“It’s unclear to me how many free passes the hyperbolic Steve Jobs gets, but clearly he’s reaching the end of his allotment: Last year, he promised a 3 GHz G5 by June 30, but this week, Apple upgraded the G5 line to 1.8 GHz and 2 GHz dual processor models, with a third model, sporting a liquid-cooled 2.5 GHz processor due ‘in July’ (if we can believe that claim). So 3 GHz isn’t happening anytime soon,” Paul Thurrott writes for Paul Thurrott’s Internet-Nexus.
“…when I complain about Apple, this is pretty much the type of thing I’m talking about. There is a line between ‘promotion’ and ‘bald-faced lying,’ and Apple just crosses it a little too often for my tastes. For example, when the company writes, ‘now the Power Mac G5 offers dual processor models across the board at 1.8GHz, 2GHz and 2.5GHz, for a substantial speed boost at the top of the line,’ that’s an exageration, because the 2.5 GHz model is not available now at all, and given Apple’s history, might not meet its expected July release date as well. making that ‘substantial speed boost at the top of the line’ a little less compelling … now,” Thurrott writes.
“And when Jobs boasts about 3 GHz processors and 100 million iTunes downloads, well, that’s just irresponsible. I suspect shareholders are happy enough about the company’s other successes that they’re willing to overlook a few indiscretions. But that won’t always be the case and arguably should never be the case anyway,” Thurrott writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We agree with, and only with, what we’ve quoted from Paul Thurrott above. Now hell has really frozen over. Granted, we have to wait until June 23 to make sure Jobs doesn’t have any tricks up his sleeve, but it doesn’t look like it right now. This Thurrott article is exactly the type of thing SteveJack predicted would happen in his article “Apple CEO Jobs misses ‘3Ghz G5 within a year’ prediction by wide margin” – see link below.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Steve Jobs needs to stop making predictions he can’t hit – June 09, 2004
Apple CEO Jobs misses ‘3Ghz G5 within a year’ prediction by wide margin – June 09, 2004
It seems to me that Steve Jobs is more accurate in making predictions than Thurrott in making analysis, even when he has all the information in front of him. While it would be nice to have a 3 GHz model now, when was the last time Intel saw a 25% jump in speed? It’s never had a 50% jump in speed and considering it is new technology, I’m not surprised at the delay. I will say that perhaps Steve made a tactical error by promising 3 GHz in a year, because it might have caused some people to hold off on a buy decision instead of going with what was available now. I know I’ve waited because I figured that holding out for another year would really pump the speed up. But I don’t fault the man for thinking that he could give me 3 GHz in a year with the information he had at the time.
This is clearly the same 2.0ghz part from the Xserve that is overclocked to hell to 2.5Ghz. Sure, IBM will stamp it as a 2.5ghz part, but it really isn’t. The liquic cooling isn’t for quiet. It’s for the overclocking.
THIS IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM. IBM cannot get it’s crap together to put out parts. The only difference between Motorola and IBM now is that back then, liquid cooling wasn’t an option.
Moreover, their liquid cooling is designed by an idiot. Closed loop for 2 processors!!?!? Duh. One of the processors is going to pour HOT water on the other. So one processor will always be running hotter than the other. This has lame ass hack spelled all over it.
I’m worried again for Apple’s processor and machine design again.
Finally this machine, beyond making the entry level headless mac prohibitively expensive, is NOT suitable for a lot of pros. It’s a fully HUGE tower and it still cannot have more than 2 hard drives and one optical drive. Pathetic.
The only thing that is good about all of this is they announced it before WWDC, because it’s such a complete miserable dissappointment, it would have been a big downer. Kudos to Apple’s marketing for playing that right to get this crap news out of the way beforehand.
Expect G5 sales to stay relatively crappy.
Thurott speaks and the market speaks � Apple stockholders will not stand for this, they will simply drive the stock price higher. Wall street is not punishing Apple for shooting for the moon and only getting into orbit as a result.
Really, this is just more sour grapes from Thurott, this piece of irrelevant “nana nana na na” impresses no one. How many have been harmed by the enthusiasm of Apple’s projections? Certainly far fewer than have been harmed by the illegal activities of the MS monopoly.
In the end, the pronouncements made by Jobs are more closely related to the athlete who “guarantees” a game 7 win, they are commitment to excellence and to always making the effort to go beyond what is expected, something I will always respect.
For those without imagination, Apple issues regular guidance to the financial markets and files mountains SEC paperwork that together present a drab enough picture of expectations that are grounded in solid reality. Thurott should turn his attention to these if he is offended by Jobs.
