Odd, it seems I already do that on my mac… :)

“People are buying 32bit Macs, and therefore won’t be able to run anything 64bit.”

Agreed, but my point was that people wont need to run 64-bit software for quite some time, so long, IMHO, that they will be buying new macs by then.

About your quotes from the wikipedia article. I never meant to imply that only systems with more than 4gb are the only ones to benefit. Since I have read the article :)… What I meant to say is that servers were the first ones to adopt 64-bit cpu’s and such since they needed more than 4gb… Of course you dont NEED to have more than 4gb for 64-bit to matter. What I’m getting at is there is no 64-bit software available that a regular user would be interested in… and I would predict that there wont be any for quite some time. This also touches on your “the software follows suit” comment, it hasn’t. Only OS’ supporting it have come around, along with their drivers… That’s all. Infact we found taht the 64-bit version of Farcry was pretty weak and regularly stick to the regular version.

So while it is possible that we see steve incorporate 64-bit intel cpu’s (blech, btw) soon, it would be pointless for more than a couple reasons.

- No useful 64-bit software to the mini/laptop crowd. While video editing and stuff may be helped by larger address spaces and such, it is already ‘adequate’ right now (and convenional improvements still make a difference, such as hard drive speed, etc) and there isn’t any alternative to the current 32-bit apps!

- While it’s not the only factor, next to no systems will have or need > 4gb of ram for at the very least a year and a half -> 2 years.

- 64-bit intel really eats it… :( (OT: I am SO glad they didn’t shove a crappy P4 in any of these new macs)

Also, I don’t think I really missed your point.

“They (and all of the 3rd party application providers) could have waited for the 64bit solution and ported all of their software to Intel 64 and have been done with it once and for all.”

You were saying you didn’t get ‘why they rushed’ to switch to intel’s 32-bit cpu’s because developers will have to transition to 64-bit when the change-over comes. And my response was that the developers wont have to make another transition because their 32-bit software will work without issue on new 64-bit hardware. Only software that specifically benefits from the 64-bit architecture will have to be rewritten and those apps will be nearly from scratch as it is. They are most likely working on this sort of thing right now… But somehow I doubt the ‘consumer’ crowd will care about these newest crazy-high-end apps.

With that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they transition the PowerMac to a 64-bit intel cpu, allowing these high end apps to run on the highest end computers. Which makes perfect sense to me…

“I appreciate your opinions though, I love these types of conversations/speculations :)”

Agreed, arguing and such is teh rox0r. :P

Unless your doing video editing or using an application that moves alot of information back and forth. Nah, your’re right, people don’t use Macs for that ;0

“It’s just not necessary. And even if it was, all you need is a 64-bit capable OS (like OSX) and 64-bit device drivers (also already taken care of) and all your 32-bit apps will run perfectly fine.”

I think you may have missed my point. People are buying 32bit Macs, and therefore won’t be able to run anything 64bit. In the PC world the hardware went 64bit and now the software is following suit. This is how it should have been done on the Mac. Again, anyone buying a 32 bit Mac gets left behind in the transition to 64bit. you need a new 64bit computer to run the 64bit OS and apps. The drivers have nothing to do with it.

“This is demonstrated by my Windows XP Pro x64 Edition box I played around with for a while and still used all my 32-bit apps on.”

Yep, on your 64bit hardware. Like I said, you missed my point.

Here are some points from the link you posted:

“A change from a 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture is a fundamental alteration, as most operating systems must be extensively modified to take advantage of the new architecture. Other software must also be ported to use the new capabilities; older software is usually supported through either a hardware compatibility mode (in which the new processors support an older 32-bit instruction set as well as the new modes), through software emulation, or by the actual implementation of a 32-bit processor core within the 64-bit processor die (as with the Itanium processors from Intel, which include an x86 processor core to run 32-bit x86 applications).”

“While 64-bit architectures indisputably make working with huge data sets in applications such as digital video, scientific computing, and large databases easier, there has been considerable debate as to whether they or their 32-bit compatibility modes will be faster than comparably-priced 32-bit systems for other tasks.”

