New laptops and Cinema Displays

Apple today released complete redesigns of their laptop line and, unexpectedly, they are offering a new Cinema Display. The new designs are in the black and aluminum style of the new iMac.

Cinema Displays
* 24" screen
* Price: $899
* ONLY the new design is available in black and silver. The old designs (20", 23" and 30") are still available on the store but we don't know for how long.
* LED backlight (easier on both the eye and the environment at the same time)
* Built-in iSight camera, mic and speakers
* Internal MagSafe power adapter that allows you to charge a MacBook
* Built-in USB ports, NO Firewire
* Connects via MiniDVI
* Max resolution 1920x1080
* Glossy glass screen
* Contrast ratio 1000:1 (massive increase from 400:1)
* 14 ms response time (same as previous gen)

My thoughts - Seems to be aimed at consumers due to the lack of FireWire, relatively low resolution (the old 23" offered 1920x1200), glossy screen, Mini DVI connector and the fact that every single photograph shows a MacBook tethered to it. Looks nice for watching HD iTunes movies on though.

And it gets bonus points for a huge increase in contrast ratio. I wouldn't advise it for color-critical work though.

Read more...

MacBook
* One-piece aluminum cases (this is the "brick" everyone was referring to)
* The original white plastic MacBook remains but lowered to $999
* GeForce 9400M graphics chipset (256 MB shared memory) delivers a significant boost in graphics performance over the previous Intel on-board graphics
* Ultra-thin LED display
* All-glass multi-touch trackpad
* 5 hours of "wireless productivity"
* USB-only, NO Firewire

Low-end model ($1299):
* 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo
* 3MB L2 cache
* 2GB of RAM (expandable to 4 GB)
* 160GB HD (or upgrade to 320 GB HD or 128 GB SSD)
* 8x Superdrive
* 2x USB

High-end model ($1599):
* 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo
* 3MB L2 cache, 2GB of RAM (expandable to 4 GB)
* 250GB HD (or 320 GB HD or 128 GB SSD)
* 8x Superdrive
* 2x USB

My thoughts - The graphical upgrades are much-appreciated but there is no FireWire which makes it of limited professional use. Also, there is no indication as to whether or not these machines can boot into Target Disk Mode (which makes the machine behave like an external hard disk which is great for backing up data if the machine fails).

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MacBook Air
* Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics chipset
* Identical form factor to previous model
* SSD doubled in size from 64 to 128 GB
* Faster CPU

Low-end model ($1799):
* 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 6 MB L2 Cache
* 2 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Memory
* 120 GB SATA hard drive

High-end model ($2499):
* 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 6 MB L2 Cache
* 2 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Memory
* 128 GB solid state drive

My thoughts - Could be good if a lightweight machine is important. Speed is now less of an issue than with the previous model but still a significant factor. No FireWire so storage options are limited.

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MacBook Pro
All the features of the MacBook above, as well as:
* 256 MB GeForce 9600M GT graphics in addition to the GeForce 9400
* Only 15" models available

Low-end model ($1999):
* 15.4" LED-backlit display
* 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo (3MB L2 cache)
* 2GB DDR3 RAM
* 250 GB 5400 RPM hard drive (or 250 GB 7200 RPM or 320GB 7200 RPM or 128GB solid-state drive)
* Slot-loading Super Drive
* FireWire 800 replaces FireWire 400

High-end model ($2400):
* 15.4" LED-backlit display
* 2.53 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo (6MB of L2 cache) (with 2.8 GHz upgrade option)
* 4GB DDR3 RAM
* 320 GB 5400 RPM hard drive (or 250 GB 7200 RPM or 320GB 7200 RPM or 128GB solid-state drive)
* Slot-loading Super Drive

My thoughts - Out of all of the new products unveiled today, this is the only one geared at professional users. It's faster (2.8 up from 2.6) and has faster memory and front side bus. It also has a 128 GB solid-state disk as an option, which will give a further speed boost. It's not a must-buy for previous MacBook Pro owners as the main selling point is the visual redesign, but it's good if you're in the market for a new machine.

