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Everything above kilo (1,000) is expressed with a capital letter so Mb and Gb; mb is millibytes (one thousandth of a byte) - Guardian correction
Imac and Macbook rumours wrapped up
IN THE ABSENCE of hints about the secretive Apple cult's release of its new Imac range, the US IT press has been giving the outfit the free publicity Jobs' Mob has come to expect.
Most of the rumours have been sparked by the fairly obvious expectation that Apple will make some sort of announcement about Imacs this Autumn.
The most reliably repeated rumour has been that Apple will finally follow the rest of the PC industry and release a Blu-ray option for its Imac lineup.
Since this is hardly a cutting-edge or sexy prediction, the rumour mill has also manufactured a yarn about Apple doing something else that might be a bit more interesting. It is only logical to think that Apple might do something to try and upstage Microsoft's Windows 7 launch.
After all, any brand new hardware from Apple is worth a lot more column inches to the US trade press than another Volish operating system that will only wind up in about a third of all PCs in the world.
In this case the Apple watchers' latest forecast is that we can expect new Macbook laptops as well. What is funny about this rumour is that the laptops in question will supposedly be that much promised yet never delivered mythical vapourware, the "low cost" Macbook. When we say low cost we do not mean that in any sense comparable with the rest of the PC market. So far Apple's idea of a sub-$1,000 laptop has been to make one priced at $999.
AppleInsider claims that the new models are expected to arrive as "the most affordable notebook offerings in the Mac maker's history". Not a difficult bar to slip under, we would have thought.
Its source said that models awaiting certification were seen in white polycarbonate shells, consistent with the sole $999 model that's currently available.
It looks like Apple will reduce the low-end model's price by making a less expensive version of the same polycarbonate shelled Macbook. If Apple also releases a Tablet PC next year, then it will have two or three products hovering in the $800 to $1,000 range.
Cnet, in the absence of any facts, speculates what these rumoured cheap MacBooks will look like. If Cnet is right, it will be pretty expensive and the battery life will be more important than performance. These would be powered by Intel's recently released consumer ultra-low-voltage "CULV" processors like the SU4100 or SU7300, presumably.
Our own bloke down the pub, er, industry source in Portugal, who works for one of the Apple resellers, said it was being shipped in late October. Since this is close to the Windows 7 launch date we woke up from our pint. However he didn't have any details whatsoever about what features they'd ship with, so we lost interest and had another snooze.
After all, Apple does not need a new range of cheap Macbooks. New Imacs would have the same spoiler effect on Windows 7, particularly when you have the US IT press prepared to give Steve Jobs a standing ovation when he appears on stage. µ
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I suspect that the folks at CNET are on the right trail. Netbooks are delightfully svelte, but they are not much computer. The new generation of CULV models beat them in every usable way, but still give great battery life and offer a much more readable screen.
I suspect that Apple will lose the optical drive also, slim the whole thing down, and stay with the polycarbonate casing for cost savings. Doing this for $899 should be a no-brainer - even for Apple.
If Apple could manage to get the first number to be a 7 it would get some real attention! But that runs counter to the "satisfaction" Apple customers have come to expect from knowing that they "paid a little more but got a lot more."
Windows 7 is already on so much machines that it is not even funny to try to peddle anything Apple can reveal as "stealing the stage" from it.
You practically don't need any marketing for 7, especially after the whole world knows how Vista failed, and how 7 is better.
So if Apple went out with completely new OS it would not matter really... They are a small company compared to M$.
They produce a few PC clones with custom Unix OS, MP3 players and phones, nowhere near the corporate/business, server and OS presence needed to make a real game. It's funny to see everyone forget that just for the fun of the storytelling in the press... lame.
When Vista and Leopard released they both had one thing in common from their previous version, they were both fat and bloated. Snow Leapard, being streamlined is can now run at acceptable levels (in Apples eye) on ULV chips and such if Apple decides to release one. They also have their iPhone/iPod OS (OS X Mini) too.
Psihomodo, you wrote, "They are a small company compared to MS." Do you have any idea how much Apple has grown in the last decade? Apple's market value currently stands at $181,313,360,800, ahead of Google's, not to mention more than $10 Billion more in cash savings than Google,
Would you say that Google doesn't have the size or leverage to "make a real game?" If Apple doesn't have a chance, then neither does Google.
Forgot to mention that Apple is also now within $10 Billion of MS's savings. So Apple is catching up, in fact posting record profits today (Oct 19), year over year Mac growth of 17%, 38% for laptops, the last quarter being the hottest despite the coming Windows 7.
Sure you're beloved corporate/business Microsoft is very large but, after all, it went from an unknown tiny software company to the new IBM practically overnight (thanks to the uninformed decisions of a bunch of ignorant white-haireds at IBM panicking over the beginning of a PC revolution - started by Apple, a company that isn't done with what it has to say about where computing will continue to go).
And look at Ford, who gave up 100% market share to GM, both of whom gave up most of their market share to Asia. Behemoths come and go.
All said, though you're wrong about Apple's size, and whether it warrants attention from the tech media, you're not wrong about it being hard to steal the thunder from a product that people don't actually buy directly (comes preinstalled with each new PC). You're not wrong about Apple's lack of corporate IT leverage and technology, both a long way off from MS. And people tend to use at home what they use at work.
However, what people use at home is much simpler than what they use at work. Email, surfing the web, iTunes, etc. is simple enough to be rethought, and divided among non-PC hardware devices, and for that my money's on Apple.
Don't be so quick to marginalize Apple, Psihomodo, just because you're a Microsoft fanboy just as, I'm sure, you consider Apple users who defend Apple products.