If you remmeber, the dorsal threads of old AI were plagued by this same sort of multiple personalities...
let's not use this thread to discuss the verity of the source.
I believe (and have some evidence) that Dorsal M = the same person that posted at the old AI and nailed the MWSF PowerMacs. However, i'm not going to ban anyone that claims otherwise, it's just stupid.
I'd also like to reiterate that we are not banning ANYONE, and whoever suggests otherwise is LYING.
Notice, we're not locking barely ANY threads, and not censoring any words short of f--- here. Frankly, I'm too busy with other work right now to be so anal 'bout these forums- if there's something big, i'll fix it, but mostly, we're hoping that they will moderate themselves.
I probably shouldn't have piped up in the first place, endorsing one Dorsal over the other... but it was just my attempt to be nice and help y'all out.
Don't like it, sorry. I won't do anything in the future to try to credit sources again.
sheesh.
Remember guys...
(And don't take that image as me being anything other than tryign to lighten the tone. It's a MESSAGE BOARD about TRIVIAL RUMORS! CHILL OUT!
I tend to agree with Matsu. I thought it was common knowledge he anonymized himself last time around (hence we couldn't really know his IP)...so how could someone be said to "match" it this time around? Admittedly I don't know much about IP spoofing and such but this whole thing seems a little odd to me.
I will pose this question to users of AI: what does AI itself have to gain from having a "real dorsal" posting here, as verified by mods? A lot of traffic at the very least...no suggesting any Oliver Stone-like conspiracy theories but you have to admit one goal of any popular web site is a steady flow of hits.
Actually the writing style is very similiar (first person/first person plural, lots of fragmented sentences and misplaced modifiers, etc.) But the punctuation and abbreviations are a little different (this isn't too surprising since writing style usually develops early and doesn't change much while sentence mechanics are influenced by a lot of things).
Look, we've been contacted by someone who states that they have a personal relationship with Dorsal - knows that their IP's are similar, etc. That's what we're going on.
Moogs- to suggest that we would fabricate things in our forums? that's rediculous. Notice: we have a front page to put RUMORS that WE hear on, why bother with the forums?
I swear, y'all need to chill out about this... we're really not involved with this at all.
This is getting ridiculous. Stop arguing about dorsal this and dorsal that. If you have issues with some of the things he says then argue that but dont waste everyone's time hear arguing whether he is who he says he is or not.
very cool stuff, true or not. i also have an aging G4 450 (man i want to play castle wolfenstein.. and doom 3 and unreal 2..) that could use an update, so far JOnathon's seybold announcement and dates seem the most right on. Ill have to start savin my pennies
btw junkyard dog needs to quit with the trolling (demanding info, then making bs topics, ripping off posts etc)
I have no idea who's real or what but, I do know that Bad Flamingo was a nice try at building a new AI. It just didn't happen. I like the people who post there but, it's like waiting for water to boil ( not much action ). Also accepting a suggestion from you about rumors is like thinking the National Enquirer will give me insite into the real world.
I also have a G4 450 and it plays those games quite well! Maybe what you need is a new video card? I've got a Radeon in mine and I upped the RAM also ( 640 mgs. ). The preview for Wolfenstein plays flawlessly.
For you linguistic analysts, and just for old time's sake, here is some old Dorsal.
From March 2, 2001: [quote]Hello people. This has been an exciting time for us here, as last week we received some prototype PowerMacs with a few surprises. They came in new enclosers never before seen. These appear to be still a work in progress, but from the little I can say, they are spectacularly designed. Imagine a 17" Cinema display crossed with the present G4 tower case.
Motherboard.This machine is very similar to the older "UMA2" machine in our posession a while back. A basic rundown of motherboard features: a 300pin sawtooth CPU card connector, 3 DDR-SDRAM DIMM slots, 4 PCI slots in 33MHz configuration, modem slot pads and integrated Airport (Lucent), AGPx4 slot with NVIDIA GeForce2 MX chipset. Board is also slightly smaller in dimensions. ATA is still 66 in these units. System bus is still a double pumped 133MHz bus from memory controller to CPU and Memory controller to SDRAM. 133MHz bus to the peripheral controller chip. Firewire finally at 800Mbps but there is no USB 2 on any of our prototypes. Sound is the same as the "UMA1.5" systems.
