Mwsf What's Coming Up?
Well, with so many announcements lately, will be interesting to find out what will be in store for Macworld SF.
The only thing that it seems to be somewhat certain is the introduction of
Ilife 06 with Front Row and Photo booth plus the regular updates for the remaining apps.
Maybe Airport Xpress A/V could be introduce as well with an Apple remote to control it plus Front Row.
Any thoughts?
The only thing that it seems to be somewhat certain is the introduction of
Ilife 06 with Front Row and Photo booth plus the regular updates for the remaining apps.
Maybe Airport Xpress A/V could be introduce as well with an Apple remote to control it plus Front Row.
Any thoughts?
Comments
But this expo will be consumer oriented instead of professionally oriented. Home entertainment system? Who knows.
iLife '06
iMovie update- faster, better
iDVD- more templates. HD DVD support
iPhoto- Versioning (Tiger only) faster,
Garageband- faster, better
Front Row Pro- Added DVR and bonjour features.
iTunes- support for FRP
iWork '06
Keynote 3- better stuff, easier integration
Pages 2.0- Easier UI, endnotes, better page handling
Numbers- Spreadsheet in Improve/Quantrix mode.
Drawing X- drawing app, vector support
Mac Mini Intel
iBook Intel
Larger iPod Nano 4-8GB
New 20" and 23" Cinema Display with built in iSight
Dual Core Xserve models
ARD 3.0
XSAN 2.0
New Groupware app based on HULA
Count on it.
Cinema Displays I think later not now. Maybe at WWDC.
I like the idea of a MacMini with some sort of DVR capability. with Intel?
80 gig Ipod Video
and larger capacity Nano. I agree with you. Scratch proof!
That aside I still think some kind of iHome MacMini with DVR, and iTunes, AirTunes, and a buttload of other stuff could be a possibility. People want to merge their computing with a lot of their other electronics. Hell look at iTunes it set the trend. Coputer/stereo, iPod. Some cool stuff is going to be there I hope.
Now that we are moving to PCI Express there's the perfect opportunity to put Expresscard slots (Cardbus replacement) on all consumer Macs and all laptops.
I imagine that in a couple of years you'll have plenty of Expresscard choices for a wide range of products like TV Tuners, Wireless upgrades and more. The iMac should have had some sort of upgrade slot.
Apple could do a variation. How much would i add to Apples's cost to ship a computer with a complete set of a/v/cable connections? It couldn't be much, since you can buy VHS or dvd players with a gazllion in/ouputs for less than $200. even $100.
October 27, 2005
Rip and Burn and Download on a Stereo by David Pogue
JUST because a bunch of individual ingredients are delicious doesn't mean they'll taste good when they're all cooked up together. Ask anyone who's ever sampled a 5-year-old chef's rendition of chocolate chip spaghetti with meat sauce and grape jelly.
Similarly, many an electronics company has tried and failed to slap together a decent product from buzzword-compliant components - say, iPods, wireless networks, sound systems and personal computers.
So you might not have high hopes for the Olive Symphony, a $900 hi-fi component (www.olive.us) that merges all of those technologies and more. But instead of creating a multiheaded digital Frankenstereo, the company managed to make all of those technologies and features feel natural together. The resulting box takes a long time to describe, because it does so much. But it takes surprisingly little time to master, and most of its features are usable whether you own a computer or not.
If you're looking for a one-line description, well, think of the Symphony as an iPod for your stereo. Inside is a completely silent, fanless, 80-gigabyte hard drive that stores up to 20,000 songs. (A 160-gigabyte model, the Musica, is available for $1,100. It has a fan, but you'd practically have to climb inside the thing to hear it.) The back panel has both analog and digital outputs to your sound system.
The front panel's scroll wheel and bright, monochrome screen permit quick navigation through gigantic music collections by song title, playlist, album name and so on.
Now, Olive isn't the first company to invent a stereo component with a hard drive. What makes the Symphony, which will be shipped to stores next week, so interesting is all the different ways music gets onto and off of it.
Take the built-in CD player, for example. When you slip a CD into the slot and press the glowing Play button, the music begins. The song and band names appear on the screen in huge letters, visible from across the room, courtesy of the machine's built-in two-million-album database of album and track names.
