Exactly, they were surviving before *but* it doesn't take much to know that after the move to Intel and allowing people to use Windows, Apple has really taken off. I doubt Apple will ever announce or let public just how many users have a copy of Windows on board, but there are definitely people out there who need to have both and have chosen to do so. And the entire war of the 90's is over, as both have software on each others computer.
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Apple to Adopt Alternative Chipsets for Next Laptops?
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Exactly, they were surviving before *but* it doesn't take much to know that after the move to Intel and allowing people to use Windows, Apple has really taken off. I doubt Apple will ever announce or let public just how many users have a copy of Windows on board, but there are definitely people out there who need to have both and have chosen to do so. And the entire war of the 90's is over, as both have software on each others computer.
Well, I really hope people like you and nagromme are right. However, my car analogy wanted to show another very important aspect of continuity...if Apple starts moving away from standard and well-supported Intel chipsets, it risks ALSO moving away from a preferential treatment by the biggest chipmaker, as well as losing official endorsement AND industrial support for such customized solutions...
It really seems nice to have new Macs revisiting the WONDERFUL concept shown by the Apple IIGS, the Amigas and other custom-chip powered computers...but let's not forget also that Apple is in a rare moment of ABSOLUTE success in all markets, simply because people can't fail to see the advantages of a perfectly integrated YET STANDARDIZED hardware with the OS in the world...
chipsets
wait wait wait. my view of this is this is either:
1. its a pile of donkey ****.
2. this maybe true, they could be working with ibm or better yet making there own chips again because they work very well and up to like 9 ghz. since the company they bought works on the low power consumption it could all make sense. and remember they said the new pic of macbook pro case is a little more rounded and just a tad bit chunky that may be for the ppc chips their making or thus putting ppc and mixing with intel on one board. thats my sorta veiw.
wait wait wait. my view of this is this is either:
1. its a pile of donkey ****.
2. this maybe true, they could be working with ibm or better yet making there own chips again because they work very well and up to like 9 ghz. since the company they bought works on the low power consumption it could all make sense. and remember they said the new pic of macbook pro case is a little more rounded and just a tad bit chunky that may be for the ppc chips their making or thus putting ppc and mixing with intel on one board. thats my sorta veiw.
The same goes for Microsoft. Their acceptance of boot camp as a vehicle to improve sales was made clear when they included a section on it in an advisory to XP SP3 beta testers recently. I wasn't able to use a Mac for work until I bought my Intel MBP as 95% of my job is Windows server related. I probably spend more time running Server 2008 than OS X on it. So although it is impossible to quantify, that is at least 1 sale of a Mac that wouldn't have happened without Windows support.
That said, I don't for a moment believe that this rumoured chipset change will remove Windows compatibility. I wouldn't mind a heat reduction though.
What if Intel actually worked with Apple (and PA Semi?) on the chipset? That's moving further into a preferential relationship.
Not in notebook chipsets they aren't.
Quad-core? And dual-core desktop Core 2's had 1333 MHz FSB.
This interests me. If Apple would need to make a new chipset for Nehalem anyway, why make one now that will go for only a year?
By "SSE," I meant SSE, AVX, and whatever new instructions Larrabee will bring. AVX isn't coming until 2010 anyway.
I think there are probably a few reasons for this potential move, all of which have been mentioned before in this thread;
1) Intel integrated graphics cannot/doesn't support Open CL, and thus cannot used to accelerate Snow Leopard
2) To prevent Mac clones being produced if Apple lose the lawsuit with Pystar etc
1) Intel integrated graphics cannot/doesn't support Open CL, and thus cannot used to accelerate Snow Leopard
2) To prevent Mac clones being produced if Apple lose the lawsuit with Pystar etc
I admit to being skeptical that Apple will abandon Intel CPUs and Northbridge/Southbridge chipsets.
I wonder, instead, if we won't see something like the Commodore Amiga, with specialized support chips? Agnus, Denise and Paula did wonders two decades ago and considering how technology has advanced, Apple could really define the "digital lifestyle" market with a new set of specialized custom chips.
And by tying the new features and capabilities to the chipset, which they can then patent and copyright up the wazoo and refuse to license, Apple could make OS X on "clone" hardware unappealing because it would be unable to use any of these new technologies. And it would also offer a strong incentive for existing Apple Mac owners to buy new machines to take advantage of the new features.
