From Macworld 06: iMac, iSight, Front Row, MacBook Pro, and so much more

Tired yet?

If you're irritated that my material here looks and reads nothing like a blog, be comforted; this isn't a blog, and I'm not a blogger. Adjust your antenna accordingly.

The unnatural contortions that Apple had to go through in order to unveil Intel Macs "early" at Macworld Expo (it was not early to my mind--it was either now or Summer, and Intel's striking Apple's segment then) are reflected in a high wire dance that's still underway. I sat down with the Apple marketing VPs for hardware and software Wednesday, and much of the x86 Mac strategy still has a moving target feel to it.

Some bits are nailed down, in particular, the pieces that Apple figured consumers would care most about. I'll start with hardware.

These x86 machines, and those for the foreseeable future, are 32-bit boxes. The fact that Apple chose a target market that doesn't care about 32 vs 64 makes Apple's plans pretty clear. It's too bad those plans weren't made clear in Apple's otherwise stellar documentation.

The x86 iMac and the MacBook Pro are very similar machines; they're meant to be. Apple designed them for well-heeled consumers, although, as you'll read in a follow-up entry, Apple's Pro Tools will land on these boxes in March.

That'll be a feat. MacBook Pro and iMac are strictly 32-bit boxes. The way they're constructed, the Intel Core Duo CPU is practically incidental to the design, a director of traffic. Apple doesn't agree with that assessment, but disagreement is essential in heathy relationships.

The magic, the place where the ass that all Macs must kick get kicked, is the ATI X1600 Radeon (or Mobility Radeon). PCI-Express, 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM, space warping graphics processing unit. I don't kneel before it in a workstation or even a deep-pocketed enthusiast's overclocked game box. But this GPU lifts these Macs out of Intel mediocrity. I knew Apple's warmed-over chassis design and "poke a stick in Intel OEMs' eyes" advertising wouldn't do it. So ATI gets all the huzzahs from me on this one.

Little known fact: Apple software engineers choose, within applications, which graphical tasks will run through the GPU as lists and which will just spray onto the screen as plain old pixels in a frame buffer. In early Macs, the Dock animation had to be done with the GPU, but in later models, the CPU took over. It's still that way: Developers can switch GPU/CPU/GPU, wherever the job is done best.

Apple still has some of those decisions to work out. There were jerky bits in all of the animations demonstrated to me. I have great hopes for 10.4.5.

Apple warned me off seeing the slow CPU/killer GPU design as a bellwether of Macs to come. It appears to me that MacBook Pro is having power management problems; with that beastly GPU, I'm not surprised. The demo unit was blazing hot at the rear, highlighting the no-free-lunch policy in electrical design. A much cooler CPU, but much slower, too. A fast bus to RAM, but the speed kicks in only after you install two sticks whose specs match exactly. The 667 MHz front-side bus heats things up, the worst offender has got to be the killer PCI-Express GPU. The bottom of the machine was intolerably hot. We don't have PowerPC to blame that on any more.