“A common misconception is that 64-bit architectures are no better than 32-bit architectures unless the computer has more than 4 GB of memory. This is not entirely true:”

If the whole process takes a long time as you seem to believe, then yes you are right and most people won’t be affected. Hoever I think Stevie boy will be making that statement you quote at the end of your post much sooner than you think. Though I hope not :)

I appreciate your opinions though, I love these types of conversations/speculations :)

I don’t think so. Nearly all consumer and pro-sumers alike will have absolutely no need to go to 64-bit applications / OS in the forseeable future. It’s just not necessary. And even if it was, all you need is a 64-bit capable OS (like OSX) and 64-bit device drivers (also already taken care of) and all your 32-bit apps will run perfectly fine. This is demonstrated by my Windows XP Pro x64 Edition box I played around with for a while and still used all my 32-bit apps on. The only notable exception is anti-virus which seems to need native 64-bit versions… but who runs anti-virus on their mac these days anyway?

So, there will be no ‘transition’ becuase it’s a simple matter of shipping systems with 64-bit cpu’s and a 64-bit enabled OS. Manufacturers of hardware will need to have 64-bit versions of their software, but most of that is already done since there have already been 64-bit system from apple in the past. With that said, I must mention again that 64-bit support is mostly used in server situations where you need >4GB of memory since that’s the cap of 32-bit systems.

This article has a good overview if you aren’t familiar with the specifics. But, in short, don’t worry about any commotion over a future 64-bit move. Steve will simply get up on stage one day and go “oh and we’re shipping these with 64-bit cpu’s now!…” Done. :)

Since most, if not all applications available on both platforms seemed to run faster on a PC, many people, including myself, did not see the logic behind spending more money for less performance. Yeah Windows could be a pain, but the truth is that over the last few years, it has matured into a solid and reliable OS.

Apple had lost its advantage.

With the switch to Intel, that’s all over now and I am currently in the process of learning this wonderful OS all over again.

The switch to an Intel made MB, CPU and chipset, is not the bad thing most are making it out to be (except for the loss of Firewire 800). Intel makes a very reliable board, and trips to the Apple store for motherboard replacements will be a thing of the past.

With regards to the Mac-mini, unfortunately I am forced to agree with the critics. The on-board memory scheme will tax the bus and anyway you look at it, will cause performance to suffer.

Unfortunately, Intel’s on-board offerings do suck. A better option would have been an IGP chipset from ATi now that Intel is also using them on their boards.

The real problem with the transition to Intel will surface in the near future. With Intel about to switch to their 64bit cores, why Apple would rush to make the transition to a 32bit system is beyond me. They (and all of the 3rd party application providers) could have waited for the 64bit solution and ported all of their software to Intel 64 and have been done with it once and for all.

When Apple does finally move over to a 64bit platform, this whole transition thing will start all over again. Now that will be something to bitch about.

It’s your right to say so. And I can appreciate that many may not think the name was the best choice. All I am trying to do is speculate that no matter what the name change was, everyone would be all hot and bothered anyway. So when I say ‘get used to it’ I don’t mean it like a flame (ie. too bad for you, haha, i win) but more to say that things have been changing significantly at apple since 1997 and things will continue to change as per steve’s magical ultimate plan (helped by the RDF no doubt) and there isn’t much that anyone can do to change it…

With that said, something like a name change is hardly important enough to argue about as much as we have (let alone articles like the c|net one linked). And that’s really all I was trying to say… err.. argue… because… I wanted to stop.. the… arguing… damn.

:)

I’d would be interested to see a poll, though… I’m sure there’s a wordpress plugin somewhere for polls… a-ha! Like this one.

I don’t think ‘linguistic fluency’ IS any measure of taste.

Agreed. I was being tongue in cheek anyway. :)

As to the name change, I am starting to see your angle, but I think you are conflating a couple of my points. I do think that the Mac is losing some of its magic and I do think that MacBook Pro as a name sucks, but I do not think that the Mac is losing its magic or selling its soul because of the name change. No, it is far simpler than that – the name just sucks.

Incidentally, it may be a British thing – and would any British readers care to chirp up at this point and prove me wrong – but I have yet to find someone on this verdant isle who likes the new name. I wonder if we can do polls on TAB…

You make some good points, especially about the sodimms… That’s definitely my mistake, I could have sworn they used them at one point, but it’s also easy enough for me to be confused with some PC knock-off I came across a while ago.

However, I think you missed what I meant about the ‘power users’, no doubt due to my poor english (I am no journalist)… What I was getting at is that while a buyer of a mac mini could certainly want to burn a dvd or use their camera and iPhoto, download music from iTunes, burn cd’s, all that ‘etc etc etc’ stuff, it seems like they might not be especially inclined to do it all at once. My parents crappy PC can use iTunes, it can burn cd’s, it can do pretty much anything. The point is that if I were to upgrade their ram to 1GB (which windows machine do enjoy btw, it’s much past 1GB that makes next to no difference) they would hardly care. iTunes will receive negligible performance increase, etc. So I’m not saying that mac’s shouldn’t be ‘insanely great’ becuase they should, and are. All I’m saying is that they upgraded the ram so that they can sacrifice some and save on the video card, which in all truth isn’t really as bad as you make it out to be. It’s replacing, what, a radeon 9250 or some such other nonsense video card? All we’re losing is the onboard memory of the card really, and they’ve upgraded the ram on the machine, so it’s a wash, imo.

