Apple orders 40,000 970s
- Thread starter mightyjlr
- Start date
gwynarion
I stole the Sun
From what I've heard the new motherboard designs cannot physically fit into the current case designs, which has made a new design necessary. I remember reading a few rumours about it (the design) a month or so back, but nothing very specific or very reliable. At any rate, the shape/fit of the motherboards seems to be reasonably accurate. Of course this could just lead them to stretch the current design "up" or "back"...
gwynarion
I stole the Sun
Well two of those types do or can have pretty significant physical differences. The most obvious is that laptops have an attached monitor and fold up into a flat package that is easy to carry (plus all the other stuff about battery power and different architecture that deals differently with heat, power, etc).
The other is servers. Many servers are designed to be rack mounted and include such features as hot swappable drives and redundant power supplies. Many are also designed--all the way down to the cpu--to be much more reliable and resistant to crashes, which can often contribute to slightly slower clock speeds because of physical limits. From a software perspective servers also usually run a different operating system that is easier to maintain remotely.
Looking at the final two categories you could think of them as being partly differentiated by hardware and partly by purpose. Workstations generally have faster hardware and are intended for more intensive tasks. Desktops typically are not quite as fast or as robust. This is the hardware difference. The purpose difference is where you see Compaq supplying one level of computers to CompUSA and another to business resellers (like the company I work for). A desktop would be a computer for SoHo users while a workstation would be found in a business/corporate environment. Looking at the Apple lineup you could say that the eMac and iMac are desktops while the Powermac is a workstation. This isn't completely accurate, but it points the way, I think. This is all just my interpretation, though, and may be not entirely valid.
Darkshadow
wandering shadow
That's most likely true. I doubt Apple would make an interim 10.2.x release just to take advantage of the new chip.
I don't think you'll get much of a price break on the PB, as discussed earlier I expect they'll use the G4 chip for quite some time. Aside from the specifics of the 970 in laptops, just think back to the G4. How long were Powerbooks still using G3s after the G4 was introduced in desktops? Off the top of my head I'd say it was at least a year.