It's worth noting that this machine does not have FireWire 400 ports so you will need a FireWire 800 to 400 adapter in order to use FireWire 400 equipment with it.

Read more...

Conclusion
It is interesting to note how Apple seems to be separating its professional lines from its consumer lines. The new graphics chips in the MacBooks make them much better for Final Cut Studio but the lack of FireWire now cripples them in that regard. I think this is deliberate.

There's nothing here to make pro users sit up and take notice but if you're in the market for a new MacBook Pro, you'll benefit from the speed bump and the (hopefully) more rugged design due to the new one-piece construction of the base.

Blu-ray unfortunately wasn't a feature in these new machines but then again, OS X 10.5.6 wasn't released either and there's no way they could introduce Blu-ray drives without OS support. But it does complicate the issue because if Apple were to, for example, release OS X 10.5.6 in two weeks with Blu-ray support in the OS, their laptop line would probably not be updated for another 3-4 months, whereas they could have just waited if Blu-ray support was just around the corner. I'm sure Apple must be working on this somewhere in their facility but when it will materialize remains to be seen. The next big event is Macworld in January so fingers crossed it will appear then.

Edit: One thing I didn't realize at first is that Apple is ONLY offering the MacBook Pro in a glossy screen configuration - the matte option previously offered is no longer present. The thing about glossy screens is that when calibrated properly, they are fully capable of reproducing accurate colors in a perfect environment. The gloss on the screen tends to reflect the environment which makes it virtually useless for professional work in most environments. I'm sure a third-party will create a matte screen cover for the MacBook Pro but for a machine supposedly targeted at professionals, they really shouldn't have to. This is disappointing.

After Effects CS4 to drop PowerPC support

There's a post on the Keyframes blog (the official Adobe blog of the AE product manager, Michael Coleman) stating that due to limited time and resources, they have decided to drop PowerPC support in After Effects CS4 in favor of adding new features for Intel users.



So After Effects CS3 is the last Universal Binary version so if you still have a PPC Mac, you'll have to buy it before the new one goes on sale (which is a bit tricky because a release date hasn't been announced). It should be noted that this only applies to After Effects and not Photoshop or the other apps but it's obvious that they will all go that way eventually.

I don't see this as a major issue as the number of Intel users is currently very large and will get even larger by the time CS4 is released. It's a shame for people with old PPC machines still kicking around (me) though, and it's reducing the resale value of the older machines. Universal Binaries were such a great idea but to companies who also develop for Windows and have very large codebases, it unfortunately makes more sense to make Intel-only versions.

Third party Mac Pro Blu-ray drives

MCE Technologies has announced the availability of an internal 6x Blu-ray drive for the Mac Pro that seamlessly fits into one of the existing bays inside the machine.



The drive alone is $499 but there is also a version bundled with Roxio Toast 9 for $599. An external version is available for $749. It requires OS X 10.5.2 or higher but no device drivers are needed.

Currently the only Mac applications capable of burning Blu-ray movies are Roxio Toast 9 and Adobe Encore CS3, however there are quite a few more available for Windows if you have a Boot Camp partition available.

[via TUAW]

Mac Pro and Xserve overclocking tool

This has been going around the internet for the past couple of days. The German division of ZDNet has released an overclocking tool for Mac Pro and Xserve machines running Leopard.

Overclocking is the process of artificially increasing the clock speed of your processor and memory in order to make it operate at a faster rate. For example, you could make a 2.8 GHz processor operate at 3.0 GHz without the expense of purchasing a faster CPU. This is very popular in the Windows world, particularly with hardcore video gamers, who have managed to push CPUs beyond 4 GHz.

However, increasing the clock rate also increases the power consumption and heat output of the CPU. Upgrading the power supply and increasing the CPU cooling may be necessary - areas that may be tricky with tightly-designed Apple products.

