haplain's never-ending quest

[Cory5412]

Really cool find, hap. Please continue sharing more about that machine as you find it.

Given that the G5 was released as of mid 2003, I can believe that Apple had teams working both on duallie PowerBook G4s as well as a framework for a mobile G5 system. Although, at 113W, it's pretty exceedingly clear why Apple never shipped it. Haswell has some 47w mobile parts that are considered by most gadget sites and tech reviewers to be insane. (Incidentally, they're the quad core Haswell+Crystalwell chips that have IRIS Pro graphics with the 128mb on-die cache that can be used either as CPU cache or as video memory, they're also at a pretty high clock speed )

With that power envelope, it's not very surprising that this never showed up as a product, and my guess would be that it never really got beyond the phase of PCBs mounted on acrylic. It would be interesting to know whether or not there was a 15-inch version in the works. At 113w, it would need to be pretty fat and have a gargantuan brick to be viable.

yea… you are correct… but WE HAVE NO OTHER OPTIONS

The Intel transition is super interesting. It's said to have been started pretty early on. My guess is that the folks working on the Q51 didn't know about it, but this was going on in Apple at the time.

I'm trying to find a reference to it, but it's said that the Intel transition kind of came together at the last minute. I can't find the article I'd originally wanted, but it suggests that Steve Jobs literally waited until the evening before WWDC to decide which of two full-length WWDC presentations to show off, one featuring a Mac platform with renewed investment in PowerPC chips and the other featuring a Mac with Intel chips. It's entirely possible that I hallucinated that thought. Although, the stuff I've come up today about the "AIM" relationship is pretty interesting. On all fronts, Apple was in both a really bad and a really good position, with PowerPC. Even though Steve Jobs liked to be different, and PowerPC helped that happen, I don't know how much life there was left in the platform, at least for desktops and especially for laptops.

 

[haplain]

Here's some more prototype stuff for everyones enjoyment. Happy New Year! I'm going to see if I can top last years prototypes. Thanks to everyone for the support, help, and encouragement!

 

[haplain]

And I saved this one for last... Check out this Mac mini top cover. It's only the cover, the innards are my buddies I'm turning into another project for him since he's such a good guy. He was nice enough to give me the top case since he has no use for it. Look at that iPod mini dock connector on the back. Too bad they didn't release it with that. The story behind why the didn't was because the iPod mini team was so behind schedule they forced the Mac mini team to redesign the top without a dock since they could get it together in time. I doubt there's another.

 

[Byrd]

That's really interesting haplain, would it have been for a G4 Mini? Does the lid fit and interface with a standard Mini?

 

[haplain]

So the guts on the inside of the entire prototype Mac mini are for the Intel Core Duo chipset. There's a connector on the top of the bridge board on the first Intel Mac mini's that doesn't do a thing. I always wondered what it was for, now I know. The lid will fit on any 2009 or before Mac mini. It's got the CD drive but it could also fit on the "server" models with no CD drive too.

 

[LCGuy]

I remember hearing rumours about this back in the day, very cool to now know that they did build such a beast.

 

[haplain]

PUCKS. These show the subtle variations that each and every device Apple creates goes through. You can see the small differences in the depth and contour of the different designs. They serve no purpose other than to show the size, weight, and form of the "final" product. These are from the iPhone 3G and I'd imagine hundreds of these exist in Apple internally, and a few with me

 

[Gorgonops]

Given that the G5 was released as of mid 2003, I can believe that Apple had teams working both on duallie PowerBook G4s as well as a framework for a mobile G5 system. Although, at 113W, it's pretty exceedingly clear why Apple never shipped it. Haswell has some 47w mobile parts that are considered by most gadget sites and tech reviewers to be insane. (Incidentally, they're the quad core Haswell+Crystalwell chips that have IRIS Pro graphics with the 128mb on-die cache that can be used either as CPU cache or as video memory, they're also at a pretty high clock speed )
With that power envelope, it's not very surprising that this never showed up as a product, and my guess would be that it never really got beyond the phase of PCBs mounted on acrylic. It would be interesting to know whether or not there was a 15-inch version in the works. At 113w, it would need to be pretty fat and have a gargantuan brick to be viable.

Comparing that power figure to anything modern is a little dirty pool. Remember that around the time the G5 was introduced "notebooks" (Luggables? Mobile workstations?) using the "Mobile Pentium 4" were the high-end of the Wintel market and some of those approached 90 watts TDP for the CPU alone. A Mac laptop based on a G5 would have been, well, no worse, than those things. Marketing might have been something of a problem given Apple's emphasis on slimness/lightness/etc. from the first titanium G4s, but by shouting "It's PROFESSIONAL" loudly enough they probably could have moved them out the door if they performed decently, which is of course the real $64,000 question. Those Mobile Pentium 4 laptops almost inevitably hit their thermal limits and were forced to throttle the CPU when continually stressed, it's very likely a G5 laptop would have the same problem unless the cooling system was positively miraculous.

