It’s rumor-quashing time again: Apple’s Greg Joswiak, Senior Director of Hardware Product Marketing, tells MacCentral that Apple is “set for some months now” on its hardware line, having updated PowerBook, iBook, Power Mac (dual 1GHz), and, of course, iMac in the last two months.
It’s rumor-quashing time again: Apple’s Greg Joswiak, Senior Director of Hardware Product Marketing, tells MacCentral that Apple is “set for some months now” on its hardware line, having updated PowerBook, iBook, Power Mac (dual 1GHz), and, of course, iMac in the last two months.
It’s good to hear that Apple is concentrating on converting both Windows and UNIX-based customers to OS X. However, this remains disappointing news for pro users with especially processor-intensive demands.
While the G4 exhibits outstanding performance in tasks optimized for the AltiVec, including DVD encoding and (for us audio folks) things like realtime reverb modeling, other tasks lag far behind the Intel platform. That’s frustrated some Mac loyalists, including a senior computer animator who wrote me last month after the keynote to say that Macs don’t stand up as well to their PC counterparts in production as commentary by George Lucas might have led you to believe.
Not everyone is doing special effects for the next blockbuster on their computer, and as a result, even for many pro digital audio, publishing, or video production the current lineup is more than sufficient for their work. But with Apple courting new markets, it’s important that it remains competitive on the processor-intensive high end. Optimization could be one solution: Apple and Genentech have created an implementation of biotech tool BLAST that runs five times faster on the Mac than on 2GHz Pentiums.
Let’s hope Apple is keeping processor strategy at the forefront — and that they consider options other than Motorola if that company can’t deliver. Click the feedback link and let us know what you think.
