PowerBook G4 Speedbump
Apple updated the PowerBook G4's a few minutes ago, and here's the lowdown after a cursory glance...
- G4 CPUs, up to 1.67GHz. Mark my words, this is not going to benchmark well. At all.
- The 15" and 17" models are shipping with GPUs that should have CoreImage support.
- The 15" and 17" models now have Apple's 'Sudden Motion Sensor', which I'm not even going to get going on, you've all seen the commercials for the competitors.
- They PowerBooks have 'new trackpads' that include scrolling support, which means you can use two fingers to scroll up and down or side to side within a document. I'm assuming Apple is hoping few will realize their trackpads could already do this, you just needed a 3rd party driver...
- Keyboard backlights are supposed to be brighter.
- All the Powerbooks ship with 5400 RPM drives. May I just say, about damn time, although there's no option for a 7200RPM drive. This has been a pet peeve of mine going back for years, as Apple has just kept using the slowest drives they possibly could. During a conference call, an analyst even asked them about possibly including faster notebook drives. Like say, 5400 RPM, since everyone else in that class was (seriously, like a year ago). Apple's response was "Well, current 4200 RPM drives are as fast as the older 5400 RPM drives". Yes, but what about current 5400 RPM drives?
- The 17" PowerBook comes with support for Apple's 30" HD Cinema display out of the box, while it's an add-on for the 15". Apparently it's dual link, and I really want to learn more about how they're doing this exactly -- I'm thinking there has to be some kind of catch.
- SuperDrive is now 8x, but I'm thinking a $2k PowerBook should probably have a SuperDrive, which it doesn't.
I may have missed something, after all it's early, but there doesn't seem like much to miss. If you hadn't looked at Apple's numbers, their PowerBooks have taken one hell of a sales dive over the last quarter, and they hadn't been doing really well before that.
I guess we'll know next quarter whether or not this update will do anything for them...
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 31, 2005, at 09:39 AM
Comments (8)
Posted by: Paul Mison at January 31, 2005 11:43 AM
Sidetrack is cool, but I suspect that to really detect two touches, which the new PowerBooks apparently do, you'll need new hardware.
Still, it'll be interesting to see if the sort of people who go delving into install packages can copy the driver back to an older PowerBook and make it work.
Posted by: Jon H at January 31, 2005 01:57 PM
Did the earlier PowerBooks have audio stereo line-in?
These do.
Posted by: James H. at January 31, 2005 03:01 PM
I find it kind of depressing that a Powerbook I bought in August probably won't be able to handle CoreImage. Really the GPU and HDD upgrade are about the only reason I'd consider this. However, I won't be considering for a quite a while as my machine is almost 5 months old.
Posted by: Josh Marshall at January 31, 2005 04:26 PM
The Powerbooks can all handle Core Image, even the 12". The Geforce 5200 does support vertex/pixel shaders, which Core Image relies on.
The only Macs that don't support Core Image *on the GPU* are the iBooks and Mac mini, with the Radeon 9200s.
From my understanding of the old Tiger preview pages, Core Image should be supported across all Macs, it will just be slow as hell on those without graphics cards supporting shaders.
Posted by: Carl at January 31, 2005 05:37 PM
I, for one, wish Apple would re-release the specs for CoreImage, so we can end all this pointless speculation.
Posted by: Nathan Nutter at January 31, 2005 05:44 PM
I ordered one!
15" with 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 100GB Hard Drive!
Posted by: at February 1, 2005 03:52 PM
You left off bluetooth 2.0! Not sure what good it is, but it's there!
Really lame update but what other options do they have? The MHz speedup is worthless but the 5400 drive should give a boost.