I wonder, instead, if we won't see something like the Commodore Amiga, with specialized support chips? Agnus, Denise and Paula did wonders two decades ago and considering how technology has advanced, Apple could really define the "digital lifestyle" market with a new set of specialized custom chips.
And by tying the new features and capabilities to the chipset, which they can then patent and copyright up the wazoo and refuse to license, Apple could make OS X on "clone" hardware unappealing because it would be unable to use any of these new technologies. And it would also offer a strong incentive for existing Apple Mac owners to buy new machines to take advantage of the new features.
I think we're all hoping for that any changes make it out in time for the touch promotion(including myself) but I'm not holding my breath.
Any ideas if you will buy before the edu discount expires if Apple has not released a revised MB/P or if you will buy the MB/P with the touch promotion? I am in a similar boat and will have to decide by mid-August; however, I am also thinking about the benefits of buying one of the Adobe suites of software, as well, which adds pressure to buy before the end of the promo.
Yep, and there'd be thousands more switchers who absolutely LOVED the Amiga, who developed for the Amiga, or who played the best games on the Amiga. I wonder what Apple would do with the Cloanto folks? Would we see a licensed OS X native version of Amiga Forever bundled with every Mac? Or would the Amiga brand be moved in with Apple, forcing any Windogs users who use Amiga Forever to switch? And what of some of the best Amiga apps that WEREN'T games, like Directory Opus, etc.?
All questions are hypothetical, of course, unless you know something I don't.
BJ
To be honest, I love my imac, but I've waited for apple to make a 2008 Summer laptop offer that appealed to me, and one hasn't come. I'm getting a windows laptop.
Maybe next time the cycle will fit me better!
To be honest, I love my imac, but I've waited for apple to make a 2008 Summer laptop offer that appealed to me, and one hasn't come. I'm getting a windows laptop.
Summer doesn't end for almost two more months.
I needed a MacBook before the new ones were to be released, so just found the best deal I could on a used one. I plan on buying a new one as soon as they come out. That's what I would suggest to anyone who has to have one in a certain amount of time if the new ones haven't come out. If you buy a used one you will most likely be able to turn around and sell it for the same price you purchased it. Macbooks appear to hold their value way above other brands. This means you'll be paying a lot for a late model used one, too, but you will for sure get your money back out of it, unless you drop it in the bathtub or something.
I don't care about all this fancy chipset and glass touch pad stuff going around. I'd just like higher resolution options on the 15in, and a regular old SD card reader, like most other laptops of that size have. If they want to add in some other cool stuff, too, that's fine as long as it's fast.
Funny thing I have noticed is that Windows (2003 Server with high performance settings) in a VM seems more responsive on my macbook than OSX running native. I'm new to Mac, though, maybe I just don't have my fanboy goggles on yet.
I think you're way off. Like many folks here, I've owned 2 PPC mac's. Actually, I'm still using a PPC Mac (see my sig), I haven't made the switch yet to intel!!
How does abandoning PPC for Intel equate to 'getting' multi platform? You imply they offer two or more architectures and make them all feel the same, but frankly, they can't be rid of PPC fast enough according to all the nay-sayers for PPC support in Snow Leopard. They don't WANT to support multi platforms. Isn't that kind of ironic for a company that supposedly 'gets it'?
Given all the talk about how CPUs are pretty much reaching their peak in terms of single core power, I'm not sure they ever really 'needed' to switch over to Intel in the first place. That got them a small speed boost, but now they're talking about 8+ cores, maybe 32+ in a few years. They could have had multi-core PPC instead with Grand Central and saved everyone the headaches of Universal Apps, Rosetta, etc., not to mention abandoning all that software that only runs under Classic. I can run old games like ProPinball on my brand new PC running XP or Vista, but I can't on a brand new Intel Mac because it was an OS8/9 set of games. I can run them on this 1.8GHz upgraded Digital Audio, though (although they don't run smooth in Classic under OSX; you have to use OS9 to play smooth so even Classic isn't/wasn't a great solution for backwards compatibility with apps that just aren't "that" old by Windows standards where almost everything "just works" from 1998 onward, at least on my new XP machine.
Believe whatever you want, but the ability to run Windows is the real reason the Mac is selling better, IMO. People may have 'liked' the Mac better before Intel, but many would never buy one because they NEEDED to run certain Windows only software. Newer Macs eliminate that problem and allow you to run them at the same time even through virtualization (Fusion, etc.) I don't care how fast PPC could have been or if they could have used multiple processors with this Snow Leopard idea with some new PPC hardware; it wouldn't matter a bit because there would be no Windows compatability and so the Mac would still lose tons of sales for users that NEED Windows. And don't kid yourself. Most of the world NEEDS Windows because it's 90% entrenched across the entire planet and that's where the software is, like or not.
