970 appearance: Educated guesses - Page 2

Gosh, what I would do to be employed at one of those retail stores right about now...this is probably one of the most exciting times at Apple!

Visigothe, dude, if this stuff even turns up remotely accurate, then you're up for some good things (well, at least good words)!

Probably to arm them for the riots that will happen on the 23rd when there is no mention of 970 Power Macs in the Stevenote.

"We've got a lot of things to go over today, so let's get started.

First, the 970 PowerBook. [etc.] And it's available right now.

Then, the 970 iMac. [etc.] You can pick it up at the Apple Store today.

And we're pleased to unveil the all-new 970 iBook. Again, you can get yourself one right after the keynote.

Oh, and there's One More Thing(TM):

[silence]

New PowerMac G4s: 1.01GHz, dual 1.26GHz, dual 1.44GHz, available in September."

Thanks for the kind words, fred_lj!

That said, I really don't think that there is anything new or exciting from my information, just a lot of jumping off points for wild speculation.

Oh, also just to be clear, in no way did I mean to imply that a new 15" PB was going to be available based on information I received. This was just an observation

Rock on! 8)

I think it would look cool in bad ass black.

probably won't happen as all the displays are gray, etc,

Nah, Apple has already gone through its black phase in the 90s. We like to think that they are a bit more progressive than that

"Probably to arm them for the riots that will happen on the 23rd when there is no mention of 970 Power Macs in the Stevenote."





Riots indeed.

(Lemon Bon Bon pitchin a baseball bat with a nail through the end...)



They'd betta be there...

Lemon Bon Bon

Speaking of the look of the new Towers.

I saw a PC 'Advent' (or whatever it's called...) in PC World. It's got a rather slender 'tower' form factor. Like a desktop on its side. But sleeker. With the 'in' blue glow lighty thing that 'cool' PCs are having these days. Quite attractive for a PC.

Not bad. Didn't have the Apple edge. But not bad.

If they can get a Toast Burning Pentium 4 in such a narrow 'Tower' design...it may give some clues as to where Apple may go with the form factor on the 970s.

Slimmer. Much slimmer? A few 'glowy' lights or ambient touches ala the 17 incher keyboard?

As for the PSX...something about it triggers the idea that the 970 Tower may be aluminium based with some plastics in a kinda 'Advent' form factor. This all seems in vogue. Apple may well put their own spin on it.

A slender 'tower' version of their Powerbooks designs..?

Lemon Bon Bon

Nah, it's gonna be round....like a donut....or more like the giant space stations you see on sci-fi movies.

Seriously, I think the new Powermacs will be shaped like a cube with rounded lines. Picture a cube that's about to implode. No, I'm totally serious.

noooo, not that kind of black....

Black anodized alu.
Not cheap plastic, something which when you look at it, says power.

Look at IBM's servers (iseries) they are all plastics, but you feel some respect for that machine :-) just by looking at it.

Simple, clean lines, not too round, basically balck alu box with some of 'apple touch' one small power button,

Everything now it's silver/gray-ish. It's starting to get old...

I don't think black is the solution. Why would Apple make amazing computers that are virtually invisible. I think the new powermacs, and eventually the whole line, is going to be some sort of "blend" between aluminium, chrome, white and clear plastics. Nothing flashy, but cool looking in a subtle kinda way. I think the current cinema displays are the most succesful product Apple has out there design vise (maybe not ergonomic though). The next powermac may have some sort of handle, but not four handles like the current one. I also think it will be slimmer without compromising internal space, and it will probably have great cooling capacity without the need for a dozen fans blowing in all directions. In all these years since the B&W G3 Apple has probably had time to make thousands of prototypes, and we're going to see the fruit of their work soon. Exxxiting.

netro

titanium is the new black.

black is so last century.

hmmm.

supposedly they are going to be aluminum, they will resemble the current G3-G4handled case, but the handles will not be as rounded, but more 'angular.' but as what has been rumored for a while now, definitely aluminum, as far as I can tell. (brushed aluminum, not black or red or pink poka-dotted.)

