PowerBook G5: Held up By the Sleekness Factor?
There are some things people are convinced they must have even if they don’t necessarily need them. For me these things include cigarettes and Coca Cola (Pepsi for the duration of iTunes promo, and yes the trick still works). Other folks have more demanding needs, these people imagine they truly need a PowerBook G5. Why do they lust for some fictional (as of this time) product? I honestly couldn’t tell you. The G5 is a great chip (it is one more than the G4) but the G4 seems more than adequate for just about everybody not doing serious film editing or the like. That observation aside just about anyone who uses a computer for more than e-mail and web browsing can pretty much convince themselves that they are a power user and hence in need of maximum power. If you need more power on a notebook you want a PowerBook G5.
Unfortunately for the masses of folks lusting for a snappy G5 crammed into a svelte PowerBook the product just doesn’t seem to be coming anytime soon. At this point I will note that there are rumors of a G5 PowerBook coming out in the second quarter of this year. (There have also been rumors of a G5 PowerBook debuting in every quarter since the original G5 was introduced so ignore the specious gossip.) Steering clear of rumorville one has to wonder what the hold up is. Here there is really no mystery, everyone knows the thing keeping the G5 PowerBook out of eager hands is the heat issue. Just take a look at the active liquid cooling system in the Dual G5. Or you could go with a quote by Tim Cook when talking about a G5 based PowerBook calling the problem:
“the mother of all thermal challenges”
Wow, mother of all thermal challenges, eh? That’s some pretty strong language, I wonder if the engineer in charge of re entry on the Apollo 11 mission would agree. No matter. It’s clear that the only issue is heat, of that we can be certain.
Well maybe not. There are already Athlon 64M laptops on the market and I must note that numbers given by IBM indicate that the 970FX is pretty well in line with the early Pentium M chip (Banias). So the easy road to take is to assume that if you can get a 64 bit Athlon into a notebook and given the fact that plenty of Pentium 4Ms made it into notebooks then it should not be too difficult to slide a G5 into a notebook enclosure. Of course the situation is a little more muddied than that straightforward analysis. Point being is that it could be done and it hasn’t.
As to the reasons why Apple hasn’t produced a G5 PowerBook yet the biggest is that they don’t have to. Only Apple makes PowerBooks so they are in a competition to get one on the market. When you’re the sole vendor you get the ability to say “We’ll get it out when we get it out.” Imagine two companies making hardware that ran OS X and you can bet there would be a mad rush to get something, anything out to the PowerBook G5 starved masses.
On the surface this seems bad for Mac users. Honestly if Apple can make a PowerBook G5 shouldn’t they? That answer is not so simple. Is it better to do something just because you can or is it better to wait until you can produce something singularly excellent? Let us allow our imaginations to run free for a moment and imagine what a G5 PowerBook might look like if it were released tomorrow. As previously mentioned the thermal issues of a 2 GHz G5 chip are roughly equivalent to the original Pentium 4M (power consumption right around 25W). That chip was featured, as best as I can tell, in the Dell Inspiron 5150. That computer was thick, bulky and at about 8.5 pounds the only thing it inspired anyone to do was look for a lighter computer. Still it did get it half right. It ran for a fairly long time per charge (5ish hours) and was, by all accounts plenty powerful. For another example take a look at an Athlon 64M notebook. It is bulky, weighs about 5.5 lbs and is something Apple would decidedly not produce.
I’ve got no doubt that a G5 could be in a PowerBook tomorrow if Apple were willing to trade design for functionality. They could whip up a three-inch thick computer, make it whine like a leaf blower and let run for an hour on a full charge. Of course that is not the Apple way. Personally this seems the right way to go about things. Why produce a compromised computer that will be universally ridiculed and nearly unusable just for the sake of getting something new out the door? Sure it isn’t a problem when you’re not known for highly usable and stylish design but it would be a serious black eye for Apple. I bet plenty of people disagree, I’m sure there is a strong contingent of folks out there saying: I don’t care if I’ve got to wear asbestos pants and stay within arms reach of a socket, G5 me Apple and make it to go!
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Comments
I recently bought a PowerBook 1,5 Ghz. If Apple would release a PowerBook G5 in 2006 Q3/4 I might consider.
I agree. I wouldn’t want a PowerBook to be compromised in form or battery performance if the current G5 processor is not ready to go mobile.
I think it is best to wait, I hope not too long, for a new chip or a better cooling solution or whatever it takes to make a portable 64 bit, faster and all.
You’ve got to be kidding about the G4 being adequate enough for film editing.
Please keep in mind that the front side bus is quite anemic and is not comparable to the FSB of the G5 chip. That alone is helpful with rendering. I have a tibook 550 G4 and a 1.6 Ghz G5 powermac. I do realize that G5 chip is nearly three times as fast at my pbook Mhz-wise, but don’t discount the bus!
Using Magic Bullet for Editors, it took my powermac a couple of HOURS just to render a few filters on just a 7 minute short! I would NEVER try that on my tibook. It would even take a few minutes for the thing to load the clips, let alone render them.
So a G5 Powerbook would definitely address a legitimate need for those of us who would need to edit on the go.
Thanks.
You know. I misread what you typed. You do say NOT doing serious film editig. I got all worked up when I saw the passage and ranted. Sorry.
I dunno, today’s bloated apps are starting to bog down my 1.3ghz g4 powerbook. Office components like PowerPoint seem to struggle at times, and the one RPG I play doesn’t like my G4 (or the graphics chip).
And getting any decent performance out of Virtual PC is a pipe dream on my g4… Maybe it’s Micro$oft’s fault…
Go to Bear Feats. There is a lot more to consider than just a CPU.
There is talk from IBM of a newer G5 that would be less power hungry, but in the meantime the increase to 1.67GHz G4 is a slight improvement, with the 128MB of video RAM, bus speeds and 2GB RAM. Not to mention the price drop.
And then there is the future Cell processor, but we know so little about it at this point, and I would wager it will be more power hungry, at least initially (from the architecture designs I have seen for it).
For now though, I am real happy with my thin, light, and, let us not forget, sexy powerbook. I agree that Apple has made the right choice in waiting until the technology allows them to keep all of these factors optimized while improving performance.
There’s always more to consider than just the processor’s power consumption, energy waste, and size. Always.
I think G4s are great. The world doesn’t actually need 64-bit computing yet. It needs a way to defy the laws of thermo-dynamics and keep processors from releasing so much heat!
Sure, 64-bit’s great if you’re calculating the entirety of Pi, or working on the billions of base pairs in the human genome. In those cases you want to be able to address insane amounts of data and memory without tricks required to do so on a 32-bit processor.
Freescale Semiconductor is working on a new G4 that seems to confront a lot of the drawbacks of the current line, such as the poor front-side bus (and thus lack of support for faster RAM). These new chips (the e600 line, I believe) would have dual-core capability (which would be AMAZING in a PowerBook) and, I imagine, better energy consumption.
There was also talk of Freescale making a discreet G4. For those that don’t know, it’s (somehow) a processor that sacrifices little in the way of speed in order to use like half the power (10W, if the reports/rumors hold true).
I’m in no rush to see a PB G5. Give me a dual core 2 GHz G4 with a faster frontside bus anyday.
Leave the G5 where it belongs - in servers and workstations.