We've been following this years Macworld keynote from Apple chief, Steve Jobs. Read up for our summary of what's new, what's been updated. Jobs started giving some information on the current state of Apple products. Apple have sold 42m iPods since launch (32m last year) and claim it to be the 'best music player in the world'. The company also claims to have sold 850m songs on iTunes (3m / day), and have 80+% of the market.
New for the iTunes store is SNL content. Comedy sketches from the show will be available for purchase from iTunes for the normal price. Also of note is new sports content for iTunes. Jobs commented that " for the first time last week we added some sports. For the first time with ABC and ESPN we put up some Bowl games." Apple have confirmed a FM tuner / remote for the Nano, and 5th generation iPod videos, costing $49.99 (image at engadget). Users will be able to tune the radio via the standard iPod interface. The FM feature announced today fills a hole that has long needed plugging, and marks a significant feature improvement for the product.
Jobs left arguably the best bits till the end of the keynote, so we've brought them forwards. Apple discussed their work with Intel, and said that thanks to Intel's hard work, the company had stayed on track with their goal of shipping Intel chip powered products. The first device to be powered by Intel will be the iMac. All other devices currently on the PPC platform will be converted to Intel by the end of the year. The new iMac comes with a built in iSight, as well as front row. However, it keeps the same design as well as the same size (17", 20" screen). Powered by dual core Intel chips, Jobs claims the iMac will be 2-3 times faster than existing models. Existing software is being transferred across (see below), with programs such as Office running well under Rosetta (universal binaries coming soon, free update), and programs such as Quark running as universal binaries. Microsoft, incidentally, have committed to supply Office for Mac users for the next five years at least.
Apple are launching today the Macbook Pro, a brand new laptop powered by a dual-core Intel chip. The Macbok Pro solves the heat issue that Apple had trying to get a G5 chip into a Powerbook. Slightly thinner than an existing Powerbook, the Macbook Pro will feature 15.4" screen ("as bright as the Cinema Display units), an iSight camera, and will run 4-5x faster than the Powerbook. It also features a IR sensor for the recently released remote control units. A rather novel magnetic power cord (in terms of the attachment mechanism) called MagSafe is also included, perhaps meaning an end to yanking laptops off tables. The Macbook Pro will ship in February, but Apple will be taking orders from today. Priced at $1999 and $2499 for 1.67GHz and 1.83GHz respectivly, they come with an ATi Radeon X1600, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth, 4x Superdrive, 512MB/ 1Gb RAM and 80Gb / 100Gb Harddrives. It weighs 5.6 pounds and comes with features previously seen on the Powerbook, like the backlight sensor, and DVI out for 30" displays.
Click here, for more information on the new Apple products.
All in all, a lot of new and updated products from Apple. The fact that so little time was spent on the iPod and iTunes puts to bed any sense that Apple might be drifting towards only that market, and proves the company has a lot more to offer. Interestingly, we didn't see either a cheap iBook release (see comments on new Intel chip based products later in the year) or the Mac Mini media center that so many had predicted. Neowin, sadly, wasn't at Macworld - we'd like to thank worldofapple.com, macrumors.com, and the ever reliable, engadget.com, for doing what Apple should do themselves.
Update Apple's store seems to be having some serious problems; the message saying 'back within the hour' has been up for the last hour or so; if you can't get through, we suggest you try again in a few hours.
View: Apple (currently getting badly hammered - expect long load times)
Link: Steve Jobs at Macworld | Intel & Apple
View: Macbook Pro Homepage
New for the iTunes store is SNL content. Comedy sketches from the show will be available for purchase from iTunes for the normal price. Also of note is new sports content for iTunes. Jobs commented that " for the first time last week we added some sports. For the first time with ABC and ESPN we put up some Bowl games." Apple have confirmed a FM tuner / remote for the Nano, and 5th generation iPod videos, costing $49.99 (image at engadget). Users will be able to tune the radio via the standard iPod interface. The FM feature announced today fills a hole that has long needed plugging, and marks a significant feature improvement for the product.
