Apple Rumors - WWDC Thread - Panther/G5 (1 Viewer)

[Michael*K]

I don't think anyone mentioned that Safari 1.0 was being released today along with a Safari Software Developer's Kit. The new machines are nice, although, if they require nine fans it will be a hell of an engineering feat to get a 970 inside of a PowerBook. I'll wait to see the Panther developer's build in a few days. Font Book is a welcome addition. Expose is nice too, but I can't hide the disappointment over the progress (or lack thereof) of Mail.app. Seems the only things Jobs highlighted with it were cosmetic improvements.

 

[Patrick Larkin]

Jobs mentioned Mail.app was much faster. Also, the addition of threaded mail is a much needed addition. What else is there to do in Mail anyhow? I have folders in Mail with over 17,000 messages and it runs fine for me.

The bad thing is that Jobs gave the street date for Panther as "the end of the year."

Oh, and if you didn't see the keynote, it seemed Jobs was really on the offensive against Microsoft. He made a snide remark about how they had a great relationship. And then he showed the video of the Panther snarling and then the Longhorn biding its time eating grass. Priceless!

 

[Michael*K]

I have folders in Mail with over 17,000 messages and it runs fine for me.

Glad it works for you. I'm supporting 10.2 for 400+ users and I can assure you that it doesn't run fine for many of those people. Screwed up indexes, compaction errors and frequent writing to disk notices are common complaints. Throw in the well documented complaints about the attcahment encoding and you're left with a mail client that makes me want to pull my hair out. Luckily our users have access to Entourage, but they shouldn't have to utilize two separate mail clients. The tight Mail.app integration with Address Book is really the only thing keeping us from switching at this point.

Jobs mentioned end of the year for 10.3. The employees at the Apple Store read a company bulletin after the keynote that stated the release for Panther is pegged for September.

 

[Patrick Larkin]

Michael - Ew, Entourage. Entourage is horrendous - not from a feature standpoint where its great - but from the way it handles your mail. Its a single file proprietary database. It can take literally 20 minutes to send a folder of email to the Trash and another 20 minutes to empty the trash. I got tired of watching Entourage thrash continuously and rebuilding my mail box more than once.

I work for a school district with approximately 6,000 Macs. 1200 or so of those are staff member Macs. It seems like Eudora has maintained its most used client status after years and years. Personally, I use Mail but only because I prefer a lightweight email client. I've never seen an attachment problem but then again we are pretty much a Mac only shop.

 

[Michael*K]

Patrick, I'm not saying Entourage is without faults. However, when it comes to getting attachments to clients, it's been pretty bulletproof for us--at least in terms of attachment encoding. Working for a large law firm--a business almost exclusively in the Windows domain--we can't afford to sit back and let spotty e-mail issues raise the ire of our clients. It's too easy for them to take business elsewhere. And it's all too easy for clients wrangling with problem e-mails to say "it's a Mac problem." That may in fact be B.S. (eg. an attorney fails to tack a file extension at the end of the filename) but eventually word will filter back to the Partners that ultimately decide what direction the Firm's I.T. department should move.

 

[Sean Moon]

Well, while the specs on the new G5 are downright sickening(meaning, sickening that I cant afford something that wonderful yet) I dont like the case for the new towers as much as the G4s. The inner workings look amazing, as everything is sectioned off, but the outside shell doesnt have the sleek sexy look apple has had over the years. It still looks good and sleek, but looks more industrial in design, where the G4 towers looked simple as well, but the clear casing gave it this delicate look which was sexy. Other than that...these machines are amazing! I just hope they dont change the monitor designs to reflect the new towers, since hte current ones are gorgeous.

 

[Camp]

I think the monitor designs will change eventually. It doesn't make sense to continue with the lucite look for the monitor line when everything else is going aluminum.

This is the pro line. We'll have to see what they do design-wise once the G5 migrates into the consumer line.