No, Apple's move to Intel was a smart one because the Mac could now run Windows, not because it made them faster. I'm using a 1.8GHz G4 PPC Mac right now. Do I *NEED* a faster CPU? Why would I? What is there you can even do on a Mac that NEEDS more CPU power? It runs Word 2004 just fine. It runs Safari and Firefox with plenty of speed. Unless I'm going to do professional video or something, I don't need more CPU power on a Mac. GAMES are the only big reason you need more CPU and GPU power on ANY computer these days and if you don't game, you don't NEED a newer computer. People won't believe that, of course. They have to have the latest and greatest regardless of actual 'need'. Buying a brand new Macbook won't let me game anyway, so what's the point? The old PPC Mac-Mini had more GPU power (as in a real GPU card in it) than the current Intel one. That's just plain sad, really, especially when you consider the 'appliance' known as AppleTV has a better GPU than their Mac-Mini 'computer'.
The only chipset I want to see Apple 'adopt' instead of Intel is an actual useful GPU for the Macbook and Mac-Mini.
The problem with that idea is that it takes a specialized company to move chipsets ahead with any chance of beating ANOTHER dedicated GPU company. What Amiga did back then was enter a market full of CGA graphics and case speaker 'blip' sounds and offer something better that had stereo sound (of a sort) and 32-color graphics that could display 4096 colors in a special mode. That was HUGE for 1985, but it doesn't exactly cut it in 2008. Do you seriously think having a custom chipset for something like graphics in 2008 is going to keep up with let alone BEAT a dedicated NVidia or ATI card that can do SLI and other things and that get new and even faster cards out every 6 months?
Well, let's look at the Amiga and see what happened. It took them over 7 YEARS to update the graphics on the Amiga even ONCE (with AGA that could barely manage what VGA had been doing for a couple of years already). The Amiga still didn't have any 16-bit audio built-in, couldn't do any kind of 16-bit graphics for display purposes without some kind of frame-buffer card to add into it, etc. Ultimately, 3rd party companies invented retargetable graphics drivers for the Amiga because Commodore couldn't manage to see 10 feet in front of its own face. Then Commodore went out of business and the Amiga has been pretty much dead ever since. I should know. I used my Amiga 3000 until 1999 and finally caved and bought a PC. Now I've got a new PC and an upgraded used Mac. The Mac is more Amiga like than the PC, but Linux probably has more in common with the Amiga than the Mac in terms of 'feel' (well the Amiga's GUI was never really 'complete'; you needed the CLI/Shell or 3rd party programs like DiskMaster2 to really make certain operations easier to accomplish...kind of like Linux still needs the Shell to do certain things whereas the Mac doesn't NEED the Shell at all and never even had one until OSX came about (because it's really BSD underneath).
So if Apple thought custom chips for something like graphics is a good idea, I hope they're prepared to keep up with the Jonses and update it every 6 months... oh wait, what am I talking about? The Macbook and Mac Mini both use worthless integrated graphics that have less 3D power than my Radeon 9800 Pro in this 7 year old PowerMac. So maybe Apple really doesn't care if their graphics ability doesn't keep up and is only updated every 7 years like with the Amiga? Sadly, that doesn't make me want to stay with the Apple platform. I like the OS, but ultimately I'm going to want good hardware. The reason I have a brand new PC and a used Mac is because it's easy to get good hardware on a PC for cheap and I can play modern games on it. You have to pay out the nose to get 'ok' hardware for OSX (MacPro with the fastest card you can get for it) or hack together a Hackintosh which will STILL only support certain 'behind the times' graphics hardware and then end up having almost no games to play natively on it anyway, so what do I need a NEW Mac for? All the application I use daily on this Mac run just fine on its 1.8GHz 7448 G4 (Browsers, iTunes, e-mail and even Photoshop CS2 all run great). I watch HDTV on my home theater downstairs and use AppleTV to rent HD movies so I don't need it on my PC or Mac. I'll get a PS3 for Blu-Ray and some of the HD gaming and I'll play new PC games on the Windows XP PC here. The Mac will do its duty running my whole house audio system, conducting 'safer' online business and shopping (due to a lack of viruses and less spyware compared to Windows) and some basic photo editing and printing.
