.
If you have a PC with Intel processor (like future Apples
) you have good odds to have an Intel mobo, or at least a mobo using many chips produced and sold by Intel to other integrators.
It was about time
God, I know that the G4 is like buying a PIII (rethorically speaking) but I love ’em
If I could sell mine (G4 1.25, 15” BlueTooth, Backlight, etc.) I’d buy one of these
Don’t knock the P3. The P-M has a lot more in common with the P3 than the P4, and I remember the higher-end P3s beating the first P4s on most benchmarks.
I’m still waiting for those Mac mini updates you promised us three weeks ago, Thom!
I’m still waiting for those Mac mini updates you promised us three weeks ago, Thom!
Maybe you should watch out better as Apple has already confirmed that upgrade *weeks* ago.
http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2005/09/20050930023909.shtml
Next!
What on earth are you talking about, Thom? The fact that Apple confirmed that buyers *might* get machines that exceed the specs? I *still* cannot purchase a Mac mini with the specs that you quoted. Please see:
http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html
I agree right – it’s a dirty trick Apple is playing, having people order Mini’s and not knowing which one they’ll get.
Its nice that they have moved up their powerbook resolutions. I would really love to upgrade my 17″ powerbook from 1440×900 to a higher one. But will probably end up waiting a year or until they come out with the next powerbook lineup with a full hardware refresh.
I assume a lot of users are waiting for something like a 17″ High Resolution, 2Ghz Centrino (Or next years equivalent) with a beefed up video card (GF7800GTX GO 256MB?/Radeon XXXX) and hopefully by then larger hard drives with faster speeds. Not sure if they would use just a faster RPM or perhaps some type of hybrid memory to increase the load times. All in the same nicely designed shell and for the same price. Of course I am probably dreaming (Lack of sleep)
All this continues to point to the fact that IBM still unable to deliver 3ghz CPUs
Welcome to today, glad you could make it. Your statement isn’t exactly news or have any meaning. IBM can’t be arsed, apple are going Intel – or haven’t you heard?
Yeah, as if Intel or AMD had 3GHz on their multicore CPUs either…
And when was Intel supposed to have that 4GHz P4 again?
Seems like a lot of people are still wrapped up in MHZ for spec’ing cpus. Even Intel are trying to back away from the whole MHZ thing (look at how well a lower spec’ed MHZ Pentium M compares to a higher spec’ed MHZ P4).
Now about the current Apple offering, I want to post a message someone else somewhere posted that summed things up to me:
I read a review of Intel’s just released Paxville dual-core Xeon today. It runs at a top speed of 2.8GHz (and no motherboards are available yet,
they had to use a pre-release one). Each core has 2MB of L2 cache, but otherwise it can’t even keep up most of the time with a 1.8GHz dual-core chip from AMD.
AMD only recently released a 2.4GHz dual-core processor. The G5 is 2.5GHz dual-core
– so Apple are competitive in terms of processing power on their workstations, and that is good.
Simple point, current DUAL CORE Intel is 2.8ghz, AMD 2.4 ghz, and G5 2.5 ghz. Looking at that for all the MHZ people out there, Apples offering compares WELL to other CPU venders DUAL CORE MHZ OFFERINGS!
It’s almost as if everyone has reached some sort of wall with the cycle of shrinking processes and increasing clockrates, thus pushing the entire industry into developing multicore processors and pushing parallelism off to the application developers. I sure wish this had been more widely reported! Thank you for telling me, Sabon!
I have had my 15″ PB for two years now and I wanted to wait until the intels came out to upgrade, but higher resolution and faster HD’s (100 gig at 7200rpm) is making it mighty inticing to upgrade!
And that is what is wrong with Apple. I bought my powerbook 8 months ago. I would live to have bought a wsxga resolution notebook. The resolution was readily available on x86 machines. But with Apple we celebrate when they allow us a high res notebook.
All this continues to point to the fact that you have absolutely no idea that overall system performance is more important than raw Mhz numbers…
I’ll take PowerPC (or AMD) over Intel’s P4 3Ghz space heater any day!
Yeah, because an entire architecture and a whole company are way better than a CPU.
The powermac’s are indeed interesting beasts.Disapointing news from the powerbook/i-book front.Still the inferiour FSB,more memory doesn’t take that bottleneck.
