Is Apple Taking Advantage of It's DOWNTIME?
Apple is very much in the same position as AMD was just a few years ago.
After production, supply, and reliability issues with it's early K-series chips, AMD was pretty much in the same scenario that Apple finds itself. They were getting laughed at. No one took it seriously. Yet, AMD took advantage of the time that they were getting laughed at to address many of the mis-steps they'd made previously. When the Athlon was released, they went right to market with a product capable of putting Intel on the defensive. Intel for the most part has been reeling ever since. Moreover, Intel has continued to look more and more like the AMD of old, with all sorts of mis-steps and mis-calculations.
Those of us that purport to be practitioners of the Mac Faith, must ask ourselves is Apple taking advantage of their down time. Personally, I am not so sure. While Apple has lagged behind in the introduction of exponentially faster chips obviously by no fault of their own, they have been slow to adopt faster bus technologies and memory enhancements that are clearly within their power to introduce. As AMD has taken up the Apple banner that size doesn't matter; at least when it comes to (G/M)hz, we know that perception does.
Clearly the 867 Mhz Pro-system could have benefitted from DDR all the way around, when it was introduced months ago, let alone the 800+ systems that are currently being offered. While L3 DDR is great, it's still quite laughable that 66Mhz anything can be found on-board, when faster is clearly available.
I love Macs and I love cars. It doesn't help to put the fastest engine available in the car if you don't modify the fuel system to feed it. Equally so, if Apple wants to be taken seriously in the corporate world, they need to do more than add a few software titles to the bundle and slap "Server" on the box; they need real corporate ware. If it aint rack mounted, hotswappable with load balancing and other features, it aint real. OS X server may be a great software bundle, but without great hardware to showcase it's true power, no IT manager in the world would touch it.
I'm reminded of the dearth of cars with loud mufflers and a ton of stickers on them after the "Fast and the Furious" came out. I'll tell you this, there isn't a sticker on my truck, and I haven't gotten around to the muffler, but with the attention I've paid to my engine and subsystems, I beat the little "Sticker Monkeys" all the time.
Heres hoping to Apple experimenting with "ahead of the curve technologies", all to be introduced with the advent of the first G5, and not added later as an afterthought, while being presented as an upgrade.
After production, supply, and reliability issues with it's early K-series chips, AMD was pretty much in the same scenario that Apple finds itself. They were getting laughed at. No one took it seriously. Yet, AMD took advantage of the time that they were getting laughed at to address many of the mis-steps they'd made previously. When the Athlon was released, they went right to market with a product capable of putting Intel on the defensive. Intel for the most part has been reeling ever since. Moreover, Intel has continued to look more and more like the AMD of old, with all sorts of mis-steps and mis-calculations.
Those of us that purport to be practitioners of the Mac Faith, must ask ourselves is Apple taking advantage of their down time. Personally, I am not so sure. While Apple has lagged behind in the introduction of exponentially faster chips obviously by no fault of their own, they have been slow to adopt faster bus technologies and memory enhancements that are clearly within their power to introduce. As AMD has taken up the Apple banner that size doesn't matter; at least when it comes to (G/M)hz, we know that perception does.
Clearly the 867 Mhz Pro-system could have benefitted from DDR all the way around, when it was introduced months ago, let alone the 800+ systems that are currently being offered. While L3 DDR is great, it's still quite laughable that 66Mhz anything can be found on-board, when faster is clearly available.
I love Macs and I love cars. It doesn't help to put the fastest engine available in the car if you don't modify the fuel system to feed it. Equally so, if Apple wants to be taken seriously in the corporate world, they need to do more than add a few software titles to the bundle and slap "Server" on the box; they need real corporate ware. If it aint rack mounted, hotswappable with load balancing and other features, it aint real. OS X server may be a great software bundle, but without great hardware to showcase it's true power, no IT manager in the world would touch it.
I'm reminded of the dearth of cars with loud mufflers and a ton of stickers on them after the "Fast and the Furious" came out. I'll tell you this, there isn't a sticker on my truck, and I haven't gotten around to the muffler, but with the attention I've paid to my engine and subsystems, I beat the little "Sticker Monkeys" all the time.
Heres hoping to Apple experimenting with "ahead of the curve technologies", all to be introduced with the advent of the first G5, and not added later as an afterthought, while being presented as an upgrade.
Comments
I think some of the things you point out are illustrated by the fact Apple has not even bothered updating the motherboard on this revision. The PowerMac engineers (and Steve) are obviously more concerned with the next big project...
<img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
[ 01-28-2002: Message edited by: Tarbash ]</p>
While I do hope Apple releases the G5 with the latest in Hyper Transport, DDR and whatever sans the kitchen sink, or and the kitchen sink (If it will help with the performance crown), I can't help but feel sorry for people that have purchased an 800+ G4 Tower recently. DDR & Rambus(Ugh!!) I'm sure would have added quite of bit of value and been some consolation to the nice people who've helped contribute to Apple's bottom line, while Apple was selling these poor people clearly obsolete memory and bus connections.
