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.
GEE WHIZ DID I STIKE A NOTE HERE--you are not typical, and what laptop would do the things you would like to do. as a market you are a minority, can a wintel machine back the muscle of a desktop setup you have? tell me which one. The education market is elemetary, highschool, college and post grad. I want as many people with a mac, and right now at elementary, highschool and my sons college apple rocks its THE laptop to have but other things are obsticals. but if apple can get a laptop with wireless at aprox 1gz and get the price down below 800 or 750 more students would get one. i got my son a refurbished 850 dell cheap used and cheap, he wanted an ibook but hey lifes a b...tch
We are all frustrated about this laptop thing, if a new laptop came out today i wouldn't buy till jan anyway, but new better would be here quicker. chill, you are using too much of your energy on this.
Would a person who bought a Power Mac G5 buy a Powerbook G5 5 months later?
That's a possibility.
Apple's not going to sell much more than ~800K units a quarter, so it makes much more sense for them to have on strong product in the Power Mac G5 for now rather than dilute its popularity immediately with a PowerBook G5 announcement. You'd rather have one product go stale, then introduce a fresh product rather than have two products grow stale in relatively the same timeframe.
It doesnt make sense for Apple to ditch the PowerBook G4 until unit sales completely drop off. And that won't be identifiable as a trend for at least another half year or more. PowerBook sales only barely dropped last quarter vs the one that ended in April despite a complete lack of updates. iBook sales skyrocketed despite a relatively meager update. I think Apple is currently satisfied with their laptop line-up whereas they desperately needed the Power Mac G5 on the desktop side.
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.
Now, if only 1 GHz PPC 7457 chips cost $80.
I tend to agree with the above. I wouldn't be surprised to see a mid to late August announcement, but ship dates in the later October timeframe (much like the G5 desktop was done).
Something else to cogitate about ... IBM admitted to have the next version of the 970 in prototype. Some may think 980, but it may mean 970 in a 90nm process. Originally, around the MPF '02 time, IBM said that the 130 process would be followed quickly by the 90 process in about 6 months. And we know how IBM can "sand bag".
I think the 15" has been delayed to fit it into the update cycles of the 12" and 17" which are 6 months old now. Apple probably wants to keep the "Pro Line Laptops" together.
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).
Y 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.
You missed my point. I'm not saying iBooks aren't right for about 3/4 of the college population what I am saying is there still about 1/4 (maybe more) of the college population that needs more in a machine. Right now how much of the market share does Apple have overall? About 3-4% right? They have made a nice living catering to a nitch. If you want to continue spreading your market share you have to target more nitches. The school (really big university) I just graduated from no longer sells Apples on campus. As of yesterday the only computer on campus for sale is Dell. In the art department "art department!!?!!" they push the use of Dell. I hate Dell. I really hate Dell. The school I'm going to (even bigger university) recommends that portables not even be purchased.
There are several notebook systems from PC manufacturers (1 is going to be exhibited and sold at Siggraph) with:
17" 16x10 screen ATI Radeon 9000
Dual 3.06 GHz P4
Ultra DMA 80 GB HDD, Bluetooth, WiFi,
3 USB 2Firewire, CD/DVD-RW
7.9lbs
If you want to see any number of these companies pick up a trade magazine like Producer, EMedia, Video Systems or Film and Video. I'm not going to give anybody more business by naming names. Now I know that Apple can at least produce a 1.3 or Dual 1GHz with 200 mHz Bus 2 GB Ram and a 60 GB HD and still sell it for around $3200. I would be happy to pay that much. I don't think that it is too much to ask for a portable. Do you?
You missed my point. I'm not saying iBooks aren't right for about 3/4 of the college population what I am saying is there still about 1/4 (maybe more) of the college population that needs more in a machine. Right now how much of the market share does Apple have overall? About 3-4% right? They have made a nice living catering to a nitch. If you want to continue spreading your market share you have to target more nitches. The school (really big university) I just graduated from no longer sells Apples on campus. As of yesterday the only computer on campus for sale is Dell. In the art department "art department!!?!!" they push the use of Dell. I hate Dell. I really hate Dell. The school I'm going to (even bigger university) recommends that portables not even be purchased.
