EA's 13" PowerBook prediction for Macworld

The Apple rumour mill is now running at full tilt as would be expected during the few days before Macworld. While Everything Apple doesn't have inside information as to what exactly will be released, as I've mentioned before I do expect to see a new 13" Intel PowerBook to be announced during Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote on Tuesday:

13" 16:10 widescreen 1280x800 (or possibly 13" 1280x780)
Single-core 1.66 GHz Yonah Core Solo with 2 MB L2
ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 128 MB PCIe DVI-out
512 MB DDR2 built-in, upgradable up to 2.5 GB (PC4200)
Bluetooth 2.0 and Airport Extreme (possibly with 802.11a)
8X SuperDrive (No Blu-Ray or HD-DVD)
80 GB 5400 rpm hard drive (7200 rpm option)
Possible integrated iSight
Possible backlit keyboard
$1499

I am predicting that such a machine would use the 1.66 GHz Core Solo chip for a few reasons. First, one might expect that Apple would keep the 15" and 17" G4 PowerBooks around for a few months for those who require PowerPC support for certain applications. If Apple doesn't offer Intel-ified versions of those as well, then it means that a 13" Intel Core Solo machine would not have a faster clock speed than the 15" and 17" G4s. I realize that performance-wise it would be faster in most things, but it would still be OK in terms of marketing. Second, it's much easier to put a Core Solo chip in a 13" laptop than it would be for a Core Duo chip while still maintaining reasonable battery life and weight.

Built-in Airport Extreme (802.11b & 802.11g) support in the machine would be a no-brainer, but it's possible that Apple would add 802.11a support if they chose to leverage Intel's Centrino technology, since certain versions of it already support 802.11a. I would not expect support for 802.11n (which is much faster) until the second half of this year.

The Mobility Radeon X1300 was only announced a few days ago, but this GPU is expected to be shipping relatively soon. This GPU offers H.264 acceleration, something that would benefit both Apple's current H.264 push in QuickTime as well as future Blu-ray playback support. In addition, the most most recent mobile nVidia GPUs now also offer H.264 acceleration with PureVideo, so Apple could use an nVidia GPU instead of an ATI one if desired (and if the power utilization was sufficiently low). However, whether it's ATI or nVidia, it's possible that these GPUs that support H.264 acceleration may not be incorporated into Mac laptops until well after Macworld, when they are shipping with Blu-ray drives and the video drivers to support H.264 acceleration are mature. If that is the case, then Apple may choose to use something more along the lines of the Mobility Radeon X300 for Tuesday's 13" PowerBook.

Panasonic unveils Blu-ray slot-load drive for laptops

There has been a lot of new technology shown at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas during the past few days. One piece of technology that will likely make it into Macs relatively soon are Blu-Ray drives, and several of these were displayed at CES. Along with its desktop Blu-ray drive, Panasonic unveiled its Blu-ray slot-load laptop drive, which they first announced back in October.



This drive burns CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. Panasonic is a long-time supplier of Mac laptop slot-load drives, and I would expect that Mac laptops with these would be released by Q3 2006. Toshiba has also announced laptop HD-DVD drives, but Apple has already stated its preference for Blu-ray.

iWeb to be included in iLife '06

An astute MacRumors forum member noticed this little hint to iLife '06 on the iLife support page:



iLife '06 looks like it will include a brand new application called iWeb. However, what that application is exactly is unknown.

[Update 2006-01-05]

The reference to iWeb has been removed.

Intel posts official Yonah pricing

Intel has finally posted official Yonah pricing and release dates on the new Yonah chips.



This mirrors previous Yonah roadmaps available on the net.

There is no mention of a Yonah-based Celeron for January, although there is the single-core 2 MB L2 T1300 Yonah 1.66 GHz. This again brings up the possibility of a 13" Yonah PowerBook for Macworld next week.

Aperture 1.0.1 update removes "panties"

I was poking around in the Aperture 1.0 application binary (/Applications/Aperture/Contents/MacOS/Aperture) and noticed some very strange "code" in there, about panties and Cap'n Funktographer and his Peanut Butter Elephant.



Unfortunately, this very interesting code has been removed in the new Aperture 1.0.1 Update (11.4 MB) .

Fortunately, the new update does have some nice improvements:

Aperture 1.0.1 Update addresses a number of issues related to reliability and performance. It also delivers improved image export quality and metadata handling.

Among the key areas addressed are:

- White balance adjustment accuracy and performance
- Image export quality
- Book and print ordering reliability
- Auto-stacking performance
- Custom paper size handling

A quick test confirms that JPEG exports are vastly improved:

Aperture 1.0:



Aperture 1.0.1:



(Click on pictures to enlarge)

Speed in some areas is also somewhat improved, and Auto-stacking is now fast. However, RAW conversions were not updated, as these will require an OS update (since RAW support is a function of the OS, not the application). Also, EXIF data is still not retained with exported TIFF files.

It was nice to see that Apple has not (yet) prevented the latest iBook (with Radeon 9550) from running Aperture, despite what the new Aperture Compatibility Checker 1.0.1 says when run on that iBook. Not surprisingly however, this update disables the hack that allowed Aperture 1.0 to run on other unsupported hardware (like G4 Power Macs).

[Update 2005-12-23]

P.S. I almost forgot... The Aperture binary also has references to some current and (very) old PowerPC and x86 CPUs.



I do not know the significance of these references, but they're in both Aperture 1.0 and 1.0.1.

Yonah is fast. Very fast.

AnandTech has published updated Yonah benchmarks, which show that Yonah Core Duo 2.0 GHz performs very well, even against its desktop counterparts like the dual-core 2.0 GHz Athlon 64 X2 CPU (with 1 MB L2) in professional applications.

Some are also reporting that Yonah will appear in an iBook in January. As I don't feel that any iBook would get a dual-core chip, I surmised that either these predictions are wrong, the iBook would get the more expensive 2 MB single-core Yonah instead of the cheaper 1 MB L2 version, or else the roadmap was wrong. Now I'm thinking that unless the product is in fact a PowerBook, perhaps the last option was the correct one. Researching this further, I see that some are reporting that in fact the cheaper 1 MB single-core Yonah will be released in January too. If that is true, then it would be perfect for a Macworld iBook Yonah release.

If this Yonah iBook prediction does come true, one wonders what will happen with the rest of the laptop lines. It would be nice to see dual-core Yonah PowerBooks released at the same time too, preferably including a 13" model. Even if there are issues with compatibility with legacy code, Apple could always continue to sell one or two PowerPC models for those who need perfect PowerPC compatibility.