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If you start doing anything in iLife you'll quickly find you need 80GB just for scratch space, and don't forget you may want to create a BootCamp partition. So if you can stretch to it go for at least 120GB, or even better 160.

Can I physically upgrade a HD in a Macbook on my own or do I need that space right from the get-go when I buy? Probably won't have the money until January or Febuary anyways, but that gives me time at least to keep my options open too.

:)
 
Can I physically upgrade a HD in a Macbook on my own or do I need that space right from the get-go when I buy? Probably won't have the money until January or Febuary anyways, but that gives me time at least to keep my options open too.

:)
Installing it on your own would invalidate the warranty, which you don't want to do. If you're not buying until January you may find that 120GB becomes the default size anyway. But really, the 80GB drives only stay useful for those that have a second computer or external drive to store all their data on.
 
Installing it on your own would invalidate the warranty, which you don't want to do. If you're not buying until January you may find that 120GB becomes the default size anyway. But really, the 80GB drives only stay useful for those that have a second computer or external drive to store all their data on.

I believe that the warranty would only be invalidated if you damaged anything in the process of replacing the HD. Not having replaced one myself I don't know how easy/hard it would be to cause damage.

Link to HD upgrade PDF.
 
Why 9GB?

9GB is a lot for an OS, but without reading every post above, doesn't anyone realize this is the first Universal retail Mac OS? Just about every program (I'm sure some where missed) is likely twice the size it needs to be in order to support PPC and Intel.

There are programs (search teh intarweb) that can strip out the Intel or PPC code from the OS which will effectively cut out about half of it's "bloat". Strip out extra languages, unused printer drivers, etc. and you'll have a 3GB OS in no time.
 
Unfortunately, that isn't the case. Core Duo is 32-bit. I think it was a mistake of Apple to allow x86 in their OS. It should have been AMD64 only from the very beginning. 64-bit mode has twice as many registers as x86, while PowerPC has twice as many as AMD64. Going to 32-bit x86 was a huge shock.

The only two 32bit processors that Apple used were the Core Solo and the Core Duo mainly because at the time they were the lower end CPUs available and fitted well into the iMac, Mac Book and the Mac Mini.

The vast majority of Intel Macs have the Core 2 Duo or the Xeon in them which are 64bit.

I really have no idea why you would want Apple to go purely with AMD. Their CPUs are losing badly in the speed stakes. The advantages that you laid out above are hardly cause to use a slower CPU.

I argued Amdahl's case since long ago. Apple should have skipped using the 32-bit Yonah, and made all MacIntels 64-bit Merom and later. That would have meant that with 10.5, *all* MacIntels would be 64-bit. 32-bit Intel would be unneeded after 10.4 - and obese binaries could shrink a bit.

Cromulent, I assume that Amdahl meant "64-bit instructions" when he used "AMD64", not to use AMD chips. "AMD64" is one of the common abbreviations for the 64-bit mode in Intel and AMD processors.
 
in store events

any word on if/what time in store events will be on the 26th? mine is already preordered . . . but any free t-shirts or mouse pads given out?! apple store is right on the way home from work, would love to wait in line for the excitement of the grand unveiling! :apple::apple:
 
deinterlacing

I hope the new advanced deinterlacing will be used also by iMovie 08 that is now just dropping half of the lines.
 
A 1.6Ghz processor required for DVD Player deinterlacing? Ouch.

Yeah, I'm glad I got a Macbook C2D 2.0 GHz when I did, but still, eek! I watch a lot of VIDEO_TS folders on my LCD from my Macbook, so the extended de-interlacing is a welcome feature.
 
A 1.6Ghz processor required for DVD Player deinterlacing? Ouch.
My guess as to why they've done this is because only the very top end G4s have the data throughput to cope with the program due to that processor's FSB bottleneck. Even then, the 1.67GHz G4s will struggle far more than the 1.6Ghz G5s will and I bet if there were a lower rated G5, say a 1.2GHz with a 400MHz FSB it would cope easily.