True; if they boosted the FSB to 200Mhz, double pumped – making an affective 400Mhz FSB with a bandwidth of 3200Mbps – it would provide a decent boost; with that being said, is it really worth Apple spending the time to invest into boosting the performance on chips that are to be dead very soon?
‘ll take PowerPC (or AMD) over Intel’s P4 3Ghz space heater any day!
Yes!
I personally it is very sad Apple didn’t/couldn’t stay with IBM.Wish they went to AMD straight away.
Apple is sandbagging the PowerMac line.
Apple has got to give the illusion that getting dumped by IBM was a choice. Wouldn’t want their new Quad PowerMacs embarrasing next year’s joke Intel desktops…
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=paxville&page=1
But,but, Steve told us about this wonderful ‘Intel Roadmap’ Roadmap he said!
Next year’s Mactel desktops will be using Conroe and Woodcrest, which are completely different from Paxville. Yes, it really is about the roadmap, not today’s chips.
Thats an important point to make….
So many people used Apple’s switch as reason for their personal belief that x86 chips are as fast/faster than current/past PPC chips.
Apple’s decision was governed by future roadmaps… not current product.
Or people could just rely on benchmarks that aren’t produced by Apple or Intel, rather than relying on useless marketing babble and assuming to understand the rationality of someone’s strategy sans evidence.
I suppose the real problem is for Apple zealots that rambled about RISC this and Altivec that seeing Apple move to the “vastly inferior” x86 architecture as ceding they were wrong for all of those years. We can’t have that.
“Steve told us about this wonderful ‘Intel Roadmap’ Roadmap he said!”
Yes, the roadmap they’ve had since they 2000 when they launched OSX 10.0
look at aperture
http://www.apple.com/aperture
I have a dual 1GHz G4 Powemac as my main work station. I think it is a super slick machine, and it has served me well for the past 3.5 years. However, I am amazed that people still buy Powerbooks from Apple. Granted they are slick, but 1 1.67GHz G4 does not sound much better to me than what you could get 3 years ago (granted they’ve added RAM, better GPU, etc, but still).
I can tell you for a fact that my coworker’s Linux laptop (with a 2.1 GHz Pentium M) is almost 3 times faster than my Mac. I can’t believe that people are still moaning about the fact that Apple is switching to Intel. Isn’t it obvious? With no mobile G5 on the horizon, their laptop line was doomed to irrelevance (I am amazed it isn’t already). You can argue that AMD would have been a better choice, and I do like AMD better. But pragmatically, I think Intel just made them a deal they could not turn down, and AMD couldn’t match. And that’s alright with me. FYI, even though the Pentium 4 is a piece of garbage (even Intel agrees, they are bagging it,) the Pentium M is well designed and has legs to grow. What we will see on Apple machines will not be the Pentium 4 line, but Pentium M derivatives. The Intel roadmap does look promising 2006 and later.
“I think Intel just made them a deal they could not turn down”
http://abenweek.net/blog/wp-content/photos/godfather.jpg
NetBurst was an architecture that didn’t pan out. It wasn’t a piece of garbage, Intel simply fell into a lot of holes it didn’t foresee. It happens. The architecture has seen a lot of successes over its lifetime. If they saw how the future would pan out, they might have continued with derivatives of the P3 well after Coppermine. Who knows?
Granted they are slick, but 1 1.67GHz G4 does not sound much better to me than what you could get 3 years ago
Yes and the 1.67GHz costs about 3000 EURO.They are defenitely slick,but still.
It is, in fact my Powerbook is 3 years old this November, and was the first release of the 1Ghz TiBook.
A 67% increase in processing power is alot better than what was available 3 years ago.
/mpb
These new machines seem nicely priced and competitive compared to Opteron workstations, but then you have to remember the ‘gotchas”: abandoned platform, doubtful PCI-e peripheral support, somewhat problematic Linux support for peripherals. I feel more comfortable with the Opteron dual cores or the X2’s, even though clearly Apple has made an effort to be competitve here ( they probably had no choice, it’s hard to max price a line you have given up on ).
Of course, if you like Aperture, then these look great.
It is too bad the 12″ powerbook didn’t get an update. Although the 15″ and 17″ updates aren’t that great. I wasn’t expecting a G5 or anything. I know the current powerbooks are probably sufficient for my needs, but I also know that much nicer laptops should be out in less then a year. I will just put up with this Dell until then.
