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For my needs, and i believe most 17inch MBP owners out there need a quad-core CPU + we need 8GB ram

Makes sense for apple to put quads in imacs now because they will sell like crazy. and bring out new redesigned imacs in mid 09 that will also sell like crazy.:apple:
 
I'm still new to this, but they're going to be announced (if this is true) on the 5th on January? After they're announced, when do they start selling?
 
Does your Mini look like one of those surreal cordless marketing images from Apple?


Or have you had to convert it to a Mini-tower?

Or is it like most Minis that I've seen in friends' homes and offices - a complete mess of random wires and add-ons?



What's the point of buying a tiny computer for its style, then mucking it up with add-on crap because frankly it is too small to be useful for much of its target audience?

Apple should keep the Mini, but add a small tower with room for some disks, a modest PCIe x16 graphics card, one or two PCIe x1 slots.

And the small tower should be the quad core. If you need a quad core, you probably want more than a single laptop drive in your computer! (And of course, the mini-tower should use desktop CPUs and chipsets - rather than the more expensive for less power mobile versions.)

Haha. Very true. But it's proven to be really good with plasma screens around shopping malls and airports though. Saw it at Bangkok airport once connected to the flight schedule screens.

I do. I do.

Not ridiculous. Would work really well for the work I do.

Agree. It's a really lame to generalize like that. I would love to see a 20" MBP.
 
Haha. Very true. But it's proven to be really good with plasma screens around shopping malls and airports though. Saw it at Bangkok airport once connected to the flight schedule screens.

Thank you for helping me. The Mini is a good setup for a simple, fixed task like an airport kiosk application.

As an expandable system for normal folks doing normal stuff - well, it's not so good.

By the way, do they really continue to use plasma for kiosk apps? I'd think that the "burn-in" issues would be horrible.
 
So I would guess that the Macbook Pro gets refreshed in April or May with an update of 2.53 standard and 2.66 for the higher end.

Probably, if the TDP are the same, or close.

It'd really be marketing though, .1ghz bumps across the board does not an update make.
 
They were the most recent lines updated, so they will probably be mid-late '09 before the next updates.

Apple's notebooks are its flagship products. Snow Leopard is all about multi-core processing, so I'd expect an update to coincide with the Snow Leopard launch.
 
My only wish is that the MacBook Pro can equate or outshine the iMac as then there really is a defined Pro range and Consumer range of products.

Just my $0.02...

+1
I have a home music studio MacPro quad 3GHz and a small set-up in Central London to work through stuff with clients, and at the mo' that is run with a MBPro 2.5 (6GB RAM, 2x500GB HD internal) ... this is mainly for ease of keeping the software and plug-ins synced between the two machines! But the disparity between the machines on some Logic projects is hilarious!!!
I would love to have greater power slung in the MBPro, won't be long I suspect!
 
Does your Mini look like one of those surreal cordless marketing images from Apple?

design_hands20060228.jpg



Or have you had to convert it to a Mini-tower?

minitower_01.jpg



Or is it like most Minis that I've seen in friends' homes and offices - a complete mess of random wires and add-ons?

029-thumb1.jpg



What's the point of buying a tiny computer for its style, then mucking it up with add-on crap because frankly it is too small to be useful for much of its target audience?

Apple should keep the Mini, but add a small tower with room for some disks, a modest PCIe x16 graphics card, one or two PCIe x1 slots.

And the small tower should be the quad core. If you need a quad core, you probably want more than a single laptop drive in your computer! (And of course, the mini-tower should use desktop CPUs and chipsets - rather than the more expensive for less power mobile versions.)

I bet Apple can make a pro tower much smaller than the current Mac Pro, and use SSD, cooler chips as Intel announced yet another smaller wafer with lower voltage/heat, and with more speed and make it about half the size. It would be nice to see this happen soon.
 
Tangent: re-purposing G5 PowerMac --> Server

I used to do this too but then I worked out some math

Electric power cost $0.20 per KWH. The G5 uses (at least) 0.15 KW so it costs $0.03 per hour to run. Over a three year lifetime it costs about $780 to run and that's if you never never run air conditioning and never power up the monitor using it purely as a file server.

It might be cheaper over all to buy a RAID enclosure.

Understood, but a couple of things come to mind.

The first is that any alternative is going to consume power, so some of your above electrical savings is smoke. In any event, I can generally use the home heating :)

The second is that I'd simply like to have an OS X server to play around with anyway.