Jobs left arguably the best bits till the end of the keynote, so we've brought them forwards. Apple discussed their work with Intel, and said that thanks to Intel's hard work, the company had stayed on track with their goal of shipping Intel chip powered products. The first device to be powered by Intel will be the iMac. All other devices currently on the PPC platform will be converted to Intel by the end of the year. The new iMac comes with a built in iSight, as well as front row. However, it keeps the same design as well as the same size (17", 20" screen). Powered by dual core Intel chips, Jobs claims the iMac will be 2-3 times faster than existing models. Existing software is being transferred across (see below), with programs such as Office running well under Rosetta (universal binaries coming soon, free update), and programs such as Quark running as universal binaries. Microsoft, incidentally, have committed to supply Office for Mac users for the next five years at least.
Apple are launching today the Macbook Pro, a brand new laptop powered by a dual-core Intel chip. The Macbok Pro solves the heat issue that Apple had trying to get a G5 chip into a Powerbook. Slightly thinner than an existing Powerbook, the Macbook Pro will feature 15.4" screen ("as bright as the Cinema Display units), an iSight camera, and will run 4-5x faster than the Powerbook. It also features a IR sensor for the recently released remote control units. A rather novel magnetic power cord (in terms of the attachment mechanism) called MagSafe is also included, perhaps meaning an end to yanking laptops off tables. The Macbook Pro will ship in February, but Apple will be taking orders from today. Priced at $1999 and $2499 for 1.67GHz and 1.83GHz respectivly, they come with an ATi Radeon X1600, Airport Extreme and Bluetooth, 4x Superdrive, 512MB/ 1Gb RAM and 80Gb / 100Gb Harddrives. It weighs 5.6 pounds and comes with features previously seen on the Powerbook, like the backlight sensor, and DVI out for 30" displays.
Click here, for more information on the new Apple products.
All in all, a lot of new and updated products from Apple. The fact that so little time was spent on the iPod and iTunes puts to bed any sense that Apple might be drifting towards only that market, and proves the company has a lot more to offer. Interestingly, we didn't see either a cheap iBook release (see comments on new Intel chip based products later in the year) or the Mac Mini media center that so many had predicted. Neowin, sadly, wasn't at Macworld - we'd like to thank worldofapple.com, macrumors.com, and the ever reliable, engadget.com, for doing what Apple should do themselves.
Update Apple's store seems to be having some serious problems; the message saying 'back within the hour' has been up for the last hour or so; if you can't get through, we suggest you try again in a few hours.
View: Apple (currently getting badly hammered - expect long load times) Link: Steve Jobs at Macworld | Intel & Apple View: Macbook Pro HomepageJobs showed off their new imaging program, Aperture. The software is described as being to " the camera as Final Cut Pro is to Video". Also on show were Widgets, pieces of software sitting on the desktop performing unique functions (e.g. showing the weather). Apple now host 1500 widgets. Mac OSX 10.4.4, a minor update now available for download, has been released today, with new Widgets included. It will also run natively on the new Intel products (iLife and iWorks also work on the Intel chips, with the other Pro software coming in March - $49 trade in available). iLife has also been updated (making it iLife '06), with an improved version of iPhoto (claiming to be faster, and containing more editing features).
Photocasting has been formally announced today, allowing users to share photos in a similar fashion to podcasts. However, the service does appear to require .mac membership to use, or at least, to publish. Users will be able to subscribe to the RSS feed, making viewing platform independent. New versions of iMovie and iDVD were also demoed, with a host of new features in both products. iWork has also been updated, again, with a number of new features, like image editing. Apple will be offering the software for free for 30 days with all new Macs sold.
The '06 version of Garageband has new features to help podcasters, and includes an extended library of sound effects. New to the iLife package this year is iWeb (bad news for Dan Wood then?). iWeb lets .mac users publish (with one click, no less) photos, movies and music to weblogs via a simple Mac program. The program will include themes for easy publishing, and will also offer users the option of RSS feeds from their content. It will also allow users to take advantage of modern web gimmicks features like AJAX. iLife '06 is available today, for $69.99.
Radish™
and intel chips used in new iMacs ? you know the onesmade by... Apple ?......
- That would be a major concern if true...