The fact that Apple confirmed that buyers *might* get machines that exceed the specs? I *still* cannot purchase a Mac mini with the specs that you quoted
Oh come on, just admit that I was right from day one, that Apple has upgraded the Mini to the newer specs, and that even Apple itself confirmed it.
The fact that they want to clear out inventory is none of my concern. Now stop acting like a baby, admit that I was right (surprise), and deal with it.
I don’t mean to flame, but you’re acting rather childish yourself. Why have a “length” contest? The ego really is quite silly. How about you be the mature adult and just let it go? You’re only adding fuel to the fire.
So, if you tell Thom he’s wrong, you are acting like a baby.
The fact that I cannot confidently buy a machine with the new specs is all of my concern! That is all that matters to anyone but rumor-mongers. I continue to assert that (three weeks after this websited claimed so) Apple has not updated their Mac mini line, based on the following facts:
1) There has been no press release.
2) The same old machines are for sale.
3) Apple has not confirmed any new specifications, but merely acknowledged that some Mac mini’s might exceed the published specifications.
Even if the line is updated tomorrow with the exact specs quoted by this website, the article was still *wrong* from day one. The line was not updated three weeks ago! It’s quite straightforward.
I agree with Thom. Apple wants to clear inventory of the older mac minis. If they made the new specs public no one would want the older speced ones. What apple decided to do is give some people a newer spec machine while still selling the old one. Getting a higher spec’ed machine than you paid for is better than the other way around.
Also only the rumor mongers know what is going on. Normal people look at what apple is offering and place an order if Apple gives them a machine they are happy and don’t complain. I don’t see anything wrong with it.
Normal people look at what apple is offering and place an order if Apple gives them a machine they are happy and don’t complain.
That didn’t come out as intended. I meant to say Apple gives them a machine that exceeded thier initial expectation they are happy. The other way around would be bad.
feel like commenting on Aperture?
They’re pricing it like a Photoshop competitor, but the description sounds like iPhoto Pro Special Eye Candy Edition. Does it sound like there’s something important there?
Photoshop owns Mac graphics; the Windows version is appallingly weak in comparison, but still popular. It’s expensive but it works well, it’s familiar, and everyone has it. Even if Aperture can’t replace Photoshop outright, does it offer anything (that iPhoto doesn’t) that might make it worth having in addition? For $500?
Yes,
This is the app the entire Digital Photography world has been waiting for. It’s not iPhoto Pro, it’s a just a great app that holds its own.
PS really isn’t a great tool for doing digital photography development. It’s a tool for altering photos heavily. But what people who shoot in raw like myself have been waiting for is a app that lets us shoot in just raw, dump the files to our computer/laptops and open them all up quickly and see what we got. Currently this is a painful process with apps like photoshop. Also photoshop is overkill, since all one really cares about if your not into destroying photos, is preserving your files, adding any needed meta data, renaming and such. then Adjusting things like white-balance, making B&W conversions, cropping, resizing, and exporting/printing final prints. There really is nothing that comes close to this currently. And definitely not something this fast or user friendly. Just the whole viewing possibility is in make it worth it (partially since OSX lacks a proper built in image viewer)
This will almost definitely go on to be the biggest pro app apple has ever created. Photography is done by way more people then any of the other areas covered by apples pro apps. This apps will be bought by amateurs in flocks. It’s cheaper then CS2 (half the price I think).
I so hope it lives up to what I’m seeing. If it does, I think it will be the most important app ever to me. (that is of apps that arn’t given apps that everyone uses, like webbrowsers.
You say that the Windows version is appallingly weak in comparison with the Mac Photoshop.
What are the differences?
Why bother? 389 people will have mac’s in about 10 years anyway.
I have to say a lot of people had made very good posts about the whole situation. That being:
1) Reason for Apple move to Intel is the ROADMAP. Lets hope the roadmap turns out like it is planned.
2) The CPU technology lacking for Apple (PPC) is in the mobile machines. This is probably the major reason for them leaving PPC (couldn’t work it out with IBM on how or cost of producing a mobile G5).
3) The P4 is junk (and raises your power bill
, but the Pentium mobile IS a good CPU (actually I recently built a PC Cube system, and used a Pentium M for the CPU).
