Faster Intel Updates?

[Eidorian]

Now that we're in the land of plentiful chips, should we expect faster updates from Apple on their computers? PC's seem to get new chips more often then Macs did. I remember the slow upgrade cycles during the iBook G3 era. We just saw the Rev. C iMac G5 hang around for 3 months. Will this be common in the future now that we have Intel pumping out so many new chips every year?

 

[Phat_Pat]

that would suck... cause your computer would become "old" when its brand new!

 

[mad jew]

I hope so. Technology is meant to be outdated rapidly, it's progress. When Apple stagnates it gives other manufacturers the opportunity to move ahead.

The only negative will be all the threads made by newbies complaining about not having the latest and greatest Mac to boast to their friends about.

 

[Eidorian]

I hope so. Technology is meant to be outdated rapidly, it's progress. When Apple stagnates it gives other manufacturers the opportunity to move ahead.

The only negative will be all the threads made by newbies complaining about not having the latest and greatest Mac to boast to their friends about.

Yeah, I got my iMac last June but these new Intel offerings are very tempting. I'll watch our Buyer's Guide and buy one maybe for my birthday later this summer. Still, the sooner I sell my G5 the better. I can get more money out of it for my next Mac.

 

[mad jew]

Of course, in a perfect world people would be content with the machine that best satisfies their needs at the time of purchase. The release of a better machine changes the capabilities of previous machines only in relative terms, not in absolute terms.

 

[Dreadnought]

I don't think they will update it much faster. Apple does a lot of development in the other parts of the computer as well. Therefore you can get by with a lifespan of 5 years if you buy a top of the line Mac, not 3 with a pc, which is hopelessly outdated by then.

 

[Eidorian]

I don't think they will update it much faster. Apple does a lot of development in the other parts of the computer as well. Therefore you can get by with a lifespan of 5 years if you buy a top of the line Mac, not 3 with a pc, which is hopelessly outdated by then.

Yeah, we may not see as much CPU upgrades but we'll see more than we did 3-4 years ago. I expect a 4-6 month turnover rate on CPU's. Still, with standard built-in wifi and the iSight it easily puts it over a similar Dell. You'd have to get those custom on a Dell and they get expensive.

 

[LethalWolfe]

In the past Apple was on a fairly consistent 6 month update cycle, although sometimes that got stretched as I think they were trying to milk as much as they could out of their limited CPU options.

Hopefully now w/Intel Apple won't have to "milk" anymore and we'll see strong updates every 6 months.


Lethal

 

[ChrisA]

Expect rapid upgrades but not in GHz.

Now that we're in the land of plentiful chips, should we expect faster updates from Apple on their computers? PC's seem to get new chips more often then Macs did. I remember the slow upgrade cycles during the iBook G3 era. We just saw the Rev. C iMac G5 hang around for 3 months. Will this be common in the future now that we have Intel pumping out so many new chips every year?

Of cources they will upgrade. I expect the clocks speeds to slowly creep upward
but the real speed boosts will come when (not if) Intel catches up to what's happening in the Sun/SPARC hardware world. To quote from Sun's web site:

"The UltraSPARC T1 processor gives you up to eight processing cores with
four threads per core. It's like a rack of servers on one chip.

No this is not science fiction speculation. You can buy a T1 powered machine today for about $3K. (compare that to price of a quad core Power PC) I expect 16 and 32 core CPS in a few years. And again Intel will follow.

In the next five years will will not be talking about GHz anymore. That is mostly "topped out" We will compare the number of CPU cores and threads per core

 

[atari1356]

I think we would have seen more updates in the past from Apple, if there were actually faster processors coming out... but the slow development cycle of the G4 dragged on and on.

Hopefully Intel will be quicker to release new faster processors than Motorola/IBM - and Apple will have a quicker update cycle as well.

Now that Apple is using the same processor as PC's, they're going to need to keep pace with the PC manufacturer's to stay competitive. It was easy to hide behind sketchy benchmarks saying the G4/G5 processors were faster than Intel/AMD because the processor was completely different.

Now that Apple is using the same exact processors, direct comparisons can be made... so Steve's reality distortion field won't hold up if Apple falls behind again.

 

[andiwm2003]

i guess since GHz is and will be the strongest marketing number in the PC world Dell and co. will come out with speed bumps every three month. At the same time chips will be largely pin compatible. so apple will follow and offer more often small speed bumps.

this will hopefully bring down the insane prices of used macs. at the same time the gamble of buying a mac will be less risky since the changes between updates are rather small.

only once a while there will be larger updates, new form factors. probably the same frequency as before the switch.

 

[Eidorian]

i guess since GHz is and will be the strongest marketing number in the PC world Dell and co. will come out with speed bumps every three month. At the same time chips will be largely pin compatible. so apple will follow and offer more often small speed bumps.

this will hopefully bring down the insane prices of used macs. at the same time the gamble of buying a mac will be less risky since the changes between updates are rather small.

only once a while there will be larger updates, new form factors. probably the same frequency as before the switch.

Yeah, I'm more of a cache and core person over sheer clock speed. It worked in the past but now we're looking at smaller computers with less volume to work it heat production and power usage.