drool
1″ thick, 6.8lbs, 1Ghz G4, 512Mb, 17″ display @ 1440×900, 60Gb drive, slot-load DVD-writer, GeForce4 440, gigabit ethernet, 54Mbps wireless network, Bluetooth, FireWire 800, 4.5 hours battery life… And it runs MacOS X, the FreeBSD/Mac hybrid OS that is apparently a UNIX geek’s wet dream.
I think putting Gb ethernet on a laptop is ridiculous; ISPs and large corporations are starting to use Gb ethernet for backbones and interconnects; it’s wasted on a laptop. Still, a machine to drool over, and only $3299 (US).
posted at 9:59 am on Wednesday, January 08, 2003 in Science and Technology | Comments (3)
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Well Macs have generally been ahead of the curve. At home 10Mbps is totally impossible as I sometimes play videos across my lan which are recorded at 8-12Mbps so my 100Mbps lan is required. Now once you get a couple users going on your home lan playing say an HDTV stream which might be easily 25Mbps, you can see that a Gbps home LAN becomes a necessity, so why not corps, and why slow down a corp network just for one guys laptop (well unless you’re using smart routers all over the place instead of hubs).
Also, I’m regularly shoveling gigabytes around at home, why should a corporation expect any less of its users? (Where I work not only do I install Visual Studio and our sources every other week on some test system, but all of us install (different versions of) our product suite across the network on our PCs, sometimes several times a day)
Anyhow, that said, a 1Ghz CPU with a 60Gb hard drive is obsolete out of the box. You’d be lucky to store a few years of photos and couple of movies to watch on the plane on such a box and get adequate playback ripping and editing capabilities.
Funny that you should mention the GB ethernet. I was watching ScreenSavers on Tuesday (MacWorld Day), and the Woz showed up. They started talking about the new PowerBooks and how he was gonna order a couple.
Then, they got off the subject and started talking about how it must be difficult for him to walk around a place like MacWorld, where everyone recognizes him, stops him for autographs, etc. Woz replied that it’s not too often that he gets to realize his celebrity status like that.
The only other times he really gets noticed are when he buys shareware. The host asked him if he ever gets noticed when he buys Apple hardware, and he says that it’s only happened once. When the first PowerBook w/GB ethernet came out, he ordered 2 with the GB ethernet option.
A year later, someone called him up and told him that only 2 PowerBooks had been sold w/GB, and that he owned them both :-).
—
Mando
<laughter>
That Apple has sold two Gb Ethernet laptops in a year surprises me not at all. Except for very small niche markets, who needs Gb Ethernet to the desktop?