[b]Processors.[b/]3 different processor cards. The first is a PPC 7440 with 256KB of L2 cache and no L3 cache. This one runs at 600MHz. The midrange one is a 7450 with 1MB of L3 cache and frequency is bumped to 733MHz. The last one is a dual processor: 2 x 733MHz. Speed is remarkable on all these units.
notes:
The DP unit crashed a few times so far. We think it may have heat issues, and not so much board issues.
All DDR SDRAM is certified and half the DIMMS we put in would not work in the motherboard. The board is much more stable because of this.
Very fast machines. Even the 7440 is very speedy compared to the 667MHz "UMA1.5" we have in here now.<hr></blockquote>
From March 5:
[quote]It's been a busy few days, and limited sleep coupled with weekend working hasn't helped. Here is some information to clear up some questions and/or misunderstandings. The OS we are running is OS 9.1 with an enabler for now. We also opted to install a build of OS X on the machines (4K60 I believe). Regarding firewire and PCI, the nature of our work involves testing equipment that relies on those interfaces, therefore they are very important to us. Also, I believe some of you do not understand how easy it is to implement ATA/100 versus ATA/66 on a chipset. This 'southbridge' is a sample and a work in progress. Some features have not been implemented. Also remember that firewire/ethernet and other higher bandwidth controllers are kept on the northbridge. This southbridge is almost feature exact to the present controller, save a few changes to the interface so the newer northbridge can work with it. Also, memory throughput reached about 630-ish MBps using internal memory testing utilities (we do not trust GuagePro with test systems). The case is like nothing you have ever seen. I mentioned the 17" ACD before only to illustrate this design is as different to other cases as the ACD is to other 17" monitors. Most of you will be pleasantly surprised and welcome the new case. Externally and internally it is meticulously detailed and attractive. It reminded me why I cose to work with Apple in the first place.<hr></blockquote>
March 8:
[quote]Bandwidth is being tested with internal software that is not commercial. This is for both PCI and memory. In fact, some of our engineers believe our software is not adapted or optimised for the new machine and they are retooling some of the code. I might have new numbers soon about memory performance. PCI performance is done with software that shows noticable performance gains over the present line of machines. Notice I said 'noticable' and not 'extra-ordinary'. Performance gains are typically 20-30MBps over the newer digital audio PowerMacs released this winter.
The case has support for the same amount of internal drives as before but they are located in different locations. External bays are the same but one is larger (I am being as general as possible, so make your own conclusions). Port placement is similar, yet slightly different than before. Think three. Creative internal speaker placement to say the least. And lastly, if you liked handles, be prepared to say bye to them.
Good day!<hr></blockquote>
March 12:
[quote]I don't have any information on what is 'UMA3', but what I have heard of the specs are that it will not be a typical chipset like we have today; a memory-PCI controller and peripheral controller. On UMA3 you will see something to the effect of a big PCI-X/peripheral controller connected via RapidIO to the processor which in turn will have a memory controller on board the die. Also there will be another controller just for the Ethernet and firewire on a seperate RapidIO port. This is the basic jist of future chipsets from Apple. But we won't see anything like this until the PPC 7500 is being used in Macs.<hr></blockquote>
May 2:
[quote]Interesting few days. I have had a chance to use 2 new prototypes from Apple. They are contained in the same plastics of the last prototypes but a different color. Where the last ones were a dark gray, these new ones are a much lighter gray with white Apple logos. There is one external 5.25 bay and one external 3.5 bay. It?s hard to explain the case. It is shaped like the cube on its side. Imagine a clear piece of plastic shaped like an upside down U like you would see on a cheap PC exterior case. The top is perfectly flat, and it gently curves downward to the straight sides. Encased in it is a light silver box that fits perfectly inside the plexi-glass outer shell. There is only about 3 inches of clearance from the bottom though. In the front there is a flat front panel that covers the CDRW drive. The drive is a slot load and there is a grove cut into the plastic like the one on the top of the cube. Underneath there is an unoccupied rectangular piece of plastic in the shape of a 3.5? device for future expansion I imagine. Near the bottom of the front panel I see a stenciled white circle with a vertical line through it also like the cube (the power button). The reset and interrupt buttons are located in the back. At the bottom of the case, where the exposed 3 inches of the U shaped plastic and the silver box meet, the U shaped part curls inward and around in four 2-inch diameter circles that form feet. Ingenious! Between the curled feet that rest on the desk, the U shaped plastic is slightly off the desk by about a third of an inch so the edges do not make contact with the desk surface.
