“Steve Jobs’ Jan. 10, 2006, Macworld Expo keynote marked an important milestone in the history of the Mac platform, but not as big or, frankly, as exciting a moment as I and many others had expected,” Henry Norr writes for MacInTouch. “What made the day historic, of course, was the introduction of the first Intel-based Macs – a new version of the iMac and a new laptop, the MacBook Pro, both featuring Intel’s new Core Duo processor.”
“Two things made the day a bit of a letdown, at least to judge by crowd reactions, as well as my own. One was the absence of hardware the rumor sites and pundits had led us all to expect: lighter, cheaper, Intel-based iBooks; an Intel-based Mac mini or some other “media Mac” with built-in DVR (digital video recorder) and other living-room-oriented features; and an upgraded version of the iPod Shuffle,” Norr writes.
“The other factor was that Apple, in designing the new Intel-based hardware it did deliver, clearly chose to put its emphasis on continuity rather than change. While both the new iMac and the MacBook Pro have a few appealing new features, from the user perspective, they’re not radical redesigns, and they’re no cheaper than their predecessors. In the case of the MacBook Pro, there are even some disturbing steps backwards, compared to the comparable PowerBook,” Norr writes.
Norr writes, “And the one big advance Jobs touted – a huge improvement in processing performance (2-3X in the case of the Intel iMac, compared to the G5 version, and 4-5X in the case of the MacBook Pro, compared to the latest PowerBook G4) – remains pretty abstract for now, because he backed up his claims only with synthetic SPEC benchmark results, not actual application results or live demos, and because we don’t yet have the new machines to try in our own work or play environments. (After listening to Apple for decades dismiss the SPEC benchmarks as all but meaningless, it’s hard not to notice the irony in the company now trumpeting its SPEC scores. I’m surprised it didn’t present at least a few comparisons done with real-life apps, at least the iLife apps.)”
Full article, very highly recommended, here.
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NewType — Well motherf-cking said.
Thanks to Jeff for a link that’s truly useful. Yonah/CoreDuo is a nice CPU, but it’s obviously not as great as Intel (and now Apple) want to portray it. Battery life has not been improved at all over 90nm Pentium M (actually worse), and it’s performance numbers are similarly static unless you’re doing more than one thing at a time. I loved these quotes from the PCWorld article:
“Gerry Purdy, an analyst with MobileTrax, expects improvements on simultaneous tasks but not on tasks you merely switch between, such as working in a word processing document and then in a spreadsheet. “But when you do two things simultaneously and at least one of them involves media management, such as music or video, that’s where dual core will really make a difference. For example, playing a live CNN video while you answer e-mails,” he says. … Leslie Fiering of Gartner agrees, offering the example of antivirus software’s annoying tendency to stall other applications. “You can do real work while your virus checker is running in the background,” she says.”
Well hey, as long as my Mac won’t bog down during virus checking, then all righty then! Oh, wait … no viruses. Well, at least I can watch a video while I work on my spreadsheet … except, that it’s almost impossible for a human to watch a video AND do useful work at the same time. Maybe they could implant one of these Duo’s in my head …?
Again, all kidding aside, I’m not saying this isn’t a nice upgrade for PowerBook/Mac Book. Only that you could have gotten the exact same thing from actually using the upgrades PPC has had available for a while now. Freescale’s had a dual core G4 for about a year, and even their speed ranges and watt numbers are identical:
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC7448&nodeId=0162468rH3bTdG8653
(single core version, but this link has the watt numbers)
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/overview.jsp?nodeId=0162468rH3bTdG7249
(dual core version)
And these are the initial specs based on 90nm CPUs, and the speeds (CPU and FSB) are to be scaled up on that process. When they get to 65nm next year they’ll have even better performance than the 65nm CoreDuo has now. Jobs clearly passed over what he could have done with PowerBook last year in order to make this year’s Mac Book introduction look better.
My point though isn’t only that, when it comes to performance, Intel isn’t doing anything special. The real problem is that the longer Apple lingers on how ‘great’ their computers are because of Intel chips, the longer they expose themselves to people saying, “Yeah, but …” based on the facts & real world tests, NOT Jobs’ RDF and Keynote graphs. Apple needs to start releasing products based on what Macintel is really all about – VIDEO. If this transition is going to actually bring tangible benefits beyond what could have been done with the status quo (PPC), then they need to get to what strengths Intel brings to the party. Performance is not it. Video is.
That April 1st/30yrs old reference in the speech was probably a clue. Knowing Jobs, that could be the day he announces the good stuff. If he doesn’t, I stand by what I said – Macintel is money down the drain.