I was present at Apple’s WWDC yesterday and witnessed one of the historical moments in Apple’s history, the introduction of their 64-bit platform. Am I impressed? The answer is complicated. I was happy to see Apple moving on and deliver. But I would have expected nothing less from a 4 billion tech company who had the need to catch up with the “other” platform, the 32-bit PC. You all heard by now what’s new in yesterday’s press releases and news coverings. But here is a wrap up of the first day of the conference and a commentary on what Apple really announced yesterday, underneath its surrounding distortion field.
We got there (myself and my friend, DesktopLinux.com’s Jill Ratkevic) quite early so we got through the media registration on time (thankfully they let me in, as they couldn’t find my name on their list, while I was already pre-registered via the Apple PR!!) and then we spoke to a few Apple people around. I waved to Steve Sakoman from a distance (the Newton & the BeBox architect; was at Be/PalmSource before he got back to Apple a few months ago after 13 years) and saw a few well known journalists in the tech area. At around 9:30 AM the gates opened, and they let us into the auditorium, where the keynote would take place.
The Media people were all in the left area of the room, next to the VIPs, and after half an hour everyone in the room was already sit, all 3,500 of us. Lighting was good, air conditioning was also good, and everything was going according to plan. All very well organized.
At 10:00 AM, Steve Jobs got on the stage. That was the second time I was seeing Steve live, but I somehow knew he would be… wearing the the same black t-shirt and jeans as in every other public appearance/event (yeah, for us women, clothing is a matter of discussion :).
So, the keynote kicked in with a roundup of the current achievements of Apple the past few months, the 5 million songs sold via iTunes, the iPod etc. Then, the Panther presentation started and we learned about the updated UFS file system (possibly with journaling support by default), Samba 3, VPN updates, rootless X11 by default included in the OS, faster Preview PDF version, local file encryption, built-in fax capability (showed in every Print dialog) and some font management. Nothing really groundbreaking here, just updates on the OS for things that were really needed and that other OSes already have. A nice update nevertheless.
The cool-stuff-to-look-at would definately be the new Finder, which is really not “new,” but it has being reworked on its usability side and now it includes more options on its root menu. A new “Actions” menu allows you to extend the functionality of the file manager while you now have the ability to add labels to your folders. What not many people have realized though, when Steve was doing the Finder search demo, is the kind of search that was performed. BeOS users would absolutely recognize the pattern of “spitting out” results in the search window, one by one. The new file system is obviously indexed by default and what remains to be seen is if Live Queries are also included. Live Queries is, in fact, the only feature that BeOS’ BFS still has over other fs implementations, as it requires kernel support. XFS has this feature, but the Linux kernel does not embrace it, and even worse, there are no Linux apps to actually support these specific XFS features.
So, what is “Live Queries” you ask? Well, let’s say that you have two Finder windows open, and you search on a large directory (let’s say, /Users/Eugenia/files/) for all files that start with the word “tap” on them. The search Finder window will get you the results. Now, go to the other Finder window and drop from your desktop the file taper.jpg to the /Users/Eugenia/files/ folder. Now watch the search Finder window and it has automatically updated its search results to include the new file! It might not sound very useful in this example, but under BeOS were every file had attributes, you could search by this attribute and have complex searches (“Queries”), which could also be saved for future searching). My husband never used an email client for example when he was using BeOS. Each email was an individual file under BeOS, so you could use the file manager itself to sort out your email via multiple/advanced ways! Anyways, enough ramblings about Finder and Live Queries. It is not much of a surprise though, as Dominic Giampaolo (creator of BeOS BFS) and Pavel Cisler (creator of BeOS Tracker file manager and part of the Easel Nautilus team) now work at Apple too!
Expose and Fast User Switching are impressive for “MacOS X first timers” as these feature sport funky visual effects when you use them. I heard a number of “wow” in the salle, including the journalist sitting next to me. I told him, “it is just Quartz Extreme hard at work, nothing new”. He wouldn’t listen. And at the end of that specific presentation, Steve Jobs said “so, you wonder how we do that? With Quartz Extreme!” And then the guy looked back at me and said “aaah…”. Just made me think how people get easily excited over a few visual effects, without understand what’s what and where they come from, and how much or how little engineering might these features really needed.