I wouldn't advise doing this on a machine that you depend upon every day but it might be useful for a render farm machine where speed is important and the task will be taken up by another machine if there are any crashes or failures.

Another final thing to note is that your system performance will only be as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If you overclock your CPU but have a really slow hard disk or not very much RAM, the performance increase will be limited.

All in all though, this is a very useful tool for Mac users as long as they are aware of the dangers and potential issues. It could also encourage more video gamers to switch to the Mac.

ATI announces Radeon HD 3870 Mac and PC Edition

ATI announced the availability of the Radeon HD 3870 Mac and PC Edition a couple of days ago, shipping in late June for a recommended price of $219.



This must be welcome news for Mac Pro owners, as the current alternative, the NVIDIA 8800 GT suffers from underwhelming ProApp performance, despite the recent improvements in the 10.5.3 update.

Here is a specification comparison:

	Radeon HD 3870	8800 GT
Stream processors	320	112
Core clock	775 MHz	600 MHz
Memory	512 MB	512 MB
Memory interface	256-bit	256-bit
Memory bandwidth	70 GB/sec	57.6 GB/sec
Price	$219	$279

ATI also claims a performance boost in Motion of 30-180%. Barefeats found a 21-41% performance increase over the 8800 GT - for $60 less. It is also compatible with ALL Mac Pros and available from most ATI resellers (the 8800 GT Mac Edition is only available from the Apple Store). This looks to be well worth buying.

More WWDC 2008 Day 1 news

Since my previous post some more things have cropped up:

3G iPhone
* Not 3G but is actually 3.5G
* Thinner at the edges but actually thicker in the middle than its predecessor by 0.7mm and slightly taller (people are making way too big a deal about this)

AT&T
* Apple no longer gets a cut of the subscription fee from AT&T
* No more prescribed service plans - mix and match data and voice
* Starting price: $30 a month for unlimited 3G data plus $39.99 a month for voice. Text messages are no longer included so add $5. This means the price increases from $59.99 a month to $74.99 a month. And that is the base plan.

As someone who was put off more by the monthly price than the initial cost of the phone, this doesn't make me happy. And this is entirely an AT&T thing because Apple no longer receive money from them.

However, if you want to use your phone as an iPod Touch with internet access even when you're not near a WiFi point, this is a good thing. Or if you only use voice, for example.

* In-store activation only, no more activating via iTunes
* GoPhone service no longer available

[via TUAW]

So Apple adds features, AT&T takes features away. Great.

WWDC 2008

It's Apple's WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) today and Steve's keynote just finished.

Here are the important announcements:

iPhone firmware update 2.0
* Released in "early July"
* Free for iPhone users, $9.95 for iPod Touch users (it's an accounting thing)
* Enables applications and the iTunes App Store as previously announced
* Enterprise features - Push email, push contacts, push calendar, autodiscovery, global address lookup, remote wipe.
* Positional audio (openAL) and fast graphics with OpenGLES.
* Word, Excel, PowerPoint and iWork document support
* Apps that are 10 MB or less can be downloaded over the cellular network - all others must be downloaded over WiFi or synced from iTunes.
* Enterprise users can set up private storefronts and distribute over their intranet.
* Push notification for applications - Instead of running in the background and wasting battery, the iPhone can receive messages and give you notification (alerts, sounds, badges) without needing to have the application running.

