... they'd say screw design, make the laptop a three-inch thick brick and chuck that G5 and cooling system in.

This is just like, "DUH." If you watched any of the stuff when the G5 tower came out, it was obvious cooling was an enormous issue, and I think it's silly of anyone to think that they can get that happening in a powerbook any time soon. I'm just glad someone at apple has said it, maybe that will quiet people down for a while.

Of course, I'm probably biased; I don't want them to crush the specs of my 17" pb from this summer yet

The earliest we can expect a PB G5 would be WWDC.

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spxyu02 wrote:
This is just like, "DUH." If you watched any of the stuff when the G5 tower came out, it was obvious cooling was an enormous issue, and I think it's silly of anyone to think that they can get that happening in a powerbook any time soon. I'm just glad someone at apple has said it, maybe that will quiet people down for a while.

Of course, I'm probably biased; I don't want them to crush the specs of my 17" pb from this summer yet

Ahh, yes! Nothing speaks as honestly as self-interest. That said, I'd be only too happy to enjoy an extended run of technological superiority...if only cell phones moved this slowly AFTER my purchase...

G5 Laptop sometime in '06!!

If it came in at, say 1.8 to 2.0 and had a faster FSB and all the other goodies?

We might be in a situation where Freescale works some magic before IBM can deliver a G5 chip that Apple OKs for the PB.

Right now I'm not too unhappy with the fact that Freescale is free of Moto and can compete head to head with IBM. I think that Mac users will be better off in the long run.

As for now, max out the memory on a PB and it's not too bad at all.

the problem is on IBM. obviously, you can't fit the PowerMac G5s into a portable. if you did, it would weigh 10 pounds and sound like a fighter jet. and last 1 1/2 hours on battery.

i read lots of G5 specs on IBMs website and it seems as if IBM was kind of dreaming of low power G5s. they say things like a thermal design power of 30 watts for 1.8 GHz - not far from true portable territory. but i think this never actually happened and that, in truth, the G5s TDP is much, much worse.

so, IBM slipped up, and Apple is not quite ready to bash them publicly for it. the "mother of thermal design challenges" is bullshit as it's just not possible with current G5s. once IBM gets their s*** together, there won't be any thermal challenge. it will just work.

Intel can do a low power 2GHz design... IBM is always lots of talk and no action - intel doesn't talk as much, but it puts out.

Look at the iMac for cryin' out loud. It was amazing Apple could get a G5 into that form factor and even then it's 2" thick and perforated like swiss cheese. To get a G5 into a laptop is probably going to require another die shrink...

Heck, I'll bet a lot of people would snatch up a lot of single-core G4 Powerbooks at 1.8GHz to 2.0GHz. That'd be a 20-33% increase in speed, which isn't too shabby.

I wouldn't be surprised if we never do see a G5 Powerbook. Apple may stick with souped-up G4s from Freescale until the "G6" is ready. And that might not be such a bad thing. The G4 still has legs and is a rather power efficient processor.

P.S. Me thinks somebody missed a "</i>" tag.

</i>

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Mace wrote:
The earliest we can expect a PB G5 would be WWDC.

Wasn't that from the same source who said we would get refreshed Powerbooks at MacWorld? Don't hold your breath.

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jimothy wrote:
P.S. Me thinks somebody missed a "</i>" tag.

Well, it was actually a "</EM>" tag, but hey, who's counting. Thanks for pointing it out.

Apple's CPU supplier problems are frustrating. No 3GHz as promised (remindes me of the Moto days) and the "awesome" new G5 can't be used in notebooks. My situation requires a notebook so for me today's IBM situation worse than the Moto days.

