I am not talking about the P4-M. I am talking about the P4, the desktop chip. The P4-M is just a scaled down desktop chip, while the banias(centrino platform) was built from the ground up as a mobile chip. And I wasn't really directing my last reply towards you, it was more towards Brian Green and COS.
Let's say hypothetically that Apple can get a pretty good supply of 970 chips from IBM (they aren't Moto, why not?)... so from a business stand point would it make the most sense for Apple?
I think it would make the most sense to put them in the Powermacs and have those systems shipping on time, in quantity when announced (with the whole line, singles and duals, going to the 970). Then a couple months later Apple could come out with a Powerbook with the 970.
Don't get me wrong, I hope they come out with the 970 Powerbook soon - but business wise, wouldn't it be better for apple to get the great press about the super fast new towers that they have out and are shipping... then a couple months later get even more great press for coming out with the world's fastest laptop systems.
Not only would announcing the systems together possibly dillute the significance of the announcements (some media would focus on towers, others on Powerbooks), but the delay could allow IBM to get the fab down to a smaller, more efficient size for the PBs.
I would like to see the 970 PowerBooks out soon (I have one of the first TiBooks, and it's feeling pretty slow right now), but I don't think they'll do it. My guess is towers announced at WWDC, Powerbooks a few months later (September-ish).
Well I just have to ask, if the 15" PowerBook is not going to be getting the 970 for quite awhile yet, why the hell has it not been updated to match even the 12"? The 15" models don't have airport extreme, DDR ram, FireWire 800, 167mhz bus, lightup keyboard, or the new case. They are now over 6 months old and an update is badly needed. So they are going to be updated soon...I would hope. If Apple is not waiting on the 970 for the Powerbooks why have they not been updated? I guess what I'm saying is why did apple not just add the left out features to begin with??? The 15" was only updated about a month before the 12" and 17" came out, so why did apple leave the 15" with less features? There has to be some reason right? It just seems like the 15" PowerBooks are waiting on something before they are updates.
what really drives me nuts is I can't find numbers anywhere. I just have a feeling that people are being mislead by the whole Power Mac v.s. Power Book thing. I have a feeling that a bunch more Power Books have been sold than Power Macs. Given that, what makes the Power Mac so special? I don't see it. Sure we have designers who use them and such but honestly, I don't want opinions about how many there are, I'd love to see actual data on how many have been sold. I think the Power Book is more important to Apple (regardless of people's feelings) because more will sell than the Power Macs.
Then Algol makes a great point about the 15". Why do the 12 and 17 get features that Apple simply hasn't bothered to take the time to give to the 15"? For once in Apple's history they ought to do the right thing and offer 970's in BOTH the Power Mac and the Power Book. It's as if portable needs always suffer so desktop people can get theirs first.
Twenty or so years ago I worked for a company where we sold big boxes containing multiple Z80 processors. Each user had his own processor. The machines were about the size of a chest freezer. In the office we had four or five of them running all the time doing data conversions. These machines could hold their own against the 8088 and 80286 machines of the time because of the multiple CPUs.
Then one day a very expensive Compaq 386 arrived in the office. We all sneered, "yet another PC". But we loaded the conversion program on it and set up a test run.
The 386 was maybe 20 to 30 times faster than the Z80 boxes. Our jaws dropped. What could we say? We had seen the future.
It's almost impossible to describe the emotion of that moment.
What makes the powermacs special is MARGINS!!! they have the fatest margins of any model Apple sells.
A 2000 12"PB has an expensive LCD and battery that are nowhere to be seen on the Powermac, just for starters. Then there is miniturization penalty to be paid for the drives (which also cost more than larger faster desktop drives. The difficulty of the assembly, compared to a fairly generic build for a PM. Laptops cost more to make, and even Apple's have to have lower margins than desktop equivalents if they're going to be anywhere near competitive.
So, if I'm Apple and I can sell you a 2000-3000USD laptop for a 20% margin, or I can sell you a 1500-3000USD desktop for a 35% margin, what do I choose? It's pretty obvious.
Well after reading Steve's Quarterly Report (or part of it anyway), it looks like 40% of Mac's sold were laptops. That's not enough to prove my point, and there's no chart that shows sales of Power Macs v.s. Power Books. Either way, it's just horrible that portable users have to wait so long after desktop models get theirs. We live in a world now where we're on the go all the time and need to take our stuff with us. Who knows, maybe someday laptops will actually have the priority.
