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unless they lied to us, the setup was supposed to be specifically designed with the air in mind
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Windows Goes Multi-Touch
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unless they lied to us, the setup was supposed to be specifically designed with the air in mind
How 'bout this - it's the first of 5,000,000 hits in Yahoo! for '"macbook air" intel cpu'....
I think that's almost exactly what I said
... Apple also lowered the voltage and clock a little to reduce the TDP, but any overclocker knows that you can underclock as well.
Surely you've learned by now never to believe *anything* that the Lord God Jobs says in a keynote?
If you're going to get all specific about what's a custom processor, and what is a custom package for an existing processor, you might want to be specific enough to use the term "custom bonding". Could be wrong, I suppose, but I don't think there's any solder in that package-- I suspect it's ultrasonically bonded from the pads to the lead frame or substrate.
Not sure what larger point you were trying to make though...
I said 'The only work was the "custom soldering" to connect the old CPU to the pins on the new package.'.
I would think that the quotation marks around "custom soldering" should indicate to most people that I was not referring to traditional tin-lead soldering. What's your point, then?
I was replying to:
Originally Posted by Chris Stroud
Intel put too much work into that custom processor ...
Intel put too much work into that custom processor ...
My point is that it wasn't "too much work".
Intel didn't make new silicon - it wasn't a custom CPU in that sense.
Intel took an existing (actually an older generation) silicon CPU and "soldered" it into a new package that they already had under development for a different chip.
#1 - The fingerprints thing hasn't been a problem, at all, for my iPhone. Do you think Apple forgot how to solve it?
#2 - Don't you think Apple would address the obvious issue of user strain before releasing something to the public?
I posted the rest of this on another forum, it applies here as well
some of the comments in this discussion sound a lot like the comments 24 years ago about the mouse. The mouse never replaced the keyboard, but it sure did a heck of a job supplementing it and making computers both easier to use and more functional. Touch/multitouch has the potential to advance user interface in much the same way.
Forget the MS demo, which was awful (I love how when the reporters weren't saying "works like like an iPhone", they asked about the new mac style dock) and instead just look at the Mac and the iPhone.
Both have cover flow - it's a heck of a lot easier to use coverflow on the iPhone than on the Mac - i.e. you don't need to hit a scroll bar with a mouse to start moving through the list, you just flip through with your finger. And after nearly a year of using an iPhone, I have yet to wish I could hook a mouse up to it.
Both have safari - one works with mouse and keyboard, the other works with multi-touch. Both UIs work quite well. And again, it would certainly be easier to scroll safari on the mac if you could just flip it with your finger instead of having to hit the scroll bar with the mouse to get started.
And just because the iPhone has a small screen doesn't at all mean multi-touch is only suited for a small screen. My #1 desired feature in a future iPhone would be a larger screen, which would make Safari, Mail, Maps, iPod, etc, all work even better.
Apple didn't do an iPhone first because they don't thing multi-touch would work on a desktop computer, they did it first because it was a huge untapped market where they could innovate and there was no legacy installed codebase to deal with during a transition period.
Just as MacOS X runs the iPhone, I'm sure Cocoa Touch runs on prototype macs in Apple's labs, and not just in an iPhone emulator.
That a tablet can potentially hurt sales of the 'Air?'
If I believed that Intel put more effort into setting the processors into the Air then they did, well then, thanks for the clarification. However, your manic sarcasm is hardly warranted here.
Ever heard of UNIX or the other mainframe/mini-computer OSes that predated Microsoft and had these features. Preemptive multitasking and memory protection were around for decades before Microsoft added it to windows. It's not some major innovation they came up with, it was an evolutionary addition to personal computer OSes as their hardware approached the power of the minicomputers and mainframes that came before them.
Also, MS wasn't first anyway, NeXT had these features before MS and the NeXT OS evolved into the current Macintosh.
"being the first major OS..."
Either way, your late to the party. We settled this already.
Unix, VMS, OS/360 were all certainly major OSes that predated Microsoft's existence.
My point is that if Intel really did custom soldering on these little devices, the car analogy would be that the Mac Book Air "costs as much as a BMW"!
The self contraction in your comments struck me as odd-- if you expect people to know that by "soldering" you meant ultrasonic bonding then you could expect the same level of indirection in substituting "packaged processor" for "processor".
I'm sure you know just as well as I do that when people talk about the "processor" they are just a likely to be talking about the component on the board as they are the sliver of silicon inside the package, but you came in full of 'haha' bluster to make a largely unnecessary technical clarification and fell short of actually being technically correct. I'm probably being presumptuous here, but your tone didn't suggest that putting quotation marks around "processor" would have spared Chris your derision.
From Intel's point of view, that certainly is a lot of work. Intel gets its leverage from volume-- doing millions of identical parts. Running a small low volume line is an exception they made for Apple. The chip and the package are in production, but they're doing custom bonding, running custom device tests, and maintaining separate forcasting, inventory, product tracking, technical support and failure analysis.
I'm sure every customer would like some special consideration from Intel, but we don't see a whole lot of that which indicates that it's enough work for Intel to at least discourage if not outright refuse to do it in most cases. I'm also sure that Apple had to make commitments to Intel in order to receive this special treatment and that there would be penalties for breaking those commitments.
All in all, I think it was a valid point.
