That's my prediction, and I'm standing by it.
New MacBook Pros at Photokina on Tuesday. Emphasizing the computer for pro photographers with a wide-gamut screen (remember those lawsuits? think apple's engineers would take that sitting down?).
-=DG=-
Just an educated guess.
Comments
Oh, and, the German reseller leak. That's a tip off.
Leak? LOL
i have my doubts about non-dithered screens, too. a notebook screen is a fraction of the depth of a dedicated lcd monitor - and i would assume that requires certain hardware compromises. are there any true 24-bit notebook displays on the market?
anyway, thats why i'd never bother with a 17" notebook. you save some money and increase portability, and heck, you can still plug it into a 30" cinema display when you want to get down to serious work.
the same german reseller leak that's been debunked on pretty much every site? :P
i have my doubts about non-dithered screens, too. a notebook screen is a fraction of the depth of a dedicated lcd monitor - and i would assume that requires certain hardware compromises. are there any true 24-bit notebook displays on the market?
anyway, thats why i'd never bother with a 17" notebook. you save some money and increase portability, and heck, you can still plug it into a 30" cinema display when you want to get down to serious work.
the same german reseller leak that's been debunked on pretty much every site? :P
i have my doubts about non-dithered screens, too. a notebook screen is a fraction of the depth of a dedicated lcd monitor - and i would assume that requires certain hardware compromises. are there any true 24-bit notebook displays on the market?
anyway, thats why i'd never bother with a 17" notebook. you save some money and increase portability, and heck, you can still plug it into a 30" cinema display when you want to get down to serious work.
Well, the German crap aside, there are true 24-bit notebook displays on the market. The Lenovo Thinkpad W700 has a built-in X-Brite color calibrator for the display and a built-in Wacom digitizer tablet. I hate the idea that a PC laptop, however bulky and huge, could best the Mac as a mobile photo editing solution. Granted, this PC was just released, but I also take that as an indication that Apple is brewing something along these lines, since if they were, it would not be surprising if the Chinese manufacturer of the MacBook Pro told a few of the specs to the guys at Lenovo soon enough for them to crank out a bulky, ridiculous monster before the MBP's release, to at least sell a few of them before the Apple comes out and makes it obsolete.
I don't think Apple would do the dual hard drive bays, nor the 8+ pounds obviously. I don't think they would do dual trackpads, but rather, that they'd have one that's over-sized and perhaps can double as a Wacom-style tablet. Or has functionality enabling pressure-sensitivity using ones fingers. At the very least, gesture capabilities, but that is so 2007.
But the screen has been a huge issue for the MBP. I would guess that at least one of the new MBPs, perhaps the 17", has an enhanced color gamut display, at least as an option. I mean, obviously, the panels are available, if Lenovo has access to it. Tell me: why *wouldn't* Apple offer a wide-gamut LCD panel as an option, when it's clear that professional photographers and other graphics types compose perhaps the majority of MBP buyers? Especially considering that Apple was sued over it?
Frankly I'm really *****ing sick and tired of some of the attitudes I get from Mac fanboys in these forums and the ones over at support.apple.com. I keep hearing lame excuses for why Apple shouldn't put out products with features that already exist in the Windows market, such as having an NVIDIA Control Panel for the GPU, or having a wide-gamut screen, or an enthusiast mini-tower, or better developer support for 3D interactive applications such as virtual reality clients and games. All I hear are freaking excuses. Frankly it makes me sick, and it didn't use to be this way.
Look, I realize that for awhile, it was probably necessary for us to all circle the wagons and blindly support whatever Apple handed forth as if it were divinely inspired. In '96, Apple was on the ropes... around the return of Jobs, that was when the fanboyism really got into full swing. Apple could do no wrong. For awhile the praise was warranted: the original iMac and then the G4 and TiBook were out-of-the-park home runs. Then the iPod came along, and Mac OS X. You really got the sense that Apple could do no wrong, that they really did know what was best.
However it seems now that Apple is drinking it's own kool-aid, and the press is so conditioned to Apple fanboyism that nobody talks about any of the things that are wrong with the Mac platform, with OS X, with the hardware. Any flaw that gets brought up in the boards is quickly attacked by a swarm of fanboys who religiously love however Apple does it now, and if you were to suggest for example that anything about the Macintosh (pre-NeXT) was superior to the current incarnation of the Mac OS X, you are wrong before you ever spoke. Apple fanboyism is so bad now that Mac publications cannot even be called "Mac" publications anymore, since they seem to focus more on iPods and iPhones and iTunes etc. than they do on the Mac. The latest Macworld had more iApp reviews than Mac app reviews!