By pressing one button, you can copy the CD onto the Symphony's hard drive. The process takes about 45 seconds a song; you choose the audio format and quality setting. (You get the quoted 20,000-song capacity only with the MP3 format, which is not exactly the audiophile's dream. Choose WAV, AIFF or FLAC for better quality. These are lossless formats - meaning "adored by classical music nuts"- that fill up the hard drive much faster. The Symphony stores about 2,000 songs in FLAC format.)
And what if you have 1,200 CD's? Are you really expected to sit there, drumming your fingers, feeding the box another disc every nine minutes?
Don't be silly. Olive has made an offer you can't refuse: it will preload all of your CD's onto a new Symphony's hard drive. You just pay for one-way shipping for the discs. (This offer is good until at least Jan. 1, 2006. Even after that, the service will always be available, but it won't always be free.)
The Symphony box can also rescue your old records and tapes. If you're willing to connect your tape deck or record player to the Symphony, it can turn each song into a full-blown digital track that behaves just like the songs you've copied from a CD.
Once your music collection is safely ensconced on the Symphony, you can exile the original CD's, tapes and records to the attic. From now on, you can call up any album right on the screen. You can also mix and match tracks into playlists of your own. Better yet, the Symphony's CD player is also a CD recorder, so you can burn your music - including the tunes you've rescued from your old tapes and LP's - onto shiny new CD's.
If your head hasn't yet exploded, there's more: you can also connect an iPod or any MP3 player directly to a U.S.B. jack on the Symphony (which also recharges the player). Amazingly, the iPod's own music collection now appears on the Symphony's screen, ready for playing through your stereo system. (The Symphony does not, however, play copy-protected files, like songs from the iTunes music store.) You can also copy music from the Symphony's hard drive to the iPod, thus getting extra mileage from all the work you (or Olive) did in transferring your CD collection. That is, the Symphony box lets you load and manage an iPod even if you don't own a computer - an industry first.
In fact, the Symphony doesn't even wipe out all of the music that's already on the iPod; it's content to add, not replace. Over all, this Symphony-to-iPod copying business is a pretty slick trick. (With the new video iPod, it's a trick that needs work. In my tests, copying songs from the Symphony had the bizarre side effect of stripping away all the video from the iPod's TV shows, leaving only the audio. The company promises a fix within days.)
Even this, however, is not the end of the Symphony's résumé. It also has a wireless (Wi-Fi) network antenna, so that it can join your home network. Suddenly, there are all kinds of other possibilities.
For example, suppose you keep your music collection in iTunes (the free jukebox software) on your Mac or PC upstairs. That music library shows up on the Symphony box, ready to play on your much nicer sound system downstairs.
In fact, the same stunt works in reverse: the Symphony also shows up as an icon in the iTunes software, so that you can play its music collection on your computer. In this age of copy-protection paranoia, you just wouldn't expect to find this sort of flexibility and simplicity.
Network nerds will be even more impressed to learn that the Symphony is not just a Wi-Fi receiver; it's also a full-blown access point (wireless router) in its own right. That is, if you plug a cable or D.S.L. modem into the back panel, all wireless laptops in the house can share its fast Internet connection. Not yet wireless? Stand back: the Symphony is even a four-port Ethernet router. You can plug four computers directly into it to create a network.
What does all this mean to non-geeks? Simply that the Symphony box and your computers can play each other's music collections across a home network. You can also drag music files directly from your computer to the Symphony's hard drive. You can even use your computer's keyboard to manage song names and playlists; the Symphony's playlist-management software appears in, of all things, your Web browser.
(Olive also supplies a dedicated, more elegant playlist-management program for Mac OS X only.)
Those networking features also mean that the Symphony can be linked to the Internet, making it easy to download to the box new features and updates of CD track names on new albums.
Finally, the Internet connection also permits the Symphony to tune into Internet radio stations. Over 1,000 are listed when you open the package, organized by genre, and you can add your own.
Clearly, this is a machine with vast potential for musical pleasure - and for confusion. In general, the simple, iPoddish, drill-down-to-the-right-menu system keeps all these features easy to find. There's plenty to learn and troubleshoot, however, especially at the outset.
For example, adding this or any machine to a wireless network can be an evening-long headache, especially because you have to tap in your network password using the remote's number pad. Copying songs from a CD seems quick, but a very long period of post-processing is required before they're available for playback on your computer or copying to your iPod. And although the machine itself is sleek, black and beautiful (the more expensive Musica is silver), the remote control is a surprisingly cheesy, plastic, nonilluminated afterthought.
