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11.6-Inch 'MacBook' Headed to Manufacturing?
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So... Apple moves into netbook-land.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a more compact Macbook without the Air pricetag. But isn't this excactly what Steve labeled as "not good at anything" in comparasion to an iPad at the introduction keynote?
Or maybe it will be a high-end netbook, in the Air family.
I do think 11.6" can be a pretty good screen size that allows for a good compromise between "small" and "not frustrating".
Remember I had a Acer netbook with a 9.7" screen, when that was standard. Simply too small.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a more compact Macbook without the Air pricetag. But isn't this excactly what Steve labeled as "not good at anything" in comparasion to an iPad at the introduction keynote?
Or maybe it will be a high-end netbook, in the Air family.
I do think 11.6" can be a pretty good screen size that allows for a good compromise between "small" and "not frustrating".
Remember I had a Acer netbook with a 9.7" screen, when that was standard. Simply too small.
I'm not sure that description is entirely correct.
My Acer netbook with 9.7" screen had a keyboard with 95% the size of full-sized ones.
Yes, that was still frustrating -- enough to not make me want to write anything serious on it other than e-mails, let alone my bachelor graduation paper.
But a 11.6" laptop should be able to have a full-sized 100% keyboard if the layout is designed well.
That would be a sweet machine, but still,it's Apple,nothing a poor part time working full time student like me can afford. :'(
Gee, sounds like something that would provide competition to the iPad.
There's no way this is being made.
There's no way this is being made.
My prediction
executive notebook
11-12 inch screen, 1440*900
Core iX / AMD laptop
Integrated gfx (FFS these are good enough for everything except gaming)
4GB soldered on the laptop (4GB is good enough for my virtualisation Win7 running 100 000 USD software)
12hour battery life
1.4kg weight
1899 USD price
Right now the Air has shamefully out of date specs for the price. Having said that the actual CPU speed specs are fairly meaningless for the intended audience (executive travellers) - the short battery life, single USB port, lack of Ethernet port (for companies that dont use wifi for security reasons) are more serious limitations.
FFS, I better hope something selling for that price can do the occasional game of Starcraft II.
You don't need Core iX and AMD laptop would come with Radeon HD graphics.
So which is it ? Core i3 with crap graphics or the same performance from a C2D with good graphics performance on top ?
You people wanting Core i3 at any cost baffle me to no end. Aside from marketing hype, what is wrong with C2D ?
i'm in the same boat man:/
i try to save money every month to ease the pain of finding money when apple releases a new magical toy. i have an addiction.
I am very happy about this announcement. I recently bought a 11.6" Acer 1810T because I needed a small, light computer with whole day battery life that I can bring around with me all the time. My 15" MacBook Pro is very light for a 15" notebook, but it's not something that you would want to carry around all the time every day. The current MacBook Air is light and powerful for it's form factor, but is a bit big for a sub-notebook. It's also expensive, maybe not for it's niche as a powerful large sub-notebook, but in comparison to general sub-notebooks and ultimately netbooks that it'll be competing against in the portability factor.
My 11.6" Acer 1810T was only $499 CND, but had a 1.4" SU9400 Core 2 Duo, 4GB of DDR2 800 (even though it was only advertised as DDR2 667), 400GB 5400rpm 2.5" HDD, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 802.11n, Gigabit Ethernet, full size keyboard, multi-card reader, gets 7-8hr battery life on light usage (web surfing, word processing, etc.) and weighs a reasonable 3.1lbs and is 0.87-1.18" thick. I was looking for something that was more powerful than a netbook, but can still get long battery life and be light and cheap, and the Acer 1810T fits the bill.
I would definitely support a 11.6" MacBook priced around $799 or a 11.6" MacBook Air priced around $1299 if it offered similar hardware specs to the Acer 1810T in the case of the MacBook or better hardware specs in the case of the MacBook Air. Definitely a move to a 2.5" HDD/SDD is a must to increase system responsiveness. 10+hr battery life is also required. In this form factor, the Intel IGP in Arrandale is sufficient since a 11.6" screen isn't really conducive of fiendish gaming and it isn't likely to be people's primary computer. As long as Apple writes a decent Intel graphics driver, a big if, so that it can muck through an occasional game of WoW on the go, I think that would be sufficient for most people. Intel has been reported to be working on a DirectX Computer Shader driver for Arrandale so if Apple writes an OpenCL driver for the IGP, then all the checkboxes are filled in.
