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Apple

Intel Powered Macs leaked via IM?

Looking at this video (CNET), I found an interesting statement by Steve Mullaney of BlueCoat Systems whose company slogan is “we keep good employees from doing bad things on the internet” :

…a very high profile computer company that has a yearly following, a yearly event where they talk about their roadmap and what they are doing and a week before that event, somebody on IM sent some attachments on what that particular CEO was going to talk about at that particular event. And this is a very open company that is very free with ideas and very free with their network and so forth and locked that down because that was impacting their business and they let that secret out.

Sounds to me a lot like Apple. Despite being thought of as “tight lipped” Apple is a rather open company. Just about all their products get leaked a little early, and it typically greats a lot of good buzz that gets people excited and attracts attention. Don’t think Steve Jobs isn’t aware of that.

Categories
Apple Mozilla

Apple’s new Mactel’s and UserAgents

Currently UserAgents for the two most popular Mac browsers are as follows:

Safari

This visitor used Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412

Firefox

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

Does anyone out there know if Apple has switched their developer edition Intel Macs to a different UserAgent yet? I presume it’s simply swapping out PPC with i686.

It would be nice if Apple, or someone from the Safari team [collective look toward David Hyatt] would give an official mention. Or will they do like Windows and not say anything?

It would be nice to know early how this is going to be done. It would allow web developers to start updating log analysis software today so it accurately represents those new systems when it ships (and allows developers to see how much of a market there is for Intel based Macs). Not to mention it allows us to make websites that sniff for the processor type and choose what download the user really needs (rather than force a user to download a larger universal binary).

I’ve yet to see any official mention on the Apple website regarding the UserAgent change and proper detection methods for such purposes.

Categories
Apple

Intel Inside

A very interesting note here:

Customers with existing PPC G5’s will have the option of a PCI-X based add-on card with a native Intel follow-on to the P4 “D” chip and of-course the Transitive/”Rosetta” bundle. Any other PPC machine bellow the G5 (i.e. G4, G3 machines) are not included on the current roadmap inclusion. Third-party providers have shown interest is providing a solution for down-level Macs.

In regards to the G5, IBM pretty much has hit a standstill with the existing PPC architecture (i.e. PPC G5) and scalability. The initial IBM roadmap to reach the 3 GHz mark never happened and has slipped not only months but years. This really disappointed Steve and everyone else at Apple as the architecture was quite promising.

The big problem is heat dissipation. As you guys have probably noticed, the high-end dual G5’s have been sporting “water-cooling” for some time now. The old saying in the industry is “The last to water wins”, IBM lost and Intel has clearly won.

How sweet would it be to have a G5 with a Pentium 4? Tri processor goodness! Would also be interesting to see Pentium PCI cards for older systems.

Categories
Apple

Apple x86

According to CNet News, Apple will switch to Intel Chips, with an announcement next week. It’s long been rumored that Apple has had constant x86 builds of Mac OS X going since conception. This follows a rumor a few weeks ago.

Think Secret doesn’t believe so, and sees the PPC 970 progressing. Interestingly Microsoft agreed to use it in the Xbox 360, meaning the cost of the chips would likely be lower thanks to the production increase. Not to mention speed bumps on the horizon. Seems like an odd time to jump ship.