There are several notebook systems from PC manufacturers (1 is going to be exhibited and sold at Siggraph) with:
17" 16x10 screen ATI Radeon 9000
Dual 3.06 GHz P4
Ultra DMA 80 GB HDD, Bluetooth, WiFi,
3 USB 2Firewire, CD/DVD-RW
7.9lbs
If you want to see any number of these companies pick up a trade magazine like Producer, EMedia, Video Systems or Film and Video. I'm not going to give anybody more business by naming names. Now I know that Apple can at least produce a 1.3 or Dual 1GHz with 200 mHz Bus 2 GB Ram and a 60 GB HD and still sell it for around $3200. I would be happy to pay that much. I don't think that it is too much to ask for a portable. Do you?
Has anyone else even heard of these? I haven't and to be quite honest, I don't believe for a second that they exist right now. AlienWare, and some others, have a single 3.06 GHz P4 and they cook and destroy a battery quite quickly. I have never read or heard about any dual processor laptop, and considering the heat produced by a P4 3.06 I don't believe that they could be put into a portable, especially at that weight, unless they wanted to put so many fans in them that they sounded like a jet engine and got about half an hour of battery life.
There are several notebook systems from PC manufacturers (1 is going to be exhibited and sold at Siggraph) with:
17" 16x10 screen ATI Radeon 9000
Dual 3.06 GHz P4
Ultra DMA 80 GB HDD, Bluetooth, WiFi,
3 USB 2Firewire, CD/DVD-RW
7.9lbs
There is no way that it contains dual P4s, the P4 can not be use in multiprocessing environments. Only a Xeon would be up to the task, but it runs terribly hot, is very expensive, and it consumes a large amount of power, even more than the P4.
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.Would a person who bought a Power Mac G5 buy a Powerbook G5 5 months later?
I think that the advent of the G5 PowerBook is held off simply by technological problems. My guess is the marketing and sales guys would love to have a G5 PowerBook. It just isn't possible yet.
Would a person who bought a Power Mac G5 buy a Powerbook G5 5 months later?
[/QUOTE]
Certainly. In the WWDC keynote video did you see how many people had PowerBooks in the audience? You have to think that lots of them have towers in their offices. Think of photographers who make their money by photography. They carry tens of thousands of dollars of lenses around because those are the tools they need to earn a living.
However, I will say that gradually more and more people will do the calculation and say that the laptop is all they need.
Anyone talking to resellers lately about PB stock on hand? Isn't the channel kind of lean right now? It'd be nice to get some feel for what's going on. MacMall, for instance, says they have all models in stock. They sure have lots of incentives. I wonder how long it'll take to burn off existing stock.
" what I am saying is there still about 1/4 (maybe more) of the college population that needs more in a machine."
That is hard to believe--only students involved in computer modeling, DV editing and the like need a beefier laptop than an iBook...and they know what they need, so they get a PowerBook.
Please post a link to one of these dual P4 laptops--they are pretty far out there, spec-wise.
"Year of the laptop" reminds me a lot of "death of the CRT"
Total marketing crap. I don't believe he meant that notebook sales would surpass desktop sales or anything else. Such speculation gives the statement too much credit.
By the way, Appleworks is not truly compatible with Word documents no matter what Apple says. These days, most of my computing time is spent writing and I have both Word and Appleworks. I also have both versions of Word, Windows and Mac. Most formating is completely lost or garbled when opening a .doc in Appleworks. In all honesty, Textedit does a better job with Word docs than AW. AW may work fine as a stand alone product, but it does not play well with others.