Poor Motorola processor design.
 
I argued Amdahl's case since long ago. Apple should have skipped using the 32-bit Yonah, and made all MacIntels 64-bit Merom and later. That would have meant that with 10.5, *all* MacIntels would be 64-bit. 32-bit Intel would be unneeded after 10.4 - and obese binaries could shrink a bit.

Cromulent, I assume that Amdahl meant "64-bit instructions" when he used "AMD64", not to use AMD chips. "AMD64" is one of the common abbreviations for the 64-bit mode in Intel and AMD processors.

Intel already use the AMD 64bit instruction set in their consumer processors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
x86-64 is a 64-bit superset of the x86 instruction set architecture. The x86-64 instruction set natively supports Intel's x86 and was designed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), who have since renamed it AMD64. This architecture has been cloned by Intel under the name Intel 64 (formerly known as Yamhill, Clackamas Technology (CT), IA-32e, and EM64T).[1] This leads to the common use of the names x86-64 or x64 as more vendor-neutral terms to collectively refer to the two nearly identical implementations.

Edit : Bah I guess that is what he already stated. Should have read what I originally quoted again. Still the fact remains that they didn't.

The machines that these 32bit processors were put into are unlikely to ever be used in a way that could actually take full advantage of 64 bit processors anyway. The Mac Pro / Mac Book Pro are the machines that are likely to be used by people who will eventually need the extra RAM and other benefits associated with 64 bit computing. I'm really not sure it was such a bad decision thinking about it.
 
Misinformation

After reading all 8 pages so far, there have been a number of comments that I would consider misinformation. I'm not an insider, and I haven't had access to any Leopard betas, but I am a software developer.

Someone argued that Tiger was 64-bit, so you couldn't attribute much or any of the disk space requirements to Leopard's 64-bitness. This is not really true. Tiger was a 32-bit operating system (whether on Intel or PPC), but it included some low-level libraries in 64-bit versions so you could write non-GUI (command-line and daemon) apps in 64-bit. (Apple's marketing really made the most of this!) There are NO 64-bit GUI apps on Tiger, because the GUI libraries (carbon, cocoa) are 32-bit. You might occasionally find a 32-bit GUI app that communicates on the sly with a 64-bit faceless app in the background, but this was rather messy.

The big change with Leopard is that the universal binaries for most of the system frameworks and toolkits are now "more universal": they are compiled for 32-bit and 64-bit, as well as Intel and PPC. (Well, the GUI portions of Carbon are still 32-bit only, but most of everything else is 32-bit and 64-bit universal.) So I do think the more complete 64-bitness of Leopard is probably a significant contributing factor in the enlarged disk space requirements.

The OS is also localized for several additional languages/cultures, so that's part of the disk bloat as well. There will no doubt be ways (either from Apple during installation, or from 3rd parties afterwards) to trim out some of the unnecessary code & resources.

As far as the much-ballyhooed "backdrop" feature not running on PPC. As others have noted, SSE3 (and even SSE2) have a few features that AltiVec does not, and AltiVec has a few features that SSE does not. Apple's Accelerate Framework could only be either a) wrapping only the features that both architectures have in common, or b) providing less-performant alternate methods for operations that one architecture has built-in but the other does not. So just because Apple released this framework (back with Tiger, incidentally), doesn't mean that it would necessarily provide enough functionality to make backdrops work on AltiVec.

Lastly, on the processor speed issue. Clearly Apple's website says an 867 MHz G4 or faster is "required." But do we know for certain that Leopard will refuse to install on something slower? Some posters have stated this is the case, but are they speaking from experience or assumption? I don't know one way or the other, but I do know that many Apple software packages (such as iLife '05 and '06) have stated requirements of 800MHz or 867MHz G4, but have installed just fine (without any hacking or complaint) on both my 450MHz and 500MHz Dual G4s. Of course, certain features run so slowly as to be impractical, but they still run. I wonder if Leopard's stated speed requirements are more of the same: more of a disclaimer than an actual requirement? (i.e. "Slow machines are not supported; don't try any class action lawsuits saying we slowed down your machine, because we told you so, etc.") I'm curious to find out on this one.
 