Now perhaps I don't know as much as I think I do. Maybe the single chip systems would only have seen mediocre performence increases. But I can't imagine any scenario under which the Dual G4 starting at 500 Mhz couldn't have been dramatically improved by increased throughput, faster memory and lower latency or whatever.
Doesn't look good.
Apple is NOT 'holding back' on shipping Ghz+ based systems nor is it 'falling down on the job' with respect to the Ghz race...
Apple is a CUSTOMER of MOT and IBM and Apple can only do so much in the way of pushing them along.
That being said, ArkAngel does indeed make a good point and one we have to remember Intel has never been 'always in the lead' WRT speed nor has AMD nor has IBM nor has MOT and SUN.. I'll get to that below. Each pushes the other and the top dog changes every few years.
The chips MOT has been turning out have been able to hold their own against Intel those who say different are uneducated and are simply looking at the raw Mhz. Sun has NEVER been the leader in the Mhz race (as far as I can remember) but nobody seems to mind and they have the systems do very well in the highend graphics world...
Wanna guess the Mhz of the ULTRA 10 WORKSTATION? 440Mhz UltraSPARC IIi! Oh and the Blade 1000 systems are powered by up to two 750- or 900-MHz UltraSPARC-III CPUs.
Boy those systems must be the laughing stock of the industry right?! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
SGI the 'darling' of the render world... Wanna take a stab at what their CPU's clock in at? I'd tell you but you can look for yourself... Hint Ghz is not a term they use either.
Mhz DOESN'T tell the whole story (it NEVER did!) just try not to listen to those kids around here who tell you otherwise.. They know not what they speak...
Dave
[ 01-29-2002: Message edited by: DaveGee ]
[ 01-29-2002: Message edited by: DaveGee ]</p>
1) Price.
The iBook and iMac are priced probably about as well as they can be all things considered. The TiBook is expensive, but I don't think outstandingly so. The PowerMac line is expensive, but I believe Apple has to keep the price up even if the current hardware doesn't support it. If and when the souped up models do decide to show up, had Apple drastically reduced the price of the current models it would be hard for Apple to raise the price back up by $1000.
2) Design
They're obviously doing what they can here too.
They aren't in control of the processor so I imagine they're putting whatever effort they can into getting faster machines out the door.
<strong>First things first... Apple is NOT AMD or is it Intel and it isn't even Sun. AMD has full control over the speed of the chips it churns out as does Intel as does Sun...
Apple is NOT 'holding back' on shipping Ghz+ based systems nor is it 'falling down on the job' with respect to the Ghz race...
Apple is a CUSTOMER of MOT and IBM and Apple can only do so much in the way of pushing them along.
That being said, ArkAngel does indeed make a good point and one we have to remember Intel has never been 'always in the lead' WRT speed nor has AMD nor has IBM nor has MOT and SUN.. I'll get to that below. Each pushes the other and the top dog changes every few years.
The chips MOT has been turning out have been able to hold their own against Intel those who say different are uneducated and are simply looking at the raw Mhz. Sun has NEVER been the leader in the Mhz race (as far as I can remember) but nobody seems to mind and they have the systems do very well in the highend graphics world...
Wanna guess the Mhz of the ULTRA 10 WORKSTATION? 440Mhz UltraSPARC IIi! Oh and the Blade 1000 systems are powered by up to two 750- or 900-MHz UltraSPARC-III CPUs.
Boy those systems must be the laughing stock of the industry right?! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
SGI the 'darling' of the render world... Wanna take a stab at what their CPU's clock in at? I'd tell you but you can look for yourself... Hint Ghz is not a term they use either.
Mhz DOESN'T tell the whole story (it NEVER did!) just try not to listen to those kids around here who tell you otherwise.. They know not what they speak...
Dave
[ 01-29-2002: Message edited by: DaveGee ]
[ 01-29-2002: Message edited by: DaveGee ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Dave those were some really great points regarding processor speed. I forgot totally about Sun and SGI. Actually, I was reading on some site recently that Intel is digging a marketing ditch for itself because it's 64 bit cores(Williamette and Foster I think)will be introduced at between 750 and 900 MHz.
As far as Sun and SGI, I don't think either co. nor the computing world at large have any expectations that they achieve anywhere near the 5.5% marketshare that Apple currently hold. I could be ignorant, but when I think of desktop systems, I only think of Mac and WinTel systems.
Perhaps I am dreaming, but I will feel quite vindicated when the Mac is positioned for world domination (whether or not it happens). For one, I receive too much flack and too many sneers when I mention my favorite platform.
I want bragging rights, and I want them now.
[ 01-29-2002: Message edited by: ArkAngel ]</p>