But I digress. The point is that there are glaring problems with OS X, although at least from the small hints we've been given about Snow Leopard, that system is specifically aimed at shoring up OS X's issues. I just hope that they address the things that frustrate me the most: the open/save dialog boxes not automatically remembering the last place you were, interactive 3D application performance being very sub-par, no "Extensions Manager", arcane unix names for processes (at least let the extensions manager say what the various processes are and what they are doing), no multiple menu bars nor multiple Spaces on multiple displays, lack of WYWIWYG for fonts in applications like TextEdit, hiding of files inside of "Libraries" and reliance on iApps for things that the Finder should do instead, dumbing-down and departure from the logical "desktop" analogy upon which the Mac was based and which makes sense, lack of a decent scripting language (sorry but AppleScript is lame and poorly supported), too many features that are unix-only, crappy GPU drivers... I could go on.... ... in fact I will... lack of decent support for MPEG streaming files used on AVCHD camcorders, lack of updated Canon FireWire video camera drivers, lack of NVIDIA Control Panel...
Oh and then there's hardware: sharp front edges on the notebooks that cut into your wrists, keys that touch the screen leaving marks, low-gamut screens, shoddy LCD quality on studio displays, no mid-range tower (repeating myself here), no home-brew components, too-infrequent updates of GPUs, no hardware options for Blu Ray, no HDMI input to laptops, no eSATA ports, buzzy analog audio input... sigh...
Apple used to be on the cutting edge of hardware and the OS. It really did. The Powerbook G4, when it came out, was revolutionary: firewire, DVD burner, Wi-Fi, these were all features that Apple had *first* on its computers. Going back through time, the Mac was the first major manufacturer (as far as I know) to have: multiple simultaneous high resolution monitors, 3.5" floppy drives, a mouse, trackballs on the laptop, trackpad on the laptop, a decent all-in-one computer (still is the only one for that, haha), integrated WiFi, GUI, etc. But lately, I am upset that Apple no longer holds an edge in technology: why do we have to wait forever to have a Blu Ray laptop? Why can't we get an SLI system? What about eSATA? NVIDIA Control Panel? I just don't understand, guys and gals.
My theory is that Apple has all its best engineers focused on iPods and iPhones and crap. And meanwhile the Mac hardware platform is in the hands of the profiteers. Sure, Jonathan Ive designs the case, but what goes *inside* the case does not seem to be very cutting edge. Sure, it matches up well the day it comes out, but Apple waits forever to integrate new technologies, which only makes sense if you consider this: at this point in time, since Apple itself owns the primary retail channel for Macs, they are no longer able to innovate hardware as fast, since they don't want to get stuck with a bunch of inventory that they cannot sell. For example lets say they start with 100,000 MBPs in their Apple Store inventories when the machine first debuts. Six months later, if they still have 25,000 MBPs in inventory, they have a disincentive to release a new model which would force them to sell the old model for less money. At the eight-month mark, if they still have 5,000 MPBs in inventory, maybe they push the release of the new model back another month until they've sold all the remaining MBPs.
Obviously the longer they wait, the more advanced specs they can put on the new model, and the cheaper the components will be when they manufacture it. But that didn't matter 10 years ago; Apple could release a new model and leave it up to the third-party retail channel to absorb any losses related to not having sold all of the previous models. This also gave an incentive to the third-party retail channel to *sell* Macs as fast as possible, which was good for the consumer because it meant that prices could come down, special deals could be made; it was good for the consumer also because it meant that a salesperson at a retail store actually cared that you were in there. But at the current incarnation of the Apple store, there is apparently no incentive for the employees to know anything about the products or try to sell them to you.
Have you been in an Apple store recently? It's really annoying, they have all these very pretentious individuals to "greet" you, none of whom are qualified to actually sell you a product, and really seem like they are just taking up space. There are huge displays blocking the view into the store. It used to be that the Apple store was always filled with customers and you could walk in there and not feel like you were being accosted by bright-orange-shirted dildos who know nothing about anything. Now when you go in there, it always feels like there are more employees than customers, and the employees aren't actually doing anything but standing around and saying "hi" to people. I don't know about you but I find that to be highly annoying. It certainly wouldn't make me want to buy a Mac.