As far as the name, again… I’m sorry my english wasn’t good enough for you. I didn’t misunderstand your post, I just didn’t express myself very well in response since I have other things to do and my comment was admittedly too long already.

So I’ll just say this. I don’t think ‘linguistic fluency’ IS any measure of taste. I think people who bash the name are fanboys in the sense that every change apple makes is somehow ‘selling its soul’ or ‘losing its magic’. Why can’t they just make a name change? There’s nothing ‘sacred’ about apple and their products. It’s not a powerbook anymore, it’s a macbook. It’s their product to rename. My objection isn’t to not liking the name, it’s to rediculousness like:

“MacBook Pro(1) PowerBook Core
…
1. Over my dead body. See this article on c|net for more.”

You’re going to just call the macbook a powerbook core instead…? Sorry but ‘Powerbook Core’ is even worse! And the funny part is, if they actually DID call it the powerbook core you would just turn around and complain “powerbook core, ULTRAPowerBook… core over my dead body!” And you could just be joking around, sure, and that’s fine (and likely?). I’m not trying to say you can’t do that or shouldn’t do that or anything, of course. All I’m saying is that it’s stupid to get so hung up over just the name of the thing!

And since I’m getting hung up on you getting hung up on the name, I’m not going to mention it again, it’s your article so you can say what you want…

Hear hear! I find myself thinking along similar lines these days too. Whilst it must be said that a larger (but not large) userbase is good for things like persuading developers of Windows-only software to target the Mac, I do wonder if all this chasing the PC-using crowd is a good thing.

Perhaps Apple will release a Ferrari Mac on their anniversary on 1 April, but I doubt it. It would be nice though – a machine with all the bells and whistles.

Chris,

Agreed about the damage to sales, so sooner rather than later makes sense. You may be right, and we may see Apple playing a greater role in hardware design in the future, but I can’t help but wonder if they’ll think it not worth the bother. We’ll see.

Frank,

Right, we agree on the principle that Apple shouldn’t enter the budget market. But by speccing out the the Mac mini with this awful video chip, it has created a machine fit for the budget market at above-budget-market prices! A sorry state of affairs indeed!

(I exaggerate, of course, because it comes with Bluetooth 2.0, wireless, combo drive or DVD writer as opposed to the CD-ROM drives Dell still ship. But the fact remains that this is a really, really lame graphics chip.)

As your intent is to provoke, I shall respond. :)

What is a Macintosh user if he is not, by your definition, a power user? A bold statement, I agree, and one that requires clarification, but – if you will permit me to explain – I think you may see my point.

You define power users as “[those] with 5000 photos who burn dvd’s (sic) and use iMovie and GarageBand and etc etc etc”. Forgive me if you will, but is this not the very definition of a Mac user? The whole point of the Mac (through Mac OS X) is to facilitate just these tasks – photo management, making home movies, making your own music, burning DVDs, etc. The Mac is the enabler that makes these hitherto impossible (or otherwise very difficult and/or requiring additional software and/or hardware) tasks possible. Not just possible, but in fact downright simple.

I will freely acknowledge that there are those who do not require this level of functionality. But for them, I would submit that the Mac is overkill, and that their needs would be far better served by a black box from Dell, which, if security and peace of mind are required, could usefully run a Linux distribution. It is cheaper, and would be more than adequate. Of course, if they use a Mac, then yes, they can probably sacrifice 128MB of system memory for video RAM (although I can personally attest that with the onset of Mac OS X 10.4, 384MB went from being “a reasonable amount” to “not really enough”, and responsiveness decreased). And yes, the system memory can be upgraded, although not particularly easily (I have done it) and, to nitpick, not with SODIMMs. But, like I say, should they really be using Macs in the first place? It is like using a sledgehammer to kill an ant, or something…

