New iBooks, Mac minis and iPod shuffles at MWSF 2006?

[Randall]

Weren't Powerbooks supposed to be using the more advanced Intel Merom processors and not Yonah. I was of the understanding that Yonah was for iBooks and Merom would be for Powerbooks.

Or have I got my processors facts muddled?

Well you're on to something there, but the fact is that Merom is actually the successor to Yonah. So therefore, it would make sense that the Powerbooks get Yonah and then Merom. According to Intel, Merom's design places emphasis on both high performance and low power consumption. On a performance per watt basis, Intel claims Merom will outperform Yonah by a 2-1 margin. Ultra low voltage Merom chips will consume as little as 0.5W of power, enabling ultra portable laptops to have battery lives in the tens of hours.

However, both Yonah and Merom will be from the same line of processors (Pentium M). If you want to give the iBook Yonah, you have to wait a whole year to get Merom into the Powerbooks, and that is unacceptable.

 

[Stella]

I guess my interest in all this is very low.
I cannot see why Apple is bothering to change to Intel at all - the speed increases wont be very much and PowerPC is still moving along.

I have a 3.5 year old Powerbook G4 667 dvi, 10.4.3. When I test drove a new 17", it wasnt any better. Faster? Well, a bit, but as everything works well on what I have, why bother?

<snip>

Apple can't compete with laptops, for one.

G5s still run too hot. The new Intel processors will run faster than the current G4s, for sure. The G5 are fine for the moment... but that won't last too long.

As your evidence shows, G4s haven't come very far - when you compared your G4 667 with the new 17". 3.5 years later, and G4s are sooo laggging.

For some, speed is everything, especially for the average consumer. The faster, the better. The cheaper the better ( until the quality gets really noticeably crap ).

iBooks are looking very expensive, imo.

 

[Randall]

Yes.

A dual Core Yonah at 2.16 GHz, for example, will monkey stomp a single G4 at 1.67. Rosetta will provide 80% of the native speed. Let's run some speculative, but fairly realistic numbers.

Assume the following performance: 1.67 G4 / 167 MHz Bus is roughly half the speed of a dual core 2.16 Yonah / 667 Bus. This is a ballpark figure but Yonah could actually be much faster.

200% raw power x 80% rosetta speed for PPC apps will yield roughly 160%, or 1.6x the speed of an existing PowerBook. In other words, the speed boost to unconverted apps is still 60%.

Even if you change these numbers to be significantly less impressive for Yonah, you still end up with speed boosts for unaltered PPC code over a normal PPC model revision. Normal revision cycles, for Apple, have traditionally yielded somewhere from 12% to 25% speed increases.

Thank you. This is what I've been pointing out to everyone. The difference between the G4 and Yonah 2GHz is that they are GENERATIONS appart. Yonah uses the 65nm process, and has 2 cores. You can emulate PPC with Rosetta on Yonah better then you can BE a PPC with G4. Sad but true, that IBM and Apple let the G4 remain for so very very long.

 

[SiliconAddict]

Have there always been this many whiny PB owners, or is this as result of the increasing number of "switchers"?

As pointed out before, what's the point of releasing Intel PBs before Intel iBooks when some of the biggest software that PB professionals use can't run natively on Intel yet?

The ratio of whiners to nonwhiners is proportionate to the number of years the PowerBook line has gone without any REAL updates. And when I say real I do not mean RAM boosts, a new LCD, dual layer burners, price drops, and spiffy new touchpads. So at one time no there weren’t this many “whiners” The only people who aren’t complaining at this point are people who:
-Are happy with their PowerBook so they don’t care about the “Next big thing”.
-Have no technical expertise in computers.
-Are Apple/PPC fanbois.

People who ARE complaining:
-Are geeks.
-Are power users who want something that can keep up with the tools they use. (Aperture on a PowerBook?

-Are people who need to run Windows “legacy apps” (Which is me. There are about a half dozen Windows apps that do not exist on OS X that I need to do my job and VPC on a G4 does NOT get the job done. What? You expect me to drag around two laptops?)

 

[evomac]

Amazon

Hello everyone...this is my first post.

Amazon has the ibook with mail in rebates now. Didn't know if this may imply a change for it since I don't normally run across MIR on Apple products!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0009U7WZM/ref=nosim/104-0094666-3506332?n=541966

If this has already been mentioned or has no meaning, then all apologies

 

[rye9]

According to Intel, Merom's design places emphasis on both high performance and low power consumption. On a performance per watt basis, Intel claims Merom will outperform Yonah by a 2-1 margin. Ultra low voltage Merom chips will consume as little as 0.5W of power, enabling ultra portable laptops to have battery lives in the tens of hours.

