While wearing any of my current "hats" as a Domino Developer, an ASP.NET developer, or a system architect for a development house, I don't have a lot of exposure to Apple hardware (my iPods notwithstanding). However I'm always looking for ways I could make use of one. For a few reasons - it'd be nice to know first hand the pros and cons of each system through firsthand experience, rather than evangalistical arguments of "x is better than y because of z" which seem to be so annoyingly commonplace at the moment.
So anyway, with the announcement of some new Mac kit, is there any opportunity for me to own my first piece of Apple kit excluding iPods? Well, no, not really - not yet anyway.
Don't get me wrong, it all looks fairly tasty, but it's not quite there for me yet. First off, with any of these systems, I have the obvious problems based around actually doing things with it. Domino Designer still has no mac version, and I refuse to run emulation such as Wine on a box in order to actually get work done. The chances of a Mac version of Visual Studio are of course even more laughable, so any Mac I'd buy would be used for a few niche activities (which after all is what Macs have always done well - fill small niches, and fill them very well) such as: music creation, music listening, email + browsing, and finally as a media center. The media center comment was really based around spectulation that one of the announced devices this time around would be a media center equipped mac mini, which would have been a fairly popular thing, however that didn't eventuate.
A few comments on what DID come out. First, the MacBook Pro. I'm sure the new names will piss some people off, but it's kind of nice and respectful to whats on the inside (or more importantly, whats NOT on the inside) to change the name. It looks like a very usable machine, and I could definately make do with one of these as a sort of a 'personal' device, ie, no work other than email to be done on it. However, commentators on vowe.net mention the small fact that there are no battery life figures mentioned anywhere with regards to the MacBook Pro - that can't be good.
John Ash takes it one step further, and does some calculations:
I went and had a look at the data sheet for the PPC used in the current line up of G4 Powerbooks and the maximum power consumption is 18W typical and 25W maximum.
Getting info from Intel on the Duo Core proved more problematic (Adobe Acrobat barfed on the downloaded data sheet with an encryption error of some sort :) ), but this from Wikipedia....
Yonah will feature four (4) levels of power consumption.
>= 50 W Core Duo E -- For Large Multimedia and Gaming Notebooks
24 - 50 W Core Duo T -- For Mainstream Consumer Notebooks
15 - 23 W Core Duo L -- For Ultra-Portable Notebooks and Some Smaller Thin and Light Clients
< 5.5 W Core Solo U -- For ultra-thin ULV Notebooks, PDA, and other Multimedia Devices
Now, that's not terribly conclusive I know, but I would have thought we were looking at the T variant for the MacBook, which puts the power consumption at 100%-200% of that for the PPC. OK, that's great for the claimed 4-5X performance improvement, but it won't help the battery life much, will it?
A low battery life will definately rain on this machines parade. However it may of course simply be an omission, time will tell. I could still probably find a use for one of these if it came my way at an incredibly reduced price, however the use would be minimal :)
As for the iMac G5? Well, I happen to own some rather nice monitors already thanks. My Sony 24" Widescreen Trinitron, Dell™ 2405FPW 24" Wide UltraSharp LCD Monitor, and Samsung 17" Flat Panel all serve me rather well, so anything with a built in screen has an instant turn off. A new Mac Mini with media center capabilities would have been snapped up instantly, but for the PC user looking to dabble and experience "an alternate user interface paradigm" the new iMac simply has nothing to offer me.
The magnetic cables sound like a good idea - although I can't remember the last time I actually tripped over a cable, but hey, maybe it still happens for some people?