“What an ungrateful bunch you are. This week Apple began its transition to Intel processors six months ahead of schedule, and all you can do is carp. Don’t you know you’re supposed to swoon over every shiny new piece of kit? It’s an odd moment. After years of lagging behind in the speed race, Apple will next month ship a PowerBook that overnight offers a dramatic doubling of performance for ordinary tasks, such as loading pages in Safari. The SPEC benchmarks Apple quotes are 4.5x faster for integer performance and 5.2x faster on floating point tests. Out goes the bottleneck bus, pegged at 167Mhz for so long, replaced by a 667Mhz bus – that’s 4x faster. And the Radeon X1600 brings Apple right up to date,” Andrew Orlowski writes for The Register.
So why, as the barman said to the horse, the long face? The catch of course is that only software that has been compiled into a ‘Universal Binary’, containing a native x86 executable, will benefit from the speed bump,” Orlowski writes. “And what Apple giveth, Apple taketh away.”
Orlowski details the list of questionable things that we all know so well by now: the lack of the FireWire 800 port, the slower, less capable DVD burner, the missing battery performance information, and asks, “So did Apple launch the MacBook too soon? Apple didn’t really have much choice. Shrewd pro buyers have been snapping up G4 and G5 based Macs as an hedge against a bumpy migration to x86. This has forestalled any anticipated ‘Osborne Effect’ to date. In March 2001, Apple unleashed the first Mac OS X, one that was far from ready for prime time. It couldn’t wait any longer – and a real product, no matter how deficient, convinces the market of one’s intentions. The early launch of the MacBook gives Apple’s ISVs a strong incentive to accelerate their plans to introduce x86 native software. They can’t blame Apple for lagging, now.”
Full article here.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple MacBook Pro, ExpressCard and EVDO – January 14, 2006
Report: key products missing from Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote due to Intel Core Duo supply issues – January 12, 2006
O’Grady: Apple’s new MacBook Pro raises a lot of questions – January 11, 2006