MobileMe
* The new .Mac
* Push email to all devices including iPhones, Macs and Windows PCs
* Online calendar and photo album - syncs with iCal and iPhoto. Drag and drop support.
* $99 per year, 60 day pre-trial available
* Available "early July"
* .Mac users get to keep their existing email addresses which will forward to a MobileMe address

3G iPhone
* Metal back replaced with glossy plastic
* Thinner at the edges
* Solid metal buttons
* 3.5" screen (same as original)
* Flush headphone jack
* "Dramatically improved" audio
* 10 hours of 2G talk time, 5 hours of 3G talk time, 300 hours standby, 5-6 hours web browsing, 7 hours video, 24 hours audio
* Built-in GPS - updates Google Maps live
* A LOT of extra countries - 70 new countries this year
* Price drop - Was: originally $599 for 8 GB. Now: $199 for 8 GB, $299 for 16 GB, $399 for 32 GB. These are the maximum prices for every country.
* Launches on July 11th (22 countries)
* Special edition white version

Steve went through the list of (almost) everything that was bad about the original iPhone and improved upon it dramatically. This is a great update.

As always, Engadget has the scoop + pictures.

P.S. I've disabled comments because whenever I post anything about the iPhone I get a TON of spam comments.

8800GT performance improvements with 10.5.3

With the recent OS X Leopard 10.5.3 upgrade, several users are reporting performance improvements with the Nvidia 8800GT, which has received bad publicity over its poor ProApp performance.

As always, Barefeats have benchmarks comparing the card with and without 10.5.3 and against the stock Radeon graphics card. At Apple Discussions, users have also posted their comparisons.

Performance improved significantly with the update but unfortunately not by enough to warrant purchasing it over the stock card. In some cases it was still slightly behind the stock Radeon. But progress is a good thing I suppose.

One poster says:


It looks like that could be the case. I hope that if it comes to that, Apple will do the decent thing and offer an exchange program.

Update: Some users are reporting graphical anomalies and Adobe CS3 suite problems with this patch

ATI Radeon 3870 due next month for Mac Pro?

AppleInsider is reporting that the ATI Radeon HD 3870 will be due "next month" for both current and legacy Mac Pros.

Details are scarce (and possibly fictional) but the card is said to include 512 MB of DDR4 memory and support for CrossFire mode (linking two cards up to boost graphics performance, usually in video games) within Windows.

More importantly for professional users, it provides a mid-range alternative to NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT which has ProApp performance issues.

Color users are particularly advised to invest in an ATI card because they support rendering in 10-, 12- and 16-bit modes in addition to NVIDIA's 8- and 32-bit offerings. The NVIDIA card gives you a choice between best and worst, with no in-between values. This can cause problems for people wanting something higher than 8-bit without the massive performance hit when working in 32-bit mode.

At present, the only way to get a mid-range ATI card in your new Mac Pro is to buy one of the ones from the old Mac Pros and update the firmware, although this has the caveat that you have to install it in an older Mac Pro first in order to update it. This news would appear to be the answer to many professional users' prayers, although I hope that Apple introduce a driver update for those that have already upgraded to the 8800 GT.

CalDigit SAN announced at NAB

I just got this in my inbox courtesy of the LAFCPUG mailing list.

Right now at Digital Rebellion we're running Xserve RAIDs on Xsan 1.4. I love these things but they're loud, they kick out a lot of heat and they're no longer being made. They're still pretty good and they're not out of date yet but I have been looking at alternatives with the future in mind.

CalDigit, famous for their hardware RAID cards, demonstrated such an alternative at NAB. One major departure from the Xserve RAIDs and their replacement, the Promise VTrak E-Class, is the fact that it does not use 2 or 4 Gb Fibre Channel cables (which cost around $80 per cable) to transmit data. It uses ePCIe which allows it to transmit data at speeds of up to 20 Gbps and allows for very long cable lengths of up to 300m.

With the recent announcement of the entry-level Scarlet camera, the demand for real-time access to extremely high resolution streams looks set to increase dramatically and, luckily, the CalDigit SAN has the bandwidth to transfer multiple 2K streams in real-time.

Uniquely, there is also an ePCIe ExpressCard device to allow laptop users (MacBook Pro only) to access the SAN. This is not currently available for fibre-based networks.

There's nothing on their site as of yet but they have a press release out and it looks like more details will be announced nearer the shipping date, which is currently unknown. This is definitely something I'm keeping my eye on.