It's been said by many others before, but "Year of the Laptop" was simply relating to laptop sales. Apple's laptop sales are growing in a marketplace where desktops are declining. Other manufacturers are finding the same thing, IBM recently stated that laptops were accounting for 55% of personal system sales. Fred Anderson talked about future G5 Powermac sales not reaching as high as Powermac sales from a couple of years ago, and attributed some of this to the availability of the 17" Powerbook.
As usual, Jobs was right, however the interpretations and hopes of many of us has taken the statement and made it into more than it was.
You missed my point. I'm not saying iBooks aren't right for about 3/4 of the college population what I am saying is there still about 1/4 (maybe more) of the college population that needs more in a machine.
Your point still isn't clear from here: Some portion of the college population (but 25%?!) needs something more than anything Apple offers. You made it sound like you were referring only to the iBook.
Quote:
Right now how much of the market share does Apple have overall? About 3-4% right? They have made a nice living catering to a nitch. If you want to continue spreading your market share you have to target more nitches. The school (really big university) I just graduated from no longer sells Apples on campus. As of yesterday the only computer on campus for sale is Dell. In the art department "art department!!?!!" they push the use of Dell. I hate Dell. I really hate Dell. The school I'm going to (even bigger university) recommends that portables not even be purchased.
These are never technological decisions. If Apple rolled out 10GHz G5 laptops with 64GB of RAM and 5TB hard drives, weighing 3 pounds and sporting 40 hours of battery life, these decisions would not budge. Someone decided that since everyone uses Wintel, and all the applications are on Wintel, they should go all Wintel to make things simpler. Dell probably made the decision a little easier $$$ wise in order to secure their position as sole supplier to several major customers.
Also, huge decisions like this tend to be based on mature trends. Apple only recently stopped seeing fallout from its tailspin in the mid- to late-90s, and decisions like the ones your university made will probably carry forward some time after Apple releases a killer lineup.
Quote:
17" 16x10 screen ATI Radeon 9000
Dual 3.06 GHz P4
Ultra DMA 80 GB HDD, Bluetooth, WiFi,
3 USB 2Firewire, CD/DVD-RW
7.9lbs
Dual P4s are impossible in any form factor. If a Dual Xeon (or dual Itanium) laptops exists I'd be shocked and amazed - and such a beast be a luggable desktop and space heater rather than a true portable because of the nonexistent battery life, and therefore that much less interesting as a video editing workstation.
It's true that Apple can't compete with impossible machines, but not especially interesting.
Quote:
If you want to see any number of these companies pick up a trade magazine like Producer, EMedia, Video Systems or Film and Video. I'm not going to give anybody more business by naming names. Now I know that Apple can at least produce a 1.3 or Dual 1GHz with 200 mHz Bus 2 GB Ram and a 60 GB HD and still sell it for around $3200. I would be happy to pay that much. I don't think that it is too much to ask for a portable. Do you?
The chip that would allow them to go to 1.3GHz with a 200MHz bus is either just shipping now or shipping sometime soon - reports vary. How soon Apple can ship a laptop based on that CPU (the MPC7457) depends on how many of them Motorola can produce - and unfortunately, fabrication is Motorola's Achilles heel. So Apple might have to stockpile them for some time, or keep the price artificially high in order to depress sales so that orders don't run away from availability. Or, if Motorola has (finally) started to clean up their fabs, we might see them fairly shortly, at reasonable prices. Or Apple might leap to the low-voltage G5 - if IBM is producing those in sufficient quantity. There are a lot of variables in play here, and we just don't know what their values are.
Rest assured that Apple will release an updated PowerBook as soon as they are able to. They haven't been shy about doing that, and I see no indication that they've been holding anything back - at least, not CPU-wise.
You know a lot of people have responded to what was just a venting about the fact you can't lump all the college students into 1 group labeled students. There are plenty of colleges out there as well as major universities that cater to a specific segment of the college student population. Some would be a school like Ga Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc and then others like School of Visual Arts, Ringling, Sav. College of Art and Design. These schools have high percentages of students that need more than what is currently available in the powerbook.
and this is just 1 company. Remember to scroll all the way down to the specifications not just the ones next to the picture or in the product description. I was surprised as everybody else but there it was on page 36 of my Siggraph 2003 suplement.