So, what is Expose? It is the Apple way of dealing with window clutter. It is Apple’s ‘virtual desktop’ solution. It zooms down the opened windows using Quartz Extreme’s 3D capabilities, and then you easily select which window you want to come into focus full-size. Fast User Switching is just like XP’s, but each time you are changing to a different user, it moves the whole screen as a cube to the other user’s desktop. Yeah, innovation. Pretty much like this innovation. Hehe…
And then, it was iChat AV and its iSight web camera (every attendee in the WWDC got one for free btw). Well, nothing to say about it really. The camera is slick looking (and shouldn’t have cost more than $80 or $90 at best), it is just an IM application with camera/audio support, just like MSN 6. Only with less features.
I was happy about the development updates though. The Apple version of GCC apparently supports precompiled headers just like Visual C++ has for years now (props! no other version of GCC does that), they now support distributed compiling (at last, Rendezvous hard at work!), Fix and Continue support (SGI does that since 1995, VC++ does that too now), and background compilation (just like Basic on AtariST – yeah). Well, no matter if the above sentence sounded bitter to you, it is not. I am happy seeing Apple providing good support for development stuff. But don’t expect it to be revolutionary and don’t believe Steve’s hype. It is definately evolutionary. It is a positive evolution. But it ain’t innovation. It is catch up.
And same goes for this Panther release. This release of the OS — at least the features presented to us — did not reveal any major innovations. No re-definitions of how we do things. Please, don’t think that I am negative on Apple, because it isn’t true. But I do see things the way they are and not as Steve Jobs would like me to. Last year’s Jaguar WAS innovative, WAS revolutionary: Quartz Extreme, Renderzvous, Inkwell, Sherlock 3. These were brand new features not found on other systems of the time. With Panther, we actually see Apple try to USE these technologies into their system instead of just having them lurking in the background having us pray that new apps might come out that actually use them. Yes people, Panther is the continuation of Jaguar; it is the version of the OS that uses these last year’s innovative technologies, but it doesn’t really include any new innovations of its own (except being 64-bit that is, which is not really a user feature, but a system feature). Where is full MIME support for example? But hey, you can’t (truly) innovate every year, I’ll give you that. 😉
Then, it was the time for the G5. Yes, this is an exciting hardware release. The G5 is a solid and fast machine. Some people said that it doesn’t look sexy, but I think that we see a turn of Apple into more workstation markets, so this “professional and serious-looking” case is actually appropriate and to be expected.
So, Apple now has a brand new 64-bit processor, the PPC970, with up to 2 GHz speeds and promises for 3 GHz in 12 months. Support for FW800, USB 2, AGP Pro 8x, PCI and PCI-X (depends which model you buy), 9-fan but quiet case, up to 8 GB RAM (“broke the 4 GB barrier” as Steve Jobs puts it), 1 GHz bus for the high-end model.
Let me jump the gun and say that if you plan to buy a G5, get the dual 2 GHz one, yes, the $3000 high-end one. The lower end ones are bad buys (especially the 1.6 GHz model). I don’t know what Apple was thinking when creating the 1.6 GHz (money probably) but they use DDR333 on a 800 Mhz bus. That means that the CPU has to wait for the RAM to finish its cycle before it receives the new data. They should have included DDR 400 on that model too in my opinion.
Apple showed us demos of Logic, Photoshop, Mathematica and a 3D rendering app going against a Dell dual Xeon machine. We were not told of the specifics of the Dell Xeon machine, nor if HT was properly turned on in the BIOS. We were also not told if these Mac apps were specifically optimized for the G5, e.g. if they were versions that will never see the light of day on a retail box, but built specifically for the demo. Anyhow, on all instances, the dual 2 GHz G5 had much-much better performance than the Dell machine. However, I would advise to not jump the gun so fast on this. I mean, come on, iTunes and Safari are still not baby-smooth… when resizing their windows on the fastest G5! I played with the machine for a few minutes and was [again this year] negatively surprised by this simple thing that Apple still haven’t being able to master with both Panther and the new CPU: scrolling and resizing. I think I will send a copy of BeOS or Windows XP to Steve Jobs for Christmas, just so he can compare.
