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G4 iBook at MWNY?

I think what most people are not even considering that will make a huge difference depending on what you do and with future versions of the Mac OS is the amount of ram the ibook max's out at. 640MB pretty much turns the ibook into a disposable computer for many folks much earlier than they would like. I actually consider that to be the biggest issue with the ibook. When they deliver a G4 or higher performing G3 based system, I hope this gets addressed.

Besides more memory makes things easier on battery life since you don't need to hit the swap file as much.
 
Well, I'm still here waiting for my iBook 700 order to come in but I doubt that I'll be disappointed even if they do upgrade somehow at MWNY. I don't think G4 is too close yet and MWNY will be all about powermacs and jaguar developments.

The fact is, I need it now (the iBook) for writing a thesis, it does more than I need so will serve me well for a few years (I hope), and I just can't wait any longer to upgrade the G3 powerbook 233 (still running 8.1) that I got second hand 3 years ago. I'm sure OSX, even on a G3 will be a revelation over that baby. It served me well but I never quite managed to iron out the system extension conflicts on it properly either.

If I kept waiting and waiting for the next new revision, I'd never get one. I might bea bit annoyed if the price drops significantly, but the ed discount made it a pretty good buy anyway. We all have to choose our time, my time was now. I am happy with my decision and stand by it.

Now, pass me a Tasmanian beer.
 
I can't see the iBook getting updated this early again...especially since everything will be G4 then (except classic of course)...they could if the PowerBooks and PowerMacs get completely better G4's but thats not likely in the case of the PowerBooks just yet...I think that MWSF03 will be the the day/s when everything goes G4+ and by then, the iMac classic will have died..
 
Originally posted by britboy


Just because a computer is sitting still, doesn't mean you'll have a power-socket. You could be on a train, in a car..... if the battery only lasts about 3 hours, and burning a dvd the same (for iDVD for example), then it's not really practical. Until dvd burners get faster, or batteries last longer, we're not going to get them in portable computers.

Also, the powerbook range will most likely have moved on from the ti design by the time the technology arrives, so i stand by my statement that the tibooks will not be getting superdrives.
Click to expand...
Britboy,

Honestly, how often do you think that someone will be burning a DVD on a train? Once, maybe twice? You have to remember that a lot of people can only afford one computer (like me). And since I bought my first laptop, I'll never go back to a desktop. I would like the capability of burning DVDs on a laptop.

Besides, Apple kinda markets the TiBook as a desktop replacement (or if they don't, they should). Within the next year or so, DVD burners will be small enough to fit inside laptops. Apple better be ready.
 
Originally posted by ftaok

Honestly, how often do you think that someone will be burning a DVD on a train? Once, maybe twice? You have to remember that a lot of people can only afford one computer (like me). And since I bought my first laptop, I'll never go back to a desktop. I would like the capability of burning DVDs on a laptop.

Besides, Apple kinda markets the TiBook as a desktop replacement (or if they don't, they should). Within the next year or so, DVD burners will be small enough to fit inside laptops. Apple better be ready.
Click to expand...


That's not the point. I doubt you would see many people trying to burn dvd's in a train. What i was saying is that there isn't much point in incorporating features into a portable machine, if they cannot be used. A computer should stay true to itself, not try to hash together a half-baked concept. I agree, within a year we will leaps in the technology, and it may well be possible to put a dvd burner into a laptop. At the moment though, it's just not possible, nor is it the right thing to do.

If you want a dvd burner, get an external one. If you're not moving the computer around anyway, then what would it matter whether it's internal or external.
 
Originally posted by britboy
That's not the point. I doubt you would see many people trying to burn dvd's in a train. What i was saying is that there isn't much point in incorporating features into a portable machine, if they cannot be used. A computer should stay true to itself, not try to hash together a half-baked concept. I agree, within a year we will leaps in the technology, and it may well be possible to put a dvd burner into a laptop. At the moment though, it's just not possible, nor is it the right thing to do.