The third is a bit of financial pragmatism: the cost to defer buying a replacement now is just electricity, and with the steep rate of decline in hard drive prices, it pays to wait for as long as reasonably possible. Personally, I expect that 1.5TB Seagates will be <$100 by no later than mid-2009.

The fourth reason is that I only have so many husband points for buying new toys. I'm not going to squander them on small peanuts.


-hh
 
Here is what I think the quad processors will be used for.

Most definetly the iMac. Wether now or in 6 months when OS 10.6 hopefully
is out I don't know, but I believe that Apple will try to make all their Macs have more cores as soon as possible to take advantage of Grand Central. Remember that the OS it self will take advantage of multi cores as well. Not only pro apps.

I think the new iMac we will see in January will get LED-background light for the display, faster duo processors, maybe an easier way to change the harddrive like in the latest MBP's and it will get the already discussed new Nvidia graphics card which will take advantage of OS 10.6 as well.
 
Must be a shoe in for a future iMac as well.


could be but didn't they just release a new Imac not that long ago. I don't know if mac will go for a new one so soon and if this is true than by the time mac comes out with a new Imac there will be a better processor out there.
 
Intel could come out with a million cores, I barely use the dual core on my system and very few even require 2 cores or more for video and HD imaging. Net books is where everything is heading something to get online do a search or two and get on with it.

I have yet to see a compelling reason for HD content, sure it might have a richer resolution, however most of the content available is worth only releasing on DVD.
 
With the new Quad Core duo chips...

...I'd be very interested to see what happens with iMac updates.

I've being kind of sitting on the fence and stuck in a rut since Apple moved to intel because there really isn't an affordable entry level tower like there used to be.

In an ideal world I'd be able to afford the 4 core Mac Pro but it's out of my price range so I need either an iMac that's got a little more kick and expansion than the current crop or an entry level tower that retails for around the £1,100 mark.

My first Power Mac was a beige G3 Desktop which had no expansion room left by the time I got a used 800Mhz Quicksilver G4 tower to replace it which I've got configured as follows:

Zip Bay: The 60Gb 5,400rpm drive it came with originally just for back up purposes
Bay 1: 250Gb 7,200rpm System Drive
Bay 2: 120Gb 7,200rpm Audio Drive
Pioneer DVD Writer
1Gb RAM (2 x 256Mb + 1 x 512Mb)
Airport Card
PCI Slot 2: Ati Radeon 7000
PCI Slot 3: 5 Port USB 2.0 Card + Bluetooth 2.0 USB stick on the cards' internal port

Protools 8.0 is out with a hefty 2Gb memory recommendation, I need Leopard to run it as I'm still using Tiger. That's £83 to start with, once I add the cost of a CPU upgrade (£370 for a dual 1.7Ghz Newertech) and maxing out the RAM, I'm about £200 or so shy of the cost of the current 20" iMac!

I'd need an external Oxford compatable drive case and Apple to keep those firewire ports on the iMac for it to be any use to me and I'm only really gaining 2.5Gb more RAM than my current Mac can handle regardless of the obvious speed gains.

I'd love a mini-tower system like this to sort of fill the gap:

iMac based 2.6 Quad Core with a faster FSB (it's £50 from crucial for a 4Gb iMac kit VS over £100 for the Mac Pro)
4 Memory Slots (8Gb limit, not 4)
2 user upgradable hard drive bays (one in use by system)
integrated Bluetooth + Airport
I honestly don't care about graphics, anything modern is fast enough for me as long it handles dual independent displays.

The current top of the range iMac upgraded to the above specs with a second, user upgradable 2.5" drive bay would be just as useful for audio work too and I'm sure video people would appreciate the extra RAM and second drive option too.

hope this isn't veering off topic, it's sort of "why I'd like a 4 core mac that isn't a Mac pro" but still related ;)
 
I do. I do.

Not ridiculous. Would work really well for the work I do.

I maybe strange but I always found the 20' iMac to be more portable than the even the 17' Powerbooks. far more sturdy about the same weight. The 17' would run a little longer without a power point.
 
I wonder why intel has not broken the 3.06 barrier for their products? its like as soon as they hit that with the single cores, they stop increasing speed and started making multi core processors.
I mean they have a 3.2.. but that thing is $1500!
 

Hrm.. ive been under a rock the last 12-13 months... so..

But.. i would still like to see something around a 4.0+ besides the single core that was out thats 3.8..

At one point they were increasing the speed by 0.3 - 0.4 GHz ever 5 months or so.

The reason for my wanting this is i heaily use programs that dont take advantage of multiple cores. So a p4 2.0 runs this program almost as well as a core 2 duo 2.0.
 
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