Here is a little ASCII diagram to show this: |__|-----------------------|__|
From the side the whole thing looks like a perfect square. It is beautiful.
The rear of the machine has a full compliment of ports and slots for PCI and AGP expansion. The kicker is the way the machine opens up. On the back there is a familiar pop up handle like the cube (do you see the similarities?). This is the point where you pull the whole back out. This should be done when the system is on it?s side because the motherboard slides out on a rack and that rack has everything on it except for the power supply. There are 3 levels of pulling it out. The first will give you access to DIMM slots and PCI slots. The second, you will have to push a catch that enables a full pullout with out disconnecting the power supply cable. The third is pulling out the whole rack sans power supply.
All in all, it is a beautifully designed case, albeit a little limited in drive expansion. I will be using the machine tomorrow extensively and should detail some info on the inner workings of the unit in a couple days. <hr></blockquote>
[quote]Lets talk about hardware. 2 new prototypes are here now. 2 very different prototypes. Let me talk about the first. This one is a single processor UMA1.5 based system. Wait, that?s not entirely true. I would call it a UMA1.7 machine. The reason I say this is because it is using a very large controller we dubbed ?Pangea2?. It is a memory controller, PCI-X controller, firewire controller, Gb Ethernet controller, USB controller, boot ROM, audio, ATA/100 and AGP-Pro controller all on one die. Bus speed to the processor card is 266MHz. The Pangea2 chip is very close to the processor module. Motherboard is 33% smaller than the Digital Audio G4. It has 3 DIMM slots that take PC133 RAM. One note is that both IDE ports are ATA/100 now. Also the AGP slot is now Pro, with standard power out. The processor on this system is a Motorola 7450 runing at 933MHz. This system came equipped with a GeForce2MX card. Airport is still on a PC-card type card, but in a different position. The system is running MacOS X 10.0.2.
The second system has been called ?The Old Man?. But it is anything but old. It contains the very same Pangea2 chip that the first system has. But instead of SDR-SDRAM, there are 3 PC2100 DDR-SDRAM slots. The rest of the motherboard is the same except that the graphics card is a GeForce3. Power supply on both machines look like a standard ATX power supply. The 2 processors on these machines are running at 800MHz each. This system is also running MacOS X 10.0.2.
More information will come as I get better acquainted with both of these machines.<hr></blockquote>
May 22: [quote]We have not been working on any new machines lately. All our testing and prototyping has been done on present machines bought from Apple (mostly 533MHz and 733MHz models). There is no timeline on when new machines will arrive. But they will come. Final hardware is very close now, if not in a couple weeks then soon after that. From meetings last week, it is my understanding that the feature set of Apple's summer machines are set and there should be product this summer. This only covers the professional line as I have no access to any of the consumer models here.
The standard feature set should include, a highly integrated controller (AGP, PCI, peripheral, memory, network and firewire) , dual channel DDR SDRAM memory running at 133MHz or 266MHz double-pumped, AGP4X (not Pro, Apple will continue to use their own power for AGP), PCI-X (4 slots running at 133MHz and 64bit) Airport slot for 54Mbit device, ATA/100, processors will be the 7440 for lower end and the 7450 for higher end, various dual processor configurations but they may be restricted to BTO, 667-1000MHz speeds, 800 and 933MHz speeds may be skipped this time and may reappear later on in the year (or early next year) as part of a speed bump, maximum RAM will be increased to 4GB, IEEE1394b will debut at 1600Mbit speeds, modem is optional, NVIDIA Graphics will be featured on all retail configurations except for server hardware, which will continue to feature ATI chipsets (most likely Rage128), and finally optical drives I am unsure. I assume they will continue with CDRW on the low end and possibly DVD/CDRW combination drives, like I've seen from Toshiba.