I just have a feeling that people are being mislead by the whole Power Mac v.s. Power Book thing. I have a feeling that a bunch more Power Books have been sold than Power Macs. Given that, what makes the Power Mac so special? I don't see it.
What matters is not how many PowerMacs are selling (it was 158,000 last quarter) but how many could be selling. At one point PowerMacs were flying out the door at 4-5 times the current rate, dwarfing the PowerBook's volume (which shot up last quarter to 101,000). And, as Matsu has pointed out, PowerMacs have consistently fat margins (although the 17" PowerBook might still keep the honor of highest margin machine).
Even if the PowerMac gets revved, the fact is that the PowerBook and the 17" iMac are more than powerful enough to serve needs that used to require Apple's latest and greatest, and Apple's latest and greatest is sought after in no small part by new and different markets now. So in a sense I can see PowerBooks holding their ground against 970 PowerMacs just for being plenty powerful, sexy and portable.
Quote:
Then Algol makes a great point about the 15". Why do the 12 and 17 get features that Apple simply hasn't bothered to take the time to give to the 15"?
The 15" PowerBook has the job of being able to boot into OS 9.
Quote:
For once in Apple's history they ought to do the right thing and offer 970's in BOTH the Power Mac and the Power Book. It's as if portable needs always suffer so desktop people can get theirs first.
That's because the nature of a tower is such that it's much easier to add a new technology - especially a powerful CPU - than it is to engineer one into a notebook less than an inch thick. Towers simply don't have the engineering constraints that notebooks do, and as a result tower owners expect leading-edge performance, where notebook owners understand that they are trading all-out muscle for portability.
The one thing that makes less sense to me than anything else is that the most popular Laptop model, the 15" PowerBook, has been left to rot for 5 months. Apple must be smoking crack! I want to buy one of them, but I am not paying $2800 for a model that has less to offer than the $1800 12".
Why wait so long if you are not planing on doing something big with the 15". Would apple wait 6 months for a new GPU? I don't think so. I think they know that the 7455 is not going to go higher than 1ghz in a laptop and they are waiting on a faster CPU. I highly doubt apple has waited 6 months to add airport extreme and DDR but stay at 1Ghz.
what really drives me nuts is I can't find numbers anywhere. I just have a feeling that people are being mislead by the whole Power Mac v.s. Power Book thing.
Go to Apple, and click on 'annual reports'. Or maybe 'SEC filings'.
Either way, _lots_ of numbers there I think there should be a individual product-line breakdown - there was on the SEC filings I looked at.
Brian Green: The data you are looking for is here.
In this document you will find that Apple has sold ~90-170 thousand powerbooks a quarter in the three mentioned quarters. (And over the past three years Apple has averaged less than 100 thousand powerbooks a quarter, as compared to on average ~190-360 thousand powermacs per quarter in the same time period. So it seems pretty clear that, even though Apple makes much less revenue on each powermac, they do sell far more powermac units, and may even make more profit on powermacs. [Profit margins are not given or are difficult, for me, to find.])
Matsu: All the numbers in Apple's statements basically point to there being fewer than 325 thousand powermac, powerbook, and xserve units per quarter, so if Apple introduced the 970 halfway through a quarter they could have the 970 in all of the proffesional lines and ship them immediately with only ~200 thousand units prebuilt. The rest could be manufactured as time passed. Personally I don't think this will happen, but it could happen if IBM and Apple were ready and willing. I am just pointing out that there would not necessarily be all that much noise about the manufacturing just yet.
For more of Apple's financial information spend a few hours browsing this. Or just go to sec.gov and click on "search company filings" under the EDGAR heading.
Edit: These questions have already been answered two or three times since I started typing this. Sorry for that.
Ummm....why don't we cool it with the 970 talk for a while. It's just gotten boring again (like it had before MacBidoobie came on the scene to spice things up). Realistically, I don't think 970 powerbooks will show up till the christmas shopping season. Let Apple get the bugs worked out in the power macs, then bring forth the 90 nm 970.
But until I see a 970 machine in the demonstrating hands of steve jobs, things just won't be as "scintillating."
The 15" PowerBook has the job of being able to boot into OS 9.
This, I don't understand. Who still needs to boot into OS 9? I thought it was only the education market, and Quark users.
1. Who in the education market gets a $2,300 laptop? From what I've gathered, most of the education market (except for Maine) buys last, or second to last generation machines that are on massive clearance specials. It saves them loads of cash, and they never NEED the latest and greatest.