An interesting note is that the new CULV/ULV Core i Arrandales don't seem to be as power efficient as the old CULB/ULV Core 2 Duos. There is actually a new Acer 1830T out based on the ULV Core i3 processors, but I chose the older ULV Core 2 Duo Acer 1810T because it actually gets 7-8hr of battery life compared to 6 hr that people seem to be reporting for the 1830T. The only major component change was moving to Core i Arrandale. With a 1.4GHz SU9400 I'm not giving up much CPU performance, but Arrandale's IGP is up to 2 times faster than my GMA 4500MHD. It'll be interesting to see what Apple makes of Arrandale's energy consumption.
I have yet to see an AMD subnotebook with decent battery life so I can't see Apple releasing a new 11.6" unit based on an AMD CPU if it's targetted for launch this year. We'll see how Bobcat turns out in terms of power consumption and relative performance to Intel CULV/ULV processors, but it's too early for that.
My 11.6" Acer 1810T was only $499 CND, but had a 1.4" SU9400 Core 2 Duo, 4GB of DDR2 800 (even though it was only advertised as DDR2 667), 400GB 5400rpm 2.5" HDD, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, 802.11n, Gigabit Ethernet, full size keyboard, multi-card reader, gets 7-8hr battery life on light usage (web surfing, word processing, etc.) and weighs a reasonable 3.1lbs and is 0.87-1.18" thick. I was looking for something that was more powerful than a netbook, but can still get long battery life and be light and cheap, and the Acer 1810T fits the bill.
I would definitely support a 11.6" MacBook priced around $799 or a 11.6" MacBook Air priced around $1299 if it offered similar hardware specs to the Acer 1810T in the case of the MacBook or better hardware specs in the case of the MacBook Air. Definitely a move to a 2.5" HDD/SDD is a must to increase system responsiveness. 10+hr battery life is also required. In this form factor, the Intel IGP in Arrandale is sufficient since a 11.6" screen isn't really conducive of fiendish gaming and it isn't likely to be people's primary computer. As long as Apple writes a decent Intel graphics driver, a big if, so that it can muck through an occasional game of WoW on the go, I think that would be sufficient for most people. Intel has been reported to be working on a DirectX Computer Shader driver for Arrandale so if Apple writes an OpenCL driver for the IGP, then all the checkboxes are filled in.
An interesting note is that the new CULV/ULV Core i Arrandales don't seem to be as power efficient as the old CULB/ULV Core 2 Duos. There is actually a new Acer 1830T out based on the ULV Core i3 processors, but I chose the older ULV Core 2 Duo Acer 1810T because it actually gets 7-8hr of battery life compared to 6 hr that people seem to be reporting for the 1830T. The only major component change was moving to Core i Arrandale. With a 1.4GHz SU9400 I'm not giving up much CPU performance, but Arrandale's IGP is up to 2 times faster than my GMA 4500MHD. It'll be interesting to see what Apple makes of Arrandale's energy consumption.
I have yet to see an AMD subnotebook with decent battery life so I can't see Apple releasing a new 11.6" unit based on an AMD CPU if it's targetted for launch this year. We'll see how Bobcat turns out in terms of power consumption and relative performance to Intel CULV/ULV processors, but it's too early for that.
I should have been a bit more qualified. I shouldn't have said "current i5s", I should have said some i5. If you are trying to drag in all of the "all the power you want to burn" i5s and C2Ds then no. Likewise, if want to get into a CPU based raytracing and/or double precision floating point number crunching exercise then no. There is only one memory channel and a limited FP pipeline. I'm sure those can be saturated if focus on pushing data through them. Likewise a large enough screen attached to the GPU will probably cause a drop in throughput performance also. [ The AMD demos were on 1024x768 whereas many 11.6 screens are 1366x768 . Also many folks will want to use the mini display port to hook to larger monitor. It won't be a big screen, gamer machine ]
However, the article that has been pointed to a couple of times over at Anandtech pitted a i5-520M ( unless there is major typo mistake there, that is 'M' not 'UM'. ) against a Zacate. So a couple of points. Only a 'UM' i5 would work for a MBA. Those are substantially slower than the M models. So when the Zacate runs about at parity with the 520M (after Anantech puts in some fixes) in the web benchmark is indicative that this is a creditable choice. It isn't as "dog slow" as your spinning it to be. The entry level MBP 15" uses a 520M. If the Zacate isn't that far from matching performance with a 'M' , then certainly it is going to be a creditable competitor to the vast majority of the 'UM' line.
Second, I found a reference somewhere on net that these were 1.8GHz Zacate. That is probably the high end of the range. The low and mid range Zacate and Ontario (9W envelope focused) variations of Bobcat probably would suffer with substantially worse numbers. I sure there will be later benchmarks using those more mainstream implementations that get bet bad by mainstream Core-i implementations. The comparison in the article shouldn't be stretched to infer something about the high performance range.