(Incidentally, I have 1.25GB in my PowerBook and I can highly recommend it. I am someone who fits the traditional definition of a power user – I have, for example, almost 20,000 photos in my iPhoto library – and the difference between 512MB and 1.25GB is breathtaking. You are right to state that that is not typical amongst PC users – it isn’t – and at least one of the reasons for that is Windows’s astonishingly poor memory management – there is very little gained in boosting a Windows box’s memory complement. Give Windows 1GB and it won’t do anything with it; give Mac OS X (or Linux, for that matter) 1GB and it will cache everything it can in it so your computer flies along. Anyway, I digress…)

I agree that Apple would not release a machine which was, say, that bad (although…), and the chip is clearly sufficient. My lament is founded in my belief that Apple’s products should not merely be sufficient, but that even the “budget” hardware should instead strive to be “insanely great“. I seem to have heard that somewhere before…

I cannot understand what you are trying to say about the name, and it may be that you have misunderstood what I was saying in my earlier response. I maintain and will continue to maintain that the new name is a poor substitute for the PowerBook, and cannot understand why this has anything to do with being a fanboy. Indeed, the reverse is closer to the truth – were I a fanboy, I would unquestioningly accept anything that Apple did, and would defend the name against all odds, resorting to tactics such as, say, labelling people, er, stubborn fanboys. :) In any case, as I can only judge you by your style of writing, I can only comment that if linguistic fluency is any measure of taste, Gruber and I have the edge. (Si vous êtes en fait québécois, et ben donc votre langue natale n’est pas l’anglais, je m’excuse.)

I do not understand the penultimate paragraph of your comment, and therefore feel unable to respond to it.

At the end of the day, you think it is all about the software. I – and some others on here, it seems – consider it to be something more than that. That is why we feel let down.

Maybe in a few years I’ll buy another Mac but with the way things are going I won’t be buying another apple product for awhile. Keep in mind my G5 iMac is the best comptuer i’ve ever owned..

If this is going to /dev/null then I wont hold my return ‘inflammatory’ comments :)

By ‘people dont need 512mb of ram’ I don’t mean your power users with 5000 photos who burn dvd’s and use iMovie and GarageBand and etc etc etc… I’m talking about people like my parents who are still using an Athlon XP 2000 with 256mb of DDR333. My girlfriend using word on a Celeron M, etc. These people CAN easily sacrifice even 128mb of memory for video! Why not? It will make next to no difference to them. And not only that, the machines can be easily upgraded by just walking into a local computer shop and buying a 512mb stick of Kingston so-dimms. So I don’t see the problem there… yes even 512mb is painful for me, hell, I have 768mb in my powerbook that I’m typing this on and I get frustrated sometimes and I’m thinking of maxing this thing out… but that is not typical at all, especially among the PCers (who I know well, working at a crappy PC shop off and on for quite a number of years).

With that said I definitely will agree that if it’s managed poorly it will be brutal. Although Intel has been doing the integrated graphics with their chipsets for some time, and I somehow doubt apple would sit by and let something THAT bad get into production, especially when they’re STILL ahead of schedule for the transition.

About the name, again… I think you people need to relax. You dont think it’s confusing eh? How much better is a sony viao 5873875883-DHJSDK-38853? Good question, it’s not it’s far worse, THAT’S THE POINT. Think different remember? They’re trying to be recognized as different, and to them, that means getting the name ‘mac’ in every product. Why is it so hard for you to accept? I think you should rephrase your leading sentence… “Those with taste know that the name sucks.” to something more like “Stubborn fanboys knows that the name sucks.”

Reading yours and that other guys article and how you both came to the conclusion it sounds like accounting software… I think that just proves my point. Two fanboys who can’t let their favorite company make their own choice of product name.

On a side note: Did you read that part about steve’s quote, how now developers will ‘think they have to drop everything and do it immediately’? I thought that was funny because he quotes steve directly… The quote is “We said we’d be shipping by next June and we are on track to have that be a true statement…”… Hmm… BY NEXT JUNE… Doesn’t sound like a lie to me, February is before June… So… Yep.. No problem there. More examples of fanboys who don’t think things through.

Hardware outsourcing… Losing magic… Pfft. It’s about the software.

——–

Chris,

Right on. Seems like you’ve got an eye for apple’s strategy. You should start writing articles about this stuff :)

Gareth: I totally agree with you. I don’t think Apple will ever try or SHOULD ever try to get down to the bargain-basement of the Dell/HP world. But they do need to be *somewhat* sensitive to pricing.

The VERY EXISTENCE of the Mac mini proves that Apple knows it needs to compete in the somewhat-low-cost market. Pricing the original mini at $499 was an intentional effort to get a sub-$500 machine on the market.

