Today, the Dutch headquarters of Apple held a press conference concerning the announcements made by Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, last week during MacWorld in San Fransisco. During the conference, the new products would be presented by speakers from Apple Europe, and afterwards there was time to get hands-on with the new products. I got invited to this event, so read on for a few notes.
Apple’s office in The Netherlands is just off of the A12 highway towards Arnhem, in Bunnik. I must say, from the outside it’s a rather un-inspiring office building, but on the inside it looks very clean, almost Apple Store-like. Due to the major traffic jams which gridlock my country for 6 hours in total each day, a trip that should take me little over an hour actually turned out to take 3 hours (of course it didn’t help I missed an exit, but let’s just pretend that didn’t happen).
So, I got in a little late (about an hour, but I only missed the check-in). I took a seat in a conference room, and watched two men from Apple Europe talk about iLife ’06, iWork ’06, the Intel iMac, and of course the MacBook Pro. Little new information got presented here, since I already watched the keynote from Steve Jobs.
After the presentation, the opportunity was there to ask questions. Here are a few notes, things Steve Jobs did not mention in his keynote:
MacBook Pro
Then we got on to the really interesting part: actually using the Intel Macs. My attention was obviously drawn to the MacBook Pro. The machine is blazingly fast, but I’m not sure how much of that speed can be attributed to the for me enormous amount of RAM it packed (2 GB, I’m only used to Macs with either 512MB or 1GB). Front Row was noticeably faster than on the iMac G5 1.9Ghz 1GB I reviewed. Same goes for the entire iLife suite; especially iPhoto ’06 is so much faster than its predecessor (which is close to unusable). Again, it is difficult to say if this can be attributed to the machine, or to the new version of iPhoto.
I’m not sure what to think of the MacBook Pro. While I find it a good looking machine, I’m having a hard time trying to find the usefulness in adding a webcam and Front Row to a laptop targeted at professionals. On an iBook, I can understand it. However, I think professionals have more use in PCMCIA slots and modems (ie. digital photographers go to every corner of the globe, and broadband isn’t as widespread as dial-up internet).
In any case, expect a detailed review of the MacBook Pro somewhere in February. I’ll withhold my final word until I’ve used it more extensively.
Intel iMac, More
The two Intel iMacs also pack the speed improvements I noted in the MacBook Pro. Again, one can especially notice this when using the iLife applications. For the rest there is little to see here.
Rosetta is indeed completely transparent. I used Office:Mac and Photoshop, and they loaded without problems. Word even seemed to load faster than on the iMac G5. Photoshop was usable, but my fellow members of the press who appear to be heavy users of Photoshop (I ain’t) said it was noticeably slower than running it native on PPC (obviously).
The FM radio/remote control for the iPod works fine, but the radio lacks auto-search, and as such you must search for channels manually which can really be a pain in the butt when traveling. Some RDS/EON functionality would be appreciated, Apple. Now, this remote/radio simply is not worth its whopping EUR 55 (or $49 in the US).
Conclusion
Obviously, there is little to conclude. I got to use the new products fairly little, so it would’nt be fair to make any final judgments. Expect reviews of the mentioned products on OSNews in the coming months.
–Thom Holwerda
Note: My apologies for not having any photos, but I was not allowed to take any.
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Although it’s early, I find myself impressed at the smoothness with which this transition seems to be taking place. Switching architectures is no small feat, and Apple seems to be doing it with it’s characteristic ease, grace, and flair…(I’m no fanboy, I don’t even own a mac)
We can all agree, though, that apple has made tech news a bit more interesting as of late…
“Switching architectures is no small feat, and Apple seems to be doing it with it’s characteristic ease, grace, and flair…(I’m no fanboy, I don’t even own a mac)”
I agree, but it wasn’t as hard as doing it from scratch, because OS X was designed to run on Intel from the beginning from what I’ve “little” know about NeXt.
So I think in every aspect, we should see better performance under Intel(or even amd).
No mention at all of when Intel Mini Macs are coming?
It’s very disappointing. Users can’t refresh their blogs made by iWeb with the software. They have to upload the whole site each time with images, etc.
That really sucks.. especially since rsync would have rocked at this once wrapped in a nice OSX GUI.
Too bad there’s no way to wget –timestamping in reverse.
that’s not entirely true, while that’s what will be easiest for novices, you could write an applescript (or most otherl angue) that will upload automagiclly the new or changed files
> I’m having a hard time trying to find the usefulness in adding a webcam and Front Row to a laptop targeted at professionals.
While Front Row is a bit useless for Pros, VoIP and Video calls are very important in many modern working environments and so the webcam is useful.
The other thing is, people who buy MacBook Pros are not just professionals, but people who want just a high-end laptop, so for them Front Row can appeal. Besides, it’s not a problem if you pack more features into a product, the problem is when you remove them (like they removed modem, s-video, fw800 and worse screen resolution and burner, compared to the Powerbook).