Again, all my initial post was ment to do was vent about labelling all students in one group. I didn't mean to hurt any feelings.
It's a con. If you read the specs it doesn't say anywhere that the laptop contains two actual processors. Instead it's using a single 3GHz pentium with hyperthreading technology (whatever that is) that gives it some of the features of a dual processor arrangement.
and this is just 1 company. Remember to scroll all the way down to the specifications not just the ones next to the picture or in the product description. I was surprised as everybody else but there it was on page 36 of my Siggraph 2003 suplement.
[/B]
A marketing ploy, they are calling the HyperThreading (SMT) capabiltiy of the P4 as a dual! It is only single processor and HT only gives max 10% improvement for mult-threaded apps anyway.
ManmadeReality, I think you are right to be frustrated about the lack of laptops updates until now.
But the dual 1.42 rig you described would cream pretty much any laptop for the tasks you describe. Since what you study requires the highest specs possible, you are probably going to be using a G5 soon right? AND then laptops will be even further behind, be they Wintel or Apple.
My point is that surely you would avoid doing that type of work on a laptop if at all possible, so why flog yourself in a vain attempt to find a suitable one?
I use a laptop for the usual three things, than go to a campus lab if I feel like playing around with a 3D app. It seems to work pretty well, though I am admittedly only doing it for a bit of fun. My major certainly does NOT require computing power!
Edit: Holy %#@*!!! That laptop you link to is over $6000!!!
"Year of the laptop" reminds me a lot of "death of the CRT"
Total marketing crap.
Yup, that's how I understood it as well. It was also like the "beyond the rumor sites, way beyond" before the FP iMac G4 was announced. However, we should get new PowerBooks before the end of the year (at the very latest) nonetheless.
The longer I wait, the more patient I grow. At this point I'm just fine with a fully functional and perfectly useable iBook.
Sorry, no sale. The "HyperThreaded" P4 is not even close to a (hypothetical) dual P4, no matter what that company wants you to think. Hyperthreading gains you about 10% in performance when it works. True dual processing gains you 50%-80% or better. If you're running intensive, single-threaded code (which is a common case in the fields you're referring to), hyperthreading can actually hurt performance relative to a plain old P4.
Comments
Originally posted by manmadereality
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.
GEE WHIZ DID I STIKE A NOTE HERE--you are not typical, and what laptop would do the things you would like to do. as a market you are a minority, can a wintel machine back the muscle of a desktop setup you have? tell me which one. The education market is elemetary, highschool, college and post grad. I want as many people with a mac, and right now at elementary, highschool and my sons college apple rocks its THE laptop to have but other things are obsticals. but if apple can get a laptop with wireless at aprox 1gz and get the price down below 800 or 750 more students would get one. i got my son a refurbished 850 dell cheap used and cheap, he wanted an ibook but hey lifes a b...tch
We are all frustrated about this laptop thing, if a new laptop came out today i wouldn't buy till jan anyway, but new better would be here quicker. chill, you are using too much of your energy on this.
Originally posted by THT
Would a person who bought a Power Mac G5 buy a Powerbook G5 5 months later?
That's a possibility.
Apple's not going to sell much more than ~800K units a quarter, so it makes much more sense for them to have on strong product in the Power Mac G5 for now rather than dilute its popularity immediately with a PowerBook G5 announcement. You'd rather have one product go stale, then introduce a fresh product rather than have two products grow stale in relatively the same timeframe.
It doesnt make sense for Apple to ditch the PowerBook G4 until unit sales completely drop off. And that won't be identifiable as a trend for at least another half year or more. PowerBook sales only barely dropped last quarter vs the one that ended in April despite a complete lack of updates. iBook sales skyrocketed despite a relatively meager update. I think Apple is currently satisfied with their laptop line-up whereas they desperately needed the Power Mac G5 on the desktop side.