And finally, there will be a new case, but that is still being worked on. I was told yesterday morning that the case we had was an unlikely design, and I don't think Apple is pursuing anything like that now. To have this machine ship, they will probably have a redesigned version of El Capitan with improved drive bays. It was said that the outer shell will closely resemble El Capitan with out the protruding handle on top and more stable (wider) legs on the bottom and still retain the easy open side door. Also the 5.25 drive bays are higher on the case to make room for a second full sized drive bay. This should also mark the end to the two-tone design that resembles an ice cream sandwich. All the lines and surface area should flow into each other. I can't wait to see one up close.
This is all for now. I will try and keep in touch, but until then, good bye.<hr></blockquote>
Sorry for the long post, but I thought it would be interesting to see some of Dorsal's old posts again.
apple toasted "workerbee" after posting on these boards. if dorsal is using the same IP both times around, there's no way that apple wouldn't have gone after him if he's posting legit info.
jimmac good to hear! i only have 256 ram (going to be buying another 512, for what $40? ) now and a rage 128.. ugh. see my dilema? i dont want to spend the $300 or so on a graphics card when i could just save it for a G5 in a couple months.. then again if the GF3 Ti200's can be flashed for macs, id buy one of those. only $99 and as fast as an original GF3.
Moogs- to suggest that we would fabricate things in our forums? that's rediculous. Notice: we have a front page to put RUMORS that WE hear on, why bother with the forums?
I swear, y'all need to chill out about this... we're really not involved with this at all.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Whoa nelly! Whoaa! I never used the word "fabricate". What I was implying was that perhaps you really don't know much more than we do (whether he's the real McCoy or not), but given a little bit of evidence, might claim "its him" just so people can stop debating it and get back to the old style rumor-mongering discussions we know and...uh...love.
Honesty, I couldn't care less because in the end, we have to wait as long as we have to wait - no amount of scoop or insider info is going to bring the new products to us even a day sooner.
I was just hypothesizing that perhaps it is to AI's benefit to state that it is dorsal, even though you really aren't too sure. Sorry if I offended you. Just thought perhaps you were hoping to stoke some interest in the forums again to get all the old regulars coming back. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself (not malicious obviously), just considering the motives of all parties...conscious or not.
Obviously I was mistaken. Never was any good at conspiracy theories....
<strong>The last post by dorsal m seems quite odd to me. Apple releasing a roadmap like that? Including digital hub devices? I thought that what dorsal did...based on the old AI...was he worked for a company that concentrated primarily on PCI busses and motherboard architecture.
?!?!</strong><hr></blockquote>
If you follow the industry, you know there are many standards chewing on the bit to replace PCI. This and the previous post from Dorsal M make a great deal of sense, if you follow what's been said in the non-rumor rags.
I just wanna say that if Jonathan says this is the real dorsal then it is and just leave it at that. I'm sick of people saying how he's a fake just because the writing style might be a drop different.
Comments
let's not use this thread to discuss the verity of the source.
I believe (and have some evidence) that Dorsal M = the same person that posted at the old AI and nailed the MWSF PowerMacs. However, i'm not going to ban anyone that claims otherwise, it's just stupid.
I'd also like to reiterate that we are not banning ANYONE, and whoever suggests otherwise is LYING.
Notice, we're not locking barely ANY threads, and not censoring any words short of f--- here. Frankly, I'm too busy with other work right now to be so anal 'bout these forums- if there's something big, i'll fix it, but mostly, we're hoping that they will moderate themselves.
I probably shouldn't have piped up in the first place, endorsing one Dorsal over the other... but it was just my attempt to be nice and help y'all out.
Don't like it, sorry. I won't do anything in the future to try to credit sources again.
sheesh.
Remember guys...
(And don't take that image as me being anything other than tryign to lighten the tone. It's a MESSAGE BOARD about TRIVIAL RUMORS! CHILL OUT!
[ 11-27-2001: Message edited by: Jonathan ]</p>
<strong> his writing style is completely different to Dorsal's.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Is there an echo in here?
I will pose this question to users of AI: what does AI itself have to gain from having a "real dorsal" posting here, as verified by mods? A lot of traffic at the very least...no suggesting any Oliver Stone-like conspiracy theories but you have to admit one goal of any popular web site is a steady flow of hits.
<img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />
Moogs- to suggest that we would fabricate things in our forums? that's rediculous. Notice: we have a front page to put RUMORS that WE hear on, why bother with the forums?