I do think multitouch has its place on the desktop (and probably quite literally, on the desktop) but its not going to supplant the keyboard and mouse until we get comfortable putting our displays low and in front of us.
If I remember Minority report correctly, he never touched the screens-- he used gestures from a distance to manipulate the display. For an upright screen at the distance I'm comfortable with, that would be much easier for me to work with if they can make it controllable.
To resurrect a point I made before we got into a debate about Microsoft's role in taking down the twin towers, I wouldn't be surprised to see Cocoa Touch in the full OS (and it would fit well with the apparent theme of the WWDC) but I would expect it to be a minor feature along the lines of Inkwell. Great for people who need it, and a novelty for everyone else.
To clear things up:
Intel did develop the reduced size Merom on Apple's spec, however they are now cheerfully selling it to anyone else. Like all big corporations Intel value their key customers and Apple - although not in the same league in terms of sales volume as HP or Dell - are a key customer.
Intel did develop the reduced size Merom on Apple's spec, however they are now cheerfully selling it to anyone else. Like all big corporations Intel value their key customers and Apple - although not in the same league in terms of sales volume as HP or Dell - are a key customer.
Not surprising... Do you know if anyone else is buying it?
Apple is certainly a key customer-- Intel has coveted their business for at least a decade and probably since the beginning, and well beyond Apple's incremental revenue stream. I think they mostly didn't like that there was someone out there bucking the trend and proving you could get away with it.
I also think Intel likes Apple as a test market and early adopter. They can't play favorites among the Windows clones, but because Apple is different from the rest Intel can get away with making special arrangements. It doesn't come off as anti-competitive.
That may be true, but that still doesn't get past how imprecise multi-touch is. It would irritate the heck out of me trying to work on a multi-touch computer for all of my tasks. My hands would always be in the way of what I was trying to manipulate.
I do not deny that the feature is coming, I just hope that I can turn it off.
Hickman
I'm always puzzled by the "please Apple, don't give us what we want - it might lower the sales of systems that aren't what we need" arguments.
Mini-tower, tablet, mini-mac, better graphics in the MacBook, ... Keep hearing that refrain.
Note that one of Apple's suppliers has quite a different opinion on the issue:
I don't consider cannibalization a bad thing - isn't it better to lose a MacBook
The MacBook
Take the 1 minute multi-touch test
Have you tried multi-touch on your own computer? I simulated multi-touch by just faking it (touching my screen and it does nothing) for one minute. The result? My arms got tired after 40 seconds. A second test of switching between fake typing and fake multi-touching showed me that it's a surprisingly cumbersome act to take your hands off the keyboard and move them up to the screen and back to the keyboard and back to the screen. I predict it will be a cool, eye-candy feature that people will try out for a few minutes and then go back to the keyboard--a lot like speech recognition.
My guess is that Microsoft will follow the "touch the monitor" approach and fail while Apple will follow a more natural and usable "keyboard doubles as a touchscreen" approach. I believe Apple has some patents for a keyboard where bumps can appear and disappear on the keyboard so it can be flat for a touchscreen and then have bumps in the right place to simulate keyboard keys.
Have you tried multi-touch on your own computer? I simulated multi-touch by just faking it (touching my screen and it does nothing) for one minute. The result? My arms got tired after 40 seconds. A second test of switching between fake typing and fake multi-touching showed me that it's a surprisingly cumbersome act to take your hands off the keyboard and move them up to the screen and back to the keyboard and back to the screen. I predict it will be a cool, eye-candy feature that people will try out for a few minutes and then go back to the keyboard--a lot like speech recognition.
My guess is that Microsoft will follow the "touch the monitor" approach and fail while Apple will follow a more natural and usable "keyboard doubles as a touchscreen" approach. I believe Apple has some patents for a keyboard where bumps can appear and disappear on the keyboard so it can be flat for a touchscreen and then have bumps in the right place to simulate keyboard keys.
yAWN.
Ditch Vista, that could help, this is jus pure gimmicks, nobody would give a flying $%&* about it except some enthusiastic basement kids and the usual clueless IT press crowd.
Let's forget NeXT, it was an utter crap. It has now less in common with Leopard than XP has with NT 3.5 BTW.
If you had any brain cells, surely you'd realize it was an EXTREMELY BASIC DEMO. If you were expecting Microsoft to somehow show off the entirety of Windows 7, then I don't really know what to say.
Probably not nearly as many kernel panics that I've gotten on Leopard.i wonder how many BSOD's you'll get out of that thing.
Ok, I tried it. Going through normal routine, using my "finger to screen" instead of trackpad. Unless you are constantly holding your hand out, I don't see any problem of fatigue. Also, I don't see how its cumbersome. Its just as cumbersome as taking your hand off of the keyboard to get to the trackpad.
This is what I did:
1.) Try opening mail, looking at the new mail, and opening one, reading it and occasionally scrolling down.
2.) Open Safari, read through my homepage, open a new tab, switch to one of my favorites, read through that.
Now, don't expect for this to replace a keyboard, but for a replacement for the mouse, it works fine in my experience.
Very cool, but its just a patent. Companies file patents all the time with weird, advanced, and amazing methods of doing things -- Most don't make it to the real world.
I think that is because when Apple does it, Apple does it RIGHT. M$ can come up with all sorts of great ideas, but they can't seem to properly execute them, anymore.