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.
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.
I tend to agree with the above. I wouldn't be surprised to see a mid to late August announcement, but ship dates in the later October timeframe (much like the G5 desktop was done).
Something else to cogitate about ... IBM admitted to have the next version of the 970 in prototype. Some may think 980, but it may mean 970 in a 90nm process. Originally, around the MPF '02 time, IBM said that the 130 process would be followed quickly by the 90 process in about 6 months. And we know how IBM can "sand bag".
I think the 15" has been delayed to fit it into the update cycles of the 12" and 17" which are 6 months old now. Apple probably wants to keep the "Pro Line Laptops" together.
Originally posted by Amorph
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).
Y 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.
You missed my point. I'm not saying iBooks aren't right for about 3/4 of the college population what I am saying is there still about 1/4 (maybe more) of the college population that needs more in a machine. Right now how much of the market share does Apple have overall? About 3-4% right? They have made a nice living catering to a nitch. If you want to continue spreading your market share you have to target more nitches. The school (really big university) I just graduated from no longer sells Apples on campus. As of yesterday the only computer on campus for sale is Dell. In the art department "art department!!?!!" they push the use of Dell. I hate Dell. I really hate Dell. The school I'm going to (even bigger university) recommends that portables not even be purchased.
There are several notebook systems from PC manufacturers (1 is going to be exhibited and sold at Siggraph) with:
17" 16x10 screen ATI Radeon 9000
Dual 3.06 GHz P4
Ultra DMA 80 GB HDD, Bluetooth, WiFi,
3 USB 2Firewire, CD/DVD-RW
7.9lbs
If you want to see any number of these companies pick up a trade magazine like Producer, EMedia, Video Systems or Film and Video. I'm not going to give anybody more business by naming names. Now I know that Apple can at least produce a 1.3 or Dual 1GHz with 200 mHz Bus 2 GB Ram and a 60 GB HD and still sell it for around $3200. I would be happy to pay that much. I don't think that it is too much to ask for a portable. Do you?
Originally posted by manmadereality
You missed my point. I'm not saying iBooks aren't right for about 3/4 of the college population what I am saying is there still about 1/4 (maybe more) of the college population that needs more in a machine. Right now how much of the market share does Apple have overall? About 3-4% right? They have made a nice living catering to a nitch. If you want to continue spreading your market share you have to target more nitches. The school (really big university) I just graduated from no longer sells Apples on campus. As of yesterday the only computer on campus for sale is Dell. In the art department "art department!!?!!" they push the use of Dell. I hate Dell. I really hate Dell. The school I'm going to (even bigger university) recommends that portables not even be purchased.
There are several notebook systems from PC manufacturers (1 is going to be exhibited and sold at Siggraph) with:
17" 16x10 screen ATI Radeon 9000
Dual 3.06 GHz P4
Ultra DMA 80 GB HDD, Bluetooth, WiFi,
3 USB 2Firewire, CD/DVD-RW
7.9lbs
If you want to see any number of these companies pick up a trade magazine like Producer, EMedia, Video Systems or Film and Video. I'm not going to give anybody more business by naming names. Now I know that Apple can at least produce a 1.3 or Dual 1GHz with 200 mHz Bus 2 GB Ram and a 60 GB HD and still sell it for around $3200. I would be happy to pay that much. I don't think that it is too much to ask for a portable. Do you?
Has anyone else even heard of these? I haven't and to be quite honest, I don't believe for a second that they exist right now. AlienWare, and some others, have a single 3.06 GHz P4 and they cook and destroy a battery quite quickly. I have never read or heard about any dual processor laptop, and considering the heat produced by a P4 3.06 I don't believe that they could be put into a portable, especially at that weight, unless they wanted to put so many fans in them that they sounded like a jet engine and got about half an hour of battery life.
