Apple announces $499 Macintosh

AppleInsider ^ | January 11, 2005

[HAL9000]

Preliminary info from MacWorld Expo -

Jobs introduces Mac mini. New member of Mac family including a slot-load Combo optical drive, FireWire, ethernet, USB 2.o, both DVI/VGA output. It plays DVDs, burn CDs, and is very quiet and tiny. Its height is half the size of an iPod mini. Jobs calls it "BYODKM" -- Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, Mouse. Will come in two models: 1.25GHz 256MB/40GB for $499. A second model with a 1.4GHz, more memory and larger hard drive will sell for $599. Mac mini will ship on January 22. Ships in a box smaller than the regular iPod box.

[Bulwark]

Again, I'll back XP's very modern NT based architecture against your Unix based ancient architecture any day.

Great. You can take your "video driver in ring 0" model and have fun with it. Real Operating Systems don't do things so insecurely.

[N3WBI3]

And if 100 people deliberatly drive into yugo's and 100 people deliberatly drive into saabs will the mortality rate be the same?

[N3WBI3]

the G4 architecture is as different from the P4 as the itanium so why the comparisons there?

[general_re]

Realistically, it seems to me that RISC vs. CISC is kind of a red herring these days, as the answer of which one is "better" is more or less "both", given the evolution of processors over the last decade. Comparing the current (fairly large) PPC instruction set to, say, the original MIPS instruction set doesn't make PPC look very RISC-ish when they're put side by side. Contrariwise, despite the x86 instruction set, the P4 decodes x86 instructions into what are quite RISC-like micro-ops. Honestly, it looks very much like the "RISC revolution" resulted in chips that are hybrids, capturing the best aspects of both philosophies, more than anything else.

[KwasiOwusu]

"Now, what was that about "CRAPPLE"?"

From Wired at the time:
"Today's the Day. Apple is offering to owners of the beleaguered PowerBook 5300s and the 190s one of the company's current PowerBook models -- a 400 MHz G3, with a six gigabyte hard drive, 64 MBs of RAM, DVD and a 14.1-inch display -- for $1,800, a $700 savings over the suggested retail price.

The PowerBook 5300, introduced in 1995, was the first PowerBook with a PowerPC CPU but is better known as the "Flaming PowerBook."

Apple speedily recalled these units, soon reintroducing machines sporting new batteries. But these 5300s were also plagued with widely reported problems: the plastic casing was fragile, the case hinges cracked, there were motherboard and circuitry issues, and some of the AC power ports easily broke under normal use."

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,38345,00.html

"the plastic casing was fragile, the case hinges cracked, there were motherboard and circuitry issues, and some of the AC power ports easily broke under normal use."....
Even the replacements were screwed up too..Umm.. still CRAPPLE.

[antiRepublicrat]

Honestly, it looks very much like the "RISC revolution" resulted in chips that are hybrids, capturing the best aspects of both philosophies, more than anything else.

Most definitely. AMD chips are practically RISC chips after their front-end Intel-compatible x86 decoder, and quite similar to the G4 in architecture. Anyway, my post wan't so much RISC vs. CISC, but just about the vast differences in architecture between the chips.

[KwasiOwusu]

"And if 100 people deliberatly drive into yugo's and 100 people deliberatly drive into saabs will the mortality rate be the same?"

Still wrong analogy.
You see, malignant virus writers hardly bother with Macs at all.. I mean 2% share.. hardly worth the bother.
Nearly all their efforts are concentrated on Windows.

You analogy however assumes both operating systems are attacked to exactly the same extent, which is not the case.

You know what? Why don't you leave Saab's and Yugo's alone for now and go drink orange juice or something?
Do you a lot of good too.

[N3WBI3]

Look being a Microsoft kneee padder I can understand you want to ignore the underlying architecture of an operating system but to say tat if MS and MAC each had 50% market share they would eacher have the exact same problem with spyware and viruses is just plain stupid. One will be better or worse, it depends on which OS has a better architecture.

You analogy however assumes both operating systems are attacked to exactly the same extent, which is not the case.

No I am saying if 100 people tried to hit 100 saabs, and 100 people tried to hit 100 Yugo's would the death tole be the same? If 100 people try to hit 100 Macs and if 100 people try to hit Windows would the number of cracks be the same?

Look enjoy the rose color glasses of architecture does not matter, whatever gets you through the night man..

[antiRepublicrat]

Itanium is 64 bit for starters.

Which doesn't really help it except for certain applications. One thing that does help it is not being limited to the ancient x86 architecture, such as being able to have a lot more registers. The PPC architecture is also more modern.

I have to see a proper standardized test of systems based on the 2 systems before I can possibly comment on that.

It really depends on the benchmark and system configuration. But for TCP-C (transaction processing) I see a 4-way Itanium 2 1.5GHz getting a 50% higher score than a 4-way Xeon 2.8 GHz.

[HAL9000]

The reason Macs are relatively virus-free is that most of the world runs on Windows platform.