To shake loose the old quotation, what is a corporation except that its reach should exceed its grasp?
And Dan is right, calling SJ a liar is pretty strong. He made a prediction (that he had little control over) and it missed. In the technical sense, he lied. Was it on purpose? No. Oops, the dream is shattered, Steve Jobs is human. Whoda thunk it?
it was a prediction, the ibm ceo stood right there and said the same thing. what are you going to do? its still a 25% increase in clock speed, the only thing i dont like is the inclusion of the 5200s after all this time. bottom line, the g5 with os x is the best desktop computer out there, and it just got better, no one can take that away.
So Steve was wrong about 3.0, who cares ? be happy that were not PC zombies and in control by BIG MONEY Bill Gates and all of the problems that they have. LOOK at all the fun stuff you can do on a mac and laugh at the PC world. Would you like to have a DELL or have a mac who speed is little short from it mark. So if you listen to stupid to the writer Thurrott, who is probably a PC whiner anyway, then so be it said that you can jump in the same line with him, a first class FOOL “so let it be written, so let it be done”
Read here: http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/06/09/apple/index.php
No 3.0 GHz in time promised by Steve. Really fucking stupid–not only make a prediction you can’t back up, but also cost yourself sales doing it. How many PowerMac purchasers have held off upgrading because they were waiting for 3 GHz machines that, by the above article, won’t be available even in a guestimate time range.
Further:
No G5 PowerBooks on the horizon. Again by the above article apparently in the “how the hell do we do that?” stage.
No G5 iMac on the horizon. Same place as the G5 PowerBook.
I tell ya, great design department, great OS, but the rest of the company is staffed by monkeys.
Good thing Apple fans are used to taking it up the ass.
Good Lord! Everyone bitches when Apple keeps its hand close to its chest! Now, when Steve Jobs for once tells us what’s coming and when, everyone has triple conniption fits when he misses the deadline. Some folks just cannot be pleased, no matter what.
What SJ said seems like a lie today. Let us see the same in a different way: I will give you the same facts that Steve Jobs had an year before and see if you can come to the same conclusion that SJ came to an year earlier. If yes, then he is not a liar.
There are two advantages in being pessimistic: Either you are proven right, or you are pleasantly surprised.
But, there are few people who dare to make unreasonable expectations, meet them most of the time, miss it sometimes because of a few things (that probabaly are either in or out of their control). But, these are the crazy ones. If you do not see “genius” in them, it’s not your fault. That’s what his company is about.
so i guess the idiot wants no more ‘roadmaps’ from Apple!
on the one hand, you have people keep asking what’s coming in the future. but when you’re at the edge of technology, depending on specific breakthroughs, it’s awfully hard to predict.
The new line models are blazing – I do not see what the big deal is over 3 GHz. The dual 2.5 GHz machine with dual 1.25 MHz front side buses provide almost (or more than?) 20 GB per second in raw bandwidth.
The benchmarks show its aggressive power. OS X is 64-bit optimized to utilize dual processors as are many of the apps used on OS X – so speed demands should be more than met by any of the dual proc machines.
“There is a line between ‘promotion’ and ‘bald-faced lying,’ ” Actually I don’t think this counts as promotion. In actuality Steve probably hurt sales of the G5 rather than promoted it because everyone was waiting for the 3 Ghz.
I’ll bet he has learned his lesson though and will be more circumspect in the future.
God, Thurridiot has been so wrong about Apple so many times that it really bugs me when he is even a little bit right. Well, I guess it would probably be as hard for him to be wrong 100% of the time as it is for Steve to right 100% of the time.
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Read: “Steve to be right”
Man, I wish MDN had an edit function.
I can’t believe all the posts above which clearly show that so many of you are caught in the mHz myth that was conjured up by Intel, and recently abandoned. Processor performance is not about mHz alone, it is about how a processor can process.
Sure Intel has much higher clockspeeds, but they do not have the highest performance levels. In the PC space, AMD soundly wups anything Intel has at the same mHz, and is more than competitive at a full gHz less. I would also point out that the G5 is now running at about the same mHz as the best AMD chips, which in itself is quite an accomplishment given how far behind the G4 was several years ago.
While I agree, that Steve needs to reduce the number of predicitions he makes, I can’t understand when or why predicitions have become promises. A predicition is just a predicition–its not your word of honor, or even a “this is our stated scheduled goal”. It’s pretty much like me standing in the middle of a semi-busy street and saying, “I think a car will drive pass in the next 30 seconds.” I could be on the money, or I could be bowled over by a car zooming pass in the next 5 seconds, or I could be standing there for the next 30 minutes.