2. Almost all Quark users can use Quark in Classic (I know several publishing houses that do this already). Of those Quark users that still NEED to boot OS 9, do you really believe enough of them are currently buying 15" powerbooks that Apple would hold back upgrading the hardware just for them? I can't fathom how this group could be larger than the market of people dying to get the 15" as soon as it's updated.
Moreover, wouldn't updating the 15" to OS X booting only (among other things) help clear out the last of these stagnant 15"ers to those that need OS 9 booting?
as soon as the 970 ships (say on PMs), NOONE will buy a G4 powerbook (unless they sell them for ?999)
EVRYONE will wait for the 970 powerbook.
so, either apple releases 970 PMs and PBs at the SAME TIME, or expect PB sales drop to 0.
Agreed. Moreover, those of you saying Apple should span out the powerbook/powermac 970 releases to milk the publicity to the fullest... how can Apple hit a home run with the press without releasing both at the same time?
If only the 970 PMs are released, the press will say "the PMs are great, but the laptops are still dog slow, SJ doesn't get it, Apple will die this year"
If both are released, the press can say, wow the entire pro line is wicked fast, 64-bit primed and ready for the awesome Panther upgrade in September. That's a home run.
I also agree that if SJ were to release 970 PBs at WWDC, it could create an almost fanatical buying frenzy among developers (if the PBs were on hand to buy or just available to use during the week), and a rush for many of them to want to utilize the 64-bitness of the 970 in their code, if possible.
Twenty or so years ago I worked for a company where we sold big boxes containing multiple Z80 processors. Each user had his own processor. The machines were about the size of a chest freezer. In the office we had four or five of them running all the time doing data conversions. These machines could hold their own against the 8088 and 80286 machines of the time because of the multiple CPUs.
Then one day a very expensive Compaq 386 arrived in the office. We all sneered, "yet another PC". But we loaded the conversion program on it and set up a test run.
The 386 was maybe 20 to 30 times faster than the Z80 boxes. Our jaws dropped. What could we say? We had seen the future.
It's almost impossible to describe the emotion of that moment.
But I look forward to feeling it again...
That would be great, but I really don't think we'll see performance jumps like that in the future of computing. Things these days really seem to be more of an incremental approach to speeding up everything.
I think speed jumps like you experienced are going to come with dramatically different changes, like optical computing, or a completely different method of creating chips.
I could see 2x or 3x, given what's been banted around on the boards here.. (and that's nothing to sneeze at, my jaw would drop a bit for that).
Personally, I'm more excited about what might be coming up in Panther, and how that might affect my workflow, or what I can incorporate into programs I work on. To me, the future of Apple is the software & the OS that runs that software.
(Although I will give you that hardware will often help the software, like built in web cams, video ipods, etc, etc).
Comments
Tony
I think it would make the most sense to put them in the Powermacs and have those systems shipping on time, in quantity when announced (with the whole line, singles and duals, going to the 970). Then a couple months later Apple could come out with a Powerbook with the 970.
Don't get me wrong, I hope they come out with the 970 Powerbook soon - but business wise, wouldn't it be better for apple to get the great press about the super fast new towers that they have out and are shipping... then a couple months later get even more great press for coming out with the world's fastest laptop systems.
Not only would announcing the systems together possibly dillute the significance of the announcements (some media would focus on towers, others on Powerbooks), but the delay could allow IBM to get the fab down to a smaller, more efficient size for the PBs.
I would like to see the 970 PowerBooks out soon (I have one of the first TiBooks, and it's feeling pretty slow right now), but I don't think they'll do it. My guess is towers announced at WWDC, Powerbooks a few months later (September-ish).
Then Algol makes a great point about the 15". Why do the 12 and 17 get features that Apple simply hasn't bothered to take the time to give to the 15"? For once in Apple's history they ought to do the right thing and offer 970's in BOTH the Power Mac and the Power Book. It's as if portable needs always suffer so desktop people can get theirs first.
Twenty or so years ago I worked for a company where we sold big boxes containing multiple Z80 processors. Each user had his own processor. The machines were about the size of a chest freezer. In the office we had four or five of them running all the time doing data conversions. These machines could hold their own against the 8088 and 80286 machines of the time because of the multiple CPUs.
Then one day a very expensive Compaq 386 arrived in the office. We all sneered, "yet another PC". But we loaded the conversion program on it and set up a test run.
The 386 was maybe 20 to 30 times faster than the Z80 boxes. Our jaws dropped. What could we say? We had seen the future.