Additionally, Apple did the SPEC benchmarks using GCC 3.3 on both x86 and PPC, while the vast majority of the C/C++ developers in the x86 Windows land actually use the much faster and much more optimized for P4/Xeons/HT Intel ICC compiler. Then, you will probably find out that Apple’s numbers are not really that fair. They keep calling their x86 benchmark results to have come out of the “best PC money can buy,” but they don’t explain to us how the Pentium 4 scores more than ~1200 at SPEC.org, while Apple gives it a measly ~800 number on its own results. Apparently, the PC they tested with, it’s not the fastest P4 money can buy. Most user-oriented applications are using integer and not floating point anyway (PPC970’s main strength). But workstation-class applications might need fp. [Update: Others had similar thoughts as well regarding the real speed of P4/Xeons. Here is another article as well at hand. And another one.]
I am not saying that G5 is slow. It is not! It is a fast machine. It is the product that has made Apple really caught up with the competition. But I don’t see the dual G5 at 2 GHz overcoming the x86 today. Intel released today a 3.2 GHz P4 and they expect a new P4 version (faster core per same speed), to go all the way up to 4 GHz before the end of this year. Apple’s roadmap is to reach 3 GHz in a year from now. So, has Apple caught up now for real, or Intel will speed through again and leave Apple in the same condition as it was until last Sunday night? We will know in a few months.
My other problem with the G5 is its entry-point price. The lowest-end model (the one with the slaughtered memory version) starts at a minimum of $2000. Seeing how close the prices of the 1.6 and 1.8 are, I would argue that Apple could go lower and introduce the low-end model for $1700 or $1800. This new G5 business, are really in need of a cheap offering. Oh, and while you are at it, move down the price of the eMac G4 to $499 to better compete with the cheap PCs. Apple really needs to offer cheaper computers. In my opinion, the important thing in this point in time in Apple’s history is not the profit margin. It is the market share percentage. This is where Apple loses a small sum everyday these days and it could prove fatal if developers leave the platform because of the declined user base. So Apple, show us that $499 eMac of yours! We know you got margins!
Anyway, enough rambling. After the keynote was over, we got downstairs to the actual showfloor, and it was nice to see companies like Perforce, Oracle, OpenOffice.org, Metrowerks, Trolltech, Big Nerd Ranch, LaCie, O’Reilly, 4D, Frontbase, REALBasic and more. The participation of the Mac developers was quite high. There were many people at the conference, even with this hefty registration fee. I suggest you go over to the conference sometime this week if you got the needed money to register. It is a nice, interesting, well-organized event overall with some interesting development sessions throughout the week. Get yourself up to speed with the Apple world. It’s worth it. Just don’t take into account everything as served to you by marketing, but use your head.
Well, all I can say is that entry level G3 iBooks are still $1500 — way too much.
Actually they start at $999. I have an ibook and it’s no G5 or P4, but it works great for my development needs. The battery lasts far longer than any PC laptop I have seen, and having 802.11b without having to be careful with the pc card sticking out (I ruined 2 this way) is great. I’m still shocked everytime I see how fast it can go to sleep and recover.