If you want a dvd burner, get an external one. If you're not moving the computer around anyway, then what would it matter whether it's internal or external.
Click to expand...
Britboy,

I hear what you're saying, but the point is that I want all of the functionality of a desktop in the form factor of a laptop. Eventually, this means DVD burners. While the battery life issue makes it less likely now, in the future, you'll see better battery technology (or lower power burners) that will make it possible.

As to having an external burner, I'm not playing that game. I want all of my drives to be inside my laptop. I don't want to have to carry around an external burner (just more weight) where ever I go. What will end up happening is that I'll just leave it at home.

Anyways, you can rest assured that there will be DVD burners in notebooks pretty soon.
 
Originally posted by ftaok
Britboy,

I hear what you're saying, but the point is that I want all of the functionality of a desktop in the form factor of a laptop. Eventually, this means DVD burners. While the battery life issue makes it less likely now, in the future, you'll see better battery technology (or lower power burners) that will make it possible.

Anyways, you can rest assured that there will be DVD burners in notebooks pretty soon.
Click to expand...

There we agree :)

It will no doubt be interesting and exciting to see what develpments emerge in the next year. I'm not expecting dvd burners before this time next year, but that's just my guess ;)
 
G4 iBook

I really do not see this happening. Several people have incorrectly stated what the Altivec (Velocity Engine) is and what it is used for. The Altivec instruction set is designed to do many of the same operations on a large group of data. Things that CAN, but don't have to, take advantage of this are Audio/Video encoding, Image manipulation and video effects, etc...

Even though many Apps (like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and iTunes) are written to take advantage of this totally separate vector processing unit (Altivec), they do not have to. They still work without it, although not as fast. Apple may have forced iDVD to check for a G4 and therefore, does not work on a G3, even though it should. Media Cleaner Pro does MPEG encoding on a G3, so I know it is possible...way slower, but possible.

Games do not use Altivec. A G4 processor IS a G3 with the Altivec unit attached to it. With that said, a G3 at 700Mhz WILL be faster than a G4 667Mhz on anything that does not use the vector processor, ie everything except what I mentioned in my first paragraph. The only reason the 667 TiBook beats the 700 iBook is because of the slightly faster bus, faster hard drive and bigger cache.

With all that said, I did buy a 700 iBook 12.1" last week and even with the stock 128megs of RAM, it runs OS X quite good. I imagine that once I max the RAM out, it is going to eat my tower for lunch. BTW my tower is a tricked out B&W (400 G4, 1GB RAM, Ultra160 SCSI, PCI Radeon 32Mb DDR, etc...) Once 10.2 comes out, these little iBooks are going to kick some butt.

The iBook will not get a G4 until they slap a DVD burner in it. BTW, you already can get a DVD burner in a Dell. However, those Dells are tanks compared to a TiBook. Apple would be smart and wait for the new blue laser disc technology, instead of wasting time figuring out how to shove a DVD-R burner in a TiBook or an iBook.

-mark
 
Re: G4 iBook

Originally posted by avkills
I really do not see this happening. Several people have incorrectly stated what the Altivec (Velocity Engine) is and what it is used for. The Altivec instruction set is designed to do many of the same operations on a large group of data. Things that CAN, but don't have to, take advantage of this are Audio/Video encoding, Image manipulation and video effects, etc...

Even though many Apps (like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and iTunes) are written to take advantage of this totally separate vector processing unit (Altivec), they do not have to. They still work without it, although not as fast. Apple may have forced iDVD to check for a G4 and therefore, does not work on a G3, even though it should. Media Cleaner Pro does MPEG encoding on a G3, so I know it is possible...way slower, but possible.
Click to expand...
along with those apps, iPhoto will take advantage of Altivec. And whether or not Apple intentionally sets iDVD to check for a G4 is irrelevant. iDVD does not work with a G3 and that's that. (although Formac has DVD software that encodes with a G3)

Games do not use Altivec. A G4 processor IS a G3 with the Altivec unit attached to it. With that said, a G3 at 700Mhz WILL be faster than a G4 667Mhz on anything that does not use the vector processor, ie everything except what I mentioned in my first paragraph. The only reason the 667 TiBook beats the 700 iBook is because of the slightly faster bus, faster hard drive and bigger cache.
Click to expand...
Yeah, games don't benefit from Altivec, but if I wanted a game machine, I'd have bought a PS2 (or a PC). As for the G4 being a G3 with Altivec, that may have been true with the early G4s, but with the divergence of the G3 and G4, they are quite different now.

