The more I think about Jobs's statement, the more I think it was nothing more than an off the cuff remark. I'm beginning to think we have all read FAR too much into it.
this is exactly what apple does, and this works for apples business model, [ie: high margin niche player] - but in the grand scheme of things, apple does indeed compete with Dell, and a lot of people DO run over to Dell after looking at Apple's offerings.
Well, part of the point is that there is only room for one Dell in the world--just ask Gateway. I do think there is room for one Dell and one Apple to both be profitable companies. Apple could not survive on Dell's margins.
I don't thing Apple is sitting on some top-secret uber laptop they just won't sell us, though. More likely there have simply been bugs and delays they didn't expect. Even "clearing out inventory" hasn't been that big of a concern since Apple got it's inventories under control.
Edit: So, Amorph, what is keeping the iBooks back - just the PowerBooks being relatively slow?
In terms of CPU, nothing. The 900MHz 750fx G3 is the fastest G3 IBM ships, and it's clocked as high as the 750fx can go. When IBM rolls out the 750gx late this year/early next year, or if Apple decides to migrate to Motorola's 7447, the iBook will get another bump. If it goes to the 7447, it'll probably get an upgrade from the G3's 60x bus to the G4's MaxBus, which will mean a motherboard revision.
In terms of other technologies, Apple has to make the iBook cheap, quiet and durable, and keep the battery life good. Performance simply is not a primary concern for that model - it only has to be fast enough.
As far as other features go, I have to agree that the lack of spanning in the consumer models is a purely gratuitous omission. I've been grumbling about that for years. It used to be a bedrock Mac feature, and it still could be very easily. </rant> The rest of the machine's features are balanced relative to the price and the design goals.
Agreed. No company with the slightest bit of sense would spend the R&D dollars necessary to make such a product then let it sit in warehouses decreasing in value.
Heh, Bagu - that is a TR-101 isn't it. I've posted about that on various forums. I love it. I SOOOO wish Apple would make something with this form factor.
www.dynamism.com has details. It is kinda overpriced I must admit.
Apple customers would tear that little machine to pieces, and then wonder if it's covered under AppleCare. It looks like a toy, and would likely be treated as such.
If Apple did make a 9/10" sub-ibook, it would have cd-rom drive only, no firewire, one usb, 20 GB HD, and as few moving parts as possible, though it would likely still look like an ibook.
I admit it's disappointing not to have new laptops now. but lets' face it most people don't need but 800mgz usb, internal modem, card slot or 8011b wireless. Most students don't need much for wireless and writing papers and doing internet. let's not fall into the mgz myth, yes i won't buy till new architecture, but many students by refurbished laptops just to get a laptop, knowing that when a company releases one it is pricey and in 6 months obsolete. so maybe apple does better by lowering the price of laptops so more can get them. My present software to view images from my hospitals server only needs 266mhz--96ram,--remember those numbers-- so that's all i need, but do you think i can find a cheap laptop with warranty with 266....no way, faster faster faster for what...most students and kids and more than 90% of people need longer battery life than more speed, few programs require more than 1ghz.....if i was a student then i would look forward to a laptop by apple and save 400 bucks. these socalled tablet pc's are 1.3ghz, so we as nutzy apple people entertain ourselves with these forums, yes i want to hear the scoop, what impresses me more is that apple is slowly moving more stuff and growing into the market i want apple to get to 10-15% market share and gets its name out, more has been done with iPod than other hardware to cause people to switch. Let's wait some more My work won't be updated for 3-6 months if then, when my work place moves i will move to a new non wintel laptop. My iMac dv 400 works just fine.
Hey by the way does the new appleworks read .doc word documents? I may need to get either word for os10 or appleworks. Maybe i can find a student to get me one of those university deals. students and even my self like to save big $$$$$. What i would like to see is an ibook at $600--so when do you think we'll see this, many people would like os10 and a cheap laptop. My wife would like a apple laptop, but she doesn't want to spend big $ for email and word processing. HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED. Maybe get the price down.
Hey by the way does the new appleworks read .doc word documents?
Yes, and it also can save in .doc format. You can even chose which version of Word, and which platform.
It's not going to be able to handle really wild formatting or embedding, but for most of what's out there it works fine. I personally have never been sent a Word file I couldn't handle, and I've never heard of an issue with a Word or Excel file I've generated from AppleWorks.
AppleWorks comes free with iBooks, AFAIK.
Quote:
What i would like to see is an ibook at $600--so when do you think we'll see this, many people would like os10 and a cheap laptop.
The iBook is a steal at its current price (especially considering that its software bundle is pretty comprehensive). I have no idea if or when it'll drop to $600, since that's outrageously cheap for a portable, but since it's aimed at the educational market, and Apple's trying to win that back, there's significant pressure to lower the price as much as possible. It's hard to say. Prices and release dates are the hardest things to predict.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Apple will announce Powerbook G5 machines in September, ship in October.
