My current computer is a three-year-old Mac laptop. I paid about $1300 for it at the time. The specs are:
1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo
677 MHz bus
2 GB DDR2 RAM
160 GB HDD
Looking at the current offerings, for $1000, you get:
2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo
1066 MHz bus
2 GB DDR3 RAM
250 GB HDD
This seems like a really meager improvement for three years time.
Maybe it’s Murphy’s Law?
If there was any shredded cabbage involved then it would be Cole’s Law.
Nothing you’ve posted actually violates Moore’s law.
I would figure we are reaching a point where home computer got about all the power currently needed. Once a new generation of games requires more speed and whatnot, the hardware people will build computers to meet the new requirement.
You should hire Bob Loblaw to sue Apple for breaking Moore’s Law.
You can walk into any retailer that sells computers and get a laptop with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, and a dual-core processor at 2.2 GHz or higher, in any of several brands of your choice, for $500. You just won’t get the picture of a fruit on the back, which is where the other $500 usually goes.
More processor power in a laptop is not always desirable, and the stupid things usually spend the vast majority of their time waiting for the user. All those extra processing cycles are just going to waste as heat, sucking up battery power.
Moore’s Law is alive and well in the desktop, which some pinheads predict will completely disappear in a couple of years. I just bought a quad processor computer with 4 gigs of RAM and a terabyte hard disk for $450. It’s just not a laptop (nor does it have a graphic of a piece of fruit.)
Hertz measurements in CPUs isn’t as obvious a measure of performance as we’ve been lead to believe over the last 20 years. They have reached a physical limit of how many hertz they can squeeze out of the surface area of a CPU anyway, so they’re not likely to commonly get to or over 4Ghz any time soon. The real breakthroughs they’re making now are in the number of cores, address space, and the length of the pipeline.
Computers are much more powerful than they generally need to be, anyway, the problem is just that software and operating systems are pretty inefficient. We don’t need better CPUs, we need better written software.
And this isn’t an Apple specific problem (it’s not like they’re the one making the CPUs or memory), it’s computers in general, so everybody who sees this as an opportunity to launch into a lopsided anti-mac argument should direct their attention to the threads where people are asking support questions so you can really obstruct conversation.
Well, you can go over to the macrumors forum where they’ve been whining incessantly about Apple’s “outdated” offerings for months now. But the gist of the matter is that Apple is expected to release laptops based on the latest Intel offerings any day now. Updates generally happen every nine months or so and this one is a bit late. Theories for the lateness range from blaming it on the iPad (unlikely) to supply or integration difficulties with the graphics card (more likely).
After Apple released the last major update to the laptop line with a separate Nvidia card, Intel pitched a fit and sued Nvidia, claiming their license did not cover their newer architecture chips. The delay in new laptops from Apple could easily be due to this as the Intel GPUs are apparently pretty lame and the workaround to use anything else was only just released.
Note, however, that the latest Intel chips, Intel Mobile core i3, i5, and i7, are only somewhat faster (20%?) than the existing Core Duo processors with similar clock speeds, although they are more efficient in energy use and, I think, are better at balancing processing requirements between cores. The problem is that while chips speeds have improved lately, it’s mostly been through the use of multiple cores. But laptops have limited power and cooling capabilities, so you can only put so much in the box before you get a battery life limited in minutes and/or a machine that cooks your flesh while you use it.
From what I’ve read, for intensive programs that are programmed to make use of them, the new quad core (i5 & i7) things can be a lot faster.
The example I remember is encoding a video in Handbrake (something I do often). It was around 1 hour for a core 2 duo and 20 minutes for an i5. You can get a new iMac with an i5. There’s talk of the next MacBook Pro refresh (probably coming after the iPad has fully released, so as not to harm its buzz) will contain i5s or i7s.
Quad cores, yes. Most of the rumors circulating around the laptops are assuming dual core for energy conservation reasons.
Sounds like a good deal. What did you get?
But then - what improvement do you actually want? I’ve got almost the same machine as you - first-gen macbook with a slightly faster processor, slightly smaller hard drive. It browses the web with alacrity, runs Office with applomb, and plays even high-definition video readily enough. It’s not a gaming machine (and, incidentally, the modern macbooks have better video cards) - but I’ve got a console for gaming.
I honestly don’t need a more capable computer right now. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s another two or three years before I do.
Don’t forget the stickers! The last Mac we bought (we now have three) came with two stickers instead of just the meager one in last year’s packages. This is good because we have a couple PCs and Linux boxes that were likely to get us beaten up for their inherent non-hipness, but slapping the stickers on our doors kept the hooligans away. Definitely worth the Apple Tax!
I realize this, but in this case, it’s the exact same architecture as well, with only a modest speed bump. If the current Macbook were running an i(2n+1) core, I’d be less annoyed.
It’s at least partly an Apple-specific problem. As others have pointed out, you can buy a non-Apple laptop for much less. I’m well aware of the Apple tax, and I’m happy to pay a bit extra for the OS and general aesthetics of Apple, but traditionally the Apple tax has been very modest on their low-end laptop. When I bought my current computer, it was < $100. But I can price out a Dell with equivalent or better hardware for ~ $650. That’s pretty sizable.
I’m always amazed at this argument. I’m not saying that you’re wrong, for your own use, but I’ve never been at a place where I had “enough” computer and didn’t want more. Sure, the computer I have is perfectly serviceable, and it does all those things that you said. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better. I want to be able to leave my Windows Virtual machine running all the time, and not have to start it up and shut it down over and over because it’s too much of a performance drain. I want to be able to watch that HD video while compiling in the background and then, whenever I want, switch to some other application and not have to wait 2 seconds while it pages back in. I want a higher-resolution display, an SSD, a Bluray drive. Now, I’m not saying that all that should fit into a $1000 laptop right now. I know there are tradeoffs with power consumption, SSDs are still expensive, etc. But there’s still lots more computer that I’d gladly use.
There have been several major revisions in the “Core 2” line of processors since its inception.
The first one is possibly a T5600 while the latter is almost certainly a P8400. A cursory glance at the Passmark CPU capability benchmarks lists their relative performance as (quantity is arbitrary):
T5600: 1003 Passmark
P8400: 1538 Passmark
So for 30% less money you’re getting 50% more performance already, not even counting the fact the memory bus is significantly faster. I don’t think these numbers are as far out of line as they appear by merely comparing raw gigahertz.
For comparison with the newer stuff? I have in my home machine a Core 2 Duo E8500 3.13Ghz Wolfdale that I got a little under 18 months ago. If I were to spend the same now on a processor, I’d end up with a Core i7 920
E8500: 2384 Passmark
i7-920: 5590 Passmark
Depending on what ends up in the next revision of the Macbook, you could see that kind of performance (the 920XM is around 4000 on this scale, and the i5 mobiles are all in the mid-2000s.)
Microcenter’s in-store brand Powerspec. It’s down at at Kansas City apartment, but it’s a Q8300 processor (I believe) with Windows 7 Pro, 64 bit, 4 gigs of RAM, a single terabyte HD and a DVD burner. I bought it for $449. It was the end of the model year, so I got it at a discount. I stuck a better video card in it so I have HDMI and DVI outputs.
Thanks gaffa. Looks almost like this one (except for the HD).
Ah, you’re right! I was wrong about the HD, it’s only half a terabyte.
I edit HD video on it, and have been able to cut 3 1080i streams at full frame-rate using Edius, once I upgraded the video card.
Shit, I wanna know too.
D’oh. I are slow.