Intel PowerBook Rumor Mill 362
catdriver writes "AppleInsider has an article guessing about Apple's new Intel portable offerings in early 2006. 'With the initiation of the Intel Power Mac project last month, all five of Apple's Intel Macintosh projects are now said to be underway and moving at an exhaustive, yet fruitful pace. It should come as no surprise that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is reportedly leading the charge, with his heart set on making 2006 the next 1984.' With Mac OS X for x86 now catching up to its PPC sibling, is Apple ready to take the plunge?"
could backfire (Score:3, Interesting)
First glance you may say, good for apple, they still get the money. However, what that starts to do is move mindshare for apple to a premium hardware supplier, not a platform supplier.
I believe there are many people that will consider doing this, and I think this could hurt OSX. This move could put Apple (overtime) going Head to Head with Dell not MS.
Acquisition plans on hold... (Score:2, Interesting)
I've no plans to buy PC or Mac hardware until I see the value proposition Apple offers in its future products. I am all Mac PowerPC now, but I keep eyeing those cheap Wintel boxes (today it is $299.00 after mail in rebate for an HP with 15" LCD). Hard to resist a bargain.
I don't need new hardware, but if the Mactels allow me to run PC application via Wine or some other software, I'll go for it real fast.
What I would really like to is have one drive boot into MacOS and another with an alternative OS. I would like the Apple computer to boot any PC OS. I don't care if Mac OS X never boots on standard PC hardware.
Mostly I am just curios as to how Apple will engineer these machines.
Change is good.
Re:Should anyone be surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
My next laptop (Score:5, Interesting)
Craploads of RAM and HD space
Running the latest version of OSX
Running any version of Windows and Linux in VM spaces
Just reduced my development test machines from four to one
I've currently got six separate machines. My main development box (Suse 9.3), my game box (WinXP), and my four test machines for compatability testing ( WinXP, Win2k on cheap beige boxen, Suse9.3 on a decent IBM Thinkpad, OSX on a MacMini ). Reduce my test machines down to one machine that's also my portable. Lowers my power bill, more desk space, and a portable I can do ANYTHING on (from development, to BF2/Civ4)
Re:No more 12"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Will it cost more than a Dell running Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider if you said that about Ferrari or BMW. They have high priced product, and they certainly sell a lower volume than companies that focus on cheap product that has a large market share. Their business sense is generally not questioned; they have a loyal customer base who is willing to pay for their brand. Even items with the Ferrari and BMW logo like jackets and... well... laptops sell well.
Apple is a brand associated with high quality products. Thus they do not compete on price, but rather on perceived quality.
--
Evan
Re:What about applications? (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple's making a push for serious imaging with Aperture. I'm wondering if Aperture is a Photoshop killer for those who using Photoshop is overkill? We (large newspaper) changed our workflow to tap into more of PS's power, but for the longest time, we were using Photoshop for about five features that the run-of-the-mill imaging apps didn't provide. It was like using an A-bomb to squash a mouse.
If they throw a decent spreadsheet into iWork, THAT would be enough to pull us off Word, too. I don't know that the cupboard is that bare for MacIntel Powerbooks without MS or Adobe.
Re:I don't understand (Score:3, Interesting)
"Dream?" Fantasize is more like it. If "recompiling" was all it takes, there would be no differences between what is available under OS X from anything else. Recompiling of C or C++ code (so long as it doesn't need to interact with Quartz/Aqua) targeting PPC has been available since Day One for OS X.
While it is one thing to run faceless software that can connect to the BSD guts of OS X, once it needs to talk to the user it will have to interact with the Cocoa (Objective C) GUI layer, or be retricted to running from the Terminal window or X11 or maybe use a Java presentation layer -- none of which are completely satisfactory (assuming there is a significant amount of user interaction).
However, I note that SBCL is supported [sourceforge.net] on both PowerPC and Intel hardware, under OS X and PPC in particular (but NOT OS X on X86), as well as most *nix flavors on X86 platforms. Windozers apparently need not apply. If you want to run SBCL on a Mac, you'd better be securing one of the last PPC Macs, as there seems to be no X86 port in progress. Sadly, the SBCL port is (apparently) *not* an Xcode implementation, as they would be able to produce a universal binary that would run under both X86 and PPC platforms by merely clicking the appropriate checkbox at build time.
I guess you fall into that camp of believers in Intel performance. I hope it comes out that way, but a lot of the PPC bigots (and I am one such) are wary of the ginormous power draws of the Intel desktop line, and are suspicious that the reduced power notebook lines give up horsepower to achieve their low power goals (which may or may not be acceptable, depending on how one uses a notebook).
