Yes, With the annoucement of the MacBook Pro I am contimplating turning over to the dark side of the PC Universe.
I’m mean, it is just so sexy, and I can dual-boot windows or OS X or any flavor of X86 linux I want.
On a more serious note, I just want to run down some technical reasons on why this is probably the best laptop announced over the last two weeks (and there were many many laptops announced).
Intel’s new Core Duo is a great processor. Two cores, so essentially two processors, running on one system, which means you can process about twice as much information at one time. There are limitations on how effective this is at improving your preception of the performance increase, but for the most part, it is definitely going to improve your speed vs. other single-core processors. Also, this thing gets amazing battery life out of laptops for how much horsepower it packs.
EFI instead of BIOS…this is technical, but I think it is an important step. BIOS is what is called a ‘legacy’ technology. BIOS is your Basic Input-Output System, which lets the hardware talk to the software. It is what loads when your screen is black and runs that memory check. EFI, or Extensible Firmware Interface replaces that for something much more flexible, and up-to-date.
This means you could build in a media player that ran without booting the whole computer more simply than they do it currently. Also, something to note, Windows Vista supports booting from EFI, while XP does not (XP 64 bit edition does, but core duo is not eAMD64 compatible)….fortunately, I’m a beta tester for Vista, so if I buy a MacBook I can easily set up a dual-boot enviornment…..mwahahah
But, why dual boot (which means pick one opperating system or another during boot-up) when I can have BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!!!!!
Thats right kiddies, Microsoft, Intel, and AMD are all working together to provide us with what is called Virtualization Technology (VT). This VT stuff allows us to seperate our hardware into individual ‘Virtual’ systems with no loss of speed. That means if you have a dual core processor, you could virtually seperate one core from the other to be running one OS on once core, and the other OS on another. The only hiccup is that the OS has to support this. Windows Vista does (or will), but I don’t know if OS X is going to. I”m sure some Linux’s will, but honestly I’m only interested in OS X because it is essentially a version of BSD that has a working DVD player and laptop power-saving modes.
Now, I have one other thing to point out about VT that some of my tech friends probably don’t know about since I found out at an MS seminar and haven’t heard of it before or since.
VT allows even more seperation of hardware, to the point that the OS can detect failures of components in systems, and shut down just those parts without messing up the rest of the system.
The example I found the most interesting that MS told me about was this. You have a server with multiple processors. One processor blows. The OS detects it, stops using it, and informs you it is fried. You tell the OS to electrically turn it off. Then, while the system is still running you take off the heatsink, remove the processor, replace it, and tell the OS there is a new one in and to start using it again. It takes off without a hitch…no shutting down or rebooting. (This scenario scares the piss out of me because I drop screws a lot while working on computers, but it is cool)
My understanding is that this can work with PCIe, PCI, AGP, RAM, and all kinds of other stuff, and the MacBook supports it.
Also, the Macbook has a widescreen, is under 6lbs, and uses expresscard (replacement for PCMCIA…but not backwards compatible), has wireless….hopefully mini-pci based so I can upgrade when 802.11n comes out in 2007… and it has bluetooth, built-in camera for video chat, dvd/rw and all that jazz.
Now, when the memron core version of core duo comes out, and they add firewire 800, I think you will have the best laptop in existance. I may have to purchase a new laptop in 2006…and it might not be one I put together myself.
I’m a traitor…it is OK to tell me so.