Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 15:13:57 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: So what happens to FreeBSD now? Message-ID: <p05100351b760d07b6e2a@[194.78.241.123]> In-Reply-To: <20010628103439.C9802@lpt.ens.fr> References: <200106260901.AA23134284@stmail.pace.edu> <20010626084126W.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <p0510031eb75e868cb1bd@[194.78.241.123]> <2425994267.20010627160101@163.net> <p05100337b75fdc404cc5@[194.78.241.123]> <20010628103439.C9802@lpt.ens.fr>
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At 10:34 AM +0200 6/28/01, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: you get that figure? It seems to me that you can get a > laptop from Dell, with comparable or better features, for a price > lower than the cheapest iBook (say $1200). Okay, let's start with the two major lines, Inspiron and Latitude, at <http://www.dell.com/us/en/gen/products/line_notebooks.htm>, and compare this with the iBook (see <http://www.apple.com/ibook/>). The closest Inspiron model is the 2100 (see <http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/model_inspn_1_inspn_2100.htm>), with a 12.1" XGA display, Pentium III@700Mhz, 128MB of RAM (256MB max, not user upgradeable), 10/100 Base-T Ethernet interface, 56Kbps modem, ATI Rage Mobility M graphics chip w/ 4MB SGRAM, 3.4 lbs (w/ 4-cell battery, 3.6 lbs with 6-cell battery), 1.01" thick, 10.7" wide, 8.66" deep, and $1699 for the lowest-cost model. According to the technical specifications at <http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/model_inspn_3_inspn_2100.htm#tabtop>, it can last either 1 hr. 40 min. or 2 hrs. 30 min., depending on which battery you install (4-cell or 6-cell). They currently have a promotion with a free upgrade to a 20GB hard drive, and you can get either a $100 mail-in rebate (which is what brings it down to $1699) or a $100 discount on the external DVD-ROM drive (again, brings it down to $1699). Let's take a look at the iBook. The lowest-priced model is $1299 (the DVD-ROM model starts out at $1499). It is 11.2" wide, 9.1" deep, and 1.35 inches thick, weighs 4.9 lbs, has a 12.1" XGA display, 500Mhz PowerPC G3 (and we all know that G3 chips get a lot more work out of each Mhz than Intel Pentium chips), 64MB or 128MB of SDRAM (128MB on the DVD-ROM model), user-upgradeable to at least 640MB with an additional 1.25" SODIMM module, 10/100 Base-T Ethernet interface, 56Kbps modem, 10GB hard drive (20GB optional upgrade), Rage Mobility 128 video chip with 8MB RAM, dual USB ports, firewire port, and 5-hour battery. Upgrading the hard drive to 20GB costs $200. This would bring the DVD-ROM model up to $1699. However, let's note what the Inspiron is missing. It doesn't have an internal CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, you instead have to use the external media bay. The battery doesn't last nearly as long as the iBook (half as long, with their 6-cell battery). Also note that the Inspiron has a much slower video display chip, with half as much video RAM. It doesn't have a firewire port, and only one USB port. With regards to weight and size, I don't know what it would add to carry around an extra battery, plus the external media bay, plus the DVD-ROM drive plugged into the external media bay, but I have to believe that all this would add up to at least an additional 1.3 lbs, and probably quite a bit more. Moreover, with the much slower video card (with half as much RAM), and no internal firewire port, the Inspiron would be worthless as a highly portable video editing machine, which is a role the iBook fits quite well. These same failings make it considerably less suitable for a lot of other roles, too. And what if you don't (or can't) spend $1699 to buy a mini-notebook? With Dell, you simply have no other option. At least with the iBook, you can drop the DVD-ROM drive, drop the amount of RAM, drop the hard drive back down to 10GB, and still get something quite useful (and very upgrade-able) for $1299 -- that's a 30% reduction in price, which is quite significant to many people. If you want something from Dell more comparable in terms of features, you have to start with the Dell Latitude L400, which has a starting price of $1939, still has only one USB port, no firewire ports, slower ATI Rage Mobility M graphics chip with only 4MB SGRAM, starts off with a 6GB hard drive (20GB adds $179), CD-ROM instead of DVD-ROM (add $70 to upgrade), and I can't find anything about battery life, but it comes with a 4-cell battery standard (6-cell costs $49 extra), and I'm sure that the life can't be too different from the Inspiron. No, frankly, Dell just doesn't have a machine that can compare. The machines that Dell has that are closer in terms of feature parity all have larger screens and are much, much more expensive, or based on older and cheaper technology and weigh a lot more, etc.... I have recently found out about a website at <http://www.dynamism.com/>; for a company that specializes in locating ultra-portable laptop models from a variety of companies, and putting them all together on one site. You can even select three of the several different models they have and do head-to-head comparisons of the models. From what I briefly saw, it looked like there might be some laptops out there from other companies that can better compare with the iBook on features, but they're also much more expensive. > Chip design needs a quite different kind of expertise from assembling > machines or writing operating systems. Does Apple have it? This is why I'm saying that Apple could spend money to hire certain people away from Motorola, and spend a lot more money to obtain the rights to have someone else produce their own in-house chip designs, and allow Motorola to focus exclusively on the embedded market. > Especially to keep up with the gigahertz wars between Intel and AMD? As we know, Mhz and Ghz are meaningless. What matters is how much real work gets done, and that depends on the internal architecture of the chip, how parallelized it is, how many simultaneous instructions it can perform, how many instructions it takes to perform various operations, how well the compilers take advantage of the chip features, etc.... If you want to talk about Ghz, you might as well start talking about MIPS and MFLOPs. They're about as useless for determining real-world performance of a CPU chip as Ghz is. > However, it seems IBM continues to be interested in PowerPC, and > certainly has the expertise. I'm not sure Apple needs to get its > hands dirty with that. IBM is mainly interested in the server market, the Power4 multi-chip architecture, etc.... Unfortunately, although all three companies are interested in PowerPC, they are each focussing on a different part of the market, and Apple is getting squeezed out of the picture in terms of controlling where PowerPC is going to go. I think that they could buy themselves a bigger piece of the pie and have more control over where they help take PowerPC, by taking some of their four billion dollars they've got in the bank and transferring that to Motorola, in exchange for some chip design personnel and additional production rights to the architecture, et.... -- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be> /* efdtt.c Author: Charles M. 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