it has new text to speack features as will as an new app called time machine whihc is a back

The text to speech features have already been fairly impressive. Not that I've ever used it other than for fun when I first got a Mac.

If you use the text-to-speech for anything other than a toy, the current version is fairly limited. The voices are not sufficient quality to really listen to for a long period of time. You can buy better voices to plug in, though. The big problem is that the voices are not trainable. Good text-to-speech systems have a dictionary where you can tell the system how to pronounce certain new words. It is usually a simple substitution, such as ["Geoffrey"->"Jeffrey"] or ["SCSI"->"Scuzzy"]. You can then set the dictionary by application or some such. This is especially important if you tend to listen to documents fom particular domains, such as computer science or medical. It is really irritating to hear the computer stumble over the same word again and again.

Another useful feature is the ability to have the text-to-speech pick up stylistic cues, such as bold or italics words using a different intonation.

Apple's tests indicate a performance drop of 38% with audio-video apps. I think things like Core Animation, the user interface, and audio-video apps deserve some kind of cut-down version of the G4 Velocity Engine (AltiVec) on a chip, handled by one of the Core 2 Duo's cores.

I've never seen or heard of Leopard's TTS capabilities, but they had better be better than Vista's. Dear God, let's all hope Apple won't take a lesson from Windows Vista.

That is the thing that is missing on the x86 architecture, the AltiVec (Velocity Engine), thereby slowing down the machine.

This is one of the things why I found Apple should've stuck with the PowerPC family of processors.

xboxrulz

The reason Apple switched to Intel was IBM/Motorola were having production troubles on their 90nm production lines. Incidentally, AMD was running into the same trouble about the same time with their production as well. Also, AMD was running into a production wall, they were already selling all the chips they produced.

Basically, Apple wanted IBM to continue focus on developing the PPC platform them and IBM is gradually getting out of the R&D business and basically came back and said: "You want PPC chips, you can help by paying for some of the R&D to the tune of a Billion dollars a year".

Furthermore, the G5 Chips for laptops just wasn't working. They could have pulled the G4 desktop vs. "G4" notebook chip (the G4 in laptops are a completely different chip series than those in desktops...and don't have near the performance of their desktop counterparts).

When Apple went chip searching, Intel announced their focus on performance per watt. Something that really matters as notebook sales out paced desktop sales, especially for Apple. I see a lot of iBooks and Powerbooks around now and fewer iMacs/Powermacs at home.

Whether you like Intel or not, they are the only company that can really meet the production needs for Apple. Apple is assured they will have chips for their machines.

Now rendering in programs like FCP isn't so great, but should improve in programs like Lightwave and Maya as their rendering optimized for x86.

Which is the sad part because the PowerPC chips were already surpassing the x86 architecture for a long while now. The thing is, if IBM opened up its architecture, then I think others will pick it up and improve upon it.

Heck, all the game consoles are even using the PowerPC (or it's variants)

xboxrulz

This post has been edited by xboxrulz: Nov 10 2006, 11:54 PM

Yeah, I'm sticking with PPC Macs for another couple years at least. Thankfully some can be had on Ebay at reasonable prices, so that's my new favourite shopping place. Personally I'd rather have 2 lesser machines for the same price as a brand new one. Then I can always work on one and then set it to render and work on something else on another machine.

I am thinking about getting an intel iMac to test drive out the Mactels sometime this next year when OS 10.5 is released. Really that is the big hitch, I have the money in the bank, but I'm not going to spend $1000 then only to shove out another $150 for an upgrade two months later....

Personally I'm interested in the Xgrid 2 stuff...that could solve some of the problem's I've been having with my set up.

i have been a windows user my whole life and i decided to change to a mac because i wanted a change and now i like mac's better. There are so many more advantages but the one disadvantage is the software and games because you can't get good games and software on it.
When leapord comes out im going to get it because apparently it's going to be good and i am really interested in all it's features like time machine and spaces.
I think i would love ichat the best.
What is your favourate part of leopard?

Well, Apple didn't really release much about 10.5 except that it has Time Machine, Spaces and a full 64-bit architecture support (which I'm excited for). O and XCode 3.0

xboxrulz