We can agree that there are a vast number of Windows viruses (At least 68,000 according to Symantec - not including worms and spyware) - and Mac OS X is relatively virus-free.

However, since Apple reported yesterday that Mac OS X has over 14 million active users now, your explanation doesn't withstand scrutiny. Viruses have been sucessfully developed for platforms with a much smaller user base than Mac OS. Many hackers have tried to develop effective Mac viruses - and they've all failed.

Most experts attribute the Mac's security record to superior design and engineering.

The reason that Windows has so many viruses is because it is a soft target. It's much easier to infect Windows because it is designed poorly. With a little motivation, any pimple-faced teenager can write a Windows virus and spread it to millions of PCs.

[general_re]

Indeed. I imagine that the differences will probably eventually be reduced, though. For a while, the P4's strategy of deep pipelining resulted in some fairly significant performance gains via clock-speed increases, but it's pretty clear that it will prove to be a dead end sooner or later - they could probably wring some more out of it, and probably will, but that looks like a holding action to preserve marketshare while they can finalize this dual-core Pentium-M or whatever they've got up their sleeves. Meaning that x86 and PPC will probably wind up converging more and more as time goes by.

[KwasiOwusu]

"Look being a Microsoft kneee padder "

That remark, coming from Mac holly warrior has got to be very amusing indeed.



"to say tat if MS and MAC each had 50% market share they would eacher have the exact same problem with spyware and viruses is just plain stupid."

We are talking hypothetically here of course.
Let's face it, Apple will never get 50% of PC sales, unless they moved to Pluto, and even then Microsoft will still clobber 'em.

But if they both had 50%, of course far more virus writers will attack Macs than do do right now.
Its a bit like that Firefox browser.
For years we kept getting a daily barage of propaganda saying Firefox was "safe".
But the moment Firefox market share rose to 6% in 2004, the # of viruses for Firefox jumped dramatically (we have a thread somewhere here on FREEP in which the # of viruses for Firefox jumped to 55 in 2004 from less than 20 or so for the whole 3 years plus between 2000 and 2003).

Top armed robbers simply don't break into poor people's homes that much.
They concentrate their efforts on the homes of the rich and on business.

[N3WBI3]

That remark, coming from Mac holly warrior has got to be very amusing indeed.

Umm Spunky I dont own a Mac (though my wife does), I use Windows and Linux... Next question?

But if they both had 50%, of course far more virus writers will attack Macs than do do right now.

No one here disputed there will be more attacks the question is how many of them will be successful?

[KwasiOwusu]

"However, since Apple reported yesterday that Mac OS X has over 14 million active users now, your explanation doesn't withstand scrutiny. "

Um...Windows active users number 575 Million worldwide, making your 14 million Mac active users just 2.4% of the market.

http://enterprise-linux-it.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_title=Report--Global-PC-Market-Set-To-Soar&story_id=1814.52736608

Seems like his explanation DOES stand close scrutiny after all.

[KwasiOwusu]

"Umm Spunky I dont own a Mac (though my wife does), I use Windows and Linux... Next question? "

Never said you did, nor do I really care.
I said you were a Mac holly warrior, which you are.

[N3WBI3]

I said you were a Mac holly warrior, which you are.

I dont make excuses where Mac fails, and I dont trash other systems without knowing them...

[HAL9000]

Well, we're all interested to hear your take on the new Mac. It would be a nice system to use with your iPod, eh?

With these new low-priced Macs, I think Apple could gain 10-to-15 million new Mac customers over the next couple of years - at Microsoft's expense.

[antiRepublicrat]

A CRAPPLE fanatic's definition of a troll: "Anyone who doesn't think the sun rises and sets on a Mac computer"

I don't. I couldn't stand Macs until OS X, with its UNIX core, became mature. I hated OS 9, which didn't have protected memory, preemptive multitasking or symmetrical multiprocessing while Windows 9x had the former two and Windows 2000 had the latter one too. Coming up on the turn of the century, Mac users still had to manually allocate RAM to their applications. It may have been pretty, but OS 9 was a technologically backwards OS.

I did, however, appreciate the architecture of the chip it ran on. For a while the implementation was shoddy with Motorola's stall at 500MHz, but Freescale Semiconductor has done a great job with it post-Motorola.

[antiRepublicrat]

ithe G4 architecture is as different from the P4 as the itanium so why the comparisons there?

That was me. I was trying to show how different processors can have vastly different efficiency at the same clock speeds. Since he obviously hates the PPC architecture, I brought up another example of a lower-clocked processor beating a higher-clocked one from the same company, his beloved Intel.

[N3WBI3]

anti,

You made a good point, to which Kwazy said 'well until I see a side by side I dont know'. My question to him was why the questioning mind there when he was dead sure about the g4..

The G4 may perform better or worse, depending on the task (I really dont know), I do know RISC is more efficent in general and that clock sppeds mean nothing... Benchmakrs in general are nothing but silicone voodoo..