Hereafter is a message from Pierre who has good news to report for French-speaking Canadian.
Last Friday around lunch time, I got a call from Apple Canada Public Relation Office, in English of course. Apparently nobody is speaking French at Apple Canada.
Previously I have heard a news reporting that French-speaking Canadians had to pay an additional 89$CAD if they wish to buy a PMG5 SP 1.8GHz with MacOSX in French.
Apple representative promised me that this was a mistake that will be corrected only next Tuesday. They also mentioned to me that all previously issued bills including this mistake will be modified. Let's expect that we can trust Apple on this subject.
This looks like the happy end of an unfairness.
Dominique presents Backdrop Folders 1.3.2:
Backdrop Folders is an utility ($18.95) allowing the use of Exposé in an innovating way, creating customizable "views" of certain folders of the Finder on the Desktop.
Those "views" remain visible when using the feature "Reveal the Desktop" of Exposé, what allows a convenient access to folders, in order to open, move or copy a file.
To see a Quicktime demo:
http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/products/backdropfolders/inaction
We’ve said a lot on the “anatomical” differences between the mono 1.8GHz G5 and his big dual processor brothers. There’s a major difference that escaped us (it has only one processor! ;-) ).
The processor is SOLDERED to the motherboard, just like on iMacs and ‘books. In the event of a failure, Apple has to replace both of them.
This design choice, along with those mentioned earlier, has the only purpose of reducing the production costs. It still is a great step backwards, as the last Powermac with a soldered CPU was the 7200, almost 10 years ago (it’s the great karmic wheel rolling on my friends).
translator’s comments
We received quite a lot of information on the new mono 1.8GHz G5 desktop, which turns out quite different from the other G5 desktops.
First thing first, there’s no more fan in front of the processor (the one you have to remove in order to reach the RAM chips on the Dual procs G5s).
The motherboard has also been on a diet :
- there’s only one processor slot (doh !) ;
- the RAM slots are no longer horizontal but vertical ;
- the CPU cooling system is way simpler ;
- the memory controller’s cooling is also simpler, with just a heat sink.
All this matches with pictures leaked on the web last June and removed at Apple’s request. That product had thus been ready for quite some time.
From all those differences, we can draw the following conclusions :
- the processor generates less heat (hey dude, there’s 50% less processors in there !), and the mono 1.8 will probably be a quieter machine than the dual G5s.
- Apple as gone to great length to make the manufacturing cheaper by reducing the size and complexity of the motherboard.
- This machine is no last-minute quick-out-the-door hack to fill a hole in Apple’s product lineup, but a long-matured product that just waited for the iMacG5’s hype to fade away to be released.
translator's comments
Freescale published a PDF that goes into the details of the little brother of the PPC 7447 found in the iBooks and Powerbooks:
MPC7450UM.pdf
The PPC 7448 brings it's share of novelties and improvements:
- 90nm process, same as the G5.
- Speeds from 1.5 GHz and up.
- Improvements in the Vector Unit (Altivec) to avoid bottlenecks. this should bring some welcome speedups.
- 1 MB L2 of L2 cache, instead of the previous 512 KB. This cache now can supports ECC, though if this is activated, the performances will suffer a bit.
- For the Power Saving modes, like its siblings, it upports 1/2 speeds, but also has another mode that brings down the speed to 1/4 of the original, which is great, paired with the increased CPU frequencies.
Even with those improvements, the Logic Board doesn't need to go through a redesign. If Apple is not ready to introduce a Powerbook G5, those PPC 7448 will most likely be featured in the next Powerbook revision.