I’ve only been using apple for a little over 3 months now… before that I was a die-hard linux fan…all the way back to Slackware’s first release. Within a month of having the iBook I grabbed a used G4 tower, and I’m very close to ordering the dualG5. My iBook can dual boot debian, but once Panther is released I’ll get rid of that partition, I have 4 other linux machines at home…
And I know I’m not alone, I can’t begin to count the posts I’ve read on /. and other sites of people just like me, switching to OSX after years of never considering an apple. And unless you’re running a server, I honestly can’t think of a single thing you could do with Linux that can’t be done is OSX. I’m not talking about the opensource aspect of it, I don’t want to go down that road, I AM talking about getting work done. Whether you code in Java,C++,PHP/MySQL, etc. etc. it’s all essentially the same as my experience in linux. And as much as I respect KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice, etc. etc. the simple fact is they don’t work as well as MS Office on OSX. Sure I can do “almost” everything, but when I get an excel or word file from a client, “almost” doesn’t do it. Once OpenOffice is no longer “almost” I’ll be the first in line to switch.
And don’t even get me started about Photoshop vs. The Gimp
I guess my main point of all this is nothing is perfect but apple is as close as I’ve found for a lot of areas (programming, design, film, music, etc).
Maybe I’m just getting old, but tinkering to just get my sound card working isn’t my idea of fun… just as cutting my hand to install a new motherbard isn’t fun.
As for the marketing being over the top… what company out there doesn’t take the same approach? I learned when I was very young that the pictures on the McDonald’s menu were not what I had on my tray, the movie is rarely as good as the trailer makes you believe, etc.
Sorry for the long rambling post, I’m the last person I ever expected to sing praises of Apple.
Anyone who thinks Macs are as fast as PCs does not use Premier or do 3D rendering. Working on a Mac is much better, but you gotta be deluding youself if you think a Mac is twice as fast. Clock for clock, we beat Intel and maybe even AMD Athlon, but not fastest on fastest and not with second-tier video card offerings. We cannot get into a discussion on speed with PC users. That’s not subjective like working environments.
To Floyd Lloyd – the extra quality isn’t necessarily in the hardware, it’s in selection and tuning. Instead of being a cobbled together assemblage of parts, a Mac is a tested, tuned and standardized whole. You can say the same thing about Dell, et al, but my Macs do seem to be a much more integrated package than a PC. Maybe just a holdover from the old days, when it was more true.
My Alienware WinXP machine was top-notch 2 years ago. Everything primo, $2800. I hate this damn thing. Hardware & overheating problems out the wazoo. Alienware’s support is horrible. The Dells and Microns at work are fairly problem-free though, but they’re just terminals realy.
Jobs should compare against boutique vendors like Voodoo or Falcon NW since they are in the same niche market. Let’s rack a $3k Voodoo against a $3k G5.
You are correct, but I meant usable laptops. I simply cannot use a 12″ monitor. I have switched for all the reasons you mention. I am SOOO sick of dealing with driver issues on linux. I LOVED linux for a long time, but I am getting really tired of having to relearn how to admin my box with each new release. As I mentioned, the move to sysconfig sucks — it should be an option, but it should not be mandatory. Give me rc.conf anyday. Also, I used to love to tinker with my boxen. I have a job, have just had a son, and am currently enrolled in 3 classes. I simply do not have time to read 500 pages of howto, scour sourceforge, and scour other various bugfix sites to discover that, oh say, the autoconfig is set to use PCMCIAKernel instead of External, and now every boot my laptop hangs. I need things to work *NOW* — I don’t have the luxoury, nor the impetus of time to dick around with my machines just to get them on the air.
Again, I cannot afford $1500 for a 15″ laptop running 5 year old technology. I have no problem with the G3, in fact I like the layout of the iBook better than the titanium, but the current price scale fot the iBook is one place that I really, REALLY cannot fathom what Jobs and associates are thinking. The only reason I’m even considering it is because of the OS. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that the iBook is just going to be dropped from production rather than come down into the realms of reality pricing. Oh, and whole 1 button mousepad deal sucks.
Apple really should implement some sort of “never obsolete” policy. That would justify their price point in my mind. If in a year, I could trade in my G4 for a portion of its original retail value towards a new G5, I’d be happy. As it is, apple is essentially asking all of us to buy a new $2k+ box a year. I’d be ‘insanely pissed’ if I’d just purchaced a new top-o-the-line g4 box.