One problem for Apple using this is that perhaps would not be able to do a "better" config with a small clock bump. It has similar issue the C2D ULV has in that Apple is aready at the top end. There is no were to go for a clock speed bump.
Sure, but the vast majority of apps that average folks use involve a usage of both GPU+CPU . Browsers (as in the article's IE tests ) , Office (writing/presentations ) , etc. Similarly, not many folks uses ultramobiles to do run heavy computational jobs. Sure someone who was pressing their MBA into doing AutoCAD like jobs will suffer if switched to Zacate, but is that really the primary market the MBA is aimed at ?
That's a bad feature would not want in a ultramobile offering ?
As I said previoulsly the Zacate only has to compete with the old SL9400/SL9600 ( not quite ULV , but definitely "Low V" ) offerings and turn in incrementally better performance. The graphics results are obviously substantially better than anything the Core-i 3/5/7 UM series has to offer. That aspect is purely in the loss column in that competition. To 'win' all the Zacate really needs to do is at least 'tie' the ULV offering on the core of the CPU performance metrics. If slightly ahead it should be game over.
The only "win" for Intel would either be a shrunk and speed bumped C2D (so Apple can use Nvidia graphics ) or some Sandy Bridge offering (which has better graphics that may be good enough. ). The latter isn't coming until well into next year. The former just doesn't seem likely ( unless Apple, and others, pushed Intel into a corner. )
There are some Boinc numbers supposedly leaked, which show Bobcat being quite close to a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo, at least in Boinc performance, and much higher than Atom. Bobcat Clock speed is probably a bit under 1.8 GHz.
Die shot and BOINC graph
They do.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3863/amd-discloses-bobcat-bulldozer-architectures-at-hot-chips-2010
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/08/evolution-not-revolution-a-look-at-amds-bulldozer.ars
Llano is a stopgap until the Bulldozer arch gets moves down to the midrange on the next iteration. Short term, no. AMD is going to use LLano to aim at the middle because that is a pretty mature market. Bulldozer to cover the higher end (where having problems competing with upper end Westmere/Nehalem ) and Bobcat to cover the lower end "Atom" and slightly above. If AMD and get those top/lower ends right they can iterate toward the middle over time. They can't go high speed evolutionary in all 3 at the same time. Nor should they want to.
This issue is that MBA (and higher end ultramobile market) has lots of overlap with the "slightly above Atom" zone.
LLano isn't going to work for a MBA. To chop down the TDP into a level that would fit in the box, you'd likely have to chop the clock speed down so far started to neuter much of the peformance advangtage over the Bobcat arch.
LLano separated from price/performance evaluations probably doesn't look good on paper. There is more than just performance to consider. Price point matters increasingly more in the Windows/PC market.
Looking back over the other material leaked to internet so for.. Yes. The machine in the Anandtech demo was ID'ed by others as running at 1.6 GHz. However, if look at the commentary on that graphic in the anantech forums on the context from that source is that speed on Zacate can be "at the 1.6 GHz to 1.8 GHz range"
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=30429707&postcount=50
so later commentary and context.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2104706
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple stepped to AMD and said they wouldn't mind a 1.8GHz-2.0GHz that ran over 18 W TDP but under 24 W. That is still way lower than any Intel solution (or Intel + Nvidia ) that can roll out right now (or into good portion of next year) if put a floor on the graphics performance to that of the 9400M of the current MBA.
Boinic is running something other than Whetstone and Drystone as a benchmark ? Those two are highly influenced by clock speed. (both CPU and memory ) So sure, if you can get one of the Core-i implement to trigger on turbo mode and hold that constantly.... you'll turn in better numbers. Is that what really happens running a real OS responding to outside stimulus and diverse set of apps though ?
The C2D doesn't do anything to solve the graphics delivery problem. CPU+GPU fusion is essential as go forward in the class of laptops the MBA represents. The current MBA battery capacity is 20 W-hrs smaller than the other Macbooks. If Apple shrinks the case around a 11.6 screen it could take a small hit to shrink even more. They need graphics + decent CPU + low power.
The other issue is that Intel has pulled engineering resources from C2D designs. They are going to continue to make them for a couple more years, but what is in the catalog now is essentially what is going to be in the catalog a couple of years from now. If stick with C2D all can do with MBA is speed bump the graphics processor. [ unless customers have completely twisted Intel's arm and they bump the C2D offering. I doubt that though since they are intent on aggressively pushing out the the new archs. Not shrinking the old ones. ]
At the branding level, Core i3 is going to get a Sandy Bridge bump and a future shrink bump. C2D isn't.