4) Current PPC is dead end in the fact they won’t sell anymore PPC, but software support will continue. The PowerMAC move probably won’t complete until end of 2007. Adobe and others have said it will take some time to move their current software to offer Intel support. Plus future builds will use FAT binaries so both Intel and PPC will be supported in the future past 2007. Apple has sold millions of PPC machines, and are not going to just dump support for PPC anytime soon. If that did happen (ohh 10 years down the line or so), most people will upgrade to Intel MAC hardware, or you just run Linux on it (who knows where Linux will be at that time).
I have the feeling that Apple is playing some tricks here. Can it be that Apple will have Intel on the mobile platform and G5 dual cores on the PowerPC Line even after 2007? IBM can deliver dual cores that give us real power.
Rosetta (universal binaries) can be really the trick.
What you think ?
Pasha:
I have to agree, I wonder also if they will continue to sell PPC on the high end. Could be they target PPC towards the graphics/FPU crowd. It does do well in these massive PPC clusters, and with certain applications.
I think this all depends on what Intel’s roadmap offers on the high end at the time, and what IBM offers on the G5 high end (in 2007).
One thing to be assured about, IBM most likely would continue to evolve the G5, since they use it in their own low end servers. So I would hope/expect the G5 will continue to get better. IBM really has no reason to build a mobile version, except for Apple. I think what happened is IBM wanted upfront costs to make a mobile G5, and Apple didn’t want to go that direction. I am sure given enough money, IBM would of made a mobile G5.
Given the above, I don’t see why Apple couldn’t offer PPC in their high end offerings, along with Intel. I am sure if the Intel offering in the high end does not beat the PPC, then Apple will continue to offer high end PPC’s machines. But since we are looking at the 2007 roadmap (for intel/ibm), its hard to tell. Based on what Intel has done recently, I have not been impressed with them (AMD has done much better). Only good thing from them is the Pentium M, which again goes back to the mobile front.
I don’t know how reliable this info is, but it seems that the new dual 2.3 is about as fast as the old dual 2.5 (which makes sense given the larger cache, faster memory, and supposedly lower-latency memory controller). http://media.99mac.se/g5_dualcore/
Adobe Premiere: RIP thanks to Final Cut Pro
Adobe PDF Distiller: On its way out, thanks to native PDF in OS X.
Adobe Photoshop: your days are numbered.
At least you still have Indesign and Macromedia Flash….
Apeture is in no way a Photoshop competitor. Apeture is a competitor to Capture One PRO from Phase One. Apeture is a RAW image management application. It allows you to import, organize, correct, soft-proof, backup, export and print your RAW photographs in a non-destructive way. This is a perfect compliment to Photoshop in a professional photographers workflow. It seems to have a lot more features than Capture One Pro has too, at just about the same price point as well.
“Apeture is in no way a Photoshop competitor.”
Maybe not yet, but it will be.
Guys, please try to understand that aperture is not trying to replace Photoshop, it is meant to complement it.
Aperture is sort of like a pro iPhoto.
It’s main feature is it is able to handle RAW images, and non-destructive editing of images. You can take a single raw image, apply various edits to it, and save a version of it, go back to the original, adjust the settings, aperture, whitebalance, levels etc, and save another copy.
And all these multiple copies don’t take up extra space. And since all of this is non-destructive, you are not losing any information.
When you need to do more intensive editing, you can open an image in Photoshop, edit it, and when you save it, another version of the image is saved.
In addition is had a number of very powerful and useful Project Management features, including versioning, stacks ( automatically associating a set of photos that were shot within moments of each other) and many more.
Again, please note that this is only for professional photographers, and this had been designed to save lots of time for them. It’s not for the casual photographer who wants to play around with a few images.
Can it be that Apple will have Intel on the mobile platform and G5 dual cores on the PowerPC Line even after 2007?
Yes.
Apple wanted to break the 3.0GHz barrier myth with IBM.
I bet the new dual-core 2.5GHZ is even faster than the hypothetical dual 3.0 GHz Power mac.I furthermore think it will be a very tough job for Intel to beat the dual-core 2.5 GHz PPC CPS’s.We now now the Paxton is good to go back to the drawing board.
But,Intel has a fine Pentium M line that would make quite an improvement to Apples Power/i-book line.It wouldn’t suprise me at all if Apple stays with the powermacs on the IBM PPC bandwagon even longer,who knows.
