Who's Getting The New PB?

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DanTekGeek

MacTechGeek
I would have liked for it to be out today, but apparently that dream wont come to fruition(sp?). I guess I can stand to wait one more week or so, BUT NOT LONGER! (you listening apple?). Anyway, how many of you are planning on buying one of the new Powerbooks when they come out? I'm hoping for a 1.67ghz, 128MB VRAM to become one of the default configurations, so I can buy it in-store. (want to make sure I dont get any dead pixels). Of course, I'll upgrade the ram, but not from apple. (speaking of which, where do you guys suggest I get ram?). Anyway, I'm STILL waiting for my shuffle to ship. I hope that if I do have to order online, it wont take this long to ship them. (I ordered the shuffle as soon as the store was up).
C YA!
 
i'm waiting for the new ones in hopes that i can get an "old" 12" 1.33 for roughly the same price as the ibooks.

i got ram for my pm from crucial.

oh, and i'm thinking of ordering a shuffle. even the local apple store says they've been told it will be 3 weeks till they get them.
 
cfleck: Do you know if the old 12 inch 1.33 will be fully able to take advantage of Tiger? I thought it might not have the graphics chip to take full advantage of it...

P.S. Good places to buy old 12 inchers?
 
the cards that were "supported" used to be listed on the tiger preview page, but i can't find them now. i don't know off-hand though. on the other side of things, i think the only thing that the newer gpus are good for is that new quicktime encoding stuff. i may be wrong, but i dont think i'll have much need for it on a 12" pb. i don't do a lot of video anyway. are there other tiger "features" that need a newer gpu?

oh on where to get "old" 12", the apple store here typically gets rid of their floor model for a discounted price when the new ones come out. as well, you'll find a lot of people will return them this time of year (just after christmas) and they release those on the cheap as well.
 
I'm stickin to the ole PowerMac G5 for now. No sense in "downgrading" to a PowerBook ;)
 
The fx5200 line of chips that come in the iMac and Powerbook 12" will be supported by Core Image in Tiger.
 
viro - is that on apple's web site somewhere? can you tell us where? i'd like to see what they are requiring.
 
Yes a G4 iBook should be able to run Tiger just fine, though perhaps not all of the swanky features. I am not sure what is public knowledge so won't list the requirements for the current seed but if your Mac has firewire and a DVD chances are it will meet the minimum specs to run Tiger.

As I understand it when people are talking about determining "compatibility" with Tiger usually I think they mean compatibility with Core Image. Much like Quartz Extreme and 10.3 though, Tiger will run without these features. On the U.S. site they have taken down the minimum cards required, perhaps because they are not certain yet what the final minimum requirements for Core Image are yet. The old list is still available on the Australian site though http://www.apple.com.au/macosx/tiger/core.html as well as pasted below for posterity.

The performance gains and features supported by Core Image ultimately depend on the graphics card. Graphics cards capable of pixel-level programming deliver the best performance. But Core Image automatically scales as appropriate for systems with older graphics cards, for compatibility with any Tiger-compatible Mac.


Supported graphics cards:

ATI Radeon 9800 XT
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
ATI Radeon 9600 XT
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600
NVIDIA GeForceFX Go 5200
NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 Ultra

These cards are available in today’s PowerBooks, Power Mac G5s and both the 17-inch and 20-inch iMac.
Click to expand...

I am not sure in what cards pixel level programming is available but that seems to be the deciding factor for some of the features.
 
cbrooks3 said:
will my G4 iBook 933 be compatible with tiger?
Click to expand...

its not an issue of compatibility. i would guess that the requirements for 10.4 will be nearly the same as for 10.3.x. the issue at hand is what kind of graphic card will take advantage of the coreimage functionality.

i think there is a thread on this point, but if i remember correctly coreimage is something of an offload. that is it offloads graphics goodies to the gpu that the cpu would otherwise handle. in the end, i imagine that anythingn using coreimage would still "work" with a nonsupported gpu, but it would be processed by the cpu.

correct me if i'm wrong.
 
Just out of curiosity, what will my powerbook not be able to take advantage of in Tiger? It's only got a 64 MB ATI 9000 in it.
 
Eye candy. And maybe will be lacking some interface speed (i.e. it'll stay more or less the same as in Panther, but not slower).

But back on topic (post _those_ questions in the Tiger forum!): I'll probably skip this evolutionary step in PowerBooks...
 
This is a guess since I have not investigated the features in Tiger yet and even if I did I am not a "graphics guy".

Realtime resizing such as in iPhoto during the keynote. Some of the video processing for MPEG-4/h.264 is probably shuffled off to the card. As an example the 3 way chat in iChatAV might not be possible and processor resources for playing MPEG-4/h.264 files in QuckTime 7 will probably be higher on older video cards.

Again those are just guesses though.

EDIT: Sorry for getting off topic. (Hangs head in shame...)
 
so back to those new pbs...

give me a decent bump on the 12"ers and i might consider a new one. boo ya!
 
It would be tempting if they up the graphics card in the 12" PB and put in a faster hard drive, but I too will wait for a G5 or a dual core G4. The rumored speed bump from 1.33 to 1.5 is not worth it for me.
 
i'm not all to concerned with the speed bump as i would love to see a slightly better screen resolution and a better gpu. boo-ya!
 
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