However, both Yonah and Merom will be from the same line of processors (Pentium M).

This is why I am not getting a Yonah iBook. Sure they are better than the current ones but hardly. Its not like the current ones process slowly, the Yonah ones will just have a better power to performance ratio, not a much better performance. Also, with this Merom coming soon, I can defintely wait and since Merom is supposed to be a whole new architecture or something is supposed to be different, it's like another transition of processors. Intel is supposed to be abandoning its Netburst technology or something making the current chips "obsolete" bc its a whole new processor with this Merom coming. (similar to the PPC being "obsolete" with the transition to Intel) So, with ANOTHER TRANSITION iminent and a processor about two times as better than the Yonah which everyone is saying is great, Merom is like 4 times better than the current chips. So it makes little sense to me to get a Yonah machine with Merom which is so much better just around the corner. So, IMO, i think it would be best to get a PPC Apple for a cheap price on Amazon.com or when there is a price drop after the Macintels are released to last you a little when and then and only then, get a Macintel with the whole new architecture. (either Merom or Conroe)

 

[sparksinspace]

... Didn't Jobs say that intel computers would be SHIPPING by june of '06? I wouldn't bet everything I had on them coming some 6 months early. I think that Jobs will show us pictures of the new intel ibooks, powerbooks, etc. Then he will talk about their performace, then announce that they will be shipping in maybe 1-2 months. That way, he could release ibooks, powerbooks, and minis at the same time. Im not sure if apple would risk the ibook and the mini to outperform the current powerbooks. ...

The last thing he'd do is to show all new shiny machines and then tell us that they won't be available for a few months... if he did what you suggest the shareholders would demand his head.. (or they should) because this would kill sales.

In the past Apple have always made product announcements with essentially immediate shipment.

 

[Randall]

This is why I am not getting a Yonah iBook. Sure they are better than the current ones but hardly. Its not like the current ones process slowly, the Yonah ones will just have a better power to performance ratio, not a much better performance. Also, with this Merom coming soon, I can defintely wait and since Merom is supposed to be a whole new architecture or something is supposed to be different, it's like another transition of processors. Intel is supposed to be abandoning its Netburst technology or something making the current chips "obsolete" bc its a whole new processor with this Merom coming. (similar to the PPC being "obsolete" with the transition to Intel) So, with ANOTHER TRANSITION iminent and a processor about two times as better than the Yonah which everyone is saying is great, Merom is like 4 times better than the current chips. So it makes little sense to me to get a Yonah machine with Merom which is so much better just around the corner. So, IMO, i think it would be best to get a PPC Apple for a cheap price on Amazon.com or when there is a price drop after the Macintels are released to last you a little when and then and only then, get a Macintel with the whole new architecture. (either Merom or Conroe)

Not a bad idea, assuming Intel stays the course and releases Merom in Q3/Q4 2006. Merom is actually supposed to be 64-bits as well. Merom will incorporate some aspects of the Pentium 4 and some aspects of the Pentium M. Intel has revealed that Merom will be a dual core processor supporting Vanderpool Virtualization Technology as well as EM64T, which is Intel's name for AMD64.

I am foaming at the mouth at the possibility of owning a 64-bit dual core Powerbook that has a battery life in the 10's of hours in January 2007. My God that would be the greatest laptop achievement in a long time.

 

[SiliconAddict]

the Yonah ones will just have a better power to performance ratio, not a much better performance.

Ummm

Dude. You are going to be wrong. As Frobozz so eloquently put it. . . The Yonah is going to monkey stomp the G4.
But then again I don't expect Yonah in the iBooks to begin with anyways so you prob will be right. . . For now.

 

[shawnce]

But once the intels come out, all of the new software coming out will be Intel - not PowerPC (for the most part). It's a hard decision to make.

This is simple not going to be an issue... The Mac OS X software market is all PPC now, that is 15+ million systems that are PPC based against 0 that are Intel based. Software is not going to ship only for Intel anytime soon. Software will be universal for a long time (3-5+ years).

 

[generik]

I guess my interest in all this is very low.
I cannot see why Apple is bothering to change to Intel at all - the speed increases wont be very much and PowerPC is still moving along.

I have a 3.5 year old Powerbook G4 667 dvi, 10.4.3. When I test drove a new 17", it wasnt any better. Faster? Well, a bit, but as everything works well on what I have, why bother?