But Olive has big plans for its audio system. For example, in December it intends to offer a companion device called the Sonata ($200), a small, wireless receiver that hooks up to speakers or even to clock radios. You can park Sonatas in up to 20 rooms of the house; each can be playing different music from the Symphony's hard drive.
So, no, you can't mash together a bunch of trendy ingredients and expect to produce a successful dish. But a master chef can create a triumphant whole even from a disparate jumble of different ingredients - just as long as one of them is an Olive.
E-mail: [email protected]
Mac Mini Intel
iBook Intel
Larger iPod Nano 4-8GB
New 20" and 23" Cinema Display with built in iSight
Definitely agreee with you, hmurchison, about the iBooks and MacMinis going Intel at MWSF (they are just praying for a major update), but I don't think the cinema displays will be unwrapped until the Pro line goes Intel.
As for the mid-capacity iPod, don't forget that a 10Gig Toshiba chip is in the works, maybe an 8gb and 10gb option?
Overall, though, I think you're not far off there!
Originally posted by Banjo
Definitely agreee with you, hmurchison, about the iBooks and MacMinis going Intel at MWSF
Just to screw with your mind, MOSR agrees. Does that shake your beliefs any?
Mac OS Rumors says....
First Intel-based Macs are getting very close! Multiple reliable sources have confirmed that Apple will be shipping its first Intel-based Macs (probably the Mini and the new ultra-thin iBook) by the time its next Mac OS X update cycle -- 10.4.4 -- is completed. 10.4.3 is nearly ready for release, and will be the last Tiger release before developmental x86 builds are rolled back into the unified code tree...suggesting that we could be as little as eight weeks away from the advent of the first x86 Ma
Linky
We won't see Intel based Macs until the middle of 1H06 - at the earliest.
Regarding MOSR: Unified Mac OS X 10.4.4 code tree? Keep dreaming. That would require a 1+ GB update for existing Mac users if they are supposed to update a PPC 10.4.3 to a unified 10.4.4. Every single binary needs to be replaced.
Originally posted by hmurchison
iLife '06
iMovie update- faster, better
iDVD- more templates. HD DVD support
iPhoto- Versioning (Tiger only) faster,
Garageband- faster, better
Front Row Pro- Added DVR and bonjour features.
iTunes- support for FRP
Partly yes, but no "FRP" and no iTunes update.
iWork '06
Keynote 3- better stuff, easier integration
Pages 2.0- Easier UI, endnotes, better page handling
Numbers- Spreadsheet in Improve/Quantrix mode.
Drawing X- drawing app, vector support
Partly yes, I don't think it will have more than one new app.
Mac Mini Intel
iBook Intel
No.
Larger iPod Nano 4-8GB
Perhaps.
New 20" and 23" Cinema Display with built in iSight
No.
Dual Core Xserve models
Perhaps.
ARD 3.0
Perhaps, but I don't think so.
XSAN 2.0
Absolutely not!! They are still working on 1.2. That will be released sometime around 10.4.3 though, but 2.0 is too far away right now.
New Groupware app based on HULA
No.
So, either both ranges go Intel at once, or first the Powerbooks and then the iBooks. You're average consumers won't care/know about the difference between P-M and G4 and will therefore happily buy an old iBook, while the power-user won't be that gullible.
As for when: I'm hoping for January, but think it will probably be around April.
- ibooks with isight cameras built-in, loaded with photobooth, and higher res screens.
- Keynote 2.5, Pages 2.0, and a speardsheet application: iwork '06. Apple needs to update pages to handle formulas and equations (for engineering or school reports), also, figues and object labes for indexes. Add import from and export to LaTeX!!!
- new ichat with document sharing between several users (ala netmeeting), when document sharing is implemented, iChat will be The collaboration tool.!
- Apple Remote Desktop 3. Apple has not updated ARD in a long time, and ARD does not take advantage of the tiger features.
- Update to the Airport Base station. NEW Design!!! even cooler!!
- a lot of third party developers demos!!!
I like the idea of a new Airport, perhaps with one of those new multimedia protocols, call it "AirVideo" like "Airtunes." OK, that's a stupid name, but you get the idea - to stream video to a TV. The base station could have some form of video-out on it along with the audio-out.
