William Bokunic’s Weblog

Flash on any type of CPU is generally very heavy in usage. More so for the older CPUs. Specifically speaking, Power PC G3s and G4s.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of using a machine with one of these chips in recent years with Flash version 9 installed, it’s not a pretty site. Flash is heavily CPU intensive and will not hesitate to max out your CPU on sites such as Youtube. Not only that, it’s also very jittery at first. It needs to buffer any flash content before you view it. For example, if you go to watch a Youtube video, once the page loads you’ll need to instantly pause the video and wait for it to load about halfway through (sometimes all the way), then hit play. Otherwise the video will be roughly 2-5 frames-per-second until the video is fully loaded.

Not a pretty site, but alas there’s hope! You can download the release candidate of Flash version 10. Version 10 will not decrease the amount of CPU used by much (Youtube still maxes out my CPU when viewing videos on my iBook G4), however you will notice a difference as version 10 adds graphics acceleration. What this does is offloads a bit of flash onto your GPU versus your CPU. No need to buffer flash!

So download it if you haven’t and enjoy.

Well it’s been rumored almost exactly to the day since the Apple “Let’s Rock” event and today it’s been confirmed: New laptop’s on October 14th!

Several rumors are:

• A new design for the Macbook Pro’s and Macbook’s
• An all glass multi-touch trackpad for the Macbook Pro’s with “enhanced” multi-touch controls.
• An entirely new Macbook in the sub-$1000 area.
• Possibly the option for a larger screen size on the Macbook and/or Macbook Pro’s.
• The Macbook Pro’s getting quad-core chips (not really a rumor, just a hope).
• Nvidia GPUs in the Macbook line.
• Cheaper overall Macbook’s and Macbook Pro’s.

For that last bit, that would only be possible with the highly rumored Apple Brick manufacturing method. In short Apple uses water jets and the like to cut the entire laptop case out of a brick of aluminum. This significantly cuts production costs as this would be done in the US (not China) and would only need a minimum number of staff to oversight it. I highly believe this to be true as the same source for this rumor correctly predicted the iPod Touch, Fat Nano and the Macbook Air (to name a few).

That’s all for now folks. I’ll do another blog post on the 14th (or maybe before if another plausible rumor appears).