Back in the old days if you walked into a third-party computer store that sold Macs, a retailer of this kind would not pay someone a wage to simply stand around who knew nothing about Macs. That would make no sense from a business perspective. But now if you go to an Apple Store, you see that they are wasting untold money hiring people to just stand around, which makes the cramped space hard to navigate, and furthers the impression that many people have of Mac users which is that we are vacuous and ill-informed dimwits who need the simplest computer out there.
I do think there is a LOT that the Apple store does right, and it's a wonderful thing. But it's clear that Apple is quite content to have someone look you in the face and tell you, "Here, pay $2499 for a computer that was $2499 six months ago and which features none of the technical innovations that it should, because frankly, we still have a lot of them left and we're waiting for your stupid ass to buy it so we won't lose money when the new ones come out."
ugh.
I know Apple has a responsibility to its shareholders to keep margins up, but cancelling innovation in favor of maintaining some insane quota of stupid people to say "hi" in its retail stores and having technologically inferior computers is not going to help the stock price. What's going to help the stock price is coming out with industry-leading hardware *before* the competition has it available, because the early adopters will pay a premium for that. But don't wait three, four months, or a year, or however long, to integrate key technologies like Blu Ray, HDMI, SLI, wide-gamut, etc. The MacBook Air? That's not the kind of innovation that is going to drive up the stock price, or get tons of people to buy a Mac who have been waiting to upgrade their aging systems.
I'll gladly pay the extra money for it if it means that I will have a MacBook Pro which truly outclasses even the best PC laptops on the market. But I look at my MacBook Pro and I see a made-in-China thing which is just not up to what I would normally expect out of Apple. I am afraid of the Mac becoming an afterthought, or at least being put on the back-burner, not being a top priority for Apple. Who is in charge of making sure all this stuff gets fixed at Apple? I'd like to know their name. Surely, there is someone who is?
I'm being optimistic and thinking, "Apple is smarter than me, surely they're working on these issues and are not asleep at the wheel. Surely we'll see a MBP at Photokinda to shut up Lenovo. Right?" Right?
-=DG=-
I full agree with your bit about cutting edge technology.
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showp...&postcount=190
I think you're getting your hopes up only to see them get dashed. Apple isn't even an exhibitor as far as I can tell. There is only an authorized Apple reseller exhibiting there.
I think new portables are coming soon but don't expect them during Photokina..
Frankly I'm really *****ing sick and tired of some of the attitudes I get from Mac fanboys in these forums... I keep hearing lame excuses for why Apple shouldn't put out products with features that already exist in the Windows market
Yikes thats a lot of aggression... I'm not saying a full colour gamut screen wouldn't be nice... but you yourself admit that the lenovo is pretty new to the market, and the panel BJNY linked seems even newer. I'm just being realistic about the chances at this juncture.
As happy as I am with OSX and my MacBook, you make some excellent points there darkgoob. In the PC market, Apple nowadays has the succes it has because of Vista being bad, not because the Mac laptops and OSX are that good.
you can't qualify MS as "bad"
only "worse"
if apple didn't exist people wouldn't know Vista was "worse" ... so by Apple making a better product than MS (in the eyes of those who purchase it) they justify their product and their prices.
Maybe you should consider sending your comment to Apple - although, ecstatic from selling iPods and other iThings, they wouldn't even notice it, I'm afraid.
That's my prediction, and I'm standing by it.
New MacBook Pros at Photokina on Tuesday. Emphasizing the computer for pro photographers with a wide-gamut screen (remember those lawsuits? think apple's engineers would take that sitting down?).
-=DG=-
Just an educated guess.
It is tuesday and you were wrong.
It is tuesday and you were wrong.
There's always another Tuesday :P
hardware options for Blu Ray, no HDMI input to laptops, no eSATA ports,
YES!!!! All of those! Please!
The thing that I noticed about apple, (working at Best Buy) is that they are so price locked its not even funny. Unless you get something refurbished or open box you will almost always pay full price, no matter how old the item is. Apple hasnt updated their Notebooks in what? 3 years? Thats the thing, the technology is always changing and people dont want to have to constantly upgrade, but manufacturers like HP and Dell and constantly putting out NEW models for the people that are first time buyers.
EVERY YEAR Apple has their college program, EVERY YEAR new people go to college. EVERY YEAR students have to make the decision of whether to buy a $1500 MacBook with 2 gb ram, 13 inch screen, with 3 year old technology, blah blah blah, OR they can buy the BRAND NEW DELL that just came out for $1000 with HDMI, 4-5 USB ports, 15 inch screen, etc. OR The 13" Tablet touch screen HP that was just sold for $899 with 350mb dedicated vram. Its fucking nice.