EDIT: Evidently this was misinformation
Last edited by Daedalus on 10 Jan 2006 - 18:57
15.4-inch widescreen display
1.67 or 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo
667MHz frontside bus and main memory
PCI Express architecture
Up to 120GB Serial ATA hard drive
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with up to 256MB memory on 16-lane PCI Express
ExpressCard/34 slot
Dual-link DVI, VGA adapter included
One FireWire 400 port, two USB 2.0 ports
Optical digital and analog audio I/O, built-in microphone and stereo speakers
Slot-loading SuperDrive
Illuminated keyboard, Scrolling TrackPad
Built-in AirPort Extreme (802.11g), Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, and Gigabit Ethernet
Mac OS X Tiger with iLife ’06 featuring iWeb, iWork ’06 trial, and more
2 GHz Core duo with 2 MB L2 cache on each core
1 GB DDR2 667 MHz memory
17" UXGA+ display with truelife (extra bright and crisp)
60 GB 7200 rpm 8 MB buffer HD
Geforce 7800 go (256 MB memory) graphics
+ all the bells and whistles (including Windows media center edition)
It all depends on what you value. If you think Windows media center is the the best thing since slice bread, go for that other machine then.
It weights a pound more too.
Last edited by aristotle-dude on 11 Jan 2006 - 03:28
Edit and yeah the Macbook does have firewire, check out the specs: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/whatsinside.html#store
Again, thanks for the roundup again Tom
-fm
it's gonna be here
The Name MacBook sucks!
What is the Powermac going to be called:
MacMac?
PowerBook - MacBook
PowerMac - MacMac
PowerBook -> MacBook Pro
iBook -> MacBook? (w/out pro), iBook (same name since it didnt have the Pro) (both unconfirmed)
PowerMac -> Mac Pro? (unconfirmed, but sounds right.)
So now there's three laptops to choose from.
Powerbook (G4 Powerbook) <=-- its not a pc laptop
Powerbook with intel duo processor <=-- normal people wont think that its an apple
Macbook with intel duo processor <=-- that's a mac
just a thought.
I find it funny that their marketing department has shifted its focus from misleading the consumer regarding the guts of the PC to ridiculing PC users in general.
"What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it's ever done in a PC."
Cute Apple, real cute. Welcome to 2006, its about time.
apple lied to us BOO HOO,
so has microsoft, so has intel, so has nvidia, and live goes on...
This press release stats that these iMacs will be 2-3 times faster (that is 200-300%) then the last version (keep in mind Apple is not even offering the 2.0 or 2.16GHz clock speeds).
And of course we all remember Apples claims that the PPC5 was 90-some-odd% faster then fastest (at the time) Intel processors (that would have been the 600 family).
Of course performance is all about what you are doing, not benchmarks. Most benchmarks are based on games, which is a little unfair because new dual-core processors don't really get a chance to show off when running games.
Don't forget that the benchamarks for Photoshop were conducted against the Windows version. It is well known in the industry that plugin load time on the windows version is much longer due to differences between OSX's loading and binding mechanisms and how dynamically linked code loads in the Win32 environment. GDI bottlenecks also played a contributing factor to slower initialization of the plugins.
There are also underlying OS differences with how large buffers are handled and allocated in the two OSes.
The DNA sequencing and LPAC benchmarks were examples of where the G5 with altivec truly excelled against the P4 processors of the time.
This new Yonah processor is a different animal from the Netburst based P4 in terms of cache design and pipeline length.
Let us not forget that we are now seeing the speed of this hardware on the same OS and it appears to be blazingly fast. Maybe it was the OS all along that made up the speed difference.
I will leave you all to think about that for a moment.
Obviously, because an Intel chip in a PC is inefficient and has been underperforming in comparison to an AMD chip
hehe... just kidding
I agree with the Reality-Distortion Field though. I can see the Reality-Distortion Field is a real thing.
Really? Did you read the fine print on the PC Mag benchmarks for Photoshop? Even the Dual G4 machines wiped the floor with the P4's when you included plugin load times. Look at the fine print of the article and you will see that they omitted that delay from the timings because it was caused by the loading mechanism of windows and GDI.
You also may not have noticed that the PC Mag benchmarks used small file sizes (30 MB or less) while the Apple tests were stress tests with 300MB files in the filter benchmark test plan.
Some might say that it was unfair but it highlighted the advantage the G5 had over the shared FSB Xeon and OS X had over windows with handling large datasets.
This difference is caused by compiler optimizations and by the performance of this new family of intel chips at running OSX. OSX is a late binding OS which can benefit from the cache architecture and faster FSB the Ynah has to offer.
It's like he's the embodiment of the Reality Distortion Field.