I love the new look. The lucite G4's were getting old. This is a very minimalist industrial look that really works. The interior is beautiful...begging for a window.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

http://www.haxial.com/spls-soapbox/apple-powermac-G5/

interesting rebuttle.

 

[Joseph S]

His article is being ripped to shreds everywhere. I would never have known $1999 was only $1 less than $2000 if it was for this.

 

[Patrick Larkin]

The VP of Hardware Mktg responds to the benchmark "criticism" ...

http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/0...id=126&tid=181

It just goes to show you that people should WAIT for analysis by a reputable source. The Haxial guy obviously doesn't know too much about CPU engineering to make any valid claims.

BTW, my claims about the G5 smoking the Xeon box was from witnessing the real world app challenge at WWDC. The Photoshop and Mathematica presentations were the most shocking...

Lets not forget some very important points: the demos and benchmarks were done running 32 bit apps on a G5 without Panther. We still need to learn what 64-bit apps will do on a 64-bit OS. Jobs also revealed that the 3GHz G5 will be available within 12 months.

 

[Camp]

I'm as excited as the next guy about the G5 but I like to think I'm fairly realistic in terms of expectations. Once it's released and all the websites/magazines have done their own benchmarks we'll no doubt be reminded that the computer industry is one of evolutionary, not revolutionary, leaps.

G5 brings parity to Apple. It puts Apple on the same page in terms of performance with the PC competition. Sure, it'll be faster in some circumstances but it will no doubt be slower in others. Athlon64 and Prescot will make things more interesting but, in the real world, all three CPUs will be close enough that using the word "parity" will be fair. Apple will respond with higher clock speeds and, eventually, the 980 CPU but AMD and Intel will keep the parity with their own releases.

Not nearly as sexy, huh? Apple users should be proud of achieving parity as it's been a long dry spell with the G4.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

I think these two points are very good. The G5 shouldnt be seen as some super computing mega machine, as some apple fans are seemingly touting with moist anticipation- rather the next step for Apple's platform, and a preview of the direction all desktop computing will take (and Gates said we'd never need more than 64k of ram).

Also- as much as I will be in line to buy a dual 2g G5 come Aug- there is always something about apple that makes it feel "slower" to me. The dektop interface coupled with the weird super-slow motion I seem to get browsing the web, always makes Mac use just FEEL slower. it will no doubt out perform PC competition on some things and not on others- leaving the age old debates running into our grandchildren's era.

 

[Patrick Larkin]

I seem to get browsing the web, always makes Mac use just FEEL slower

Enter Safari.

Camp and Vince, you are correct. The G5 merely brought Apple up to parity levels. However, the verdict is still out on the long range prospect of both processor types. Apple has passed the competition in other areas like bus speed, but the gap will close soon enough. Apple can't realistically be expected to compete with Intel - and it really depends on IBM's plan for the PowerPC. There are some awfully smart people at IBM and I'm sure they would love to take some business from Intel.

 

[Chris]

I don't know if it's a valid to say both have the right contention.. SPEC standard numbers can't really be "cooked"

http://www.overclockers.com/tips00408/

For some reason, apple comes up with numbers so much lower then any other organization, that it is hard to figure out how they got them. In comparison with other 64bit CPU platforms (Opteron) it's benchmarks look really poor.

This isn't saying Apple doesn't have a good product for it's crowd, but it's saying that if this kind of benchmarking were done on the PC side of the industry, by AMD or Intel, it would be a scandal of epic proportions.

 

[Patrick Larkin]

I love these articles.

The "article" at overclockers.com states that apple cooked the numbers by using "their" compiler. What the author fails to realize is what Apple has said - they are not benchmarking compilers, they are benchmarking CPUs so any scientist would know that you need a controlled environment. To gain control, you need to factor out the compiler to get down to the CPU performance. Duh.

Then, this genius continues:

"while Apple used a compiler you've never heard of (at least in the x86 world)."