It's almost impossible to describe the emotion of that moment.
But I look forward to feeling it again...
A 2000 12"PB has an expensive LCD and battery that are nowhere to be seen on the Powermac, just for starters. Then there is miniturization penalty to be paid for the drives (which also cost more than larger faster desktop drives. The difficulty of the assembly, compared to a fairly generic build for a PM. Laptops cost more to make, and even Apple's have to have lower margins than desktop equivalents if they're going to be anywhere near competitive.
So, if I'm Apple and I can sell you a 2000-3000USD laptop for a 20% margin, or I can sell you a 1500-3000USD desktop for a 35% margin, what do I choose? It's pretty obvious.
Originally posted by Brian Green
what really drives me nuts is I can't find numbers anywhere.
Go here:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/jan/15results.html
and click on Data Summary to get a PDF.
I just have a feeling that people are being mislead by the whole Power Mac v.s. Power Book thing. I have a feeling that a bunch more Power Books have been sold than Power Macs. Given that, what makes the Power Mac so special? I don't see it.
What matters is not how many PowerMacs are selling (it was 158,000 last quarter) but how many could be selling. At one point PowerMacs were flying out the door at 4-5 times the current rate, dwarfing the PowerBook's volume (which shot up last quarter to 101,000). And, as Matsu has pointed out, PowerMacs have consistently fat margins (although the 17" PowerBook might still keep the honor of highest margin machine).
Even if the PowerMac gets revved, the fact is that the PowerBook and the 17" iMac are more than powerful enough to serve needs that used to require Apple's latest and greatest, and Apple's latest and greatest is sought after in no small part by new and different markets now. So in a sense I can see PowerBooks holding their ground against 970 PowerMacs just for being plenty powerful, sexy and portable.
Then Algol makes a great point about the 15". Why do the 12 and 17 get features that Apple simply hasn't bothered to take the time to give to the 15"?
The 15" PowerBook has the job of being able to boot into OS 9.
For once in Apple's history they ought to do the right thing and offer 970's in BOTH the Power Mac and the Power Book. It's as if portable needs always suffer so desktop people can get theirs first.
That's because the nature of a tower is such that it's much easier to add a new technology - especially a powerful CPU - than it is to engineer one into a notebook less than an inch thick. Towers simply don't have the engineering constraints that notebooks do, and as a result tower owners expect leading-edge performance, where notebook owners understand that they are trading all-out muscle for portability.
Why wait so long if you are not planing on doing something big with the 15". Would apple wait 6 months for a new GPU? I don't think so. I think they know that the 7455 is not going to go higher than 1ghz in a laptop and they are waiting on a faster CPU. I highly doubt apple has waited 6 months to add airport extreme and DDR but stay at 1Ghz.
Originally posted by Brian Green
what really drives me nuts is I can't find numbers anywhere. I just have a feeling that people are being mislead by the whole Power Mac v.s. Power Book thing.
Go to Apple, and click on 'annual reports'. Or maybe 'SEC filings'.
Either way, _lots_ of numbers there
356 million for iMacs
216 million for iBooks
292 million for Power Macs &
235 million for Power Books
Nice to know.
There's nothing more infuriating that having over $8000 in the bank and can't get a 970 laptop. I have no use whatsoever for a Power Mac.
There's nothing more infuriating that having over $8000 in the bank and can't get a 970 laptop. I have no use whatsoever for a Power Mac.
Sure there is. NOT having 8000$ in the bank and only dreaming about a 970 laptop.
The 970 will ship in a laptop when a) a 970 can fit in and b) provide decent enough battery life while driving one.
There is no conspiracy here.
In this document you will find that Apple has sold ~90-170 thousand powerbooks a quarter in the three mentioned quarters. (And over the past three years Apple has averaged less than 100 thousand powerbooks a quarter, as compared to on average ~190-360 thousand powermacs per quarter in the same time period. So it seems pretty clear that, even though Apple makes much less revenue on each powermac, they do sell far more powermac units, and may even make more profit on powermacs. [Profit margins are not given or are difficult, for me, to find.])
Matsu: All the numbers in Apple's statements basically point to there being fewer than 325 thousand powermac, powerbook, and xserve units per quarter, so if Apple introduced the 970 halfway through a quarter they could have the 970 in all of the proffesional lines and ship them immediately with only ~200 thousand units prebuilt. The rest could be manufactured as time passed. Personally I don't think this will happen, but it could happen if IBM and Apple were ready and willing. I am just pointing out that there would not necessarily be all that much noise about the manufacturing just yet.