The fact is that Apple will say whatever they're running on is the best. If it's PowerPC, they'll claim it's the best thing in the world. Now we see them do the same thing with Intel. They couldn't be right both times.
Back in reality, the PowerPC G5 was a fine chip - often comparable to its competition although usually priced at a premium by Apple. But it was by no means superior to Intel or AMD's offerings at any time by any measure.
Back to the chip I was talking about, the G4 had great FP/vector performance back in the day but technology moves on. It had a slow bus compared to other mobile chips and adding more cache help only so much.
In "reality", the G5 was better at certain highly vectored tasks like Gene sequencing LPAC and right now the Quad core G5 is still a monster workstation.
In "reality", the G5 certainly outperformed Intel and AMD offerings for cluster solutions last year on a price/performance scale. If you had looked at the the Top 500 list, any Intel or AMD solutions would have cost a lot more and had more processors than the G5 clusters.
I was totally aware that the tasks being performed by all of the clusters were highly paralleled tasks and would be no match for a real supercomputer for tasks that were mostly serialized requiring operations on large datasets contained in shared memory.
Which one of us is in the distortion field again?
But they are cheaper for Apple, who is the winner here. Guess they dont care to compete with microsoft.
this made it perfect for photoshop worked, but also made them loose out in pretty uch ANYTHING else. I'm not so sure if the G5/powerPC5 cpu's had them though. but G4 and earlier certainly where.
and faster speed per cycle in one specific application does not make it a better cpu.
This kid is not impressed. Maybe if they would come out with an Apple Tablet PC that has some sweet handwriting software or even voice recognition software, along with iSight and quick launch nav buttons that works on EV-DO and has a good +8hr battery life, then my jaw would drop and my eyes would buldge. Here's to next year and to new consumer-centric multi-use high-def portable products.
haha. glad they made the switch to intel, finally.
What you should wait for is benchmarks of Photoshop CS 2 for OS X (Universal Binary) and the windows version.
Any difference in speed will be due to differences in the OS architecture and API.
Anyway, I'm anxious to try out the new iMacs. I think they're nice looking comps and I wanted to get one, but never did. Maybe the switch to Intel will make the iMac irresistable.
I use windows daily at work as a developer of "windows" software. I've used the following platforms:Mac OS 5.x-9.x, OSX 10.2-10.4, Windows 3.11-98SE, NT 4.x-5.1, Amiga OS 1.3-3.1, Linux, VMS, SCO Unix System V and FreeBSD 3.x. Et tu?
I use whatever tools I need to get the job done and when working in a windows shop I use windows.
I don't have to be a fanboy of MSFT in order to work with windows.
PS. You are the one that said it sucks, not me. It works ok most of the time. That's not high praise but it is realistic.
These machines use EFI instead of BIOS, so I don't see your point. I made that comment in June and now we have EFI machines.
GDI does suck (freezing and blow through) and so do the WMF and IE zero day vulnerabilities. You cannot argue against that. Maybe Vista will be better in that regard.
Stop taking my comments about windows personally.
Actually, I doubt I've ever seen anything scarier on an internet forum :o
Talk about forum stalking... Can't say it's much better than trolling either.
Last edited by Jugalator on 11 Jan 2006 - 12:02
No doubt... You can't even search for comments in news posts (can you?). Wow..... Way to dig deep to prove a point, dude.
I'm not going to say "Windows Sucks", but damn there is a lot of room for improvement.
Windows does get the job done in a business environment most of the time. I had used windows for a number of years at home and up until I got my mac, I thought windows had problems but I was a committed windows user. I started to realize that that there were some inherent flaws in the architecture of windows. The constant patching got tiresome.
To make a long story short, I eventually sold my PC to a coworker and have no problem connecting up to work via remote desktop and VPN with my mac when I have to either at home or on the road.
I will recommend these new macs to anyone that asks for my opinion on getting a new home computer or laptop. I also will never again help anyone with their windows problems outside of work.
Maybe it's coz there's no way I'm able to rake up the dosh to spend on a new iMac (the MacBook is NOT an option in it's current price)
It'd be better if they released the lower down macs first, such as ibook and mac mini
Source?
I'll be excited with the2nd gen (or 1st update) Intel iBook, when they get the quirks of the new technology cleaned up and hax00rs already figured out how to double boot Windows so that I can stop emulating w2k to use Visual Studio.
It's a begining though. Great anouncements!