I had another thought this morning: the real bugger about the Intel Integrated chipset is that it cant be upgraded. If you buy a $499 Dell, you can always slap a better video card in there to upgrade it. But if you want a headless Mac with a decent video card, it’s a huge jump to the G5. Maybe Apple will remedy this down the road. They should.

Gareth,

I did I also said that “it won’t make sense for them to return to designing their own motherboards completly from scratch”. There’s no way that Apple could have redesigned the entire product line by themselves in one year. It would not have made sense for them to hire more engineers – how could they have trained them fast enough? what would they have done with all of these additional people once the transition is complete? So they had two options – 1. Get Intel’s help and use their cookie-cutter mobo designs, or 2. Take longer doing it. Option number 2 would have been very damaging to sales – becuase people would have held off for longer, and there would have been less incentive for ISVs to start producing Universal Binaries. Personally, I think that once the transition is complete, we will see Apple continue to leverage Intel mobo cookie-cutter designs but with customized variations. Perhaps it will be like Apple’s relationship with Sun where they use 95% of the standard JDK implementation, but added some unique innovations (shared libraries across VMs) that improve the Java experience on the Mac. These got licensed back to Sun and used in later releases of Sun’s JDK.

Return to ADB and SCSI
I’m not advocating a return to ADB or SCSI, although it’s worth noting that ADB has only very recently been phased out – it persisted as the keyboard and mouse interface for Apple’s portables right up until 2004. Or maybe last year. I forget, and I haven’t the inclination to check.

Intel GPU and CoreGraphics
The Intel GPU in the Mac mini supports CoreGraphics (or vice versa). Windows Vista’s Aero Glass supports it too.

Special Measures during the Transition?
I don’t buy this, for the reasons I outlined above. If Apple wanted to design the whole thing from the ground up, they could have done that straight off the bat. No, make no mistake about it, this is the way things are going to stay.

Mac mini as Powerhouse
I didn’t expect this, I must say, and it is a really nice inclusion – it makes it a very respectable machine. Also note that you can get up to 2GB of RAM as a BTO option!

Shared Video Memory
The talk of this 80MB minimum when it says it has 64MB video RAM is worrying. How much RAM is it actually going to use? Can I tweak it like one can in PC BIOSes? It’s worth bearing in mind that these days, users do need 512MB as a minimum in their machines as applications like iPhoto and GarageBand place ever-increasing demands on system resources – Ryan, I think you’re off the mark when you suggest otherwise. So to sacrifice 80MB to video RAM is quite a big hit.

The ExtremeTech review linked to also makes the point about the hardware needing to do a good job of balancing the needs of the CPU and the graphics chip in terms of accessing memory – if this is done poorly, it will have a deleterious effect on the performance of both.

Following the Price Curve
Frank, I think you’re off the mark when you suggest this. It has been observed time and time again that Apple does not want to get into the budget PC market – it is not a war they can win when the other players are like Dell. They are selling – in Mac OS X and in the exterior design – something a little bit different and so can and should charge for that. I agree that there has been a need for a reduction in price in the past – this is no longer a matter of selling £5,000 boxes to the wealthy few – but I think that Apple has its products well-priced now, considering what it is selling.

The Name
Those with taste know that the name sucks. Yes, this is intended to be slightly inflammatory. Flames will be routed to /dev/null.* :)

I certainly disagree with the suggestion that by calling it a PowerBook it would confuse people as to the processor inside. How, for example, is the name Sony Vaio PCG-TR1MP any more indicative of what processor is inside?

(Incidentally, both John Gruber and I – writing totally independently of each other – reached the same conclusion as to the origin of the name.)

Conclusion
Yes, it’s still a Mac. It still runs Mac OS X, and does all the wonderful things that we like to do with Macs even faster (except maybe attempt to run World of Warcraft). The Core Duo machine is pretty sweet and will sell well, especially given the integrated DVD writer – all in all a compelling package. I like it. I may well buy one.

My lament, then, is more one of principle than anything else – that by this outsourcing of all hardware design to Intel, some of the Apple magic is dying in some way. It’s perhaps not really that big a deal at the end of the day – as I alluded to above, it might mean fewer iBook logic board failures, because Intel’s build quality is pretty good.

I suppose we’ll see.

I’m wondering if the new mac mini is more of a high-end computer than the original. I can imagine apple coming out with a mac mini lite or some such thing with a pentium m or whatever for the real entry-level. I mean, in today’s market £500-£600 without display, keyboard or mouse isn’t really entry-level.