Macworld NY Keynote webcast

July 18, 2001 6:03 AM

Macworld NY Keynote webcast is starting. Will there be a new iMac? If you are having trouble connecting to the video stream, try this text feed.
posted by ry (23 comments total)

I'm having some trouble with the MacNN text feed. This one seems to be more reliable.
posted by ry at 6:31 AM on July 18, 2001

Thanks for the text-feed link, ry. Not only do they conserve bandwidth and avoid proprietary protocols, but for some reason real-time notes tend to be concise!
posted by Twang at 6:41 AM on July 18, 2001

Darn, no LCD iMac. Although it ain't over, etc etc.
posted by darukaru at 7:32 AM on July 18, 2001

aye, somewhat underwhelmed so far....

looking foward to os 10.1
posted by sawks at 7:43 AM on July 18, 2001

When are we going to get those killer robots we've been promised? In various fruit flavors?
posted by ColdChef at 8:12 AM on July 18, 2001

Fairly disappointing. The speed bumped powemacs are nice, but they are still far behind the pentium speeds. I'm not sure how successful the Megahertz myth explanation was. I guess the rumors of the flat panel iMac were bogus, or the price of LCD's just isn't low enough to put in their entry level computer.

A strawberry-flavored killer robot would have ruled...
posted by ry at 8:16 AM on July 18, 2001

I loved the little Computer Architecture lesson Rubinstein gave, not that I'm biased or anything. If you believe anything rumor sites say, you're bound to be disappointed no matter what they announce.
posted by gyc at 8:33 AM on July 18, 2001

Man, that was lame. No OS 10.1 till September, not a breath of air on OS 9.2 (which is complete and ready to go), nothing new on the desktop front... not even a 'one more thing'. Pardon my expression, but Steve's gotta start kicking it up a notch soon.
posted by darukaru at 8:34 AM on July 18, 2001

Looks like the quicksilver enclosure leaks that everyone thought were fake, were actually right on the money. And no more flower power or blue dalmation, but they brought back snow instead of sage. :-(
posted by dandot at 8:45 AM on July 18, 2001

I loved the little Computer Architecture lesson Rubinstein gave, not that I'm biased or anything.

the video stream was cutting out too much for me to understand most of what was being said. but i think trying to explain branches and instructions and pipelines to the average consumer isn't going to work. it's too easy to point to the large MHz gap. of course, what do people need a 1.7 GHz home machine for anyway?
posted by ry at 8:57 AM on July 18, 2001

Of course there was no discussion of 9.2. Remember 9.1 appeared with no announcement as well.

By far the highlight of the keynote was when he threw that camera.
posted by sudama at 9:16 AM on July 18, 2001

Sage was beautiful, but I think the shareholders want them to stick to colors that sell for a while.
posted by sudama at 9:18 AM on July 18, 2001

The part that cut out for you, ry, must have been Apple's side-by-side "shootout" between a 1.7 GHz Pentium and an 867 MHz G4. Guess which platform won the Photoshop tests. But no matter how many times they run those comparisons, they seldom reverberate outside the keynote hall.

I was underwhelmed by this presentation as well. I think the highlight for me was the retirement of the Blue Dalmation and Flower Power iMacs. Gawd those things were hideous.

And for crying out loud, will Apple stop shipping their computers which such ridiculously low amounts of RAM? The base configurations on those things are ridiculous!
posted by barkingmoose at 9:19 AM on July 18, 2001

They were explaining processor architcture to technology reporters and industry analysts -- who should understand this stuff anyway to do their jobs in the first place -- not to consumers.
posted by sudama at 9:21 AM on July 18, 2001

what you need a 1.7 GHz home machine for: distributed.net
posted by shinji_ikari at 9:36 AM on July 18, 2001

Well, I just bought a new G4 that can toast DVDs. I'm jazzed.
posted by jragon at 10:43 AM on July 18, 2001

they brought back snow instead of sage.

Some friends and I have taken to calling the sage color "algae."
posted by kindall at 10:50 AM on July 18, 2001

ry, about the g4 vs. pentium confusion...

basically, a processor's pipelines are where it runs the actual instructions like "load this to a register, add 1 to it, and then store it back to memory" (or x = x+1). the g4 processor has many pipelines (i believe 16-24, not sure), so many instructions can be run in parallel. the pentium 4 has fewer pipelines (i believe something like 4).

the difference is that the g4's pipelines are fairly shallow, so if you need to keep on processing information you need to enter another pipeline. the pentium 4's pipelines are fairly deep, so you don't need to stop as often. they both have their merits, and ars technica had a review of g4 versus p4 a while back, but i can't find the link on the site anymore (maybe you'll have better luck).

as far as the clockspeed myth, i believe it. look, when i bought my first ibm-pc, its clockspeed was 20mhz. the difference between that and my friend's 40mhz was HUGE. back then, processor clock speed was a bottleneck on processing, and upgrading that led to extremely noticeable differences. (clockspeed, if you're wondering, is the speed at which a processor can execute its most basic instructions.)

now, though, i can't notice much of a difference between my 450mhz computer at home and my 300mhz one at work, both with the same amount of ram (128 meg). but what a huge difference in clockspeed! really, if you want to build a faster computer, you need to upgrade bus speeds (the speed at which data travels from any part of the computer -- be that the hard drive, ram, whatever -- to the cpu), video card speed + memory, overall ram memory.

if they could improve on ram access time (when i took my os class in college, that was about 60 nanoseconds for access to a standard chunk of SDRAM), or if SRAM become suddenly much cheaper, i think we'd see a dramatic increase in speed not just on macintoshes, but pcs as well. what i don't know is if clockspeed will ever be a bottleneck again. most programs just aren't demanding enough to put such pressure on the processor's speed anymore.
posted by moz at 12:11 PM on July 18, 2001

The aforementioned Ars Technica article.
posted by kindall at 12:40 PM on July 18, 2001

And for crying out loud, will Apple stop shipping their computers which such ridiculously low amounts of RAM? The base configurations on those things are ridiculous!

Standard RAM minima have been increased for iMaxen and G4en. You can now run something more arduous than Stickies right out of the box.

I think the highlight for me was the retirement of the Blue Dalmation and Flower Power iMacs. Gawd those things were hideous.

I type this on a Girl Power iMac. Quit hurting my feelings! We're sensitive.
posted by joeclark at 1:23 PM on July 18, 2001

come on, people.... Warcraft 3!
posted by noisemartyr at 5:53 AM on July 19, 2001

moz:
I'm familiar with the differences in processor design between the g4 and the p4 (getting nostalgic thinking about system architecture class from my sophomore year...), but i wonder how successful the "megahertz myth" campaign will be in converting the average pc user to a mac user. I know I've seen several eyes glaze over when I try to explain the differences. Will they also explain the vector optimizations that are part of the velocity engine?
I agree that processor speed is really not going to be too much of an issue anymore. There are other bottlenecks these days.

I think they should focus on the benefits of OS X as opposed to Windows XP. Eventually(Ideally?), I think hardware (ie processors) will become less of a selling point, and the OS will be the defining factor.
posted by ry at 9:06 AM on July 19, 2001

Apple has now posted a page containing info and the quicktime clip of Rubinstein discussing the Megahertz Myth.
posted by ry at 6:47 AM on July 23, 2001