A couple years ago someone claimed to me that they'd actually seen with their own eyes a working G5 prototype Powerbook (It belonged to an Apple engineer who was dating their ex-girlfriend or something, it's complicated), but I'm not sure how much stock I put in that report; the unit was described as looking basically like an Aluminum G4 but about twice as thick and "functional, but buggy". I suppose if that machine actually exists haplain's bound to trip over it sooner or later; I wonder if it could have actually been a dual G4 prototype after seeing the acrylic monster in this thread. Or a Sasquatch riding in a UFO with the Loch Ness monster.

 

[Cory5412]

In 2003? The chips in the ThinkPad T30, as one example, were up to 35w. This is the chip in my particular T30, back when I had it: http://ark.intel.com/products/27356/Mobile-Intel-Pentium-4-Processor---M-1_80-GHz-512K-Cache-400-MHz-FSB

30W. I actually have more than one late Core2Duo laptop with a higher TDP. (at 35w, it's not much higher, but there you have it.) Neither of these machines throttles a lot.

At the time, luggables built around desktop parts were common, but true laptops, even the flagship ThinkPad and Latitude models, were using mobile parts at 30-35w. (I haven't personally used one of these luggables significantly, so I haven't seen their throttling due to thermal limits personally.)

For Apple to have done that, it would absolutely need to have been gargantuan. It would have been the G40 to the T30 (which itself, admittedly, was not exactly svelte, and the ultraportables in the lineup were using the Pentium IIIm until the Pentium M was available.) or the Inspiron 9100. Even more than a decade ago, Apple was not interested in building that.

Although, whether or not they could get the G5 down far enough in power usage and TDP for cooling and powering it in a mobile form factor to be reasonably possible at all remains kind of at large. Apple could, of course, have muddled its chart by offering uniprocessor G4 machines as portable machines and a trans-portable clamshell G5 as a sort of "mobile workstation." It wouldn't be the fist or last time Apple reneged on a stance once the technology changed or a market for something became clear. (iPad mini, bigger iPhone, Intel processors, I'm sure the list goes on and on.)

If Apple simply gave up on the idea that it was "portable" but rather "trans-portable" -- they could have avoided putting a battery in, thus leaving more room for computing guts and cooling, and given it a beefier, possibly built-in power supply. That would have been a hilarious, but still very interesting machine.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

If Apple simply gave up on the idea that it was "portable" but rather "trans-portable" -- they could have avoided putting a battery in, thus leaving more room for computing guts and cooling, and given it a beefier, possibly built-in power supply. That would have been a hilarious, but still very interesting machine.

Which they did - in the form of the iMac G5. It shrunk the iMac line from the "monitor on a stick on top of a large ball" iMac G4 to the "screen with a computer built in" that lives to this day. An iMac is a fully transportable computer for this use. They even had a 17" model as the small one. It's definitely no fun to lug around long distances, but it CAN be done.

 

[Gorgonops]

In 2003? The chips in the ThinkPad T30, as one example, were up to 35w. This is the chip in my particular T30, back when I had it: http://ark.intel.com/products/27356/Mobile-Intel-Pentium-4-Processor---M-1_80-GHz-512K-Cache-400-MHz-FSB

The "Pentium 4M" and "Mobile Pentium 4" (with 533mhz FSB) were different products. And here you go, here's the worst-case model with its 88 W TDP. Granted, that is a Prescott chip from mid/late-2004 but Norwood Mobile Pentium 4s with 70+ watt TDPs were shipping in mid-2003. And, yes, the computers based on them were horrible but people *did* buy them from outfits like Alienware for situations where the maximum portable performance humanly possible was what they were after. I totally agree that huge, brick-heavy "Lan Party" laptops aren't the sort of thing that Steve Jobs would have been thrilled with, but I suspect that *if* the G5 had really turned out to be the performance revolution they were hoping for they would have gone for it. (Undoubtedly while retaining the G4 for "slim" applications until IBM could cough up something that had a prayer of working for that.) However:

1: The G5 turned out to not really be all that and a side of fries; in the low-end tower configurations in particular it sometimes came off as worse than a pair of G4s but with more power draw.

2: Pentium M (no "4") laptops also premiered in 2003. It's too easy to forget what a revolution those machines were; a 1.4Ghz Pentium M outruns a Pentium 4M at 2.6Ghz and does it with a TDP of 22 watts vs. 35. (And as the Pentium M crept towards the 2Ghz mark it started outrunning even the best desktop P4s with, again, a much lower TDP.) With machines like that coming out a "Pregnant Guppy" mobile from Apple would have just looked stupid.

#2 Is undoubtedly the real reason for the Intel transition, of course. It is notable that the *very last* round of G5s from IBM could manage a 30 watt-ish TDP, and therefore could have made it into a not-horrible laptop, but that was with a 1.6 Ghz clock and everyone remembers what a dog the 1.6 Ghz G5 tower turned out to be. The writing was clearly on the wall.

Neither of these machines throttles a lot.