I swear, y'all need to chill out about this... we're really not involved with this at all.
btw junkyard dog needs to quit with the trolling (demanding info, then making bs topics, ripping off posts etc)
I have no idea who's real or what but, I do know that Bad Flamingo was a nice try at building a new AI. It just didn't happen. I like the people who post there but, it's like waiting for water to boil ( not much action ). Also accepting a suggestion from you about rumors is like thinking the National Enquirer will give me insite into the real world.
I also have a G4 450 and it plays those games quite well! Maybe what you need is a new video card? I've got a Radeon in mine and I upped the RAM also ( 640 mgs. ). The preview for Wolfenstein plays flawlessly.
From March 2, 2001: [quote]Hello people. This has been an exciting time for us here, as last week we received some prototype PowerMacs with a few surprises. They came in new enclosers never before seen. These appear to be still a work in progress, but from the little I can say, they are spectacularly designed. Imagine a 17" Cinema display crossed with the present G4 tower case.
Motherboard.This machine is very similar to the older "UMA2" machine in our posession a while back. A basic rundown of motherboard features: a 300pin sawtooth CPU card connector, 3 DDR-SDRAM DIMM slots, 4 PCI slots in 33MHz configuration, modem slot pads and integrated Airport (Lucent), AGPx4 slot with NVIDIA GeForce2 MX chipset. Board is also slightly smaller in dimensions. ATA is still 66 in these units. System bus is still a double pumped 133MHz bus from memory controller to CPU and Memory controller to SDRAM. 133MHz bus to the peripheral controller chip. Firewire finally at 800Mbps but there is no USB 2 on any of our prototypes. Sound is the same as the "UMA1.5" systems.
[b]Processors.[b/]3 different processor cards. The first is a PPC 7440 with 256KB of L2 cache and no L3 cache. This one runs at 600MHz. The midrange one is a 7450 with 1MB of L3 cache and frequency is bumped to 733MHz. The last one is a dual processor: 2 x 733MHz. Speed is remarkable on all these units.
notes:
The DP unit crashed a few times so far. We think it may have heat issues, and not so much board issues.
All DDR SDRAM is certified and half the DIMMS we put in would not work in the motherboard. The board is much more stable because of this.
Very fast machines. Even the 7440 is very speedy compared to the 667MHz "UMA1.5" we have in here now.<hr></blockquote>
From March 5:
[quote]It's been a busy few days, and limited sleep coupled with weekend working hasn't helped. Here is some information to clear up some questions and/or misunderstandings. The OS we are running is OS 9.1 with an enabler for now. We also opted to install a build of OS X on the machines (4K60 I believe). Regarding firewire and PCI, the nature of our work involves testing equipment that relies on those interfaces, therefore they are very important to us. Also, I believe some of you do not understand how easy it is to implement ATA/100 versus ATA/66 on a chipset. This 'southbridge' is a sample and a work in progress. Some features have not been implemented. Also remember that firewire/ethernet and other higher bandwidth controllers are kept on the northbridge. This southbridge is almost feature exact to the present controller, save a few changes to the interface so the newer northbridge can work with it. Also, memory throughput reached about 630-ish MBps using internal memory testing utilities (we do not trust GuagePro with test systems). The case is like nothing you have ever seen. I mentioned the 17" ACD before only to illustrate this design is as different to other cases as the ACD is to other 17" monitors. Most of you will be pleasantly surprised and welcome the new case. Externally and internally it is meticulously detailed and attractive. It reminded me why I cose to work with Apple in the first place.<hr></blockquote>
March 8:
[quote]Bandwidth is being tested with internal software that is not commercial. This is for both PCI and memory. In fact, some of our engineers believe our software is not adapted or optimised for the new machine and they are retooling some of the code. I might have new numbers soon about memory performance. PCI performance is done with software that shows noticable performance gains over the present line of machines. Notice I said 'noticable' and not 'extra-ordinary'. Performance gains are typically 20-30MBps over the newer digital audio PowerMacs released this winter.
The case has support for the same amount of internal drives as before but they are located in different locations. External bays are the same but one is larger (I am being as general as possible, so make your own conclusions). Port placement is similar, yet slightly different than before. Think three. Creative internal speaker placement to say the least. And lastly, if you liked handles, be prepared to say bye to them.
