News for Thursday, 9 November 2006

The launch of the MacBook Core 2 Duo has been a surprise for many Mac market analysts.
If an update of MacBook models was expected, many were expecting to have a speed bump and not a CPU switch coming together with a larger default installed RAM as well as increased capacity HDs.
By adopting this new CPU, Apple has proven that one will have in the future to expect Cupertino to follow closely technology developments made available by Intel. This is of course a real change with Apple's hardware historical records, especially when looking at past road maps based on slowly progressing PowerPC. It also clearly demonstrates that Apple is going toward a real fight with PC manufacturers by proposing aggressively priced hardware models, decreasing the price of the Mac entry-level ticket.
If Apple decision to integrate as fast as possible Intel's technology might give some Mac users the feeling that their computers are getting older faster, it might also be the price to keep it up with the state of the Art of IT development. One should also not forget that most of current applications are simply not using most of the power of multicores CPU architecture, so current machines will still look good in months when developers will have coded their application to benefit of dual or quad cores CPU.
Apple resellers are probably the ones who fear the most such pace for faster CPU and 6 months-based significant hardware update. Indeed, they will not want to have large stocks of computers that might turn obsolete from one day to another; if Apple keeps delivering important hardware update at this rate.

Microsoft officially announced yesterday that Windows Vista was now ready and would be on the shelves on January 30th.
This long expected system shall finally confront itself to the reality of the computer world and will have to prove its qualities. The most difficult part of it will surely be the "pirates" rush, seeking for the recognition of their kind and that will all search for any security leak.
The release of this new system, much closer to Mac OS X than XP is, might be a good thing for the Mac.
- it will require Apple to restart the innovation machine: if it didn't fully stop, it slightly slowed its pace on the most recent versions of Mac OS X, where nothing fundamental changer in the user interface recently.
- many PC users will have to buy a new machine, and if the wind of change is strong, they might also be tempted by the Mac and its OS, which were both in the headline for months.
- as the interface in Vista and Mac OS X will be much more alike, those who'd wish to switch to Mac OS X may find it easier.
On the other hand, no transition is easy and we'll still have to see if PC users will cling with XP or massively want to make the move to another system.
The answers to those questions we won't know before some months.

Barefeats has quickly compared a 2.16GHz Core Duo-based MB Pro with a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo-based model.
If some users might think that the gain would be minor or could be explain by the higher CPU frequency; results prove they are wrong.
Indeed performance jumps by 18% when testing iTunes encoding, and by 30% with Aperture. In addition, Photoshop CS2 via Rosetta turns to be almost twice faster!
Tests performed to evaluate the GPU clearly demonstrate a 20% performance increase as one could have expected it with the higher clocked GPU and GDDR.
So while running cooler the Core 2 Duo CPU-based MB Pro is faster than expected.
Direct link to the article: http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd6.html