Maybe YOU'VE never heard of it but GCC is a pretty standard compiler in the Unix/Linux world and last time I checked, most Linux boxes run on x86.

The largest mistake this guy makes is assuming Dell is straightforward with their testing. Of course any manufacturuer will tweak their machine for benchmarking.

From arstechnica.com (not an Apple site by any means) Monday, and I quote:

Today two pieces are making the rounds on tech sites that promise to show us how Apple has once again tried to pull the wool over our eyes, lying through *gasp* benchmarks about just how well their new G5 performs. You know how it goes: Apple is using skewed benchmarks to represent their products' performance. And don't you think for a minute that what Apple is doing is in any way similar to what we see from Microsoft, Gateway, ATI, nVidia, 3dfx, Apache, SGI, Novell, Sun, AMD, Intel, or any of those other companies who have never been known to use benchmarks as marketing tools.

And to read a truly technical article about the 970, check out the same site:

http://arstechnica.com/cpu/02q2/ppc970/ppc970-1.html

 

[Camp]

Apple has passed the competition in other areas like bus speed, but the gap will close soon enough.

Especially considering they're using AMD's HyperTransport to achieve those nice bus speeds.

 

[EdR]

After reading up on both sides of the benchmarking saga, it looks as if Apple actually did a decent job. One thing to note is that the rant that guy (at haxial) wrote is based on a PDF provided by Apple from the company that did the tests, it's not as if they were trying to hide anything.

The particular points the guy made (Hyperthreading disabled, SSE2 disabled on the P4 and the compiler) have all been capably rebutted. First, hyperthreading is actually detrimental to SPEC tests, having it on lowers the P4 scores (Dell does this in their benchmarking as well). SSE2 was enabled, but it was done via the compiler itself which is apparently unusual. As for the compiler, well as others have pointed out it provides a common base from which to compare. Also the P4 tests were done in Linux, where GCC is standard. If the tests were run in Windows, the GGC would be a clearly inferior compiler, not so for Linux.

I don't think you can make any solid judgements based Apple's on-stage demos of Photoshop, Cubase, Mathematica, etc. Like any hardware company, they almost certainly specifically chose tasks that would show off their CPU.

In any event, I think the G5 is going to be a rockin' machine that puts Apple back in the race. Whether it's leading or not isn't really the point. Apple hardware is once again a viable choice for those of us in 'creative' fields where we work with huge amounts of data and where fast hardware makes a real difference in how we get our work done.

 

[EdR]

Regarding Mail's performance. I tried to use it, but frankly it could not handle my 50,000 message database (I belong to a lot of email lists). I really wanted to use it, but it bogged down so much with that number of messages that I had to go back to PowerMail, which has no problems with that much mail.

 

[Ted Todorov]

So does anyone have iChat AV yet? I think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. A friend "chatted" with me from WWDC with one of the iSights all the attendees got and it is nothing short of amazing.

I think it is going to transform everything from Internet dating to international phone calls. I'm getting my iSight today if I don't melt into a small puddle first.

There is a David Pogue article in today's NY Times comparing it to the similar product from Microsoft and the contrast is stark. Pull quote:

Apple, on the other hand, would sooner die than release anything that could be described as "stuttering" or "microscopic." In iChat AV, video is as crisp, clear, bright and smooth as television (640 by 480 pixels), in a window as small as a Triscuit or as big as your screen.

Ted

 

[Ken Chan]

SSE2 was enabled, but it was done via the compiler itself which is apparently unusual.

HyperThreading has to be enabled in the BIOS and supported in the OS. So you can actually turn it on and off in the BIOS. But isn't SSE2 just a set of instructions? That would mean the only way to "enable" it is to compile the tests with a flag on, or write the ops by hand.

On a separate topic: the hard drives use Serial ATA. What about the SuperDrive (DVD-RW)? Plain old ATA?

//Ken