-walloo.

Oh, god, I hope not I don't see why everybody want's an all-aluminum case. If thats the "case", I will probably rip out the parts and stuff into my QS case

But I'm not too troubled by this tought though. I'm sure Apple will come up with something new and cool lookin', and not a CoolerMaster clone

WELCOME BACK to CDonG4!

El Capitan kicks so much ass. I like seeing new stuff but I hope they don't go backwards with El Capitan. It's sooo easy. Front ports with a cover are PC-like but nice and everyone wants them. So Apple should make use of those "speed holes" (yea simpsons )

I hope the fear for the new powermac case going backwards is unfounded. I can imagine that they're taking the basic funtionality with the door and improve on that. It's easy the best and easiest acciessible case out there today. And one of the nicest too.

Some areas that could be improved:

• Make the case a bit slimmer. I think the new case will be less rounded than the current one. Making it seem smaller than the current one, but keeping the internal space about the same.
• Firewire and USB ports on the front, maybe "hidden" below the front panel.
• A cool lcd/OLED front panel to display information about speed, temp or whatever fully customizable by the user. Never gonna happen, but would be very cool.
• Keep some sort of handle, but not the four corner ones. One fold-out handle on the top would be cool.
• New cool use of chrome, white, clear plastic and aluminum.
• Improve the cooling system. The case would be designed with best possible cooling in mind from the start with some sort of "cooling tunnel" from the bottom to the top. Making the air move in one direction avoiding the current case turbulence and hot air exhaust problems.

Can't think of more right now.

netro

OK, folks. Courtesy of As the Apple Turns, we now have confirmation of the look of the 970!

It involves... feathers.

Brightly colored feathers.

Lots and lots of brightly colored feathers.

No, I'm not kidding.

"IBM. Proud as a peacock!"

Beyond weird.
I just linked to this in the new 970 die photo thread

Beyond weird.

great, so apple finally gets to the point where it thinks it can lose Moto and all that shat, and suddenly IBM loses it on us and wraps all of its new chips in feathered boas ...either the folks at IBM need to recheck their meds or they have been watching too much will and grace ....or they are just back from a lost weekend in vegas
with these girls....or are they guys??

g

definitely guys; one of them drinks heineken and has a more than boring nokia 3410...
to be hip in the eu you neeeeeeeeeeeed a candy colored mobile phone and drink candy tasted breezers...

oh, wait, now i see it, that's the photographer's drink and mobile

Yeah. The current case, while gorgeous is a little on the 'porky' side and needs to lose a 'few pounds'.

I think we'll see aluminium in there somewhere...but some kind of doff of the hat to the Cube's styling. I regret that the 'most' beautiful Apple computer (in person...it was...stunning...) to date is consigned to history rather than as an actual product.

I'd like to see a stretch Cube(oid) tower with shorter or no skirt, front loading...and grill on the back. It could look really nice.

Apple have been working on the mythical 'G5' for a loooong time now. I'm sure they've got something special planned. I wasn't sure about the new iPod design until I saw one yesterday (in the flesh) and my, gorgeous. Slimmer and gorgeous. If Apple were to take a 'touch sensitive' cue with 'LED' backlighting and blue ambient case glow when in th dark et al. Could be like the tower from the future. Some of the PC cases are getting some nice touches on them ala Advent with compact tower form and the odd nice 'blue glow' power buttons and the odd suitable 'accent' in the design. Not Ives Apple nice. But Apple's Tower needs to move on now...without sacrificing that legendary easy of access. I think the handles will go. Time to leave that behind. It's dictating the overall design too much.

Either way, Jobs, Ives and Apple will surprise us. It's time for a change on the Tower. And with a new CPU, it's really quite inevitable. No Apple design has really survived a shift to a new product. That isn't what the 'new' Apple is about. Old glories like Claris the Dog Cow and Cubes and OS 9s...or 'not invented in Macdom or software dependence on M$ are either gone or going.