The thing that NOBODY has questioned is Apple’s REAL WORLD benchmarks. People who used the G5s side by side with the Dells saw that the G5s were up to two times faster for media intensive tasks. Most analysts, regardless of the stance on benchmarks, agree that the real world difference between the x86 platform and the G5s were indeed REAL.
Call Jobs a liar or whatever but the real truth is that the Macs at the very least are on par with PCs performance wise. When the apps are optimized for 64-bit, we’re talking TRUE WORKSTATION class performance for $3000. Anyone who doesn’t think that is amazing is ridiculous.
If Apple wanted to really screw the x86 community, the could have tested the 1.6, 1.8 Gig, and 2.0 x 2 Gig systems against 1.6, 1.8, and 2.0 x 2 Gig PCs and watched the Apples completely OBLITERATE them gig for gig. No compiler in the world would have been able to save the x86 platform then. I think Apple has actually been very generous with its tests because, gig for gig, nothing on the x86 side can compete with the 970. When the 3GHz 970 comes out it will likely STOMP any 3+ gig P4, Xeon, Athlon, Opteron, Megatron, Optimus Prime, whatever. The bottom line is that the Mac platform is more than a match now for x86.
Anyone who thinks Macs are as fast as PCs does not use Premier or do 3D rendering.
No, because sensible Macintosh users will be using Final Cut Pro instead of Premiere, as Final Cut Pro is significantly more optimized on Mac and is an all-around better program.
Working on a Mac is much better, but you gotta be deluding youself if you think a Mac is twice as fast.
No Mac users except the ones huffing paint are going to say this. If you read through this entire thread you will see that Mac users are simply saying that the new G5 systems are on par with or faster than the fastest PCs.
Clock for clock, we beat Intel and maybe even AMD Athlon, but not fastest on fastest and not with second-tier video card offerings.
It’s really hard to say which system is “fastest”. The vector unit on the G5 is its greatest advantage, but only for applications that utilize it. However, one must keep in mind that this is the case for the majority of CPU-bound applications the average Mac user will use.
As for the raw integer and floating point scores, it looks like PCs are definitely higher in these areas for UP systems (thanks to the 3.2GHz Pentium 4) and probably marginally higher for SMP systems.
And the Radeon 9800 is a “second-tier video card offering”? Please, spare me…
Apple has always had strong roots in education, taking your trade-in idea even further…
Trade in your old mac for a reasonable discount, and Apple could then donate the used hardware to school systems… this is a tax rightoff for them, and would be a great PR move as well.
Now there would have to be some threshold for obsolete products, because some things you simply can’t give away. But the threshold wouldn’t have to be that limiting. Here in Brooklyn I know there are dozens of schools that would be perfectly happy getting an old powerpc… but an Apple ][e wouldn’t cut it.
My biggest complaint about Apple isn’t the cost, I think of it like I would a luxury car or a nice bottle of wine… sure it’s expensive but you’re paying for quality. My biggest complaint is no discounts offered when you buy more than one item. I can justify the $3K for the dual G5, but come one… give me some sort of discount if I want to add a flat monitor or an iPod!
Now if I could get that discount AND trade in my Quicksilver AND know that somewhere students would be benefiting from it, I’d be much happier, as would tons of other mac users, and little Johnny at that school wouldn’t be complaining that it’s no G5!
Well, I didn’t really mean that you would be able to trade up a crappy old box that no one wants, or necessarily that you should be able to walk in off the street with a G3 iMac and trade up for a G5. It would be a nice addition to their Apple Care policy or something like that. I have a 1/5 year old G4 quicksilver 900MHz. I’m fine with it for right now, but in another year I’d probably like to be able upgrade to a similar or even better G5. That’s the sort of thing I had envisioned.