Why, because in 2002 when Apple asked Motorola when 1.3 GHz 7457 chips would be available in at least 50k CPUs per month quantities, hoping for an April 2003 answer, Motorola came back with a Q4 2003 answer. Hugely disappointed, Apple decided to go on a crash program to put the PPC 970 into Powerbooks and eat a 3 to 5 month delay in their Powerbook update cycle. Ok, I made the preceding up, but totally realistic, no?
These machines will be 1.0, 1.2 and 1.4 GHz 1.1V PPC 970 machines with single channel PC2700 DDR SDRAM (2 slots), Firewire 800, USB 2, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, etc. 12" Powerbook at 1 GHz, 15" at 1.2 GHz, and 17" at 1.4 GHz. At 1.4 GHz and 1.1V, the CPU power budget would be around 30W. The x86 world has long accepted to use chips of such power consumption or more, and Apple will sacrifice 0.5 to 1 hour of battery life to do it if necessary.
It was such obvious sandbagging even back then. The Power Mac sales were going to continue to be weak until Fall, so Apple had to push something, and for the most part, it worked. Laptop sales are making up a bigger piece of the pie even though the products aren't that remarkable. Apple's 1Q04 (calendar 4Q03) will of course be dominated by G5 revenue.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Apple will announce Powerbook G5 machines in September, ship in October.
I'm going to not go out on a limb and say Apple gives desktop sales time to peak before unveiling PPC970 based laptops. It'd literally be too much of a good thing.
You are luckier than me, Amorph. I haven't had much luck importing papers. The footnotes seem to drift off into the nether world.....
Well, I admittendly haven't imported any academic papers. I got through college with AppleWorks, but it was running on an Apple //c, and Windows didn't exist yet.
Ok. I have to vent for a second about all you a** holes that say you know what students need. Not all students need a toy portable like the iBook. I am a grad student / professional studying and working in Electronic Intermedia (motion graphics, 3d, video, etc). When I work on my Dual 1.42 G4 2GB Ram and 3x120 GB hard drives I can spend 45 secs or longer rendering out 1 frame in After Effects. That is a long time to wait to see if you like an affect. Can you imagine how long a slower portable with less available ram would take? I know I am not a typical student but neither are the 45 students I graduated with or the 300 undergraduate students I will be working with over the next 3 years. Those numbers are just from the 2 state schools I am attending. Can you imagine how many students that are not typical like me just in the US that may need a faster portable? But oh you think all we need is something to type on, it would be crazy to think that any student might need something more professional to run things like after effects, maya, lightwave, final cut pro, avid, cinema 4d, etc, etc, etc. Think with some intelligence before you decide whats good for everybody in a group. Right now we are thinking about recommending more powerful PC portables to our students even though it breaks my heart.
If Apple did make a 9/10" sub-ibook, it would have cd-rom drive only, no firewire, one usb, 20 GB HD, and as few moving parts as possible, though it would likely still look like an ibook.
First (to make it clear for others), they *wouldn't* make such a thing.
And even if that were the case, it *would* have FireWire, because that's the whole point of subnotebooks as far as I can see: carry it around anywhere you go, but when you need some more space / an optical drive / a camera / whatever, you've got FireWire and USB slots to plug stuff into.
I'm going to not go out on a limb and say Apple gives desktop sales time to peak before unveiling PPC970 based laptops. It'd literally be too much of a good thing.
I actually did think about this, and that's why I said an announce date in September and shipping in October. That gives them 3 months of Power Mac G5 sales. Then again, I thought what does it matter? Since the profit margins for Power Macs and Powerbooks are equally huge and the products are also in the same price range, how could it hurt. Would a person who bought a Power Mac G5 buy a Powerbook G5 5 months later?
On top of that, there would be a very clear delineation of performance between Powerbooks and Power Macs. Due to heat dissipation and power consumption concerns, a PowerMac will always be faster than the top of the line Powerbook, so the two markets will not overlap that much anymore due to a wide performance difference.
Hopefully, a G5 mini in the $1000 to $2000 range and an iMac G5 are in the works as well. Going down the price range with a hot new product should only make the potential market bigger and bigger, but yes, they definitely have to have their high margin products sell without competition for awhile.
Ok. I have to vent for a second about all you a** holes that say you know what students need.
The iBook isn't the be-all and end-all solution for all students. It is, however, a good solution for most (and keep in mind here that "students" means K-12 at least as much as college students as far as the iBook is concerned).
Quote:
I am a grad student / professional studying and working in Electronic Intermedia (motion graphics, 3d, video, etc). When I work on my Dual 1.42 G4 2GB Ram and 3x120 GB hard drives I can spend 45 secs or longer rendering out 1 frame in After Effects. [...] it would be crazy to think that any student might need something more professional to run things like after effects, maya, lightwave, final cut pro, avid, cinema 4d, etc, etc, etc.