Most of my experience with Pentium 4M machines involved a Dell Latitude 640, and that thing was a dog. Unless you turned the power management off, then it sounded like a hair dryer and was still distinctly canine in aspect, if not actually a dog anymore. Barely faster than the Pentium III-based C610s and totally a boat-anchor compared to the D600. It was still nicer than those stupid Mobile Pentium 4 (or just straight-up desktop Pentium 4) "LAN Party" laptops, however. I have a long semi-boring/comical story about someone's bright idea to buy some of those to run a mobile training class on that I'll skip repeating. Suffice it to say that were I ever to find a laptop like that in the wild today it's one of the few pieces of technology I'd totally be up for "Office Space"-ing to death just for the cleansing joy of it.

 

[Cory5412]

Although Netburst occupies the same soft spot in my heart that G4/G5 occupies in the hearts of many, I'll totally acknowledge that the Pentium M was a better chip in every single sense.

The C640 and T30 were pretty similar, do you know whether the C640 was using the "Mobile Pentium 4" or the "Pentium 4M" ? My T30 had a sticker reading "Pentium 4m" on it, but I've just never spent that much time with a C640.

In terms of doggedness, I had a gig of ram and a very new (like, from 2009 or 2010) disk in my T30, which probably contributed to its relative sprightliness. It matches the 1.67GHz PowerBook G4 in Cinebench, despite being two years older, and it ran Windows 7 well enough. I was able to play a few YouTube videos on it and run iTunes, but (and I've long presumed this was a RAM constraint) it was not pleasant to run very many applications at once. (This is the case with the machine that replaces it on my desk, a ThinkPad X31 with a 1.4GHz Pentium M and anywhere from 768m to 1.5GB of ram, so at least part of this is that I'm running Windows 7 on decade-old hardware. The X31 now runs a console-only Debian Linux installation, but that's another story.)

 

[Gorgonops]

The C640 and T30 were pretty similar, do you know whether the C640 was using the "Mobile Pentium 4" or the "Pentium 4M" ? My T30 had a sticker reading "Pentium 4m" on it, but I've just never spent that much time with a C640.

The C640 was also a 4M at... I don't honestly remember, 1.8ghz? To be fair I guess it wasn't a *terrible* machine in and of itself, it just came off rather badly when compared to both its predecessors *and* its successors. The C610s I was comparing it to had the 1.13 Ghz Mobile Pentium III-M, and... wow, that actually has a higher average Passmark score than the 1.8ghz Pentium 4M does. It was heavier and got worse battery life than P-III as well, so its whole existence sort of seemed pointless. (The one good point about it was it had a 1400x1050 screen vs. 1024x768.)

Again, though, it was still a much nicer machine than those "Lan Party" laptops. (I can't remember if they were actual Alienware units or knockoffs.) Huge, flimsy, loud, the battery was basically a 1 hour UPS, terrible.

It matches the 1.67GHz PowerBook G4 in Cinebench, despite being two years older, and it ran Windows 7 well enough.

It's amazing how Apple was able to keep perpetuating the illusion that the G4 was even remotely competitive after about 2002. The one crutch it had to stand on was the Altivec unit, which is what let it keep winning a select few media-related benchmarks, but for general-case IPC the G4 is basically a Pentium II/III competitor and it really started to suffer from memory bus starvation once the clock was ramped up into the Ghz ballpark. I do sort of wonder in retrospect what Apple's plan was for laptops when they gave the nod to using the G5; were they just really optimistic that IBM could deliver a laptop version, were they counting on a skunkworks deal with what became P. A. Semi to deliver a workable PWRficient CPU three years earlier than what actually played out, or what?

 

[Cory5412]

it just came off rather badly when compared to both its predecessors *and* its successors.

Having owned an X24, T30, and X31, I have tried not to compare the T30 to the two X series machines, because it sits in a different class of hardware, and the X24 was hampered by a fairly low ram ceiling compared to a T23, which would probably make the T30 look worse than it did to me. I have a T42p, but I don't have a T40, but I have no problems believing that the Pentium M coupled with the doubled memory capacity of the T40 would make that look a whole lot better than the T30 as well.

With the T40 having been available in 2003 as well, it's interesting to think about how badly the G4s were doing at the time, compared to x86 machines. (Again, I was not only drinking the Mac Koolade from about 2002 all the way through like 2007, I was the proprietor of the Koolade, and I made reasonably specific and heavy attempts to prove that Apple was omg the bestest evar on a pretty regular basis.)

 

[haplain]

Here's a question for you all? What macs have you heard exist, that haven't been found yet? Maybe that's the best way for me to continue my quest :beige:

 

[unity]

Here's a question for you all? What macs have you heard exist, that haven't been found yet? Maybe that's the best way for me to continue my quest :beige:

Nice... nice... rub it in....

:lol:

So how many Twiggy Macs do you have?

 

[haplain]

Haha tu chez ok added to the list

 

[unity]

Would a MultiServer count since it never went into production? Or do you already have a dozen of them and use them to keep the hot tub level?

 

[haplain]

Good call also added. Ones for sale right now. I'm talking to the guy about it. 5k's a tad steep.

 

[unity]

Good call also added. Ones for sale right now. I'm talking to the guy about it. 5k's a tad steep.

He has A LOT of stuff. Bought a few things from him over the years. I thought for a while he stepped away from things. Tempted to buy one Lisa part from him per week so I can just build my own without a huge upfront cost!