Originally posted by manmadereality
There are several notebook systems from PC manufacturers (1 is going to be exhibited and sold at Siggraph) with:
17" 16x10 screen ATI Radeon 9000
Dual 3.06 GHz P4
Ultra DMA 80 GB HDD, Bluetooth, WiFi,
3 USB 2Firewire, CD/DVD-RW
7.9lbs
There is no way that it contains dual P4s, the P4 can not be use in multiprocessing environments. Only a Xeon would be up to the task, but it runs terribly hot, is very expensive, and it consumes a large amount of power, even more than the P4.
Originally posted by THT
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.Would a person who bought a Power Mac G5 buy a Powerbook G5 5 months later?
I think that the advent of the G5 PowerBook is held off simply by technological problems. My guess is the marketing and sales guys would love to have a G5 PowerBook. It just isn't possible yet.
Would a person who bought a Power Mac G5 buy a Powerbook G5 5 months later?
[/QUOTE]
Certainly. In the WWDC keynote video did you see how many people had PowerBooks in the audience? You have to think that lots of them have towers in their offices. Think of photographers who make their money by photography. They carry tens of thousands of dollars of lenses around because those are the tools they need to earn a living.
However, I will say that gradually more and more people will do the calculation and say that the laptop is all they need.
That is hard to believe--only students involved in computer modeling, DV editing and the like need a beefier laptop than an iBook...and they know what they need, so they get a PowerBook.
Please post a link to one of these dual P4 laptops--they are pretty far out there, spec-wise.
Total marketing crap. I don't believe he meant that notebook sales would surpass desktop sales or anything else. Such speculation gives the statement too much credit.
By the way, Appleworks is not truly compatible with Word documents no matter what Apple says. These days, most of my computing time is spent writing and I have both Word and Appleworks. I also have both versions of Word, Windows and Mac. Most formating is completely lost or garbled when opening a .doc in Appleworks. In all honesty, Textedit does a better job with Word docs than AW. AW may work fine as a stand alone product, but it does not play well with others.
As usual, Jobs was right, however the interpretations and hopes of many of us has taken the statement and made it into more than it was.
Originally posted by manmadereality
You missed my point. I'm not saying iBooks aren't right for about 3/4 of the college population what I am saying is there still about 1/4 (maybe more) of the college population that needs more in a machine.
Your point still isn't clear from here: Some portion of the college population (but 25%?!) needs something more than anything Apple offers. You made it sound like you were referring only to the iBook.
Right now how much of the market share does Apple have overall? About 3-4% right? They have made a nice living catering to a nitch. If you want to continue spreading your market share you have to target more nitches. The school (really big university) I just graduated from no longer sells Apples on campus. As of yesterday the only computer on campus for sale is Dell. In the art department "art department!!?!!" they push the use of Dell. I hate Dell. I really hate Dell. The school I'm going to (even bigger university) recommends that portables not even be purchased.
These are never technological decisions. If Apple rolled out 10GHz G5 laptops with 64GB of RAM and 5TB hard drives, weighing 3 pounds and sporting 40 hours of battery life, these decisions would not budge. Someone decided that since everyone uses Wintel, and all the applications are on Wintel, they should go all Wintel to make things simpler. Dell probably made the decision a little easier $$$ wise in order to secure their position as sole supplier to several major customers.
Also, huge decisions like this tend to be based on mature trends. Apple only recently stopped seeing fallout from its tailspin in the mid- to late-90s, and decisions like the ones your university made will probably carry forward some time after Apple releases a killer lineup.
17" 16x10 screen ATI Radeon 9000
Dual 3.06 GHz P4
Ultra DMA 80 GB HDD, Bluetooth, WiFi,
3 USB 2Firewire, CD/DVD-RW
7.9lbs
Dual P4s are impossible in any form factor. If a Dual Xeon (or dual Itanium) laptops exists I'd be shocked and amazed - and such a beast be a luggable desktop and space heater rather than a true portable because of the nonexistent battery life, and therefore that much less interesting as a video editing workstation.