You used the word professional twice. Apple has a professional line for professional needs. If the PowerBook is not adequate to the tasks you require for whatever reason, that's a shame, but it has nothing to do with the suitability of iBooks for the general student population. I would be surprised if your college was going to PC laptops in the iBook's price range in order to run the above apps, so again the iBook is simply not targeted at you. The statement about what it's good for obviously apply generally, not absolutely, or Apple would be showing off iBooks on their FCP, Shake and Logic product pages.
Comments
It was clearly about share of marked
Originally posted by grad student
this is exactly what apple does, and this works for apples business model, [ie: high margin niche player] - but in the grand scheme of things, apple does indeed compete with Dell, and a lot of people DO run over to Dell after looking at Apple's offerings.
Well, part of the point is that there is only room for one Dell in the world--just ask Gateway. I do think there is room for one Dell and one Apple to both be profitable companies. Apple could not survive on Dell's margins.
I don't thing Apple is sitting on some top-secret uber laptop they just won't sell us, though. More likely there have simply been bugs and delays they didn't expect. Even "clearing out inventory" hasn't been that big of a concern since Apple got it's inventories under control.
Originally posted by jouster
Edit: So, Amorph, what is keeping the iBooks back - just the PowerBooks being relatively slow?
In terms of CPU, nothing. The 900MHz 750fx G3 is the fastest G3 IBM ships, and it's clocked as high as the 750fx can go. When IBM rolls out the 750gx late this year/early next year, or if Apple decides to migrate to Motorola's 7447, the iBook will get another bump. If it goes to the 7447, it'll probably get an upgrade from the G3's 60x bus to the G4's MaxBus, which will mean a motherboard revision.
In terms of other technologies, Apple has to make the iBook cheap, quiet and durable, and keep the battery life good. Performance simply is not a primary concern for that model - it only has to be fast enough.
As far as other features go, I have to agree that the lack of spanning in the consumer models is a purely gratuitous omission. I've been grumbling about that for years. It used to be a bedrock Mac feature, and it still could be very easily. </rant> The rest of the machine's features are balanced relative to the price and the design goals.
Still waiting for a lightweight subnotebook from Apple, despite unpopular opinion.
www.dynamism.com has details. It is kinda overpriced I must admit.
If Apple did make a 9/10" sub-ibook, it would have cd-rom drive only, no firewire, one usb, 20 GB HD, and as few moving parts as possible, though it would likely still look like an ibook.
Jaedreth
I admit it's disappointing not to have new laptops now. but lets' face it most people don't need but 800mgz usb, internal modem, card slot or 8011b wireless. Most students don't need much for wireless and writing papers and doing internet. let's not fall into the mgz myth, yes i won't buy till new architecture, but many students by refurbished laptops just to get a laptop, knowing that when a company releases one it is pricey and in 6 months obsolete. so maybe apple does better by lowering the price of laptops so more can get them. My present software to view images from my hospitals server only needs 266mhz--96ram,--remember those numbers-- so that's all i need, but do you think i can find a cheap laptop with warranty with 266....no way, faster faster faster for what...most students and kids and more than 90% of people need longer battery life than more speed, few programs require more than 1ghz.....if i was a student then i would look forward to a laptop by apple and save 400 bucks. these socalled tablet pc's are 1.3ghz, so we as nutzy apple people entertain ourselves with these forums, yes i want to hear the scoop, what impresses me more is that apple is slowly moving more stuff and growing into the market i want apple to get to 10-15% market share and gets its name out, more has been done with iPod than other hardware to cause people to switch. Let's wait some more My work won't be updated for 3-6 months if then, when my work place moves i will move to a new non wintel laptop. My iMac dv 400 works just fine.
Hey by the way does the new appleworks read .doc word documents? I may need to get either word for os10 or appleworks. Maybe i can find a student to get me one of those university deals. students and even my self like to save big $$$$$. What i would like to see is an ibook at $600--so when do you think we'll see this, many people would like os10 and a cheap laptop. My wife would like a apple laptop, but she doesn't want to spend big $ for email and word processing. HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED. Maybe get the price down.
Originally posted by NOFEER
Hey by the way does the new appleworks read .doc word documents?
Yes, and it also can save in .doc format. You can even chose which version of Word, and which platform.
It's not going to be able to handle really wild formatting or embedding, but for most of what's out there it works fine. I personally have never been sent a Word file I couldn't handle, and I've never heard of an issue with a Word or Excel file I've generated from AppleWorks.
AppleWorks comes free with iBooks, AFAIK.
What i would like to see is an ibook at $600--so when do you think we'll see this, many people would like os10 and a cheap laptop.
