PowerBook G5 - 'Some Time'

not to upset people who want one, but considering I bought my first G4 pb a few hours ago, this makes me happy :D. Good to know they will continue to make software that works with it for "some time"

I just bought a PB G4 1.25 last September. Two years of use will be just fine before I buy a new Powerbook!

Oh the pain! The horror!

Joswiak made similar comments before, with the same "not anytime soon" line. I'll look for it.

Def. not good news...

Edit: Here is the MacCentral Article .

"Motorola is huge for us," said Joswiak. "Our partnership with Motorola is not going away, G4s are in every other part of our product line. As you can see, [the G5] is not going in a PowerBook anytime soon. Motorola remains very important to us, but IBM is the one that can take us to the next level."

That was from June 2003 btw. Not much has changed in almost a year. :(

If Moto can come up with a decent FSB for the G4, it would be a great processor for Powerbooks for sometime.

If we could just get true DDR333 or 266 it would be outstanding! The G4 is not so bad - it's simply a matter of bandwidth that causes the problems.

Oh the pain! The horror!

Joswiak made similar comments before, with the same "not anytime soon" line. I'll look for it.

Def. not good news...

He makes mention of the lead time the G4 had, which was 18 months. This puts the time frame around MWSF in 2005... which seems right. However, one has to admit that even if they were going to bring them out next week, they couldn't very well say "Oh you'd be nuts to buy one of these now.. the G5 ones will be out any day now!"

It was an awful long time before the G4 made it's way into the portables after being introduced, so that's fair enough, but the other thing to consider is that that was when Apple was stuck with Motorola and slow progress in general - hopefully things will be slightly accelerated with IBM now. Mind you, that G5 chip is truly a monster - I can only imagine the amount of re-engineering that will have to be done in order to put that thing in a laptop without having it melt instantaneously and fuse into the user's lap. ;)

Plus, there's always the question: Right now, what do you absolutely need a G5 in a portable for that a nice 1.5 GHz G4 can't accomplish? I'm sure there are exceptoins, but really, does anyone truly NEED a G5 in a PowerBook other than simply for bragging rights? If you need a G5, I say get a tower...

Rome wasn't built in a day.

I'm glad Apple is being vocal about the timetable (albeit a bit vague) because drooling fanboys need to have this stamped on their pasty little foreheads: The G5 Powerbook is a monumental undertaking. Customers expect every other component, such as battery life, to remain the same or better than the previous generation. So it's not just a matter of slapping a G5 in there and doing some minor retooling.

Expect to see it January '05 at the earliest, and don't be surprised if we don't see it until June '05.

...pointed out that it had taken at least two years for the G4 chip to make it from the desktop to the notebook.

Two years?!?!??

If the same thing applied to the G5...then wouldn't that mean that we wouldn't see G5 Powerbooks until Summer 2005...

That's a long time, and would mean at least one more and maybe two more G4 powerbook updates. The Powerbook G4 might be up to 2.0Ghz before the G5 is released!!

meh, I can wait

You can wait. The rest of the industry and many consumers who are interested in performance however will not. Current Pentium M laptops already kick the G4’s ***. Screw OS X. If Apple is going to neglect the hardware what’s the point?

If IBM can get two PowerPC 970s in a blade server, why can't Apple get one in a laptop!

(And those are really 1.6 GHz PowerPC 970s, and not POWER 4s. See here)