First Intel Penryn Chips Due in 2007?

[Macinposh]

AidenShaw, you are one of the most informed people I have run into in a long time.

Seconded,as usual.

But still,month after month we still have this heated debate about the elusive "Pizza Mac". It just shows how we different people have such a different views...
I personally would love a small form headless mac. I even might buy it, even it for 100% certainty would be outpriced compared to PC counterparts AND it would have a ****** gfx card.


But apple wont release it.



Imo, the reason is just in apples marketing strategy. The layering of the products atm, are simple and perfect.


Macmini = The gateway,the 3rd computer
iMac = The computer
Macpro = The workstation


What many people has missed,the computing has reached a intresting point in the last 1-2 years. The needs of the masses has been saturated.
The masses (say,95% of total computer users) can do all their taskes with present computers. Period.
Mail,voip,surfing,light retouching,filling up their iPods and occasional clip viewing. I would say there is no technologies/fads in sight (2-4years) that would require more horsepower for the masses.


For the rest of us,professionals and freaks, it is a different ballgame,obviously.


Those masses,they dont care what the specs are, they just want a positive and easy user experience. They go to the store and buy a Thing.
Some,a small minority,buy a thing that a friend/magazine has had a positive user experience off.
This is apples strenght : It has a reputation of providing a easy,positive user experience in a clean,identifiable package.

Introducing a Pizzamac would shake and ruin this holy alliance of three.


1.Pizza would be a better multimedia center than mini,for only few hundred bucks more. But if would be more unwieldy and blonkier than mini. But it still would cannibalize the sales.

2.Pizza would be more expandable than iMac, and few hundred cheaper. But it would be more unstylish/wieldy for certain enviroments (ad-agencies,hip offices,homes). And it would cannibalize the iMac sales.

3.Pizza would be cheaper than Macpro, with almost the same performance and expandability. With the current sad support for multithreading, a Quad kentsfield could almost smoke a Quad 3.0 xeon. For half the price.That would intrest about 50% of current pros that are looking for a rig,but just dont need the internal raid/multi pci-card support. That would cannibalize the MacPro sales.




So,for apple it would be a Loose-Loose-Loose situation, because the image degragation,lost revenue (the overheads in the pizzamac category are smaller due to hard competition) and lost sales on more profitable models.
And they would have to allocate extra resources to the engineering,buying,stocking,manufacturing etc..



My 1€.

Anyone want to disagree?

 

[maccompaq]

You're right - the USB drive doesn't show up as more physical system RAM.

On Vista, a flash drive can be used as an additional layer of disk cache memory - the idea being that the flash can satisfy small random reads faster than the moving-head hard drive.

A common result of testing, though, is that the money is better spent on a bigger DIMM for the system RAM.

For more info, read this overview, and check out the links at the end:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

That was interesting info. I am still using XP. I hear many say that you must have a minimum of 2 GB of RAM to operate with Vista. True or no?

 

[IEatApples]

I think there will be an option for "quad" on the new iMacs!
I simply can't see the point of an "event" if the changes are purely/mostly external/aesthetics.

Now don't get me wrong, I'd love to have an aluminum iMac, but I must say that that wouldn't be enough to make me buy one if the rest was "old"!

And furthermore: Leopards need their quads!

 

[maccompaq]

Headless iMac

Macinposh, you have a very good theory. But if Apple used the Conroe desktop processor, that is $100 cheaper than the mobile unit and faster at the same Mhz rating, they could produce a "headless iMac" to sell for around $899 and still make a very good profit. This box would be user friendly in that you could do your own hard drive and optical drive swaps. That might bring more Windows users to Apple. They would not even need to buy a new monitor since the one they use with Windows will work with Mac.

With this computer, they could run OSX and XP or Vista.

Most of us do not need quad core processors.

 

[Macinposh]

But if Apple used the Conroe desktop processor, that is $100 cheaper than the mobile unit and faster at the same Mhz rating, they could produce a "headless iMac" to sell for around $899 and still make a very good profit.

Yes.They could make some profit,but at the expense of the other 3 linups loosing volume and profit. Who the hell would pay 3000bucks for a Macpro when they could get 90% of the performance with 899?

This box would be user friendly in that you could do your own hard drive and optical drive swaps.

Apple do not want customers to do that. They want customer to buy it from apple,and paying the 100-300% extra money for apple while doing that.


And 99% of buyers dont swap anything.Ever.


The plan is that users get 2 years of good using experience of using the product,then find out that their favourite youtube video is a bit slow on the old computer.
That makes them buy a New Apple computer. AND a new iPod for their daughter. AND new iSocks for the cat.