I am typing this on a MacBook Pro, so I don't really reccomend a Dell, but seriously. I think Apple is riding on its name, they are DEFINITELY not the most technologically advanced products on the market right now, but still, they are appealing and people will buy them.
But yes, I want HDMI, SLI technology, Firewire 3200 or eSata, Blu Ray, and better resolution on the monitors. Apple has always had about a 20% better resolution on all of its monitors than all other consumer models, but why not up that!?
YES!!!! All of those! Please!
The thing that I noticed about apple, (working at Best Buy) is that they are so price locked its not even funny. Unless you get something refurbished or open box you will almost always pay full price, no matter how old the item is. Apple hasnt updated their Notebooks in what? 3 years? Thats the thing, the technology is always changing and people dont want to have to constantly upgrade, but manufacturers like HP and Dell and constantly putting out NEW models for the people that are first time buyers.
EVERY YEAR Apple has their college program, EVERY YEAR new people go to college. EVERY YEAR students have to make the decision of whether to buy a $1500 MacBook with 2 gb ram, 13 inch screen, with 3 year old technology, blah blah blah, OR they can buy the BRAND NEW DELL that just came out for $1000 with HDMI, 4-5 USB ports, 15 inch screen, etc. OR The 13" Tablet touch screen HP that was just sold for $899 with 350mb dedicated vram. Its fucking nice.
I am typing this on a MacBook Pro, so I don't really reccomend a Dell, but seriously. I think Apple is riding on its name, they are DEFINITELY not the most technologically advanced products on the market right now, but still, they are appealing and people will buy them.
But yes, I want HDMI, SLI technology, Firewire 3200 or eSata, Blu Ray, and better resolution on the monitors. Apple has always had about a 20% better resolution on all of its monitors than all other consumer models, but why not up that!?
ummmm... that would be ridiculous if it where true but, in 2005(three years ago). apple released updates of the ibook, and the powerbook.............. those models might look similarish except for they didn't have built in cameras they had different size screens where boxier clunkier. Also they had specs like these
12" 1.33GHz G4, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD, Combo Drive for the entry level ibook, adn the the powerbook entry level looked like :
12MB of PC2700 333 MHz DDR SDRAM, expandable up to 1.25GB;
a slot-load 8X SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW) optical drive;
an 80GB Ultra ATA/100 (5400 rpm) hard drive with Sudden Motion Sensor;
AirPort Extreme 54 Mbps 802.11g WiFi fast wireless networking and internal Bluetooth 2.0+EDR;
D VI, VGA, S-video and composite video support;
two USB 2.0 ports and FireWire® 400;
line in and headphone out; and
a scrolling TrackPad.. (AWESOME.............)
i dont think i need to tell you how to go to www.apple.com.......... ( *psst*"click the link"); so you can see for yourself the difference in just about everything. and the macbook line was last updated in february fyi. and while it may not have been an aesthetic change. there where speed bumps that brought the line up to par with the others. and next time try google. turns it out it works.
Darkgoob,
I think you're getting your hopes up only to see them get dashed. Apple isn't even an exhibitor as far as I can tell. There is only an authorized Apple reseller exhibiting there.
I think new portables are coming soon but don't expect them during Photokina..
Don't worry, my "hopes" aren't "up." I don't think you could say I have "hopes"... I have what I know, and I have a MacBook Pro that for 8 months had a memory leaking graphics card driver that completely and utterly froze up the machine requiring hard reboot while running OS X (but while under Windows ran like a charm getting 2x the frames-per-second in the same virtual reality development application). I know that Apple replaced my LCD three times because of discolorations and I finally had to settle on the fact that the viewing angle is poor and the thing is 6-bit. And it has uneven backlighting and is not usable for certain color matching purposes. I know that my MacBook Pro will not capture video from my Canon GL-2 while a firewire hard drive is attached, unless i run one of the two peripherals through a separate firewire interface via the ExpressCard slot.
I don't have hopes.
I have dreams.
I dream of a day when Apple produces what I will consider to be the perfect laptop, or at least, one worthy of the little Apple logo that rests upon its shell. Until that day comes I will keep *****ing complaining on the off chance anyone actually cares, but I have no hopes.
-=DG=-
Yikes thats a lot of aggression... I'm not saying a full colour gamut screen wouldn't be nice... but you yourself admit that the lenovo is pretty new to the market, and the panel BJNY linked seems even newer. I'm just being realistic about the chances at this juncture.
A lot of aggression? It's $2499 worth.