Good day!<hr></blockquote>
March 12:
[quote]I don't have any information on what is 'UMA3', but what I have heard of the specs are that it will not be a typical chipset like we have today; a memory-PCI controller and peripheral controller. On UMA3 you will see something to the effect of a big PCI-X/peripheral controller connected via RapidIO to the processor which in turn will have a memory controller on board the die. Also there will be another controller just for the Ethernet and firewire on a seperate RapidIO port. This is the basic jist of future chipsets from Apple. But we won't see anything like this until the PPC 7500 is being used in Macs.<hr></blockquote>
May 2:
[quote]Interesting few days. I have had a chance to use 2 new prototypes from Apple. They are contained in the same plastics of the last prototypes but a different color. Where the last ones were a dark gray, these new ones are a much lighter gray with white Apple logos. There is one external 5.25 bay and one external 3.5 bay. It?s hard to explain the case. It is shaped like the cube on its side. Imagine a clear piece of plastic shaped like an upside down U like you would see on a cheap PC exterior case. The top is perfectly flat, and it gently curves downward to the straight sides. Encased in it is a light silver box that fits perfectly inside the plexi-glass outer shell. There is only about 3 inches of clearance from the bottom though. In the front there is a flat front panel that covers the CDRW drive. The drive is a slot load and there is a grove cut into the plastic like the one on the top of the cube. Underneath there is an unoccupied rectangular piece of plastic in the shape of a 3.5? device for future expansion I imagine. Near the bottom of the front panel I see a stenciled white circle with a vertical line through it also like the cube (the power button). The reset and interrupt buttons are located in the back. At the bottom of the case, where the exposed 3 inches of the U shaped plastic and the silver box meet, the U shaped part curls inward and around in four 2-inch diameter circles that form feet. Ingenious! Between the curled feet that rest on the desk, the U shaped plastic is slightly off the desk by about a third of an inch so the edges do not make contact with the desk surface.
Here is a little ASCII diagram to show this: |__|-----------------------|__|
From the side the whole thing looks like a perfect square. It is beautiful.
The rear of the machine has a full compliment of ports and slots for PCI and AGP expansion. The kicker is the way the machine opens up. On the back there is a familiar pop up handle like the cube (do you see the similarities?). This is the point where you pull the whole back out. This should be done when the system is on it?s side because the motherboard slides out on a rack and that rack has everything on it except for the power supply. There are 3 levels of pulling it out. The first will give you access to DIMM slots and PCI slots. The second, you will have to push a catch that enables a full pullout with out disconnecting the power supply cable. The third is pulling out the whole rack sans power supply.
All in all, it is a beautifully designed case, albeit a little limited in drive expansion. I will be using the machine tomorrow extensively and should detail some info on the inner workings of the unit in a couple days. <hr></blockquote>
[quote]Lets talk about hardware. 2 new prototypes are here now. 2 very different prototypes. Let me talk about the first. This one is a single processor UMA1.5 based system. Wait, that?s not entirely true. I would call it a UMA1.7 machine. The reason I say this is because it is using a very large controller we dubbed ?Pangea2?. It is a memory controller, PCI-X controller, firewire controller, Gb Ethernet controller, USB controller, boot ROM, audio, ATA/100 and AGP-Pro controller all on one die. Bus speed to the processor card is 266MHz. The Pangea2 chip is very close to the processor module. Motherboard is 33% smaller than the Digital Audio G4. It has 3 DIMM slots that take PC133 RAM. One note is that both IDE ports are ATA/100 now. Also the AGP slot is now Pro, with standard power out. The processor on this system is a Motorola 7450 runing at 933MHz. This system came equipped with a GeForce2MX card. Airport is still on a PC-card type card, but in a different position. The system is running MacOS X 10.0.2.
The second system has been called ?The Old Man?. But it is anything but old. It contains the very same Pangea2 chip that the first system has. But instead of SDR-SDRAM, there are 3 PC2100 DDR-SDRAM slots. The rest of the motherboard is the same except that the graphics card is a GeForce3. Power supply on both machines look like a standard ATX power supply. The 2 processors on these machines are running at 800MHz each. This system is also running MacOS X 10.0.2.