So, I seriously hope the REAL plan with Snow Leopard is to get the graphics sub-systems of OSX up to par and have some real plan of attack to make the Mac competitive with 3D in Windows. Otherwise, it'll remain a used G4 on my desk for some time to come. I'll probably get a new Macbook Pro at some point because I want to run Logic Pro in a portable form for writing music, but that's one application specific need and even there I'm thinking about finding a laptop I can turn into a Hackintosh given the MBP's obscenely high pricing. I can get something comparable for the needs I have and still do some light gaming for almost half the price yet a Macbook can't game at all, really so it's a non-option.
Basically, for me it comes down to loving the operating system, but hating the hardware and lack of gaming support. I'm not exactly a hardcore gamer by any standards; I'm still catching up with some 5 year old games, but I do have several newer ones as well. The point is I can't play them on most Macs at all, even WITH boot camp unless I want to spend well over $2400. The new PC only cost me $800 and the total upgraded Mac cost about $1200 so I still came out ahead for my needs than the cost of ONE MacPro and I can use both those computers at the same time doing completely different tasks.
If Apple would start offering upgradeable hardware that could keep up with the hardware used to run Windows, it would better position itself to attract switchers. I don't mind using Boot Camp to play games. I do mind not being able to use the latest and greatest video hardware at any cost on a Mac. I find it ironic given the Mac's history of being a graphical computer that it lags so far behind Windows and even Linux in supporting those areas. Why doesn't OSX offer SLI on a MacPro, for example? If Apple would let ATI or Nvidia have more access to the OS, they might do it for them.
If Apple were to cave and offer an xMac using Nehalem they could use SLI. Turns out Intel struck a deal with Nvidia that allows Intel to finally get SLI. Of course you can already use Crossfire. What I don't get is why Apple doesn't allow ATI/Nvidia to create monthly video drivers like they do for Windows. Those drivers are WHQL'ed as well (not beta).
I was at WWDC and personally saw someone ask an apple h/w engineer that question, and his response was basically, SLI wouldn't help us in the target market for the Mac Pro (that being desktop publishing, film, compositing etc.).
And.... i just don't get this whole super special co-processor stuff. Does apple really think it can create a processor that can do more than any general purpose CPU???
There is no economy of scale doing it all (hardware) yourself.
Ah, have you ever heard of this thing called BATTERY POWER SAVINGS?
Sorry, I like getting 5hours from my MacBook versus 1 1/2 hours which I would get from my old Lenovo with a Quadro FX 570M.
So no, I don't what power guzzling GPU's. I have a laptop for a reason - portability. If I want power, I've got a desktop computer (iMac) that does it quite nicely.
Odd, the Macbook Pro still gets 5 hours of battery life with a "power guzzling" dedicated GPU...
Looks like it night be the VIA Nano. Does very well against the Intel Atom.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=597&type=expert&pid=1
Maybe the AMD Puma.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9958990-37.html?tag=bl
Competition is good. Shame there is none with Apple computer hardware.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=597&type=expert&pid=1
Maybe the AMD Puma.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9958990-37.html?tag=bl
Competition is good. Shame there is none with Apple computer hardware.
Crossfire works on any chip so why has apple not made any drivers and where is ATI and NVIDIA with makeing there own cards for mac like they did in the past?
not only that amd on board video as well nvidia on video is a lot better then intel on board video.Looks like it night be the VIA Nano. Does very well against the Intel Atom.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=597&type=expert&pid=1
Maybe the AMD Puma.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9958990-37.html?tag=bl
Competition is good. Shame there is none with Apple computer hardware.
As to Apple not making drivers, they don't care.
As to them making cards "for" Macs, they were two-year-old cards that were twice the price of PC cards. No. Don't do that again.
And some dedicated GPUs can be turned off when needed.
Faster but hotter too.
Newer chipsets all support turning off discrete GPUs and running the IGP for power saving when tasks aren't intensive. It's simply a new technology.
As MagnusVonMagnum stated, Apple really doesn't have much of a chacne developing its own graphics platform. Any platform will have to come from ATI or Nvidia really, until Intel Larrabee is ready at least. Fact of the matter is, graphics card development is so far ahead that the only new competitor to the market in the past 10 years is Intel really. All other companies have no chance fighting the titans in ATI and Nvidia.
As for drivers, I doubt that ATI or Nvidia would let Apple get their source code for drivers anyways.