The iBook will not get a G4 until they slap a DVD burner in it. BTW, you already can get a DVD burner in a Dell. However, those Dells are tanks compared to a TiBook. Apple would be smart and wait for the new blue laser disc technology, instead of wasting time figuring out how to shove a DVD-R burner in a TiBook or an iBook.

-mark
Click to expand...
I totally agree that the iBook won't get a G4 until they slap in a SuperDrive. But if it takes more than a year to get a SuperDrive to fit into an iBook (let alone TiBook), they'll probably put in a G4 anyway.

Also, I looked at the Dell website to see if you could get a DVD burner in a laptop, but it wouldn't let me configure it. Where did you see the Dell with a DVD burner?
 
Dell DVD

It was all second hand talk by one of my Co-workers. I will check it out. I know his laptop has two optical drives in it. A DVD Player/CD combo and a CD-RW burner. It's kinda cool, but the thing is huge!

Heh! I just checked it out and could not find one either. I will call him on it the next time I see him. Sorry for the mis-information.

On another DVD related thing. I just read an article in DV mag which stated that DVD-RW and DVD+RW have a much lower compatibility rate than with DVD-R (What Apple uses). Ha ha.

-mark
 
Re: Dell DVD

Originally posted by avkills
It was all second hand talk by one of my Co-workers. I will check it out. I know his laptop has two optical drives in it. A DVD Player/CD combo and a CD-RW burner. It's kinda cool, but the thing is huge!

Heh! I just checked it out and could not find one either. I will call him on it the next time I see him. Sorry for the mis-information.

On another DVD related thing. I just read an article in DV mag which stated that DVD-RW and DVD+RW have a much lower compatibility rate than with DVD-R (What Apple uses). Ha ha.

-mark
Click to expand...

And your point is?..........:mad:
 
My point is...

that the format the other guys are putting in their boxes are not as compatible as what Apple is using. DVD-R for General has the best player compatibility out of the other consumer DVD burning formats, ie DVD-RW & DVD+RW. That was my point.

DVD-R for Authoring had the best player compatibility.

-mark
 
What would be the point of having a G4 iBook when we've already got the G4 powerbook? Would anyone buy a $3000 G4 ibook over a $3000 powerbook??? (think graphics and screen size, among other, smaller details)
I didint think so.:D
 
G5orbust, I think you missed the point. Take a look at the iMac G4. That doesn't cost $3000. In fact, it's not even $2000 and it's upgraded to a G4. I would expect that if the iBook is upgraded to a G4 we MIGHT still see the large 14 inch screen, and we MIGHT still see the 100MHz bus. We will probably keep the Combo Drive and the MHz speed should be the same, +/- 100MHz for around the same cost. [Oh, dear Pete, not minus! :eek:]

But, again, this is all speculation for a product that may not come out at MacWorld New York, maybe later.
 
Originally posted by King Cobra
G5orbust, I think you missed the point. Take a look at the iMac G4. That doesn't cost $3000. In fact, it's not even $2000 and it's upgraded to a G4. I would expect that if the iBook is upgraded to a G4 we MIGHT still see the large 14 inch screen, and we MIGHT still see the 100MHz bus. We will probably keep the Combo Drive and the MHz speed should be the same, +/- 100MHz for around the same cost. [Oh, dear Pete, not minus! :eek:]

But, again, this is all speculation for a product that may not come out at MacWorld New York, maybe later.
Click to expand...

Good Point, but would you still buy a G4 ibook over a G4 powerbook??
 
Originally posted by G5orbust


Good Point, but would you still buy a G4 ibook over a G4 powerbook??
Click to expand...


Obviously some people would. Back when the G3 was top-of-the-line, apple sold a G3 powerbook, running at 333 and 400MHz, and an iBook with a G3 running at 300MHz. Neither suffered overly as a result of the other.
 