Really! Why do people still use those ancient Macs like 700-800 MHz G4s or even 450 Mhz ?

If I had to answer that in a word, it would be... groceries. I like groceries, I like having them in my house. For various reasons; they taste good, they fill me up, they keep me healthy.

All in all, I think my enthusiasm for maintaining a smallish selection of foodstuffs in my home is probably at the core of why I'm still using an 800 mhz QuickSilver.

What are using those old Macs for? Playing music in iTunes? Surfing net? Cant think of another use... even disk storage was slow.

You can't think of another use? How's this: I use my old mac for Photoshop, Flash, After Effects, a bit of Final Cut Pro. I also play music on iTunes and surf the net a bit. A friend of mine does a lot of audio recording on his G4, but I guess his is a 867, so it doesn't qualify as "old" does it?
 
you'll be able to play them you just won't be able to use the new deinterlacing feature (unless of course you got one of those fabled G5 powerbooks)

Fabled? Here's the photographic proof

17085pBookG5.jpg
 
9GB is a lot for an OS, but without reading every post above, doesn't anyone realize this is the first Universal retail Mac OS? Just about every program (I'm sure some where missed) is likely twice the size it needs to be in order to support PPC and Intel.

There are programs (search teh intarweb) that can strip out the Intel or PPC code from the OS which will effectively cut out about half of it's "bloat". Strip out extra languages, unused printer drivers, etc. and you'll have a 3GB OS in no time.

Actually they could be up to 4 times bigger as leopard uses quad binaries. 32bit ppc, 64bit ppc, 32nit x86 and 64bit x86
 
I'll admit I'm not a code junky, maybe you are. But if it is true that Apple could only have made the whole backdrops work with SSE then I think that they need to go back to the drawing board. This is the company that has long been able to simplify things and make it work, I can't see them making this so dependent on one processors abilities, although I can see the economic reasons for this.

I'm not whining that it won't work, I can for sure use the function on my laptop, but I would think that a fairly new G5 would handle this using some other codes.

Optimizing for Altivec or SSE only requires the use of the Accelerate Framework which basically calls the appropriate instructions depending on the hardware.

Accelerate Frameworks

Altivec/SSE

"Most work involving vector-oriented calculations can be done via Apple’s Accelerate frameworks, which provide higher-level functions for image processing, signal processing, linear algebra, vector math, and operations on large numbers. The advantage of using these frameworks is that the hardware dependencies are abstracted away by highly optimized library code that will be maintained not only for PowerPC and Apple’s initial Intel processors, but also for future processors."

-backdraft
 
The only two 32bit processors that Apple used were the Core Solo and the Core Duo mainly because at the time they were the lower end CPUs available and fitted well into the iMac, Mac Book and the Mac Mini.
Yes, but by selling them as the only Intel Macs available, they have attached a ball & chain to Mac apps that probably won't go away for 5 years, because I don't think you're going to see many developers choose to support 64-bit only.

The vast majority of Intel Macs have the Core 2 Duo or the Xeon in them which are 64bit.
A huge chunk of Intel Macs have 32-bit, unless you are claiming Apple didn't sell any computers for most of 2006. A growing number, and possibly the majority, have 64-bit.

I really have no idea why you would want Apple to go purely with AMD. Their CPUs are losing badly in the speed stakes. The advantages that you laid out above are hardly cause to use a slower CPU.
AMD64 is the name of the 64-bit instruction set. Intel calls their version EM64T. AMD is producing the fastest x64 chip, so they aren't losing badly. They have lost their dominance in the mid-range, and therefore have diminished profits. But they still sell every chip they can make, hence their attention to the high end of the market.
 
Optimizing for Altivec or SSE only requires the use of the Accelerate Framework which basically calls the appropriate instructions depending on the hardware.
-backdraft

There's that "magic" claim again. Sorry, doesn't work.
 
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