I have to wonder what life would be like if Apple used x86 chips. Those Pentium M's are kicking A in the notebook performance (& battery) area and the competition between Intel and AMD is a great benefit to consumers (as competition always is).

the g4 currently has a bus of 167Mhz, the g5 slowest at 600Mhz (imac), freescale have a g4 in the works with a 667Mhz bus, the g4 does have life and once the bottlekneck of the bus is overcome it will be back in contention and with 64bit-ness in the future for lappies also, the g5 (970) may never get to the pb

If Apple could nail down a combination of alloy metal heat sinks and a very small, yet simple and reliable liquid cooling system, they might be in business. The back of the monitor is exposed to the air more than anything else and is the coolest part of the machine, and just begs to be used as a radiator.

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Anonymous wrote:
I have to wonder what life would be like if Apple used x86 chips.

Apple would be dead, just another software company trampled by the MS/Dell rhino and left for dead by the side of the road.

Even without a bus faster than 167MHz a dual core G4 powerbook would be quite nice. I remember seeing benchmarks (www.barefeats.com most likely) that compared the dual 1.4GHz G4 towers to the single 1.6 and 1.8 GHz G5 towers when they were first released. The G4 did better than the 1.6, and I seem to think it did better or comparable to the 1.8.

Long story short, even with bus bottlenecks a dual core G4 laptop (which still has cooling issues, albeit less than a G5) would result in a very significant performance boost for the powerbook. And that is with today's clock speeds. I think the problem that Apple would run into is cooling the 12 inch powerbook with a dual core.

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AFCdtLoeb wrote:
If Apple could nail down a combination of alloy metal heat sinks and a very small, yet simple and reliable liquid cooling system, they might be in business. The back of the monitor is exposed to the air more than anything else and is the coolest part of the machine, and just begs to be used as a radiator.

Cool idea (no pun intended)! Once you get the heat out from underneath the base area you're home free. The technical difficulties to move liquid throught the lid hinge (without leaks) and into the lid might be daunting, but a true "aqua" G5 Powerbook with a glowing liquid-filled (and bubbling?!) Apple logo would freak out our PC notebook friends!

-Ken P

It sounds like it will take quite a while to get the G5 into a laptop. How much heat would a dual core G4 generate? I have been waiting long enough on my 667 Tibook that I would probably get that if it came out rather than wait for the G5.

With the dual core G4, the problem switches from heat to power draw. The only way to make a dual core work would be to have it default to one chip, and then "burst" and activate the second when needed.

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pyxl8 wrote:

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AFCdtLoeb wrote:
The back of the monitor is exposed to the air more than anything else and is the coolest part of the machine, and just begs to be used as a radiator.

Cool idea (no pun intended)! Once you get the heat out from underneath the base area you're home free. The technical difficulties to move liquid throught the lid hinge (without leaks) and into the lid might be daunting, but a true "aqua" G5 Powerbook with a glowing liquid-filled (and bubbling?!) Apple logo would freak out our PC notebook friends!

-Ken P

Perhaps a divided-channel system where heat exchange between the two parts occurs in the hinge area?

And why bubbling? Why not the Apple LavaBook?

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Steve W wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:
I have to wonder what life would be like if Apple used x86 chips.

Apple would be dead, just another software company trampled by the MS/Dell rhino and left for dead by the side of the road.

Why? All the other hardware is the same technology as PCs. Why couldn't Apple have done what they've done but with a different CPU.

This is not exact of course, but the basic estimate of Power is P=CV^2f.

Power = Chip Capacitance x Core Voltage squared x frequency.

This is why there is such a push to lower the core voltage. It also explains why a chip running at 1GHz uses much less power than a 2GHz chip. So a dual core chip would have an increased capacitance (more heat), but the core voltage and frequency can stay the same. In fact, a dual core 1.5GHz machine would significantly outperform a single 2.0GHz machine with comparable or less heat output. Lastly, it also explains why a dual core processor is more efficient than a dual processor system. The cores are closer, so communication is faster. There is a little less redundancy, and there are not large system buses, etc having to connect them.

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Anonymous wrote:

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Steve W wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:
I have to wonder what life would be like if Apple used x86 chips.

Apple would be dead, just another software company trampled by the MS/Dell rhino and left for dead by the side of the road.