It's true that Apple can't compete with impossible machines, but not especially interesting.
If you want to see any number of these companies pick up a trade magazine like Producer, EMedia, Video Systems or Film and Video. I'm not going to give anybody more business by naming names. Now I know that Apple can at least produce a 1.3 or Dual 1GHz with 200 mHz Bus 2 GB Ram and a 60 GB HD and still sell it for around $3200. I would be happy to pay that much. I don't think that it is too much to ask for a portable. Do you?
The chip that would allow them to go to 1.3GHz with a 200MHz bus is either just shipping now or shipping sometime soon - reports vary. How soon Apple can ship a laptop based on that CPU (the MPC7457) depends on how many of them Motorola can produce - and unfortunately, fabrication is Motorola's Achilles heel. So Apple might have to stockpile them for some time, or keep the price artificially high in order to depress sales so that orders don't run away from availability. Or, if Motorola has (finally) started to clean up their fabs, we might see them fairly shortly, at reasonable prices. Or Apple might leap to the low-voltage G5 - if IBM is producing those in sufficient quantity. There are a lot of variables in play here, and we just don't know what their values are.
Rest assured that Apple will release an updated PowerBook as soon as they are able to. They haven't been shy about doing that, and I see no indication that they've been holding anything back - at least, not CPU-wise.
Regardless you wanted a link to a Dual 3.06 P4 in a mobile laptop. http://www.1beyond.com/products/laptops.asp
and this is just 1 company. Remember to scroll all the way down to the specifications not just the ones next to the picture or in the product description. I was surprised as everybody else but there it was on page 36 of my Siggraph 2003 suplement.
Again, all my initial post was ment to do was vent about labelling all students in one group. I didn't mean to hurt any feelings.
Originally posted by manmadereality
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Regardless you wanted a link to a Dual 3.06 P4 in a mobile laptop. http://www.1beyond.com/products/laptops.asp
and this is just 1 company. Remember to scroll all the way down to the specifications not just the ones next to the picture or in the product description. I was surprised as everybody else but there it was on page 36 of my Siggraph 2003 suplement.
[/B]
A marketing ploy, they are calling the HyperThreading (SMT) capabiltiy of the P4 as a dual! It is only single processor and HT only gives max 10% improvement for mult-threaded apps anyway.
But the dual 1.42 rig you described would cream pretty much any laptop for the tasks you describe. Since what you study requires the highest specs possible, you are probably going to be using a G5 soon right? AND then laptops will be even further behind, be they Wintel or Apple.
My point is that surely you would avoid doing that type of work on a laptop if at all possible, so why flog yourself in a vain attempt to find a suitable one?
I use a laptop for the usual three things, than go to a campus lab if I feel like playing around with a 3D app. It seems to work pretty well, though I am admittedly only doing it for a bit of fun. My major certainly does NOT require computing power!
Edit: Holy %#@*!!! That laptop you link to is over $6000!!!
Originally posted by Mac Voyer
"Year of the laptop" reminds me a lot of "death of the CRT"
Total marketing crap.
Yup, that's how I understood it as well. It was also like the "beyond the rumor sites, way beyond" before the FP iMac G4 was announced. However, we should get new PowerBooks before the end of the year (at the very latest) nonetheless.
The longer I wait, the more patient I grow. At this point I'm just fine with a fully functional and perfectly useable iBook.
Escher
Originally posted by manmadereality
Regardless you wanted a link to a Dual 3.06 P4 in a mobile laptop. http://www.1beyond.com/products/laptops.asp
and this is just 1 company.
Sorry, no sale. The "HyperThreaded" P4 is not even close to a (hypothetical) dual P4, no matter what that company wants you to think. Hyperthreading gains you about 10% in performance when it works. True dual processing gains you 50%-80% or better. If you're running intensive, single-threaded code (which is a common case in the fields you're referring to), hyperthreading can actually hurt performance relative to a plain old P4.
Don't believe the hype.