Oh, and I hear you about bundling offers — it sucks to be looking at a $2-3k box and then have to look at their $1500 monitors too. I’d live an apple monitor, but they are yet another thing of apple’s that I simply cannot afford. Apple does offer some student discounts that include various bundling offers. The Software discounts rock, the laptop discounts suck. $50 off a $1500 laptop doesn’t really cut it for a student. Now, the discounts on the G5s are really nice, something like $200 off. Unfortunately, I have 4 towers already, and have no room for another. If they could drop the price of the 14″ iBook to $1k, I think they’d sell several of them — I’d certainly buy one at that price.
that should read 1.5 year old, not 1/5 year old.
Although, Eugenia’s article sounds negative, I understand her very well. She wants to show that there are some misunderstandings with regard to what Apple claims and what some people want to believe. What she says is absolutely true, and of course that’s part of the problem. Some people will never understand that. However I like what Apple showed. Although it is funny to see some Mac fans to cheer up, it is actually a catch-up. I really appreciated many things Apple did. I think Quartz Extreme is a good decision, overall. G5 is a nice suprise, though I don’t think it will be significantly faster than pentiums, however mac users can also enjoy high speed CPUs as PC users do already.
********””””And ya know what I really hate? Being able to run Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris all on the same box, without buying emulator software. It’d be so much nicer having to buy VirtualPC, or just deal with only running MacOS, Linux, and NetBSD. “”””******
I have respect for you if it is through that you have all these Operating Systems running on one pc ( not at the same time ). Not many people I know have succeeded in dual booting Solaris x86.
Are all the different syntaxes and commands not confusing you?
You are not a normal user, you are a Free OS freak (did you pay for XP? ha ha ha), and you probably don’t have a budget for an Apple as it sounds…
Thanks Steve for bringing computer heaven back!
Thanks Steve for being a TRUE innovator!
Thanks Steve for switching to Unix!
Thanks Steve for the 64bit!
Thanks Steve for lowering prices!
I think I am pretty much through coming to this web site. Not a big loss to you actually… as it was low on my list of visited sites to begin with. But with this article the author really alienated me with her condensending tone, her ‘look how smart I am’ swagger, and some of her reponses to the posts: “Re-read the article. Slowly.”
It must be really nice to be so smart (or cynical) that you can no longer simply give credit for the thoughful and purposeful evolution of a product. Steve Jobs’ gig is to market and sell Apple stuff! Are you really offended by his hyperbole? Really? Are you equally critical when Gates or Tolvalds (sp?) speak in such grand terms? Of course Panther is an evolution of the OS! Thanks for belaboring the obvious in an attempt to intellectually separate yourself from the plebian masses. When was the last time Microsoft or the Open Source Linux folks produced something both revolutionary and accessible to average computer user?
I bored quickly of what could be concered akin to a school-girl showing off for the guys in the playground. Mostly because I read this article expecting analysis of the ramifications of the integration of the technologies announced. Apple is not an OS company, neither is it a hardware company; it is unique in that it is a company concerned with the whole computer user experience. And your infantile essay does not take that into account, as you failed to review(?) the whole of the announcements as they affect the user — through the seemless integration of hardware and software. In short, what do these technologies mean for consumers, prosumers, and professionals dealing with productivity demands.
Thanx for nothing… but at least I can come away knowing that you are, without a doubt, harder to impress than we all are. Oh.. and that you know EXACTLY what Apple could charge for their products. (must be that special insight into their product supply chain)
See ya.
Charley
As far as Premiere/ Final Cut – how many people work in a professional house where you have to have cross-platform compatiblity?
And the Radeon 9800 is a “second-tier video card offering”? Please, spare me…
A 9800 isn’t FireGL, QuadroFX, Oxygen or Wildcat. 9800’s a consumer grade video card not professional. On the AMDZone article someone linked up above touting benchmarks, the writer wonders why the new Macs aren’t being released as “workstations.” It’s because they aren’t, otherwise, we’d have professional grade cards. Igniter is the only top of the line workstation card I know for the Mac that continually supports the Mac (even G5!). Igniter is pretty sweet, don’t get me wrong, but our selection is rather limited in the $500-$2000 range.
We have Pinnacle’s stuff and Kona/ BM for narrow applications. Appian won’t support Mac anymore. RTMac is still stuck on 9.1.