Even if we upgrade a predicition to a goal, well project goals aren’t met all the time. They are there to keep the people moving forward, but ONLY a few of them are ever MUST HAVE by this date, or we can’t move on. I find it a very different thing when Steve Jobs says, “Our goal is to sell 100 million songs by 28 April 2004” vs Microsoft saying, “We will ship Longhorn in 2004”.
A 3GHz G5 chip is out of Apple’s control. Sure Jobs and company can push for a faster chip, (aside: I thought I read somewhere that a 3GHz chip has/had been produced, but wasn’t ready for prime time), but that doesn’t mean another company can deliver.
All this to say, I’m often torn between wishing Steve wouldn’t give the press and all the other naysayers statements to harp on, but I like hearing Steve’s predictions because they give me some idea of what Apple is shooting for.
Without the 3GHz prediction, I would have probably expected an upgrade to 2.2GHz in a year, and maybe a 2.5GHz two years out from the original date. Why because thats what the timelines use to be like for speed jumps, in fact, my thoughts may have been overly ambitious based on former time lines.
So the predicition/goal served its purpose, at least for me, by setting notice that the old production timelines were out the window, and faster speed jumps would be forthcoming. A year vs a year and half isn’t that much difference to me. I would expect that Apple is still pushing for a 3GHz G5 chip, and the possiblity that one might ship before Christmas is strong.
Yes wabof, that is an interesting article, but I liked it better when mrcllv linked it.
IBM knows how to cool processors, and I would be surprised if that is the problem with getting to 3.0. The “liquid cooling” is probably something very much like this:
http://www.overclockers.com/articles651/
which I personally know can cool a 2.6 ghz athlon xp silently. I think that is about 70 watts, much more than I thought the g5’s required.
Since all the g5’s seem to be rated at 20 x fsb, and in fact are probably identical chips, I bet the problem is achieving a 1.5 ghz fsb.
Why they cant stick a single g5 into an imac I can’t imagine.
“There is a line between ‘promotion’ and ‘bald-faced lying,’ and Apple just crosses it a little too often for my tastes”
I guess our good friend Paul isn’t bothered by supporting a convicted monopolist, who copies and steals technology all the time.
If we go by AMD clock, Apple did reach 3GHz with new PowerMac(actually 6GHz Xeon equivalent clock).
Arguably the release of AirPort Express and AirTunes (iTunes 4.6) is more important than when (if) 3GHz G5 ship!
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http://homepage.mac.com/johnhood
Isn’t the chip production IBM’s job. So, IBM told Jobs that we’ll be at 3gHz in a year and he latched on to that. Steve’s mistake…no.
The Athlon 64 3800+ only actually runs at 2.4 GHz, so the new G5 introduced this morning is faster. Again, until Intel and AMD are blowing the doors off Apple/IBM with faster 64 bit processors themselves, all of this hypocritical whining is pointless.
I don’t call this lying at all. Steve made a good faith perdiction based on IBM’s optimism on its processing prowess at larger line widths. And didn’t realize how poor Pepsi’s execution of a co-marketing campaign would be. He certainly shouldn’t be excoriated because of outside partner’s failure. How many times MS has anounced a product, that never materialized or was ery late and barely adequate?
SJ is human? What does that make Turdott?
>There is a line between ‘promotion’ and ‘bald-faced lying, and Apple just crosses it a little too often for my tastes.
You gotta admire the man who can take that view whilst ignoring Microshit’s antics — which, by the way, have been proven in a court of law. This kind of denial is usually symptomatic of a personality with a deep flaw; a dark side so hideous that denial is the only way to maintain some measure of sanity. This is one ugly individual. Ugh!
When you are as innovative as Apple continues to be… You can expect this to happen every couple of years. When you are literally standing in front of the plant waiting for the newest yields to drop from the assembly you can expect to get your timing tossed a little here and there. The other side of the coin occurs when a company ships products to early without the proper testing required to insure the proper internal synergy between the varied pieces.
Would it suprise anyone if the quad liquid cooled workstations aren’t the “one last thing” at this years show. Pixar could already be using them in house.
Imagine the press that will stir up.
Come on, who here didn’t cringe when Steve made that prediction last year because we’ve all seen processor speculation miss projections time and time again? Who here didn’t know this wasn’t going to happen when IBM had their plant problem and the G5 XServe was delayed?
I just don’t see this as a major issue. Sure, I want a 3GHz dual processor lighting-fast Mac. But my 500MHz G4 is still doing a great job as it approaches its fourth birthday. If I get another year out of it I won’t hesitate to pony up to the biggest baddest system Apple makes, knowing that it will probably be another 4 years before I have to upgrade.