Why? All the other hardware is the same technology as PCs. Why couldn't Apple have done what they've done but with a different CPU.

Apple makes hardware. If they used x86 parts they'd be just like every other PC company except for the operating system. Dell could kill them just because they're the WalMart of computers; they're willing to trade profit margin for sheer volume and don't care how well it works. My personal opinion, however, is that Apple would never have had the chance to compete with Dell in the x86 business, because Microsoft would have killed them first.

Here's a list of alternate OSs MS has laid to waste: CP/M-86, DR DOS, GEM, OS/2, BeOS. I'm sure there are more, but those are just ones I can think of at the moment. All tried to compete with MS in the x86 arena and all were run over. It wasn't because anything MS had was better, that's for sure, because every one of those OSs were better than what Microsoft was selling at the time. It's not because Microsoft got there first, either, because CP/M-86 preceded it. Digital Research developed CP/M-86; Microsoft bought what became PC/MS-DOS for a pittance when asked by IBM to supply an operating system for the PC. Since they had no real development cost, they undercut Digital Research's price and most PCs went out the door with PC-DOS installed. When the clones came along, MS happily supplied MS-DOS, but if you were an OEM, it came with a licensing scheme which either stipulated that you had to use MS-DOS on every CPU you sold, or you had to pay Microsoft even if you put another OS on it. Guess what happened?

Apple would have had to become a software company only, and they would have been trampled. They chose not to use the x86 architecture for very good reasons, and using a different CPU is the only reason they survived.

Sorry you asked?

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Guest wrote:
Why? All the other hardware is the same technology as PCs. Why couldn't Apple have done what they've done but with a non-different CPU.

In a form of its current incarnation, Apple did just that. They (NeXT) abandoned the 68040 in favour of the 80486. When they were acquired by Apple, NeXT was a foundering software-only company.

Lesson learned?

(And, unlike Apple, all the "other hardware" companies are essentially hardware-only clonemakers.

Currently Apple has as much influence over the fine-tuning of PowerPC CPU as Microsoft has over x86 CPU. If Apple shifts to x86, it would have hardly any influences. This is besides all the effort required to re-code and optimize the OS (+ drivers) for x86 architecture.

The time for Apple to have influence over x86 architecture is 15 years ago. And even then, it was a crap-mire that was giving Intel engineers migraines and angina. Most of us who know a thing about CPU design are absolutely amazed that it has survived even this long - if only Intel had harnessed their brainpower to head off in a new direction to build the killer processor (selling 486s for pennies as a compatibility add-on for the transition), they would be unbeatable today.

In the end, neither x86 nor PPC will win, but for the moment, I put my money on PPC simply because, FWIW, it has so much more potential.

Computer has advanced to such a stage that I am wondering who are the guys (consumers) that need so much computing and graphics power.

An average consumer like me don't need at all. My iBook uses a 900 MHz G3 with 684 MBytes RAM and my self-assembled PC for games uses a 700 MHz Duron wtih 512 MBytes RAM.

Other than hard-core gamers and hobbyists, I really don't know who. I suspect many consumers buy computers mindlessly, for lack of a better word. For most of us, the cheapest computer available in the market suffices.

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Mace wrote:
Computer has advanced to such a stage that I am wondering who are the guys (consumers) that need so much computing and graphics power.

I've wondered about that myself. Not all of us are graphics pros or serious number crunchers doing fluid dynamics simulations.

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Mace wrote:
I suspect many consumers buy computers mindlessly, for lack of a better word.

It's the "bigger is better and more is not enough" syndrome, I think.

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Mace wrote:
For most of us, the cheapest computer available in the market suffices.

Last week, an eMac qualified, right?

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Steve W wrote:

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Mace wrote:
Computer has advanced to such a stage that I am wondering who are the guys (consumers) that need so much computing and graphics power.

I've wondered about that myself. Not all of us are graphics pros or serious number crunchers doing fluid dynamics simulations.

