Apple rumored to adopt NVIDIA's Ion platform - Page 4

The iMac doesn't have these problems either but it gets lower powered laptop parts nonetheless.

You may have had a point a couple years ago, but look at the Mini now. There's nothing premium about it.

If Apple thinks the current Mini pricing is okay, they've lost their minds. An Ion Mini would not be deviating from the crazy path they're on.

Apples use of laptop parts is very interesting as it certainly isn't required in an iMac. Mini is a different story as it was designed from the beginning to be extremely small, iMacs have no problems at all with space.

For a long while it wasn't a huge issue but now we are seeing a widening gap between the laptop powered devices and the Mac Pro. This is one of the reasons I think Mini will morph into a bigger machine. In it's place a Mac Micro (ATOM powered) wouldn't be all that bad. It would be able to solve several needs at an extremely low price point. Mini would live on as an i7 powered machine.

Personally I don't think he ever had a point. The Mini has never been a premium machine. Let's face it, the Mini is the cheapest Mac going. Beyound that I'd have to argue that there is nothing premium about Apples hardware at all. The only exception here is the new laptops that have finally gotten case worth the descriptor.

Sure the current Mini is expensive after years on the market but the platform is stable. Some businesses really like the idea of stable platforms. That doesn't forgive Apple for ignoring the consummer side of the business.

An ION based Mini won't do, at least not in the market segment that Apples Mini currently plays in. That doesn't mean that an extremely low cost Mac Micro wouldn't be acceptable with an Atom in it. Such a devce could replace Apple TV and serve duty as a nettop or home server. Such a device might be even have a custom ATOM variant as intel has talked at length about competeing more directly with ARM. It would be really cool to see a quad core ATOM with triple the cache.

Dave

Just wondering:

Ion Mac Mini will have better graphic card but with crap atom processor inside.

Hmm

Is it possible: Faster GPU will help CPU...

or the other way around ???

Hmm strange marketing

Don't be surprised that they once again sell more Macs, iPods and iPhones than they projected.

They should however, innovate with that larger Mac Mini, adjust pricing and see it as the shot to grow not from just 8% to 10%, but more towards 12%-15% over a period of 12 months.

Modern games will run very, very poorly on the Ion platform. The G9400 will be bottlenecked for games.

The benefit of pairing a modern GPU with a slow processor is that it can hardware-accelerate HD video and maybe run GPGPU code.

As a few others have stated, the probability of Apple employing an Atom CPU in any device that doesn't have ultra low power or ultra low cost requirements is very small (IMHO). No current Apple computer fits this description. If the Atom story has any legs, perhaps it's destined for a revised Apple TV (which doesn't run a stock version of OS X) or a long-rumored tablet device. Maybe even an advanced iPhone/iPod at some point down the line, too.

Let's remember that Atom isn't currently designed for out-of-order execution and that just doesn't mesh well with running modern general purpose computer systems.

there are videos of COD4 running on the ion at a pretty decent rate. So to say will be bottlnecked because of the g9400m is wrong. You wont be running high end games but that isnt the target audience for the ion platform.


http://www.notebooks.com/2009/01/12/...ooks-ces-2009/

For your information, Nvidia has made public statements that a 9400M should add less than $50 retail to the price of a unit compared to the retail price of an Atom 270 with the Intel integrated graphics. That would make an Atom 330 with 9400M about $450 in your scheme of things.

With the recent price reductions of Intel CPUS I should also think that $599 would be too high for your C2D Ion example.

Nevertheless, it would be an interesting combination of products.

The 9400M isn't the bottleneck. The Atom processor is. Check out this review of an Eee PC with a 9300M GS chip (performance about the same as the 9400M IGP). Games run. They don't run well.

That's because with many games the coders usually depend more on CPU performance to get decent graphics speed performance out of the game. With the current GeForce mobile chips, that should allow game designers to "offload" the graphics computation to the GPU as much as possible, so the CPU needs aren't so severe.

You think game designers are gonna do that? Huh.

They've pretty much done that on the console side--look at the considerable power of the GPU's on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

We've gone over this before. Apple uses the Mini and iMac to achieve economies of scale for its laptop lines.

The Mini isn't going to stray far from the MacBook.
The iMac has been a MacBook Pro/PowerBook in disguise since its inception.

If Apple changes this, prices for the laptop lines will have to increase.

But the GPUs in current consoles don't do anything that the GPUs in computers don't do. Console GPUs are obsolete technically, too, they just have massive amounts of memory bandwidth. It isn't magic.

I do not see a change in the Mini product lineup as increasing the pricing of the MacBook/MacBook Pro lineup. Apple's pricing already is high enough that their margins are hugecompared to most of the industry, and not because Apple is more efficient...they just charge more.

As I see any sort of Atom - Ion product as an additional product (let's call it a "Micro") rather than a replacement for the Mini, I guess all this is irrelevant, but I do see an additional product. Even Apple has slowly accepted that there are price points where they need products. Look at the evolution of the iPod lineup, for example. "You have X number of dollars...here is the product for you."

I've noticed that, too. Note that Apple has allowed both Costco and Fry's Electronics to sell both the 4G nano and "6.5G" classic at publicly announced discounted prices.

in bold are my "modifications"
Given the specs of the current Mac mini and iMac, it is not the case anymore.


in bold are my "modifications"
And "frankly", I would be happy is the Mac mini was "just" updated.


Again, that was true in the beginning, the first Intel iMac was a mix (in specs) between the MB and the MBP. When Apple moved to the alu enclosure, the specs of the iMac jump to MBP ones and over. The current one doesn't even use the same cpus or chipset or GPU as the previous MBP. We will see what they do with the next revision.

Apple is past making economies of scale for its laptop lines.

And you know what? I think that they are right in moving the iMac specs out of notebook range, even if it costs more in terms of development costs for each line of computer, because they are different computers and Apple should optimize each line to the best of their capabilities. IMO, the Mac mini is too small to receive desktop cpus, so it's OK if it stays based on notebook parts, and that will generate some economies of scale, but the iMac could receive more desktop-type parts limited to the cooling capabilities of the enclosure.

For the Mac mini, a model based on the same specs as the new white MB would be nice at about $599/699. I don't expect new small or bigger desktop models since Apple will certainly not invest a lot of R&D money in a segment that is clearly declining fast for them.