Regarding the dual core processors; the only ones that will benefit are those who use applications that are heavily threaded – most high end applications like Adobe Creative Suite software should benefit, but gamers, quite frankly, should throw in the towl and buy a games console.
Apple’s website must be getting hammered – I can’t even fully load the product information page for Aperture. Anyway, the program seems to have a clear overlap with Photoshop which also contains RAW support. But judging from the description on Apple’s website, it also has substantial project management tools. But how useful are these organisation tools to photographers – enough to entice them away from Photoshop? If Photoshop does everything Aperture can from an editing perspective (and I’m sure it does, plus more), is the integration of a complete photography workflow in one app enough to get photographers to buy this app?
“Guys, please try to understand that aperture is not trying to replace Photoshop, it is meant to complement it.”
“Apeture is in no way a Photoshop competitor.”
Take time, guys, take time…
Final Cut Pro today is ways different than its previeus versions.
“Adobe Photoshop: your days are numbered.”
Anytime… Soon… REALLY soon… 😀
Anytime… Soon… REALLY soon… 😀
Uh huh. I believe the phrase you’re looking for is “real soon now.”
If only SLI was supported in that beast!!! I would get it in a drop of a hat!
In my view, faster processors result in bloated programs-which negates any improvements in speed. Aperture will probably run like molasses on the new dual-dual cores. It not only needs a dual-G5 but also 2 GB of RAM. This comment is not Apple specific. Windows Vista requires newer machines as well.
If only time was spent on optimizing code to run faster on existing machines.
If only time was spent on optimizing code to run faster on existing machines.
But they do, you can run Tiger on a G3. I doubt you could run Vista on a PIII. The specs are like that for a reason. You try manipulate an image with floating point precision that is 4 million pixels big, in real time. This is not amature JPG work, these specs are genuinely needed.
Everyone here knows I’m not incredibly fond of Microsoft, but I still use Windows and would like to be able to continue using it as long as some of the more exotic hardware and software I need isn’t well supported in Linux. I’ve never had the chance to use a mac, they aren’t even sold in the city I live in.
As you made that point I was reminded that as soon as Vista is release my computers that are no more than two or three years old will become obsolete; I did hear that Microsoft is going to make it possible to run Vista on what are current machines from as far back as a few years, but I’m concerned that wouldn’t be much different than running Windows XP on a Pentium III 500 is today, that might be a reasonable speed for web browsing and e-mail, but not for a developer.
If Mac OS X Tiger can still run on an old machine from 8 years ago that’s not only impresive but also a major selling point in my books.
BTW. I don’t really know how far back the G3’s go, I just said 8 years because that is what I would consider a reasonable life span for a computer, 10 years would be better since good computers still aren’t cheap investments.
Celerate, I don’t normally comment on these posts, but I can vouch that Tiger runs well on both a G3 500Mhz iMac that my brother owns and a G4 400Mhz PowerMac that work “donated” to me because no-one else wanted it. What do I mean by runs well? I wouldn’t necessarily use iMovie, or do heaps with iPhoto on them, but the 400 runs as well as the 1.6Ghz (768Mb RAM) Celeron Win XP system that sits right next to it that I have to use for a particular app at work; and for what my brother needs to do (web, email blah blah blah), the iMac is just fine. The only caveat – 512Mb of RAM. I’m genuinely surprised by how flexible Tiger is when I use either of these Macs.
I can understand that one needs lots of memory and faster processors to manipulate movies, music or photos. What I have noticed is that even applications like MS Word keep getting slower and slower with each incarnation. Word 5.1 on my 25 Mhz with 36MB RAM ran faster than Office X on a 733Mhz G4 with 1.25 GB of RAM. Manipulate a table in Pages and it slows down to a crawl. Strangely, programs in classic run faster on the same machine! The situation is absolutely pathetic.
Sorry, the specs should read ‘ Word 5.1 on my LC 475 with a 25 Mhz motorolla 08030 processor and 36 MB RAM………’
The problem is people expect computers to work without the notion of time ( not the clock built in but peoples notion of past and future). When you ran word 5.1 on your 25Mhz machine, the machine was probably cutting edge.
Software now has become moe graphics intensive. All the graphically “pretty” UIs in most modern OSes tend to chew up resources. Icons are pcitures, animations are movies and sound effects for user interactions are music files, alo there are more and more of those in the computing experience today. Hence the need for more hardware requirements.