More information will come as I get better acquainted with both of these machines.<hr></blockquote>
May 22: [quote]We have not been working on any new machines lately. All our testing and prototyping has been done on present machines bought from Apple (mostly 533MHz and 733MHz models). There is no timeline on when new machines will arrive. But they will come. Final hardware is very close now, if not in a couple weeks then soon after that. From meetings last week, it is my understanding that the feature set of Apple's summer machines are set and there should be product this summer. This only covers the professional line as I have no access to any of the consumer models here.
The standard feature set should include, a highly integrated controller (AGP, PCI, peripheral, memory, network and firewire) , dual channel DDR SDRAM memory running at 133MHz or 266MHz double-pumped, AGP4X (not Pro, Apple will continue to use their own power for AGP), PCI-X (4 slots running at 133MHz and 64bit) Airport slot for 54Mbit device, ATA/100, processors will be the 7440 for lower end and the 7450 for higher end, various dual processor configurations but they may be restricted to BTO, 667-1000MHz speeds, 800 and 933MHz speeds may be skipped this time and may reappear later on in the year (or early next year) as part of a speed bump, maximum RAM will be increased to 4GB, IEEE1394b will debut at 1600Mbit speeds, modem is optional, NVIDIA Graphics will be featured on all retail configurations except for server hardware, which will continue to feature ATI chipsets (most likely Rage128), and finally optical drives I am unsure. I assume they will continue with CDRW on the low end and possibly DVD/CDRW combination drives, like I've seen from Toshiba.
And finally, there will be a new case, but that is still being worked on. I was told yesterday morning that the case we had was an unlikely design, and I don't think Apple is pursuing anything like that now. To have this machine ship, they will probably have a redesigned version of El Capitan with improved drive bays. It was said that the outer shell will closely resemble El Capitan with out the protruding handle on top and more stable (wider) legs on the bottom and still retain the easy open side door. Also the 5.25 drive bays are higher on the case to make room for a second full sized drive bay. This should also mark the end to the two-tone design that resembles an ice cream sandwich. All the lines and surface area should flow into each other. I can't wait to see one up close.
This is all for now. I will try and keep in touch, but until then, good bye.<hr></blockquote>
Sorry for the long post, but I thought it would be interesting to see some of Dorsal's old posts again.
one thing to keep in mind.
apple toasted "workerbee" after posting on these boards. if dorsal is using the same IP both times around, there's no way that apple wouldn't have gone after him if he's posting legit info.
<strong>
Moogs- to suggest that we would fabricate things in our forums? that's rediculous. Notice: we have a front page to put RUMORS that WE hear on, why bother with the forums?
I swear, y'all need to chill out about this... we're really not involved with this at all.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Whoa nelly! Whoaa! I never used the word "fabricate". What I was implying was that perhaps you really don't know much more than we do (whether he's the real McCoy or not), but given a little bit of evidence, might claim "its him" just so people can stop debating it and get back to the old style rumor-mongering discussions we know and...uh...love.
Honesty, I couldn't care less because in the end, we have to wait as long as we have to wait - no amount of scoop or insider info is going to bring the new products to us even a day sooner.
I was just hypothesizing that perhaps it is to AI's benefit to state that it is dorsal, even though you really aren't too sure. Sorry if I offended you. Just thought perhaps you were hoping to stoke some interest in the forums again to get all the old regulars coming back. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself (not malicious obviously), just considering the motives of all parties...conscious or not.
Obviously I was mistaken. Never was any good at conspiracy theories....
<img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
[ 11-27-2001: Message edited by: Moogs ? ]</p>
Does anyone have copies of these posts?
<strong>The last post by dorsal m seems quite odd to me. Apple releasing a roadmap like that? Including digital hub devices? I thought that what dorsal did...based on the old AI...was he worked for a company that concentrated primarily on PCI busses and motherboard architecture.
?!?!</strong><hr></blockquote>
If you follow the industry, you know there are many standards chewing on the bit to replace PCI. This and the previous post from Dorsal M make a great deal of sense, if you follow what's been said in the non-rumor rags.
<strong>
Does anyone have copies of these posts?</strong><hr></blockquote>
See above, dearie.
Mandricard
AppleOutsider
[ 11-27-2001: Message edited by: Mandricard ]</p>
<strong>See above, dearie.
Oops, my mistake. I take it Jonathan meant MWNY?
If Dorsal throws out a dozen predictions...he's bound to get one of them close.