For a lot of Mac users, the new machines are irrrelevant until they HAVE to upgrade due to failure of the machine in some way.

And I thought everyone knew that a dual-core processor is NOT twice as fast.
Try putting two engines in a car - it wont be twice as fast.
Gain on these things is usually in the region of 10 - 25%.

There is a limit on speed for all things - and that limit is human speed. A 5 ghz machine would be fast, but I doubt that you will type that fast.
Store a million songs, but you can still only listen at the normal rate, one song at a time, through your ears.

The quality and use of software is much more important than speed, but this fact is lost on new users, marketing people, etc.
Its like the car that goes 200mph, but there is nowhere to run it.

I suppose that what this is about is Jobs/Apple wanting to get big market share. That will lead to lower quality and rushing buggy software to market.
Oh, wait. They are doing that already......

Why not spend some of the cash they have on a superb word processor and a superb Browser and an excellent eMail program? Thats all most of us need, and the rest is just desire - iPhoto, iTunes, etc. etc.

It isnt always good to give in to desire - it can turn you into a donkey.

"Nobody needs more than 640K of memory"

 

[sparksinspace]

unlikely: a single notebook 'line'

Previous posters have suggested that Apple might replace both iBook and Powerbooks with a single notebook line. That would just be silly, c'mon.. iBook and PowerBook are established brands with distinctive and different customer bases.. why change a winning combination?

iBook - plastic, slow, (relatively) cheap components such as the screen, still using Apple's design, cool and desirable, price bracket suitable for education which is a very big market for Apple.

PowerBook - state of the art, no compromises in performance and design, for professionals who want the coolest notebook at any cost.

However, I can very well see the point of having the same motherboard for both machines.. that would allow Apple to improve profitability on both types of machines, for iBooks you just put slower processors in and for PowerBooks you spare no expense on all components.

I suspect the Intel based machine lineup will look like a logical evolution of the current machines, rather than revolutions. The main reason being that Apple can not afford to confuse its customer base any further...

 

[shawnce]

Thank you. This is what I've been pointing out to everyone. The difference between the G4 and Yonah 2GHz is that they are GENERATIONS appart. Yonah uses the 65nm process, and has 2 cores. You can emulate PPC with Rosetta on Yonah better then you can BE a PPC with G4. Sad but true, that IBM and Apple let the G4 remain for so very very long.

/me points out that the 80% number is well a little overly optimistic.

Really folks Rosetta is good but not that good, realistically expect around 20-50% of native depending on what is being emulated.

 

[steve_hill4]

A shuffle with a small (26x11mm?) screen = a shuffle that actually has a chance to compete with its competition.

Google "DELL DJ DITTY" to see what the shuffle is up against.

Not bad, but if you took the shuffle, put a small display, similar to that and every other flash based mp3 player's display, on the side, that would be better. It doesn't need to be big, you could even have a sliding cover, but a display would clinch those few more sales.

 

[rye9]

Not a bad idea, assuming Intel stays the course and releases Merom in Q3/Q4 2006. Merom is actually supposed to be 64-bits as well. Merom will incorporate some aspects of the Pentium 4 and some aspects of the Pentium M. Intel has revealed that Merom will be a dual core processor supporting Vanderpool Virtualization Technology as well as EM64T, which is Intel's name for AMD64.

I am foaming at the mouth at the possibility of owning a 64-bit dual core Powerbook that has a battery life in the 10's of hours in January 2007. My God that would be the greatest laptop achievement in a long time.

Yeah, that would be an awesome PB which is exactly my point why it would be kinda dumb to buy Intel now with a PB like that less than a year away.

 

[sparksinspace]

I guess my interest in all this is very low.
I cannot see why Apple is bothering to change to Intel at all - the speed increases wont be very much and PowerPC is still moving along.

I have a 3.5 year old Powerbook G4 667 dvi, 10.4.3. When I test drove a new 17", it wasnt any better. Faster? Well, a bit, but as everything works well on what I have, why bother?

....

You have a point, but ... for new sales the G4 is hopefully outdated, especially when you consider the slow memory bus... correct me if I'm wrong but I believe it's a marketing gag to equip these machines with DDR memory... so for Apple to survive (and despite iTunes hardware sales do drive their business) is to bring something competitive..

HOWEVER.. the good thing about having this slow G4 is that a lot of work must have gone into optimising MacOSX and apps, some of which will undoubtedly pay off also on an Intel platform, thus making the Intel experience that much more impressive when compared to, for example, Windows where if you have a state-of-the-art machine everything seems to take the same time as it did 10 years ago on a state-of-the-art (Windows95) machine...