Not for running a Word processor- thats just sloppy code and code bloat!
No the word processor is tied into the windowing and Graphics subsytems. If the new windowing system is using more graphics than before and so is the desktop, things are bound to slow down on older hardware.
Apps are not self contained pieces of software. You can make you apps as fast as you want but if there is a lot of work that needs to be done to display it older hardware isn’t going to cut it.
If you don’t care much for code bloat the cli and Tex/laTex is your friend vi still runs superbly on older machines.
You could run Aperture in a G4 1,25Ghz, but it has to support core image…
Minimum System Requirements
One of the following Macintosh computers:
Power Mac G5 with a 1.8 gigahertz (GHz) or faster PowerPC G5 processor
17- or 20-inch iMac G5 with a 1.8 GHz or faster PowerPC G5 processor
15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a 1.25 GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor
1GB of RAM
One of the following graphics cards:
ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition
ATI Radeon X850 XT
ATI Radeon 9800 XT or 9800 Pro
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
ATI Radeon 9600 XT, 9600 Pro, or 9650
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 or 9600
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL or 6800 GT DDL
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
5GB of disk space for application, templates, and tutorial
DVD drive for installation
I’ve never used a Mac before so excuse my ignorance, but am I the only one who finds those minimum requirements steep? I can’t imagine why 5 Gb of hard drive space or 1 Gb of ram would be necessary, what is it that program does that needs so much?
1GB of RAM will probably fall short with an app like that. Apps like this eat as much RAM as you can deliver, they never have enough, since they probably load all sort of previews (remember you are talking RAW here, which the app must preprocess before being able to display or play with it, and you want to minimize how many times that happens) and cache directly into RAM. For instance, note that in order to be able to scroll through a library of thousands of thumbnails at fast speeds they are probably loading up all those thumbnails into RAM.
5 GB is then probably needed for virtual memory to dump cache data. You should not be running Mac OS X with less than 5 GB of free HDD space anyways…
Aperture is unique, great workflow for the photographer.
is that Apple continues uses PowerPC for their Pro line, uses Intel for the consumer/mobile offerings, and AMD for their server/gaming platforms.
Is that too much to ask? The arguments that both IBM and AMD don’t have the manufacturing don’t hold if you only target those much smaller and specialized markets.
Yes. You really expect Apple and all the companies making software for MacOS X to have two diffrent versions of thier software, PPC and x86{-64,EMT}.
Even microsoft can’t make that happen with itanic and x64 and x86.
My wish is that Apple uses AMD for their server/gaming platforms
I am sure that will happen as soon as Apple has any gaming platform
… will be writing all my friends and family to let them know that there’s no XMas presents for them after I buy the $3500 baby of my dreams and pay somebody for a properly optimized 64 bit Ubuntu compile.
Dual booting multi-media machine of my HD videocapture dreams, here I come!
Good for you, Kady Mae.
Can’t really justify the cost of a new Power Mac G5 since I don’t do or plan to do any heavy multimedia stuff. (If I can get a good deal on a used G5, I’d probably take it.) I’ll probably end up with a Mac mini at home and an Athlon 64 for the office (current PC there is only a K6-III). Maybe an iBook if I need more than PDA (Palm TX looks sweet) for computing on the go.
The mac is dead. Move on. Get an intel.
The mac is dead. Move on. Get an intel.
Thank you for the afternoon’s belly laugh.
I’m wondering if there are plans to introduce new iBooks too. I went out with a friend to get a 14 inch model but couldn’t get one anywhere for love nor money. The only ones available were custom models with bigger hard drives or US English keyboards. Wherever we went we were told that it could take up to a month to get the standard model.
People keep yammering that Apple had to switch since IBM wouldn’t make a G5 specifically for laptops. This is pure bull. Current G5’s could easily be used in laptops. If you underclock them, they’d even be low power. Even if you didn’t, it would still be no different than many PC laptops. Not convinced?
http://www.comx-computers.co.za/laptop_specification.php?laptop=Mec…
These folks sell a 3.4GHz PRESCOTT powered laptop. Now tell me again why Apple hasn’t put out a G5 based laptop. It has NOTHING to do with not having special low power chips.