Anybody got some benchmarks showing Intel notebooks vs comparable Intel desktops -- or better yet, Intel notebooks vs PowerPC notebooks, both running Linux (to remove any cloud of differing OS efficiencies that might be raised)? Such testing would make me a lot less queasy about the coming move, and guide me in whether to latch onto one of the last PPC models or wait to venture down the Intel path.
However, I do grasp onto the ray of hope that comes from the shrinking chip geometries. As they move from the 90 micron to the 65 micron production technologies, there is hope that both performance and power consumption can be improved, such that despite the (IMHO) superior RISC architecture of the PPC and the much beefier onboard vector units, the Intel design may well prove to provide greater throughput at less power. IBM seems to be (for whatever reason) 3-5 years behind Intel in implementing smaller production geometries, which do raise the stakes considerably for a chip manufacturer. But the power draws I've seen published/previewed/leaked for the coming Intel Yonah and Merom lines do not give me and comfort when compared to things like the Freescale dual core MPC8641D chip (10W at 1.4 GHz) [freescale.com] (which inexplicably is not in the cards for Mac portable use).
Prices are another area of concern, as Intel's cpu pricing is quite a bit more (several hundred $$$) than comparable PPC chips, at least in modest quantities. Supposedly the legendary monopolistic all-your-business discount will make this less of a concern.
In any event, Mac performance/pricing had apparently little or nothing to do with the move to Intel, which was apparently based on driving the iPods into video realms that were not otherwise possible without dedicated video hardware in the iPods (although the current video iPods seem to be doing quite nicely using the Broadcom chips for H.264 manipulation).
Me too on that grain of crystalline substance thing. Time will tell, just have to wait and see what develops.
Yonah.. Merom.. Dothan... (Score:2, Interesting)
Go Intel Haifa!
-phozz
Re: Could Backfire? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:could backfire (Score:1, Interesting)
Dude, you just made a good argument that they really are a platform supplier.
Take Final Cut Pro. If you're a video producer who wants to use FCP, you have to buy a Mac. Yes, Apple profits on the hardware and not the software, but what sells is the *application* as a turn-key solution. If Apple were just a "hardware company, period" then they wouldn't be producing FCP, iLife, OS X or any other software.
It must be nice to see everything in black and white, as if they HAVE to be one or the other!
Re:I don't understand (Score:2, Interesting)
There probably shouldn't be much difference in how Common Lisp looks from one implementation or platform to another. Or at least that's the portability argument. I'll deal with this first, then return to whether this looks "satisfactory".
Several Common Lisp implementations on POSIX systems are highly portable in terms of functionality; many more are not. Portabiilty is at the Lisp level, performance is in the implementation. So, it really is a question of "recompiling" your portable Lisp source. Your interaction with Quartz/Aqua/The Mac in General can be mediated by e.g. CLUI or by CLX+X11 or some combination, and look and behave pretty much exactly the same as on a host Windows or Linux or NetBSD system.
Moreover, modern CL compilers target several ISAs, and modern runtimes can cope with the performance tradeoffs among various architectures, although with varying performance and possible extension gaps from one host system to another. Consequently, non-standard libraries made available by a portable implementation can also be used cross-platform.
However, that said, there are useful non-standard libraries which aren't (yet) portably cross-platform. Many of these are experimental. One in particular is the OpenMCL Cocoa programming environment [clozure.com], which is obviously Mac OS X centric.
The Mac OS X "way" is cooperating processes. A GUI front ends for scripted or compiled programs, exchanging data with it via XML, text or binary streams, or even shared memory/CoreData storage. Most apps that you'd find on VersionTracker [versiontracker.com] for example, are exactly like this. Some of the apps are trivial GUIs for Apple-provided "command line tools" and the like. Many more are a mix of GUI and backend. Few are completely integrated within the same single program.
There is no particular reason why a bundle could not contain one or more fat binaries supporting x86 and PPC, some ruby or python scripts, and multiple GUIs -- one native Aqua/Quartz, one X11 (useful for remote X servers), one that runs an HTML server... The binaries could be standalone compiled Lisp code.
The code base that generates this would make delivery to a platform that is only X11 and x86 pretty easy... you just make new binaries (scripts and resources probably stay the same) and omit the Mac-specific stuff.
There are CL implementations for Windows that would gladly compile the Lisp backends without significant change to the source. The work would be in building the Windows-like GUI frontend.
Personally, I also far prefer the high-end G5 to any x86-derived implementation. However, I don't write Lisp (or Scheme or Python or shell scripts) specifically targetting the G5 or PPC... Most people writing Objective-C, C++ or even C probably aren't really writing non-portable code. So, having two Mac OS X platforms is probably not going to be as big a bear as supporting code for Mac OS X and any other platform, in some cases even including Linux/PPC.
Aggressive cross-platform thinking is a good move; abstracting away the pro
What's the guarantee that Intel based macs will be (Score:2, Interesting)