If the rumours of a 32 gig of ram UBER Mac are to believed...can you imagine the workstation crowd? They'll be beating down the doors of Apple stores...!

Lemon Bon Bon

Yes, handles have to go, at least in the current form. I think the new case will have a much "cleaner" design, borrowing some of the white, chrome, and clear plastics from the iMac, possibly with some aluminum elements. Keep the door. Add one USB and FW port on the front. Some new lighting effects. But probably they will add something new. A whole new element to desktop cases that will differentiate them from all other beige, black or mac-inspired desktop cases, and that will be copied in under 30 days (I'm willing to bet on it ) by Dell.

New case, new ultrafast processor, new ultrafast os, new impressive features, ripple aqua effects, safari, iOffice, XPress, new commersials this time showing off AQUA. Yes you heard me. It's insane that Apple still hasn't done this. I mean, people see the case. Think it's nice. People see aqua and the dock, the geenie effect, then they're impressed. The fluidity, sharp clean display. This is what really impresses people I know. Apple need to show people os X, and I have no idea why they haven't done this yet. Show them iMovie, show them iTunes, show them mail, show the EVERYTHING. The switchers commercials are nice enough, but I bet a lot of people would really like to see what the h3ll they are supposed to switch to.

FWIW:

You have said that, historically, advances in design
have been driven by the development of new materials.
Which new materials excite you most now?

Ives:
Materials, processes, product architecture and construction
are huge drivers in design. Polymer advances mean that we
can now create composites to meet very specific functional
goals and requirements. From a processing point of view
we can now do things with plastic that we were previously
told were impossible. Twin shooting materials - moulding
different plastics together or co-moulding plastic to metal
gives us a range of functional and formal opportunites that
really didn't exist before. The iPod is made from twin-shot
plastic with no fasteners and no battery doors enabling
us to create a design which was dense completely sealed.
Metal forming and, in particular, new methods of joining
metals with advanced adhesives and laser welding
is another exciting area right now.

If they are going to refine the current form factor as opposed to a completely new and radical design (which is probably a bad idea for a professional machine when the current usability is quite good) then I think they need to strip back the plastic of the current towers and mold/fasion the internal box in a way similar to the X-serve. The moulded plastic and handles add quite a bit to the bulkiness of the tower. This means less curviness and more straight lines, but not in a bad way. As for the handles I think a cool idea would be to have chrome cylindrical handles that pull up from the top front and back of the tower and go down again when not needed. They could design it so the handles look almost like a part of the machine when not in use.

Uh oh . I figured i'd post this here rather than start a new topic. I hope there is not a big problem here that could delay our beloved 970

Hopefully this IBM thing isn't too ugly.

I have to wonder whether the impending announcement of Final Cut Pro 4 and Shake 3 are in any way related to the new 970 PowerMacs? Both are planned for a June release I hear, and maybe on June 9th according to some. Obviously, Apple has known that the 970 was coming for a couple years now, and wouldn't it be smart to showcase 64-bit applications when the Power Macs are shown? Final Cut Pro 4 and Shake 3 may be the first 64-bit Mac applications, no?

Any thoughts on the possible June 9th announcement, just two weeks before WWDC? Apple could just demo it and announce it at WWDC. Why two week ahead? One remote possibility comes to mind. Maybe Apple wishes to officially leak just enough information ahead of WWDC to raise a great deal of interest and anticipation. Apple may want to pack the house, and have the eyes of the world focused on this event. Possible?

How could they not be? They didn't develop those apps to run on G4s.

FCP4 is in no way related to the 970. They have stated that this version was exclusively tested on the Dual G4, and this version is so packed with features that the push is simply to get all of it working bug free.

The next version of FCP won't have so many new features, so maybe that is when 970 optimization will occur, a 64 bit version or whatever.