I could also see them announcing lots more video content for the iTMS. They certainly need it.
Intel iBook. Will it be single-core Yonah or dual? Depends how Rosetta's doing and whether Apple wants to hold Powerbook on PPC until fall or not (dual iBook if Rosetta is still slow and Apple wants to stick the Powerbook straight into Merom, but my gut tells me things are better than that and Apple will be comfortable with single core Yonah for iBook). Ultra Low Voltage Yonahs won't be out yet, but when they are in early summer, that's when we'll see the first true Apple subnotebook, sort of as an executive desk toy launch thankyou for all the eggheads at WWDC.
Powerbook gets the 1MB L2-cache-equipped 7448 at 1.8GHZ only, and LED backlighting on the display, yielding a 20 percent improvement in actual performance and also about a 20 percent boost in real-world battery life. Perhaps a Radeon Mobility 9800 if it's pin-compatible with the 9700 (sorry, I don't know whether it is or not). No changes that require motherboard alteration until the Intel switch, however. 12-inch Powerbook discontinued, to re-emerge when the Powerbook goes Intel.
Alternative scenario -- if the hardware and software development situation is really good, Apple might go Intel on both notebook lines at once; single core iBooks and dual core Powerbooks. Powerbooks then migrate to Merom in the first Intel revision in late fall.
Originally posted by jms698
I think the Powerbooks would have to go Intel before the iBooks. Who would want to buy a G4 Powerbook when the Pentium-M iBook easily outperforms it? Apple wants to keep selling its laptops.
<snip>
As for when: I'm hoping for January, but think it will probably be around April.
Here's why I think iBook Intel and Mac mini Intel are possible for Q1 2006.
Intel, if on schedule, will have volume production underway for Yonah the nextgen Pentium M. They plan to have single and dual core versions as well as low voltage. The #1 complaint that Mac users are saying to disagree is that they can't see Apple shipping a Pentium M that is faster than current notebooks.
Well....Apple wouldn't. If they were to use a 1.6Ghz low voltage single core Yonah. The iBook intel would be competitive but it would not be sufficiently cheaper than todays 1.67Ghz G4 PB. Even if it was Apple would not have to worry because the Powerbooks have so many more features like monitor spanning and better connectivity options.
Thus my "predikshun" is for a 1.6Ghz ibook/mac mini Intel to be announced at MWSF and shipping sometime in Feb. Apple has no choice. If they announce a G4 iBook it means that they'll have to wait 6 months before making the next revision. By then Yonah has shipped and the iBook is looking pretty pathetic.
PhotoEditor
You make some good point. I did not know the LV Yonah wasn't due until summer. However It think the 1.6Ghz yonah with a 2MB cache will be affordable enough to pop it into the iBook. Then Apple updates to the 7448 for one last PPC powerbook update and then ships a DC Yonah end of summer with dual display support. Thus in 2007 MWSF we can get Merom based PB upgrades as well as Conroe PowerMacs. It's all coming together.
Originally posted by hmurchison
Thus my "predikshun" is for a 1.6Ghz ibook/mac mini Intel to be announced at MWSF and shipping sometime in Feb. Apple has no choice. If they announce a G4 iBook it means that they'll have to wait 6 months before making the next revision. By then Yonah has shipped and the iBook is looking pretty pathetic.
Isn't this a false choice? They don't have to announce a G4 iBook nor an Intel iBook at MWSF. They could simply wait until, say, April and announce both PowerBooks and iBooks with dual and single core Yonahs at around 1.8-2Ghz.
Originally posted by BRussell
Isn't this a false choice? They don't have to announce a G4 iBook nor an Intel iBook at MWSF. They could simply wait until, say, April and announce both PowerBooks and iBooks with dual and single core Yonahs at around 1.8-2Ghz.
But that's also like making the choice to make more money or make less. Consumers are far more forgiving regarding working through "teething" issues. I'd recommend that Apple go ahead and press forward with Intel based iBooks and Mac Mini. Pre-install iWork 2.0 so that there's at least one productivity app available for students and consumers. This gives them the relevant feedback they need and spurs developers to get their programs transitioned before the Powerbooks come into the fray.
Trying a simultaneous launch of iBooks and Powerbooks may prove to be foolhardy.