Hi <Whatever your name is>
Please don't change the subject on your follow-up posts in here. Due to
weaknesses in the Microsoft mechanism, if you change the subject it turns
into two separate unrelated posts and nobody has a clue what you're talking
about.
OK, to answer your question: Thumbs DOWN. Wait for the next version
1) I will not buy a MacBook of any colour until Apple releases the ones
containing an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
2) Word on the current MacBook runs about the same speed as it does on the
previous G4 PowerPCs. The next version will be dramatically faster.
3) The current MacBooks are too hot to use on your lap. "Blisters" is just
a bit of media stupidity, but trust me, you won't be using these things on
your lap for anything substantial.
OK: Intel has recently been told by its major customers that it must change
its product descriptions to make it very difficult for consumers to work out
what they are buying. That statement is literally true!
So Intel was forced to shift to describing its processors with "numbers"
that bear little relationship to performance. Apple, of course, has
elevated the celebrated "reality distortion field" from an art-form to a
science for years. It is now nearly impossible to sort through the bulldust
and hype to work out what is really in the box.
Intel's great leap forward last week means that "something" is going to
improve by around 50 per cent compared with the processor in the current
MacBook. Whether that something is speed, battery life, or heat output is
up to Apple: which processor they choose, and how they configure it.
The laptop version of the new processor was known by the code-name "Merom".
It is now officially known as the Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo. Decoding this
marketing word-salad, "Intel" means Intel made it, "Centrino" means the
chipset supports on-board Wireless, "Core" is the new name for "The thing
that comes after the Pentium", and "Duo" means "Two of them on the same
chip".
The critical difference is the magical number "2" which means "Our second
attempt at a dual processor". This one is built on the 65 nanometre
platform compared with the 90 nanometre platform used earlier. That gives
either a 40 per cent speed improvement (electrons take 40 per cent less time
to get there) or a 40 per cent improvement in power consumption/heat output
(the electrons travel 40 per cent less distance).
There are other architectural improvements that mean you can use greater
power-saving techniques (basically, you can switch half the processor off
when there's nothing much to do, and in the new version, you can do that
more effectively).
Used on a laptop, this means sharply improved heat output and battery life.
A further enhancement to the architecture improves the speed of the Front
Side Bus. This is the speed at which the processor talks to the memory.
And THAT is the critical number when you are working out how fast the thing
is going to perform with Microsoft Word (or PhotoShop, or anything else that
likes to work on large amounts of data). Disregard the years of nonsense we
have had surrounding "processor speed". The gigahertz marketing war has
been just that: marketing puffery. Because a processor can only work on the
instructions and data it can get from the memory. A processor that can get
very little from the memory just sits there idle for a greater percentage of
its time.
The Core 2 Duos released last week have a 1066 MHz front side bus. Don't
get your hopes too high: those are the desktop processors, and it's very
unlikely that Apple will try to put them in laptops: they get too hot. But
using MS Word, they're literally twice as fast as the 533 MHz parts that are
in the market now. Or 50 per cent faster than the 800 MHz desktop
components currently out there.
However, I expect Apple to announce a "refresh" of its product line in the
next few weeks. One of the first targets would have to be the MacBook line,
which has been suffering some bad press for its heat output. Presumably it
was "designed" for the Core 2 Duo, so snapping in the new part from Intel
should provide greater performance with much less heat and an improved
battery life.
Now we're waiting on Microsoft to do its stuff.
Microsoft Word on the MacBook currently runs through an emulator that has to
turn all the code instructions end-for-end. The Intel processors are
"Little-Endian" machines, the PowerPC is the other sort.
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~verts/cs32/endian.html "Rosetta" is a Mac OS X
application that performs the translation.
The next version of Microsoft Word on the Mac will be a huge leap forward in
many ways. Not least because it's a "Universal" application that will not
require Rosetta. That will mean it will run around five times faster than
Word currently does on a PPC.
The other enhancements that are being made mean that real-world performance
is likely to be as much as ten times faster. It should out-run your iMac by
between five and ten times.
So yeah: I'd wait, if I were you
Not only will your lap stay cooler, so will your frustration levels
Cheers
I'm contemplating a MacBook, but have heard Word is slown on it. Anyone
have an opinion? I'm an editor and it's the primary program I use. This
will just be my mobile unit/backup, though. Will mainly still use my
desktop i-MAC.
Also: How hot are these laptops, anyway? I keep hearing horror stories.
Blisters anyone?
Thanks, CGF
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410
