13th Jan 2006
MWSF 2006, quick impressions
I got to Macworld a couple of times this week, and saw the keynote over a stream sometime late Tuesday. The new Intel boxes are great, though it remains to be seen how well the first iteration holds up once they start shipping.
Heat
The MacBook Pro that I saw was a preproduction unit. It runs HOT. I’d say hotter than my 17″ G4. Hopefully they’ll get that addressed in the shipping units.
Evolution
This first Intel iteration doesn’t really look different than the PowerBook. There’s an iSight camera built in, an IR port, and the ExpressCard slot is narrower than the one it replaces. In between that and the “MacBook Pro” lettering replacing “PowerBook G4″, it’s pretty much the same design with some minor tweaks. I get the feeling Apple rushed this one out, in order to deal with a lot of pent up demand. The next revision ought to reveal their true intentions. Hopefully the 12″ and 17″ versions will be out before too long (though I’ve read that Intel doesn’t have enough Core Duo chips to go around, and is making HP and Dell wait in line)
FW800
At first, I was dismayed that the MacBook Pro left off support for Firewire 800. Perhaps that’s because my wife and I have ~8 LaCie FW800 drives between us.
I quickly spoke to a person from firmtek.com at the Apple booth. He was holding an ExpressCard SATA adapter. That’ll be good news for people that want to do external SATA. I told him that he should consider a FW800 adapter. Someone’s got to do it, right?
Dual Layer SuperDrive?
The MacBook Pro doesn’t offer a Dual Layer DVD burner. Apparently they moved from a 12mm thick drive in the PowerBook, to a new one that’s 9mm. It seems like a strange compromise, but the new machine is slightly thinner. I wonder if they’ll skip to an HD or BluRay burner in a laptop in a year or so. On the other hand, I wouldn’t expect anyone to burn something over 10 gb and still have much battery left.
[make that "a few years". CNet has an article about how clunky the large HD DVD players looked at CES.]
iMac Monitor Spanning
Hey, unlike the G5 iMac, the Intel iMac supports monitor spanning, Digital resolutions up to 1920 x 1200. Analog resolutions up to 2045 x 1536.
iMac Memory
The G5 iMac supported up to 2.5gb of RAM. The Intel supports up to 2gb. Interesting…
The EFI Boot Thing
A question floating around is: will the Intel Macs support dual or triple booting? (OS X, Linux, and Windows) Windows XP reportedly wants a BIOS to boot from. Engadget has a blurb about it. My hunch is that the Linux community will solve it first - they’ll quickly come up with a way to get Intel distros running on the MacBook Pro and the new iMac. Why? Well, for no other reason than to beat the Windows people to it :-)
The problem with memory on the iMac G5 was that it had 512MB on the motherboard and then a single slot.
Which means that unless you stopped at 1GB (2×512) you would have “non-simmetrical” memory.
And DDR memory busses don’t like lack of simmetry… they run about 10% slower in such cases.
The new iMac Core Duo has two slots, thus, an improvement, even if you can only reach 2GB.