Responding to G5orbust, since I do not want to quote:

Actually, I am focused on a cheap Titanium Powerbook matching the clock speeds, bus speed and, if possible, Hard Drive space as my cube. That way I like both computers as much. Plus, I get to freak out peecee users at class, when they see I brought a supercomputer to English! :D

But if I wasn't in that senario, I would buy an iBook G4. But, don't forget, if Apple plans to keep the Powerbook alive, there has to be a gap between the iBook, a cheap and affordable notebook with some features, and a top dog Powerbook, with high speeds, a faster bus speed and more expandability. That is why I would suggest that the iBook stay at a 700MHz G4 (do not tell me 700MHz is slow for a G4, I live happily with 0.5GHz), while the Powerbook is upgraded significantly to 1000MHz, if possible. I do not see a G5 in the Powerbook for a long time, however.
 
If Apple could engineer a dual cpu config for the Tibook crowd, I think we'd see the ibook go G4. That would likely lower costs on the G4 quite a bit since they could buy in greater bulk. That would likely cause the TiBook to go up in price or they could instead come out with a larger version that has the dual cpu with dvd burner option. If they go with a new slightly thicker form factor, they could probably pull this off for a high end laptop.

People can argue battery life all day long but honestly a very small percentage really use the batteries in laptops. If they can get 2-3 hours of realistic life out of a laptop battery then they'll be competitive with the Intel/AMD laptops. Most folks plug them in when they use them since many times they are small form factor portable desktop replacements.
 
Is switching the processor for the iBook a good idea?

In my best opinion the processor in the iBooks aren't the biggest concern. With Apple somewhat slow in terms of graphics power (crossing my fingers they do something about that) how long could an 16Mb video card really last? And if they are going to have higher system buses in their desktop machines they should at least bump the speed in the iBooks to 133. G4 processors across the line might make some of us happier, but I know I would prefer that Apple kept their Powerbook line and their cheaper iBook line at least a processor apart. But of course if they were to introduce the G5 and put it in the Powerbook line I would be love to see the G4 in the iBooks.
 
I consider this unlikely...

In order for Apple to successfully market a G4 iBook they will have to take a speed that is the same or faster than their current iBook speeds (which would be >= 700) considering that Apple just upgraded the TiBooks to 800 at the highend *last month*, shipping out a 667 iBook or faster would simply cut deeply into sales for TiBooks.
 
iBook hope for MWSF

iBook:
14"
600 Mhz G4
100 Mhz bus
256 MB RAM
30 GB
$1200

14"
700 Mhz G4
100 Mhz bus
256 MB RAM
40 GB
$1500

14"
867 Mhz G4
133 Mhz bus
512 MB RAM
40 GB
$1850
 
Re: iBook hope for MWSF

Originally posted by DavPeanut
iBook:
14"
600 Mhz G4
100 Mhz bus
256 MB RAM
30 GB
$1200

14"
700 Mhz G4
100 Mhz bus
256 MB RAM
40 GB
$1500

14"
867 Mhz G4
133 Mhz bus
512 MB RAM
40 GB
$1850
Click to expand...


Keep dreaming!!! And you got a what on your SAT's?
 
Re: iBook hope for MWSF

Originally posted by DavPeanut
iBook:
14"
867 Mhz G4
133 Mhz bus
512 MB RAM
40 GB
$1850
Click to expand...
Are you nuts! You'll be lucky! :D
I can't see a 867Mhz G4 in an iBook early next year, the iBooks are well behind in terms of their technology to keep prices low, the TiBook has only recently gone to a 800Mhz G4 and you will pay over $2,500 for that, I think the TiBook would have to be at 1.2Ghz G4/G5 before the iBook would go to 867Mhz G4.
...just my opinion...
 
Originally posted by britboy
"The current superdrive (the dvr-104) is 1 11/16" tall. The tibook is 1" tall. You figure it out."



Hey remember the times when a hard drive was too big, and now we've got hard drives small enough to fit into a laptop PC card slot. All we have to do is wait and it will come.
 
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