Try using that 3.4GHz P4 laptop on your lap, and then, after you get treated for minor burns, rethink why there are no G5 Powerbooks. I’ve got a 2Ghz P4-M laptop, and the only way I ever use it on my lap is with a thick, hard-cover book underneath (maybe I’m weird, but I’d like to have children someday…) Sure, Apple could make a G5 laptop like that, but who would buy it?
Quite right. The weight of the prescott laptop would crush your leg before the heat fries it.
I couldn’t imagine a g5 based laptop with the current G5s . The g4 based powerbooks themselves get very hot because apple used the Aluminium case as a heat sink by design.
Apple likes making thin laptops and makes ineresting design decisions. A g5 laptop would be un-Apple thick and heavy. A big no no.
Anyone notice the system sound effects in the Aperture demo video? Is it part of the app, the system, a 3rd party app, or was it added later???
http://www.apple.com/aperture/quicktours/
I took them to simply be enhanced the obviousness of what mouse/keyboard actions where being taken, since the watcher is not controlling them. Note that also clicks and keyboard presses are heard.
Interesting how there are people whining about the PowerBook upgrade – its a good solid upgrade; sure, it isn’t a G5 laptop, but at the same time, there is a good graphhics card, and assuming that Apples new photo package uses CoreImage, that grunty GPU will process the work well, meaning that the big advantage will come when software starts to embrace CoreImage, thus making the CPU less and less important.
As for the performance boost; with PowerBooks and PowerMac’s, people buy these machines, not necessarily for the raw power, but for the whole package; even if Dell were to turn around and offer 10Ghz laptops with battery life of up to 30 hours – the fact remains, it’ll still be another laptop running Windows – consumers who purchase Apple products want more than just another Windows laptop; Apple provides that.
As for current Mac users looking at upgrading; I’ve got a G3 600Mhz iBook (the 16MB VRAM version), and quite frankly, max it out to 640MB and up the hard disk to a 7200rpm for NZ$320; and voila, you get a speed boost that’ll extend the life of your laptop for a few more years.
I like your current hardware offerings and your new software is amazing.
I will keep purchasing your products.
In other words: mother[censor]! Great new machines and great applications.
I can see Aperture becoming the sweetheart of everyone who is a professional digital photographer or even a passioned amateur [these people also spend thousands on their hobby, $500 for a really great app is not too much to ask].
The fairly high spec is entirely due to the fact that the app is intended to work with tens to hundreds of RAW images that they want to process in real time. That’s asking A LOT of an application so you have to give it a lot. If it all works the way they intend it to, this is going to sell like hotcakes.
Too bad Apple is going to flop over and die within two quarters though. Imagine what could have been… [RAW sarcasm].
I wonder what application that’s been lying on Bill Gates’s desk for like -forever- will pop up in two weeks time to fill in for the Windows equivalent.
it just dawned on me that mactel will possibly be sold by dell, hp, gateway, etc. talk about increase in market share….
Apple has traditionally recieved most of its revenue from hardware. If they can transition themselevs to an iPod/OS/applications company, then, and ONLY then, will you MacDells. Having said that, I suspect that that’s the secret plan.
ATM, I wouldn’t buy an Apple notebook for all the tea in China. Their least expensive model is a 12″ display with a 1.5 GHz G4, and costs $1,499. You’re essentially buying the guts of a $700.00 Mac mini with a display and keyboard attached. I’d wait on the Intel models.
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/725…
I’m sorry, where’d $1,499 come from?
The iBook line is the lower cost line. I don’t want to say budget, because they are nice little machines. 12″ starting at $999.
>even if Dell were to turn around and offer 10Ghz laptops
> with battery life of up to 30 hours – the fact remains,
> it’ll still be another laptop running Windows –
>consumers who purchase Apple products want more than
>just another Windows laptop; Apple provides that.
No, Apfel provides just another OSX laptop (even a underpowered one). For the normal user it isnt different, really. The main selling point of an Apfel laptop for you is your hatred against Microsoft, and maybe your worship of the Apfel company. The average normal computer user doesnt care for such bullshit religious politics. For him Apfel offers neither a low price machine, nor a high end machine. They offer a high price low end machine no normal users need and would buy. At the time, Apfel laptops are Apfel fanboy merchandise, and a means for Apfel worshipers to keep their beloved company alive.
Photoshop 3.0 runs pretty well on my grayscale SE/30…
What’s the specs for the current release?