The system you describe is pretty much what I had in mind. Something that’s not mind-blowingly fast but will still be more than fast enough for everyday tasks. And all that without burning your laps, fanning and eating up its batteries quickly. I wouldn’t even need the _sub_notebook part.

However, they’re so much faster than the G4 that even with half again the power consumption, they still provide much better performance per watt.

Further, as Pierre mentioned, the desktops have to be taken into account. It’s really the G5 that Core has to be stacked up against, since I don’t think anyone would argue that the G4 is still a practical choice for new kit. The 2.3 GHz G5 in the Xserve had a TDP of 55W, which is almost as bad as the high-end Pentium 4s at 60-65W. (To understand how hot this is, think about the heat of a 60W incandescent light bulb.)

Personally, I hope Apple comes up with a subnotebook based on the ULV Core 2 Duo. With a 5W TDP, this could be used in a fanless system. It’d be on the slow side — 1.0 and 1.2 GHz, and slightly worse performance per clock — but I’d be all over that system. (My dream setup is a subnotebook that really only needs Mail.app and TextMate, paired with a Mac Pro for most of my work.)

I’m getting the full four bars ourside separated by a metal front door, vs. one or two with the TiBook, but there’s a big slowdown in communicating with the web.

The best news is that the original Airport card in the TiBook only gave me half the download speeds I was paying for via Cox cable (3-4 vs. 7 Mbps). Cox just installed fiber optic cables, and I got the new Airport Extreme. I’m getting 15-20 Mbps now. I’m thrilled.

My new machine is mostly pretty quiet. I think the fan came one once or twice. It’s also not been hot yet.

I realy agree about buying a machine that they’ve been making for several months. My TiBook was also EOL (I bought it after it had been discontinued) and I had few problems other than cosmetic (the wrist rest got very stained and Apple wouldn’t replace it).

S

While I lack a technical proof for this, my impression of the situation – gained from discussing this with people and playing with the machine’s settings – is the following: The Intel machines are fast and they feel faster than their PPC friends. The raw speed of the machines is rarely needed by the average user. I think of myself as being more demanding than many computer users – and I rarely max out the CPU on my MacBook. Even in the situations when I do, that is mostly for tasks which aren’t time-critical, such as re-compressing a movie I reccorded with eyeTV. To me it feels like the extra processor core is the main thing which makes the machine feel faster.

If my observations/assumptiions are half-way right, having something like a similar dual core processor at half the clock rate could come really close to being a good solution. It would use less energy and still be fast enough. I really wonder why such things aren’t offered.

(My MacBook is running its fan much more frequently as well after a year. It’s quite annoying. I think I’ll try to sell it and get a new one because I could do with a fresh warranty as well.)

For laptops, on the other hand, I am not sure there has been much of an improvement. To be fair, it should be remembered that Apple were stretching it with the G4 processor in PowerBooks. The TiBook was quiet because it had a CPU clocked at only 400 MHz or 500 MHz. Then things went into the 1-1.5 GHz range and Apple started having a very real problem with heat.

During my stay in France, I saw my brother who owns such a PowerBook G4 (with a processor in the 1-1.5 GHz). He was complaining about how much worse the fan noise situation had become over time. He said the machine was fairly quiet initially, but now the fans kept switching to a higher gear at the slightest level of activity. I witnessed it myself when he was just browsing his iPhoto library.

I don’t think the Intel processors for laptops are worse than the G4 was. They are probably even somewhat better. But the truth is that there is a demand (both from consumers and from Apple and other developers with their ever-more-demanding software) for higher performance, and that means heat. And there is simply no physical way to fit all that power into a laptop without some heat/noise compromise.

That’s what I was saying above. Maybe I am mistaken and there are actually cooler alternatives out there that make it possible to have a powerful laptop that is as quiet as the original 400 MHz TiBook was. Since noise is such a subjective issue, it’s not easy to get a clear picture of what the situation is in the computer industry as a whole. But I suspect that it’s simply not possible to have alll this power without the heat and therefore a certain amount of noise.

One day, maybe, we will have computers that are both powerful and silent. But that day is still too far in the future to even think about it.

I still think it’s fairly embarrassing that these Intel Macs are so hot and noisy. While loving my TiBook _and_ experiencing it numerous technical and engineering shortcomings, it was fairly hard to get the fan spinning on that machine. I still fail to understand how Apple managed to build machines which generate more heat with these new processors which they switched to because they have better power/performance characteristics.