New "Power"Books Desperately Needed...
May 23, 2005 @ 03:09 AMApple’s portable line is in a tough spot right now. Or rather I should say, their professional portables.
It’s no secret the current line is hideously slow. My machine cost me $3,000 a little over a year ago, and I’ve never been able to do any serious programming on it. It also barely survives my attempts at multimedia creation (all the little movies and such I put together). Unfortunately, it’s exactly these two things that the majority of recent Apple converts would use them for.
There’s been some interesting talk today about Apple switching to Intel possibly. To be quite honest, while I don’t believe it, I wouldn’t be especially upset about it. There’s no doubt that PowerPC is the “better” architecture… but the current PowerPC chips are just too large and too hot to fit into current Apple portables. The Pentium 4m by comparison is a decent little chip, and it’s already shipping in similarly sized portables from vendors like Sony, etc. So if switching to Intel got PowerBooks up to snuff, fine.
My point is, Apple’s got to do something. These machines are jokes, and I desperately need a serious Apple notebook that can handle my development. G5 PowerBook, fine… PowerBooks powered by the new Freescale dual-core high-FSB G4 chips, even better… (drool)... But I need something better than what’s currently available.