Apple gearing up for major product launch early as next week - sources - Page 3

I've used a couple Mac Pros over the years and just last August bought a 13" for travel/portability,etc.

I've used the optical drive once: To install iWork. lol. thats it.



It would be great to ditch but it's probably too early. Apparently people still use DVDs.

My local Apple reseller - a major national chain - whose computer sales usually explicitly exclude Macs - is now offering 10% off all Macs.

I agree, the space used by an optical drive would better be used for battery. I hope they will give us the option to ditch the optical drive. I'm sorry, but there's hardly a reason to use physical media anymore for most of my work. (Programming)

I know certain disciplines would be more media dependent than others, but some of use hardly use an optical disc and would rather have longer battery life.

That looks like an elephant humping a USB drive.

Looks like Tuesday morning PST updates?

No, read carefully. The USB drive is his "bone" and he's humping the USB socket.

While that might be true, a real ARM CPU would be a much better choice to add iOS app compatibility. Performance would be much more predictable and closer to an iOS device with the same chip, and power consumption would be much lower than emulating in software. Last but not least the A4 chips also have a GPU on them, and emulating an embedded PowerVR GPU using a desktop-style Nvidia GPU (this includes the ones in Apple laptops, as far as GPU architecture they are nothing like the PowerVR) without completely screwing up the performance characteristics (and thus compatibility) would be near impossible. Just look at how the iOS simulator works for debugging graphics-related bugs and performance issues, it's near useless compared to running on the device itself.

Throwing in the same A4 chips as found in the iPhone 4 would be dirt-cheap for Apple as well, by now they can probably source them for under $5 a piece.


The fact that there might be some chips based on ARM cores in Macs (I can only think of the network controller) is kind of meaningless for iOS compatibility because you couldn't use them for running anything on them besides the firmware for the part they are running, and they would be heavily customized parts based on older ARM instruction sets and with everything stripped out that's not needed for their job.


ARM replacing x86 for Macs is not going to happen anytime soon (I wouldn't say 'never' though, there's some crazy fast quad-core ARM chips announced for 2012 already). But an ARM coprocessor for iOS application compatibility wouldn't be unlikely at all, in fact, I've been hypothesizing this since the first rumors of the AppleTV running iOS applications.

If Apple would manage to pull of some really impressive engineering trick such as a switchable x86/ARM OS X version that you could boot or even run-time switch to whatever you need at the time, they could sell you a MacBook Pro that would be as fast as ever when using the Intel part, but could also last 20+ hours on the ARM part when you are on the road. Imagine how long you could run a 10W ARM chip off of the MacBook Pro battery

2013 is probably when we'll see mass rollouts of hybrid ARM/x86 (Windows/ Mac/ Android/ iOS) devices/ computers/ etc.

It does seem far-fetched now but in just 2 years time the line between "devices" and "computers" will be quite blurry.

In any case, at this stage, with the success of iOS, Apple is facing major redesign issues across the Mac line going well into 2015.

I'm afraid only Steve has so far had the real vision of how he could finally merge his triumphs together in one unified Apple Experience.

Again, I think by 2013 you won't even want to have to think about a "device" or a "computer"... It would just do whatever it needed to do. Hybrid.

I hope so. I wondered if maybe they had already received the new units, and that's how they knew to discount the old ones, because Apple isn't known for keeping it's resellers informed.

I struggle with this myself. As a photographer, I'm constantly burning dvds with images for clients. To that end, I regularly use the optical drive. I'm also on the road constantly. In order to work on the road I have to lug around an external hard drive. Its cumbersome but a necessity as I store hundreds of gigabytes of raw images on it.

If apple were to drop the optical drive in favor of say a larger second hard drive, I'd be perfectly ok with carrying around a small optical drive. One can only hope.

I see no reason why Apple can't do what is already being done by many people...put a SSD in the optical drive's space and put the optical drive in a small external case.

Apple won't do this, but there just might be enough space to put a pair of 1.8" SSDs in the optical drive bay as a striped RAID boot array.