Most of us do not need quad core processors.

Most dont even need dual core processors.Heck, most customers would get by just with one core..

 

[AidenShaw]

That was interesting info. I am still using XP. I hear many say that you must have a minimum of 2 GB of RAM to operate with Vista. True or no?

It depends....

Personally, I find 2 GiB to be an inadequate minimum for XP .

But, I often use virtual machines, tend to keep lots of application windows open across several monitors, and tend to bounce from window to window launching tasks and expecting them to run in parallel.

For Vista, I'd say that 1 GiB is the real minimum. While it may officially run with 512 MiB, it will be much "snappier" with 1 or 2 GiB.

My Vista laptop is a dual-core with 4 GiB, but:

• Only 3.25 GiB is usable due to the pre-Santa Rosa chipset
• I almost always have one or two virtual machines running
• The company bought it for me

 

[maccompaq]

Yes.They could make some profit,but at the expense of the other 3 linups loosing volume and profit. Who the hell would pay 3000bucks for a Macpro when they could get 90% of the performance with 899?








Apple do not want customers to do that. They want customer to buy it from apple,and paying the 100-300% extra money for apple while doing that.


And 99% of buyers dont swap anything.Ever.


The plan is that users get 2 years of good using experience of using the product,then find out that their favourite youtube video is a bit slow on the old computer.
That makes them buy a New Apple computer. AND a new iPod for their daughter. AND new iSocks for the cat.







Most dont even need dual core processors.Heck, most customers would get by just with one core..

I think you are right in most of what you have said. Since Apple is looking to increase market share, the computer I described might help bring over some of the PC guys who do like to get inside their computer. I know a lot who are interested in getting a Mac but hold back for some reason. It would be a gamble, but it might do the job. The profit on the computer I described would be greater than that on a Mini or an iMac. You said it very well, most of us could get by just fine with a single core processor like my Athlon 64 2.41 Ghz.

 

[AidenShaw]

Think BTO, not aftermarket....

And 99% of buyers dont swap anything. Ever.

True - but 83.943% of those would appreciate the flexibility of BTO options.

"Expandability" means a lot more than after the purchase mods by the do-it-yourselfers.

It means ordering the memory, CPU, disk and graphics (and whether to buy a new LCD or use the good one that you already have) that you want when you buy - not deciding between one of the two choices that The Lord God Jobs has decided for you.

In addition to BTO options, expandability often means that the buyer has the seller or some other professional make some upgrades at the time of purchase. So even if 99% of users never open their machines, there's still a good argument for an expandable mini-tower or pizza-box.

 

[gnasher729]

In the US Apple commands nealry 6%. A figure which is continually rising at the expense of Gateway and Dell among others. I imagine that trend will continue with the ongoing iPod and now iPhone halo effects along with the fact that OS X is a superior product.

I would just say that I wouldn't attribute Dell's and Gateway's losses specifically to Apple. Apple takes market share very slowly from the PC market as a whole. Within the PC market, the fluctuations are much much bigger. I would actually expect Apple to drop from fourth place in the USA to fifth within the next months, when Toshiba and Acer overtake Apple and Gateway ends up sixth, because right now Toshiba and Acer grow faster than Apple.

But that doesn't matter much. At some point Dell will get their act together and take share back from HP, and someone else will rise and someone else will drop, while all the time Apple is increasing its share. These PC companies can easily increase their sales relative to other PC companies by dropping the price a bit, and that is mostly what they can do. Not good for their profits really. Apple is lucky that they don't have to play these games.

 

[Kawasaki]

There is no need for 4 x 3.0GHz. If you use 4 x 2.0GHz or maybe a bit more, then power consumption goes down dramatically (power is proportional to frequency squared, so less than half the power), price goes down as well. To keep power consumption and heat down, Apple could use a slightly faster chip, run at say 2.66GHz if only two cores are active, and slow down to 2.00 GHz with four cores. Good speed for software that is not multi-core optimised, better speed for multi-core optimised software, and heat + fan noise would still be low.

Ah...

 

[Sam0r]

Ah...

Yeah, apple did that with the G4 MDD's. Mine had 933mhz chips, but it ran at 867mhz. A quick trip with the sodlering iron got it running at 1ghz

 

[macintel4me]

It seems the earliest the Mac Pro will be upgraded realstically is Jan after the holiday season is over and the Penryn's are out. I have to say this is obviously really disappointing especially as the Mac Pro's are nowhere near competitively priced at this point. I plan to do a lot of of video encoding and 4-cores would be great. I already have a decent 23" LCD monitor. The Mac Pro is the perfect machine for me except the price and timing.