For more of Apple's financial information spend a few hours browsing this. Or just go to sec.gov and click on "search company filings" under the EDGAR heading.
Edit: These questions have already been answered two or three times since I started typing this. Sorry for that.
But until I see a 970 machine in the demonstrating hands of steve jobs, things just won't be as "scintillating."
Originally posted by Amorph
The 15" PowerBook has the job of being able to boot into OS 9.
This, I don't understand. Who still needs to boot into OS 9? I thought it was only the education market, and Quark users.
1. Who in the education market gets a $2,300 laptop? From what I've gathered, most of the education market (except for Maine) buys last, or second to last generation machines that are on massive clearance specials. It saves them loads of cash, and they never NEED the latest and greatest.
2. Almost all Quark users can use Quark in Classic (I know several publishing houses that do this already). Of those Quark users that still NEED to boot OS 9, do you really believe enough of them are currently buying 15" powerbooks that Apple would hold back upgrading the hardware just for them? I can't fathom how this group could be larger than the market of people dying to get the 15" as soon as it's updated.
Moreover, wouldn't updating the 15" to OS X booting only (among other things) help clear out the last of these stagnant 15"ers to those that need OS 9 booting?
Is there another market I'm missing here?
Someone please explain?
to me one thing is clear:
as soon as the 970 ships (say on PMs), NOONE will buy a G4 powerbook (unless they sell them for ?999)
EVRYONE will wait for the 970 powerbook.
so, either apple releases 970 PMs and PBs at the SAME TIME, or expect PB sales drop to 0.
--------
my Ti is too noisy, too hot and too slow.
Originally posted by jindrich
year of the laptop?
to me one thing is clear:
as soon as the 970 ships (say on PMs), NOONE will buy a G4 powerbook (unless they sell them for ?999)
EVRYONE will wait for the 970 powerbook.
so, either apple releases 970 PMs and PBs at the SAME TIME, or expect PB sales drop to 0.
Agreed. Moreover, those of you saying Apple should span out the powerbook/powermac 970 releases to milk the publicity to the fullest... how can Apple hit a home run with the press without releasing both at the same time?
If only the 970 PMs are released, the press will say "the PMs are great, but the laptops are still dog slow, SJ doesn't get it, Apple will die this year"
If both are released, the press can say, wow the entire pro line is wicked fast, 64-bit primed and ready for the awesome Panther upgrade in September. That's a home run.
I also agree that if SJ were to release 970 PBs at WWDC, it could create an almost fanatical buying frenzy among developers (if the PBs were on hand to buy or just available to use during the week), and a rush for many of them to want to utilize the 64-bitness of the 970 in their code, if possible.
Originally posted by jindrich
year of the laptop?
to me one thing is clear:
as soon as the 970 ships (say on PMs), NOONE will buy a G4 powerbook (unless they sell them for 999)
EVRYONE will wait for the 970 powerbook.
so, either apple releases 970 PMs and PBs at the SAME TIME, or expect PB sales drop to 0.
Just like NO ONE bought the Pismo PowerBooks that had G3's in them after the G4's were in the towers.
Originally posted by cubist
What will the release of the 970s be like?
Twenty or so years ago I worked for a company where we sold big boxes containing multiple Z80 processors. Each user had his own processor. The machines were about the size of a chest freezer. In the office we had four or five of them running all the time doing data conversions. These machines could hold their own against the 8088 and 80286 machines of the time because of the multiple CPUs.
Then one day a very expensive Compaq 386 arrived in the office. We all sneered, "yet another PC". But we loaded the conversion program on it and set up a test run.
The 386 was maybe 20 to 30 times faster than the Z80 boxes. Our jaws dropped. What could we say? We had seen the future.
It's almost impossible to describe the emotion of that moment.
But I look forward to feeling it again...
That would be great, but I really don't think we'll see performance jumps like that in the future of computing. Things these days really seem to be more of an incremental approach to speeding up everything.
I think speed jumps like you experienced are going to come with dramatically different changes, like optical computing, or a completely different method of creating chips.
I could see 2x or 3x, given what's been banted around on the boards here.. (and that's nothing to sneeze at, my jaw would drop a bit for that).
Personally, I'm more excited about what might be coming up in Panther, and how that might affect my workflow, or what I can incorporate into programs I work on. To me, the future of Apple is the software & the OS that runs that software.
(Although I will give you that hardware will often help the software, like built in web cams, video ipods, etc, etc).