Apple still needs an eSATA port on all Macs and could even use a combo eSATA/USB 3 port...and matte/non-glare screens available on MacBooks.

You know, looking at that picture of the 13" MBP, remove the optical and HDD, you now have room for another entire battery, plus you can slot in a SSD easily. Or add in a dedicated GPU and half again as much battery. This is only beneficial

Definitely and what has become quite noticeable is the impact ARM could have. I have a gut feeling that there's more to the ARM movement than it seems on the surface. For the first time, companies can really do the integrated approach and achieve high performance at a competitive price.

Intel shafted NVidia and now they have gone to building their own systems. Tegra 3 is being demoed as outperforming Core 2 Duos. When everyone can get cheap 4-8 core ARM chips, why even bother paying Intel?

x86 compatibility won't be that important in a few years. The hybrid approach might be the best option at first to move people to x86 because while the SDKs from both Apple and Microsoft take care of this, being able to run a sub-2 watt chipset with a large battery would be pretty useful. Modders have already been experimenting with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8s40NYYQbs

When the process gets small enough, the ARM architecture will be able to add many more special function processors on the same (small) chip which will be most interesting. Nevertheless, the problem with multi-core CPUs remains software no matter the architecture of the processor. At the present time there are comparatively few applications which make efficient use of the existing multi-core CPUs let alone the ones that are being developed.

Although Intel's 48 core SCC research many-core processor is aimed at very hight powered computing needs, it does illustrate a concept of using scalable "tiles" which can operate independently when many applications are being run, but there is still the problem of software to take advantage of the parallel processing possibilities.

For portable devices, these limitations are not likely to be such an issue though.

The X86 architecture is something Intel is more or less stuck with because of M$. No matter how advanced the processor they might design, the X86 will remain dominant for the foreseeable future because of the software. That is where the ARM developers have an advantage. They are not tied to legacy operating systems or applications. It could be interesting.

You are aware that Windows 8 will be ARM compatible right? MS sees the way things are going and they are aware that there are beginning to be very strong options available, like servers built from a huge number of ARM cpus.

Yes, but...I'll believe it when I see it.

The idea of ARM servers is attractive to many because of the low power needs of these systems as well as their low cost. Unless Win 8 offers greater freedoms than M$ has traditionally offered and hits the ground running from the start I think the open source community will represent a much larger threat to M$ than they realize.

One of the major factors in data center location studies is the ready availability of cost competitive electricity. While I do not see that changing, the movement to less power hungry servers should be useful to everyone.

Part of the reason "I'll believe it when I see it" is that an email server for the cable company running M$ products went into an uncommanded routine some time back which brought things to a screaming halt for 72 hours. True, the cable company was equally at fault for not having a backup server online, but I am not inclined to think their server products for a new platform are all that likely to have a trouble free introduction.

We shall see though.

Well any OS has the chance of having issues upon release. That's sort of the nature of the beast. I was pointing out that Intel is not stuck w/x86 and they are moving forward with ARM designs b/c of the speed of developments in that form of design. They don't want to lose their place on top. In the end it won't matter if we're running x86 or ARM, we'll end up w/whatever is the most powerful while being the most power efficient.

Imagine down the road a few years a SoC that combines a x86 CPU, GPU and multi-core ARM chip all together. Things like that will certainly be used as transitional processors if the computing world makes an across the board switch from x86 to ARM eventually. This isn't crazy talk, it's something that is certainly capable of happening this decade.

Intel is "stuck" as you put it with the X86 processor because of the OS. They will remain "stuck" with it for a very long time because of the OS. That said, the X86 processor has been very good to them financially....

That does not mean that they will not move into the ARM market segment or that they do not have other plans. Among other things, Intel was pleased with Apple's implementation of EFI and other concepts they had been unsuccessfully urging M$ to implement for a long time. M$ remains wedded to compatibility with ancient systems which means they are unlikely to have a "new" OS any time soon. Win 8 will add some features and such and probably try to clean up the code a bit, but "new" is unlikely.

While it is true that any new OS may have some rough edges, M$ has made a habit of it.