Apple Powerbook: The King is Dead; Long Live the King
It's official: Apple has announced the first shipping models of its Intel-powered computers, beginning with its newest top-of-the-line notebook, the MacBook Pro. I can't tell you how much I loathe that name, evocative as it is of golden arches, nor how badly I want one!
Think the "Megahertz Myth" was just a defensive marketing gimmick? Try this on for size. The new MacBooks are powered by a chip called the Intel Core Duo. It's clocked at an apparently pedestrian 1.83 GHz. But because of its architecture (essentially two processors on the same chip, plus ample amounts of cache, a speedy frontside bus and fast RAM), Apple's claiming a 400% increase in speed over it Motorola-powered G4 PowerBook running at 1.67 GHz.
There's too much about the new computer for me to grasp, let alone describe. The big question mark is, of course, will any of my programs run on it? The move to Intel chips requires some adjustments to software, and not all vendors have made those adjustments or even the commitment to make them. In the meantime, Apple is including an emulator called Rosetta which is supposed to allow PowerPC-optimized software to run on the Intel models, but I haven't seen any benchmarks as to how efficient this process is in real life.
Apple's taking orders for the new MacBook (as well as for an Intel iMac), but shipping isn't expected until next month.
As a not insignificant footnote, as far as I can tell from the photos on Apple's website, there is not an "Intel Inside" sticker on the machine.
Technorati tags: Apple | Intel | MacBook Pro
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Apple's marketing in terms of processor speed is starting to remind me more and more of rock music critics and their favorite artists, whose new songs/CDs are praised to the skies until the next one comes out, then they tell you how great this one is compared to the last, disappointing album.
We've got G4s and G5s at the office, and they're both more than fast enough for our needs. But at the time they came out, they were touted as being faster than the similar level Windows PCs with their Intel chipsets. Now that Intel is producing for Mr. Jobs, they're making the G4s and G5 processors sound like they're about as fast as Intel's 8086s, while the new machines are like lightning...and now they really are faster than Windows. Which they may be, but we're getting into Boy Who Cried Wolf territory here.
(I also grumble about the praise given to the search function on OS X 10.4, not so much that it isn't good, but that most writers in the Mac camp failed to mention what a piece of crap the search function on OS X 10.3 and earlier was, compared with the search function on the Windows XP and even Windows 98 machines.)
Posted by: John at January 11, 2006 10:32 PM