Is A G5 PowerBook Still A Realistic Possibility?
by Charles W. Moore
ZNet blogger Paul Murphy thinks Apple may be fixing to release another round of PowerPC laptops. In an op-ed entitled "Apple rumours and realities", Murphy says the appearance of Intel based Powerbooks from Apple this January isn't going to happen, although we may see both Intel-based Mac mini and/or Intel-based iBooks. "Beyond that, says Murphy, "Intel is just not going to happen for Apple next year -- no Powerbooks, no iMacs, no Workstations, and no X-Serves."
Murphy reasons that in the short term, costs will be higher then expected, CPU availability limited, "and the opportunity to realize performance gains on professional level gear depends more on bad software than good hardware, while " longer term prospects are clouded because Intel is failing to deliver on its pricing, volume, and performance promises."
Murphy outlines a compelling case for getting MacIntel iBooks out early, but probably with relatively low-power and inexpensive Intel processors.
On the PowerBook front, however, he argues that:
"The obvious answer is to stick to PowerPC for another generation - pushing the first Intel products into 2007. IBM has a low power (13 Watt) G5 that would be a big winner in new PowerBooks, and Freescale's 8641, a dual-core PowerPC G4 with integrated system logic and four Gigabit Ethernet media-access controllers, offers exactly the price/performance combination Apple needs to give both the iBook and Mini big performance boosts without changing retail price or cutting their own margins.
"Doing it would reward Apple's most loyal customers and those developers who put real effort into working with the PowerPC while leaving the company with a bigger market share and time in which to make a considered long term CPU decision."
I don't know whether Murphy is just speculating, or if he has some insider knowledge of Apple's likely Intel laptop product release roadmap, but theoretically, I think what he says makes considerable good sense. Rushing MacIntel PowerBooks to market, especially if the supply of Intel's new-generation CPUs will be slow to ramp up at first, seems risky and possibly counterproductive.
Personally, I wouldn't be sorry to see another generation of PowerPC PowerBooks, especially with a Freescale 8241 or even that low-power G5 IBM processor, which, at 13 watts, would seem to be an ideal mobile computer CPU.
The big appeal to me, an I presume for many veteran PowerBook users, is of course backwards software compatibility, and to a lesser but still significant degree — continued Classic Mode support. It would be a lot softer landing in the MacIntel world for those of us with extensive investments in native PowerPC Mac software to be able to transition to Universal Binary PPC/x86 software over a period of a couple of years rather than cold turkey, and I, for one, am not in any hurry to kiss Classic Mode goodbye. I don't use Classic apps extensively, but I do use Classic Mode nearly every day, and there are a few Classic programs that I like a lot for which there are no satisfactory OS X alternatives.
However, I'm doubtful that Apple will be interested in doing any major re-engineering of the PowerPC PowerBook, which in any event would be a lame duck. Apple has been lengthening product life cycles since well before the MacIntel announcement, and I just can't see them allocating the development resources to getting a G5 PowerBook ready for market at this point, when the MacIntel transition is projected to be completed in 2007.
A more likely stopgap candidate in my estimation would be Freescale's G4 7448 chip, based on the new e600 PowerPC core, which includes the Altivec 'velocity engine' that provides optimized OS X applications with enhanced performance, and available in clock speeds to 1.7 GHz with the system bus running up to 200 MHz, along with 1 MB of L2 cache. Touted by Freescale as a a "stepping stone to the MPC8641D dual-core processor based on the same e600 PowerPC core," the 7448 is pin-for-pin and software compatible with the currently-used MPC74xx processors — it could easily be plugged into Apple's existing 'Book motherboards, and being the first MPC74xx chip made with Freescale's 90 nanometer (nm) silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS process, which facilitates increases in clock and bus speeds while reducing power consumption substantially, reportedly consumes less power than its predecessors, making it even more suitable for laptop use than the current versions of G4 chips.
Other MPC7448 power management features include nap and sleep modes, and dynamic frequency switching that allows the OS to reduce power on the fly. The e600 PowerPC core's list of goodies includes improved AltiVec throughput, a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) engine that can accelerate networking applications, such as security algorithms, network stack processing, routing and more. AltiVec technology is ideal for 2D and 3D graphics associated with video playback and recording, static imaging, gaming, Web browsing and e-commerce, including the implementation of CODEC (compression/decompression) algorithms.
However, the glass is still very murky at this point. Perhaps things will be clearer after Macworld Expo, but I agree with Paul Murphy that Intel PowerBook announcements there early are highly unlikely.
The prospects for a MacIntel iBook unveiling at Expo are considerably more promising, although perhaps as an announcement rather than a product release. The latest rumor mill scuttlebutt is that a 13.3" screen MacIntel iBook will be announced at macworld to replace the venerable 14" iBook model, while the 12.1" form factor G4 unit will continue as the entry level model in iBook form for a while yet. Indications are that the 12" PowerBook would also be superseded by the new 13.3" iBook.
This sounds highly plausible to me. Last March, David Tzeng and Rodney Chan of the Taiwanese trade journal DigiTimes, citing "sources" close to the deal, posted a report that Apple would be contracting some iBook production to longtime PowerBook supplier Quanta, with Asustek (which makes the current 14" and 12" iBooks and the 12" PowerBook) losing its status as the sole contract maker of iBooks.
Tzeng and Chan noted that "Quanta, already the biggest contract maker for Apple's PowerBooks, would start to ship 14.1-inch widescreen iBooks as early as the fourth quarter of 2005, the sources said." Of course, that was before the bombshell MacIntel announcement, which doubtless set the roadmap back a bit, but Q1 2006 wouldn't be far behind that projection.
According to the rumoristas at ThinkSecret, the 13.3-inch widescreen iBook is said to sport a WXGA resolution of 1280x720, serving up about 15 percent more pixels than the current 14.1-inch model.
Sounds yummy, and would probably be enough to persuade me to cut the Classic apron-strings and live with my PowerPC programs running under Rosetta emulation.
In the meantime, I've ordered a new Newer Technology NuPower 'EXTRA' High Capacity 6600mAh higher-capacity battery for my G4-upgraded Pismo PowerBook in anticipation of using it as a production machine for several more months at least.
Speaking of which, the Pismo (with a knackered battery that gives me about 10 minutes runtime) has been serving mainly as a desktop-bound dictation, graphics, and disk burning (it has an 8x SuperDrive module from FastMac) platform for the past several months. It's hard-wire networked with my G3 iBook and still running OS 10.4.1, since later versions of Tiger refuse to play with my Lexmark Z-35 printer.
Anyway, I hadn't restarted for some time, just leaving the Pismo asleep when not in use, but last weekend I needed to boot into OS 9.2.2 for a brief moment, so had to quit Tiger. Out of curiosity, I checked the uptime just before hitting "Restart." The reading was 130 days, 7 39 hours since the last reboot, during which more than two dozen applications had been running, and a lot of scanning, and image editing had been done. Pretty impressive, and it was still working great.
The old Pismo's performance makes waiting for Intel a lot less painless than it might have been.
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