The iBook is a steal at its current price (especially considering that its software bundle is pretty comprehensive). I have no idea if or when it'll drop to $600, since that's outrageously cheap for a portable, but since it's aimed at the educational market, and Apple's trying to win that back, there's significant pressure to lower the price as much as possible. It's hard to say. Prices and release dates are the hardest things to predict.
Why, because in 2002 when Apple asked Motorola when 1.3 GHz 7457 chips would be available in at least 50k CPUs per month quantities, hoping for an April 2003 answer, Motorola came back with a Q4 2003 answer. Hugely disappointed, Apple decided to go on a crash program to put the PPC 970 into Powerbooks and eat a 3 to 5 month delay in their Powerbook update cycle. Ok, I made the preceding up, but totally realistic, no?
These machines will be 1.0, 1.2 and 1.4 GHz 1.1V PPC 970 machines with single channel PC2700 DDR SDRAM (2 slots), Firewire 800, USB 2, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, etc. 12" Powerbook at 1 GHz, 15" at 1.2 GHz, and 17" at 1.4 GHz. At 1.4 GHz and 1.1V, the CPU power budget would be around 30W. The x86 world has long accepted to use chips of such power consumption or more, and Apple will sacrifice 0.5 to 1 hour of battery life to do it if necessary.
Now, if only 1 GHz PPC 7457 chips cost $80.
It was such obvious sandbagging even back then. The Power Mac sales were going to continue to be weak until Fall, so Apple had to push something, and for the most part, it worked. Laptop sales are making up a bigger piece of the pie even though the products aren't that remarkable. Apple's 1Q04 (calendar 4Q03) will of course be dominated by G5 revenue.
Originally posted by THT
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Apple will announce Powerbook G5 machines in September, ship in October.
I'm going to not go out on a limb and say Apple gives desktop sales time to peak before unveiling PPC970 based laptops. It'd literally be too much of a good thing.
Originally posted by jouster
You are luckier than me, Amorph. I haven't had much luck importing papers. The footnotes seem to drift off into the nether world.....
Well, I admittendly haven't imported any academic papers. I got through college with AppleWorks, but it was running on an Apple //c, and Windows didn't exist yet.
Originally posted by jaedreth
If Apple did make a 9/10" sub-ibook, it would have cd-rom drive only, no firewire, one usb, 20 GB HD, and as few moving parts as possible, though it would likely still look like an ibook.
First (to make it clear for others), they *wouldn't* make such a thing.
And even if that were the case, it *would* have FireWire, because that's the whole point of subnotebooks as far as I can see: carry it around anywhere you go, but when you need some more space / an optical drive / a camera / whatever, you've got FireWire and USB slots to plug stuff into.
Originally posted by Eugene
I'm going to not go out on a limb and say Apple gives desktop sales time to peak before unveiling PPC970 based laptops. It'd literally be too much of a good thing.
I actually did think about this, and that's why I said an announce date in September and shipping in October. That gives them 3 months of Power Mac G5 sales. Then again, I thought what does it matter? Since the profit margins for Power Macs and Powerbooks are equally huge and the products are also in the same price range, how could it hurt. Would a person who bought a Power Mac G5 buy a Powerbook G5 5 months later?
On top of that, there would be a very clear delineation of performance between Powerbooks and Power Macs. Due to heat dissipation and power consumption concerns, a PowerMac will always be faster than the top of the line Powerbook, so the two markets will not overlap that much anymore due to a wide performance difference.
Hopefully, a G5 mini in the $1000 to $2000 range and an iMac G5 are in the works as well. Going down the price range with a hot new product should only make the potential market bigger and bigger, but yes, they definitely have to have their high margin products sell without competition for awhile.
Originally posted by manmadereality
Ok. I have to vent for a second about all you a** holes that say you know what students need.
The iBook isn't the be-all and end-all solution for all students. It is, however, a good solution for most (and keep in mind here that "students" means K-12 at least as much as college students as far as the iBook is concerned).
I am a grad student / professional studying and working in Electronic Intermedia (motion graphics, 3d, video, etc). When I work on my Dual 1.42 G4 2GB Ram and 3x120 GB hard drives I can spend 45 secs or longer rendering out 1 frame in After Effects. [...] it would be crazy to think that any student might need something more professional to run things like after effects, maya, lightwave, final cut pro, avid, cinema 4d, etc, etc, etc.
You used the word professional twice. Apple has a professional line for professional needs. If the PowerBook is not adequate to the tasks you require for whatever reason, that's a shame, but it has nothing to do with the suitability of iBooks for the general student population. I would be surprised if your college was going to PC laptops in the iBook's price range in order to run the above apps, so again the iBook is simply not targeted at you. The statement about what it's good for obviously apply generally, not absolutely, or Apple would be showing off iBooks on their FCP, Shake and Logic product pages.