So MacOSX on Intel will be like afterburners and warp-drive at the same time..

 

[~Shard~]

970mp isnt going in iMac be assured, Yonah will. Single Cores for the Consumer, Duals,Quads for the pro's. This is going to be a great year and i wouldnt put it past Apple to have all machines Intel by the end of 2006.

You may very well be right. However, I would argue that due to the current timelines for Conroe/Woodcrest, we will not see an Intel-based PowerMac until 2007.

I'll take a dual-boot 12" ibook, please!

Don't hold your breath... not for a while yet...

I meant in terms of Intel rumors for January. Last rumor I heard, Intel iMacs were coming, and the new iMac shell was designed to allow an Intel motherboard to be dropped right in. But since then, rumors have shifted to a Mac mini DVR and updated iBooks, so I guess Intel iMacs will not be coming at MacWorld.

Nope, sorry to say it, but they won't be. The focus for now with respect to Intel machines will be the portable machines, probably the Mac mini as well, and then once all the existing G4 systems have been dealt with, we'll see about the G5 iMac.

 

[GregA]

Wow... all this hype is really getting to me! I need that Mac mini now! A dual-core 1.5 GHz mini would own my PowerBook at more than half the price! Not only that, but I'll be able to install both OS X and Windows on it. There are some Windows apps that I use that are not currently available for OS X, so it would be great not having to boot up my PC just for that one program. January cannot come soon enough!

I don't know how you can compare a MacMini with a Powerbook - they both meet substantially different needs and have to be approached as such.

Also, I don't think we'll be able to dual boot Windows. Apple may use EFI without a "Compatibility Support Module" for older BIOSes - which would mean Windows XP won't work (Vista will support EFI). Of course, if Apple doesn't provide some way of loading Windows from OSX, then I'm sure VMware will release something very very quickly.

 

[MacinDoc]

The last thing he'd do is to show all new shiny machines and then tell us that they won't be available for a few months... if he did what you suggest the shareholders would demand his head.. (or they should) because this would kill sales.

In the past Apple have always made product announcements with essentially immediate shipment.

Are you forgetting the introduction of the Power Mac G5, maybe?

 

[~Shard~]

Are you forgetting the introduction of the Power Mac G5, maybe?

Exactly - announced in June, and some people didn't receive theirs until November - just in time for the revisions a month later.

 

[iEdd]

Guys, Powerbooks are just as likely if not more likely than iBooks. THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE SAYING. If iBook gets an update it will have to be better than the current powerbook, it's already ALMOST EQUAL! So then iBook would be more 'professional'. But what's the point, there are no intel apps you say? I expect macworld to have a few speakers including microsoft, adobe and some other companies saying that by the time you get your intel mac, they will have office and photoshop for you. Aswell as apple's own pro apps of course.
Do any professionals buy powerbooks? Maybe the maxed out 15" ones. Do you guys expect these software companies to bring out their new intel apps and announce them months before we see intel. Aren't apple taking the Dev kits back soon? For all we know, most software could be intel already.

 

[sparksinspace]

Are you forgetting the introduction of the Power Mac G5, maybe?

ok, there was that, yes.

 

[Super Dave]

Are you forgetting the introduction of the Power Mac G5, maybe?

Or any number of product announcments? Apple's behaved well in maybe the past... 1.5 years (pulling a number from my butt), but before that I remember tons of "Available in 2 months." In the mean time they don't leave the old products out as no one would buy them. In the mean time there's usually nothing.

David

 

[~Shard~]

Or any number of product announcments? Apple's behaved well in maybe the past... 1.5 years (pulling a number from my butt), but before that I remember tons of "Available in 2 months." In the mean time they don't leave the old products out as no one would buy them. In the mean time there's usually nothing.

David

Exactly - it has happened many times in the past and will undoubtedly happen many more times in the future.

So, Intel iBooks shipping in a month, Intel PowerBooks shipping in 3 months?

 

[Randall]

Are you forgetting the introduction of the Power Mac G5, maybe?

Yeah that was a marketing faux pas, or supply didn't meet demand, but either way, that didn't go very well. I think Steve Jobs will take a more conservative approach this time, not promising us 3GHz G5's etc.

Either way, the Intel machines will be very impressive compaired to the current G4 lineup. I think just by having Steve do a quick demo of such will create more then enough buzz for the new Mactel machines. (assuming they exist and will be ready to ship soon after MWSF '06)