But yes do get the point that some folks want to class something that still works as being obsolete/ancient tech when it still have some utility left.
For the MBA though the only utility is to mate it with a newer Nvidia part. There is nothing new there.
Yes, I see no reasons why the MBA can't have an i7, but for cost. The i7 UM has the same voltage requirement, and the same heat generation as the i3 UM (except under turbo boost).
And I see no reasons why Apple should try and "shave costs". The MBA, even at 11.6" shouldn't be a netbook competitor. It's an ultralight portable.
Ultraportables have existed well before netbooks and have always been almost as powerful and more expensive than full-size laptops. Toshiba has been one of the pioneers in that segment, with the Portege first released in the late 90's if I'm not mistaken.
They could cater to everyone if they offer it at an attractive starting price with an i3 UM, and give an i7 UM BTO for more demanding customers.
And if they decide to switch to AMD, it should only be to get better (graphical) performances rather than to save money.
I disagree. The MBA, as any ultraportable, should be on par with larger laptops, and significantly more powerful than netbooks.
Besides, even with an i7 UM and 4 GB, the MBA wouldn't be a "speed daemon": it would still be less powerful than the current 2.4 C2D SSD MBP13.
Steve Jobs said Apple wasn't interested in entering the netbook segment.
At every revision, the MBA has been close to MBP13 performances. It's only distanced now because it hasn't been refreshed in a long time. Continuing that trend is the best way for Steve Jobs not to contradict his previous statement.
Switching to a smaller form factor, if confirmed, shouldn't change this mantra.
A 12" PowerBook (or an iBook) is not a netbook. An 11.6" screen would be less than 1 cm smaller in width. Not enough difference to change a PowerBook into a cheepo netbook.
i don't get it
why is an 11.6" laptop a netbook? I am writing this on a 12" Powerbook, and after these years it is still going strong, running Adobe CS3 just fine, and the form factor is perfect. It runs OSX Leopard nicely, and I've always called it a laptop. Does a 0.4" reduction in screen size place it in a different category? I don't think so. The screen resolution on an 11.6" machine would undoubtedly be higher than the 1024x768 that the 12" PB uses. So the 11.6" machine would be "bigger", but smaller. Perfect laptop IMO. Can't wait.
why is an 11.6" laptop a netbook? I am writing this on a 12" Powerbook, and after these years it is still going strong, running Adobe CS3 just fine, and the form factor is perfect. It runs OSX Leopard nicely, and I've always called it a laptop. Does a 0.4" reduction in screen size place it in a different category? I don't think so. The screen resolution on an 11.6" machine would undoubtedly be higher than the 1024x768 that the 12" PB uses. So the 11.6" machine would be "bigger", but smaller. Perfect laptop IMO. Can't wait.
So you want a non upgradeable Core i3 because going forward, the CPU+GPU fusion is going to matter, but in a laptop, the part is not upgradeable, so you're stuck with sub par graphics and gain... uh... what exactly ?
It makes no sense, you're spewing the very marketing hype I'm saying is the only reason to go Core i3 for now. Until Intel allows nVidia to make chipsets that enable better IGPs for the Core ix architecture, or until Intel ships a decent IGP, you're gimping your purchase to gain maybe 5% processing power.
Ludicrous. C2D makes much more sense right now. When in a few years it doesn't, then it will be time to change Laptops. You won't be able to upgrade your IGP anyway, you're buying a new laptop, so why gimp your current one with sub par parts "for the sake of tomorrow"... ?
yup i never understood why people classify a laptop as a netbook just because it's smaller than 13". a netbook is any laptop that uses an atom processor, plain and simple.
Currently snow leopard does not support Atom CPU. This is disturbing because the other Intel CPUs all use, and waste, huge amounts of power (my macbook pro sometimes gets too hot to touch, even with fans running full speed all the time via smcfancontrol). That was one of the tradeoffs of the Intel transition.
To make something like the Air requires a low-power CPU, and it isn't going to deliver top performance. And it's not going to be cheap either.
If you want an optical and lots of ports and a full-power CPU, buy a MacBook Pro. (Didn't we say all this when the Air came out?)
(edit) Also you can forget Apple going to an AMD CPU. Intel is like the Mafia - you deal with their competitors, they break your kneecaps.
To make something like the Air requires a low-power CPU, and it isn't going to deliver top performance. And it's not going to be cheap either.
If you want an optical and lots of ports and a full-power CPU, buy a MacBook Pro. (Didn't we say all this when the Air came out?)
(edit) Also you can forget Apple going to an AMD CPU. Intel is like the Mafia - you deal with their competitors, they break your kneecaps.