It is there for possibilities. Software that can, as I think Raena once put it, find that song for you if you just hum a few bars, improve your efficiency by dynamically adapting its own behaviour to better suit your habits (as opposed to the statically programmed assistance in, say, MS Office which has so often made me want to yell "stop helping me" at the screen) and ultimately support a non-wired machine-wetware direct interface.

Currently, all that power is being used for glitz such as Exposй, genie effects and PMT (five years ago, I could not do anything else while burning a CD, now it is routine to browse the web, check mail or do other medium level work while burning takes place in the background), not to mention reducing the rendering time for iMovie and other apps. This is because systems are straitened by serial-processing and the general ethos that the first path to power is speed; when real parallel processing becomes the norm, we may begin to see signs of the creativity described above.

[quote="pyxl8"]

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AFCdtLoeb wrote:
Cool idea (no pun intended)! Once you get the heat out from underneath the base area you're home free. The technical difficulties to move liquid throught the lid hinge (without leaks) and into the lid might be daunting, but a true "aqua" G5 Powerbook with a glowing liquid-filled (and bubbling?!) Apple logo would freak out our PC notebook friends!

-Ken P

Perhaps it's time to reinvent laptops. It'd be far more reliable to move the CPU into the display area and run cables down, than it would be to plumb cooling through a flexible hinge.
GCmad4macs

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Steve W wrote:
Apple makes hardware. If they used x86 parts they'd be just like every other PC company except for the operating system.

Apple makes hardware?

They use the same video cards as PCs, the same hard drives, the same RAM, all from other companies. The CPUs come from IBM. The computers are assembled by other companies in Taiwan, just like PCs.

Apple certainly has better case designs than PCs, but those same designs would work just fine with an x86 CPU.

Everything in a Mac is the essentialy the same as in a PC except the CPU and Apple doesn't make any of it. Why does the CPU saying "IBM" instead of "Intel" make this drastic business difference that would cause the company to be bankrupt?

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Anonymous wrote:

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Steve W wrote:
Apple makes hardware. If they used x86 parts they'd be just like every other PC company except for the operating system.

Apple makes hardware?

They use the same video cards as PCs, the same hard drives, the same RAM, all from other companies. The CPUs come from IBM. The computers are assembled by other companies in Taiwan, just like PCs.

Apple certainly has better case designs than PCs, but those same designs would work just fine with an x86 CPU.

Everything in a Mac is the essentialy the same as in a PC except the CPU and Apple doesn't make any of it. Why does the CPU saying "IBM" instead of "Intel" make this drastic business difference that would cause the company to be bankrupt?

And Apple designs the motherboard and the ROMs that are on it. If you really want to break things down to their component parts, then it is the manufacturers of the resistors and diodes who are in charge and NOBODY manufactures computers.

Anyway, read the rest of Steve W.s post regarding why it would be death.

Mac OSX on x86 is the dream of those who are devoted to the Intel chip, not Apple.

I'm sorry maybe I wasn't clear. I don't mean "What if Apple had released Mac OS for the x86 platform". In other words, where I could install it on a Dell. I agree, that's death

I mean if back when it came time to choose the next processor they chose x86 to use in their apple machines instead of Power PC.

Power PC vs. x86 is way beyond this forum, but you can't argue that latest mobile Intel and AMD chips are kicking a--. They're getting awesome performance at the same time as awesome battery and it just makes the current CPU situation in Apples laptops that much harder to wait out. Competition has worked wonders for hard drives, graphics cards, and x86 CPUs.

Now hopefully the G5 Powerbook rumors are true and we'll see them in the summer and I'll no longer be jealous. Except the pessimist in me thinks even if that happens history shows the initial joy of the leap ahead of x86 performance will wear off as the years go by with only minor updates after that (and that even if they do announce G5 Powerbook in the summer it will be fall at least before I can actually own one, but that's a totally different Apple rant)