Apple's new PowerBooks and iBooks, introduced without much fanfare in a special press conference at the company's Cupertino campus Tuesday, are both solid and substantial upgrades. The value-added features combined with significant price reductions should satisfy most folks who had been in patiently waiting for some news on the Mac portable front, although there is still some grousing that no DVD/CD-RW combo drive is available for the TiBook.

I was mildly surprised that Apple chose to announce both upgrades on the same day, via press release, yet, although the new Pismo and iBook to SE were unveiled simultaneously at MacWorld Expo Tokyo 2000, so there is recent precedent.

The iBook, in the configurations introduced last May, had been selling well (see figures below), so Apple was under no market pressure to boost sales with a new model, and the fact that they did so means makes the possibility that there may be another hardware announcement before Christmas seem more plausible.

Whatever, it is now highly unlikely that there will be any portable news at MacWorld Expo San Francisco, leaving the way clear for desktop hardware to take center stage there, possibly with a G5 chip intro for the Power Mac towers, and a new iMac if one has an already been introduced by then.

Overshadowed by Apple's portable announcements this week was IBM's unveiling of its new 750FX G3 chips, clocked at 700 MHz and 1 gigahertz with 512 MB of on-chip cache running at parity with the processor speed. This marked the first breach of the 1 gigahertz barrier by production Power PC chips, and I was surprised at the muted response from the Mac media.

Perhaps the ho-hum reaction can be attributed to a conventional wisdom notion that any G3 is old news, and nothing less than faster G4s or the anticipated G5 is worth getting excited about. It's hard to swim against the current of popular sentiment, but I'm still a fan of the inexpensive, cooler-running, less power-hungry G3, and for some tasks -- portables or the fanless, convection-cooled iMacs, for example -- I'm of a mind that the G3 makes more sense than the G4, and I'm sorry that Apple has essentially relegated it to B-team status as the chip for consumer Macs. Personally, I could get a lot more excited about a 1 gigahertz G3 PowerBook than I am about a 667 MHz G4 unit.

I own G3 (233 MHz) and G4 (450 MHz) machines, and while the Cube is of course faster, for the sort of stuff I do with computers most of the time, it's not that much faster than the old G3 PowerBook. For production use, the most significant difference I've noticed compared with my aging WallStreet PowerBook is that the Cube handles dictation in near real time, while the old 233 MHz G3 is annoyingly sluggish at this task. However, since iListen is not Altivec-optimized, the improvement has to be mostly attributable to processor speed, and should be equally impressive with a similarly clocked G3.

Coincidentally, when I had this column about three-quarters written, I received an email from Applelinks reader John Dennis, who made the following query:

"I have a friend at work who is thinking of getting a Mac.

"He wants to do audio/video production on it. I don't think really heavy stuff. I think he would like to do stuff on it for his church.

"Could he use a G3 for this type of work. I know a G3 is faster then a G4 for certain things [but] the G4 only becomes faster with Altivec enabled applications which are few and far between."

I replied that for most applications, a G3 of equivalent clock speed and cache configuration should be about as fast as a G4. Altivec-optimized apps., of which PhotoShop is the most notable example so far, being the exception. As Apple's Product Line Manager for the PowerBook, Sandy Green, told MacCentral this week. "[The new PowerBooks are] going to be tremendous for our customers, especially the ones working with Photoshop. They can take advantage of the Velocity Engine and go where they thought they couldn't go before with a portable system." However, that doesn't mean you can't run PhotoShop very successfully on a G3.

Here are the results of an actual benchmark comparison I found a while back on one of the Mac benchmarking sites:

PhotoShop 5.5 time to complete 21 filters:

• Titanium 400 G4 PowerBook 119.8 sec.
• Pismo 500 G3 PowerBook 123.1 sec.

That's a less than 3% difference. Of course the Pismo has 20% faster clock speed than the TiBook, but this does show that a fast G3 is no slouch for PhotoShop work.

The current iMacs come with 500, 600 and 700MHz PowerPC 750CXe chips; the iBook uses the 750CX 500MHz, and now the 600 MHz 750CXe (apparently) G3 in its higher-end configurations, all with 256k of on-chip cache. The 600 MHz machine with its 100 MHz bus should quiet some of the grumbling that OS X runs too slowly on the little portable. The bus speed increase alone reportedly results in about a 10 percent performance boost across the board. That, combined with a 20% speedbump is a respectable reason for digging a bit deeper to get yourself one of the premium models instead of the $1299 price leader (which now comes with 128 MB of RAM and a 15 GB hard drive, but still has just 500 MHz, a 66 MHz system bus, and a regular CD-ROM drive).