Previous releases of new machines are followed by a slight software update if necessary, and as mentioned before, the necessary tweaks may already be in the code. But surely FCP will be the Apple app that benefits from the speed and bandwidth advantages of the 970.

Actually, FCP is often behind the Apple tech curve. For example, FCP 2 was released just a few days before OS X began sales, the reason being so that it wouldn't have to run on X for a while.

>>Most likely it will have no white on it, only because it doesn't have an 'i' before the name, if they did do white, it would be copying ideas from older products.


>>Comment about bulki-ness. Because of the 'bulki-ness' we are able to have CD-ROM'S horizontally mounted, and that's a good way to keep them for speed. Now it would be nice if there was a completely new standard announced in portable storage, but that won't happen for a long time, maybe USB/FIREWIRE memory sticks will become big enough and cheap enough that we could replace one for the other.

Hey, you could at least have multiple 'drives' hooked up at one time. But that would seem awkard having 20 of those things hooked up at once...back to the CD drawing board.

PSX looks like what Soldam of Japan have created a while ago:


Part of the Soldam Figaro line

Thank you for posting that insight. I had not thought about it that way. By releasing FCP-4 before the 970 PowerMacs, it tends to avoid the question, "Why isn't it 64-bits?" Also, what I didn't think about at the time I posted is that the first OS on 970 PowerMacs will be Jaguar, almost certainly. The new Macs will not be ready for 64-bit applications until Panther is installed.

The trick is, of course, that the Cube's styling is based on proportions. If you want to keep the Cube's mesmerizing appearance, you have to make sure that any changes in size hew to the golden ratios. The Cube succeeded as a design in no small part because it was a cube, not an almost-cube or a sorta-cube.

I posted an idea for a PowerMac design that was vaguely Cube-like but rectangular, and which used golden ratios, back when Dorsals roamed the earth, but no-one picked up on it. :P

Thanks to 709's nifty link, we have some ideas to work from. The current PowerMac is a metal case with plastic bits screwed on. It sounds like Ives may be able to come up with a far more seamless case (literally!) the second time around, either will all plastic or with plastic and metal both. That sounds Cube-like - especially since that machine was one of the first to really push the envelope materials-wise.

i hope it looks like the deathstar, then i can hang it from the ceiling along with the x-wings and ti-fighters

i agree that el capitan is a bit porky . could def be thinner .

Huh. Older products. I don't see why it would not have any white on it. It seems like white is Apples "new" colour these days with almost every product going in that direction. It will not be all white, but the "background" will probably be in some sort of white-ish color with use of chrome, clear plastic, or maybe aluminum.

709, it was interesting to read about Ive and Apple playing with new methods to "mold" different materials together. That could probably mean that the separate metal and plastic chassis we see on the current powermacs is going away, and is to be exchanged with maybe a more complex but smarter chassis.

No, no, no.

Aluminium/white/chrome is just SOOOOO last year.

This year it's all about palisander, baby. Yeah, shagadelic, baby.

So folks, here it is - the 970 for the Wallpaper* generation:

White IS WHITE ! I am saying that the color white will not be as prevalent as the chrome or aluminum color. Pro lines don't go white.

-walloo.

p.s. pro lines do go palisander, however...if it's groovy it's dam(n) sexy baby.

I disagree. It may not be "iMac-y" white, but I'm ALMOST willing to bet on that it's the plastic material that's is going to be the main part of the new powermac tower, with some details in aluminium or chrome.

There is a fair amount of empty space between the Plastic and the Steal of the current case. They could keep the internal space and the door almost the same (well as similar as the Quicksilver and MDD's) but make it look much slimmer by molding the plastic to the steal (think of how the older ipod looked), make the handles match up and 'mold in' in a similar fashion (the handels are a neat solution to the 'feet' problem required by the side door).
Doing it like this would allow for the case to be 'slimmed' without resultig in somethig resembaling a Lian Li look alike.