“The other thing is, people who buy MacBook Pros are not just professionals, but people who want just a high-end laptop, so for them Front Row can appeal.”
True enough, I persoanlly know a few ordinary folks who will be buying MacBooks despite not being “pro users.”
AFAIK Front Row is intended for people sitting on the sofa, wanting to use their Macs as a Media-Center thing. So what Pro’s are you talking about?
Couch-Potatoe-Pros? Professional-Multimedia-Consumption-Couch-Sitting-Douche-Bag?
“Couch-Potatoe-Pros? Professional-Multimedia-Consumption-Couch-Sitting-Douche-Bag?”
I don’t know why I’m responding to this, but here goes:
Heaven help us that a company is marketing products that appeal to a wide range of potential users, from pros to newbies, to multimedia junkies and UNIX geeks, at reasonable prices.
Shame on Apple. Poo poo on them 😛
I just don’t see why you keep opposing the two. One can have a computer for both personal and pro uses. Just create two users if you really want to avoid any mix.
What’s wrong if I watch a movie on the computer I used allday long to write software?
pro’s on the road who want to watch a movie in the motel.
I agree, especially RE: Firewire 800.
If you’d bought, say, an RME Fireface ( http://www.rme-audio.com/english/firewire/ff800.htm ) and wanted to upgrade to a MacBook Pro, you’d be pretty pissed off.
blah you want s-video, buy the 20 dollar dongle…. modem.. yeah that sucks, FW800? it sucks for the 5 people that used it.
The screen res is not worse for the size.. the size of the screen is physically 60 pixels shorter so the ratio of physical screen to res is maintained…. No Dual Layer burning? So the F what.. that is just a stupid buffer tech that will die in 6 – 1o months anyway when BR is available.
Front row with keynote support sounded like a great idea for a Macbook Pro… until they removed svideo.
And I’m pretty sure I’ve hooked up a TV and second LCD to my powerbook to be using all 3 screens at once (admittedly I might have imagined it, im tired right now).
Is there at least a converter for dvi-svideo?
And where the hell is my firewire 800, just include the converter cable for 2 firewire 400 connections and it would be fine. Seems like they wanted to put this laptop together quickly. Its the same size, lacks a lot of old features, doesn’t seem to include any that should take up much space on the pcb, and still haven’t told us about the battery life.
But damnit, I want one.
While it’s not necessary on an Imac since most serious users have broadband I find it a bit harsh not to have a modem on the laptop. If you’re on the way it’s always easy to find a phone line but not every town has free WIFI.
but, you can always get a subscription to (or add access to a DSL account for) wifi hot spots like at the flying-J
The last statistics I saw said that something like 60% of the [UK?] internet populous is on broadband. Dialup is the minority. Though I don’t disagree. Most of Apple’s check-your-email-surf-the-web target are probably the 40% still on dialup.
It would have been nice if they included these on the new MacBook Pro, but it’s not a huge deal. You can pick up a S-Video adapter for $20, and apparently they’re going to release a Express Card/34 card that will provide FireWire 800.
On the topic of Rosetta not loading iMovie plugins, I would just like to note that in my experience with the new Intel iMac any PPC spotlight importers and automator actions will not load with Rosetta.
automator actions? those should carry over with out modification to the intel OS and run native.
> especially iPhoto ’06 is so much faster than its predecessor (which is close to unusable)
It seems I am a god, I use it every day (and it is usable)…
I hope that this new Macs are sucessful on the field. However I won’t be having one for the time being.
My laptop was 500 euro, cheaper than the MacBook Pro and beats it in every feature.
I would like to own one, but my OS experience allows me to use a dual boot laptop quite comfortable. So no upgrade for the time being.
Maybe you can dual boot, but not to OS X. That’s the whole point of buying a Mac, genius.
Yes – Firewire 800 rocked speed-wise but it was significantly more expensive and rarer than USB2 and Firewire 400 devices. This can be explained by the fact USB2 has been in every Intel PC for years and Firewire, especially Firewire 800, in hardly any. Now, the Apple version of USB2 sucked pretty hard – it ran at about half the speed of a good PC motherboard implementation – so their Firewire 400 was the faster/better option to get data in and out of their system for the money. There was even some speculation that the Apple USB2 implementation was soo bad that it might have been purposefully sabotaged to promote Firewire. However, my guess is that on the MacBook pro, since they are using stardard Intel guts, it is far closer to the PC approach and just about equal with Firewire 400. Considering how much more prevelent and cheaper the USB2 interface is these speeds will be more than acceptable for most people… See the review/benchmark below.
“The Windows PC implementation of USB 2.0 puts the Mac to shame. Today we tested the same USB 2.0 drive/enclosure on a Windows PC (3GHz Pentium 4) with built-in USB 2.0 on the motherboard, similar to Apple’s approach. We measured 33MB/s READ and 27MB/s WRITE.”
http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html