The availability of the 600 MHz model also restores the two levels of iBook performance that existed with the Standard and SE versions of the first generation iBook between February 2000 and May 2001. The addition of a 100 MHz System bus on the 600 MHz models along with the faster chip will make for a substantial performance improvements over the revision a second-generation machines. That, combined with the price drop on the top of the line iBook with its CD-RW/DVD combo drive to $1,699 makes what was already an excellent value even better.

I think that for the sort of use John described, his friend would get very satisfactory performance from one of the current G3 iMacs or perhaps the new 600 MHz iBook.

Of course, I have personally gotten no farther with OS X yet then some superficial experimentation, and the G4 may well offer significant advantages for running X. But I can't imagine Apple making OS X too Altivec-dependent with their high-volume machines still running G3s for the foreseeable future.

There have been complaints that the G3 750CX/CXe chips used in the recent iMacs and iBooks didn't have quite as much punch as expected for their clock speeds, due to the switch to 256 K on-chip cache in place of the earlier 512 K or 1 MB of backside cache. That issue should be decisively addressed with the 512 K on-chip cache sported by the new 750FX when it ships.

Consequently, as I noted above, the 750FX G3 would seem to make a lot more sense as a PowerBook chip than the 7410 G4 does.

The 750fx features:
• 512KB on-die L2 cache
• Silicon-on-insulator, low-k dielectric construction
• Copper interconnects
• 0.13 micron fabrication process
• 200MHz frontside bus capable of 25 per cent more bandwidth than previous G3 processors
• Measures 34.6sq mm
• Incorporates 39 million transistors
• Power consumption - 3.6W at 800MHz
• Clock speeds - 700MHz;1GHz

Another IBM chip announcement expected soon, the PowerPC 405LP, also projected to ship sometime in 2002, is to achieve lower power consumption by shutting down parts of the chip that aren't in use, allowing it to function on one-tenth as much power as predecessors.

Theoretically, this facility could make the 405LP an ideal chip for use in laptops, not only from a battery life perspective, but also in terms of what will presumably be substantially less heat generation.

"What's in a name?" Shakespeare asked. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." for the vast majority of laptop users, a 1 gigahertz G3 would almost certainly offer better performance than the 667 MHz G4, and better battery life with lower heat generation to boot. It seems that the most compelling reason to opt for the G4 for PowerBook applications is the G4 nomenclature. Users like the status conferred by having a G4 chip in their professional laptop. I think that's slightly silly and counterproductive, but what do I know?

With the new PowerBooks that debuted this week, the entry-level machine, which has been cut in price by $400 to $1,999 from the price point of its 400 MHz predecessor was introduced at, still has the 100 MHz system bus inherited from the Pismo, and a nominally 550 MHz G4 7410 chip that is rumored to be an overclocked 500 MHz unit, but that has of course not been confirmed by Apple. The high-end model has a 133 MHz system bus, the same as the desktop Power Macs, and runs a 667 MHz G4 chip (possibly the 7440 lower powered version of the 7450 chip in the latest Power Mac towers (but that hasn't been confirmed either). Both models have 256K of on-chip level 2 cache running at the same speed as the processor, as opposed to the first generation TiBooks' backside L2 cache with of 1ÊMB of fast static RAM, with the ratio of the microprocessor and backside cache clock speeds 2:1.(ie: the cache ran at only half the processor's clock speed.)

One thing that is indisputable, portables, especially the new iBook, are vastly more important to Apple than the ever have been.

In its fiscal Q4, 2001, Apple shipped 850,000 computers. Compared with the same quarter last year, the iMac was off 49%); sales of both professional models were down 34%); but iBook sales were up and astonishing 182% in the historically worst market ever for personal computers.

Indeed, with 251,000 unit sales in the quarter, the iBook moved within shouting distance of Apple's mass-market consumer desktop machine, the iMac, which sold 294,000, and actually edged the professional Power Mac G4s by 3,000 units. The iBook, powered by a G3, dontcha' know, is now Apple's second biggest money-maker. Portables are the logical Mac for most users, and the G3 is, for now and probably the foreseeable future, the logical portable computer chip.

Charles W. Moore