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PowerBook Duo: A hint of things to come?

PC Mag’s Sascha Segan posed an intriguing question the other day: “If you put a smartphone in a dock, it could replace a netbook. So why hasn’t anyone succeeded at doing that?”

Good question.

Now that I’ve been thinking about it, the idea of a dock into which you could pop an iPhone or an iPod touch, thereby quickly connecting it to a decent-sized external display, keyboard and mouse, some USB ports, Ethernet, and maybe an SD Card slot, you would have, if not best of both worlds, at least an attractive hybrid.

A dockable smartphone/Internet computer would no doubt cost more than a PC netbook, but it could also be much more versatile, and arguably a better overall value.

Indeed, external input device support over Bluetooth alone would make handhelds much more appealing to me. As Segan observes, with “65,000 apps for the iPhone alone, it’s hard to believe that there aren’t thousands of people who would want to use those apps with a nice big keyboard and screen.”

Of course, to make a docked iPhone or iPod touch truly competitive with the netbook segment, it would require driver tweaking and some re-engineering to support the necessary hardware inputs and outputs. There’s also the issue of what Segan refers to as “the OS problem,” specifically: The iPhone OS as presently configured is not really up to the job of supporting the kind of robust productivity apps that can run on a netbook under Linux, Windows, or OS X.

I’ve long been a fan and admirer of the Apple PowerBook Duo concept from the early to mid ’90s. It combined a subcompact laptop module that could be used as a freestanding notebook, and a Duo Dock with a full-size CRT monitor, a full set contemporary of I/O ports, and internal expansion slots for desktop power with few compromises.

Toward the end of the ’90s, laptop computers became powerful, versatile, and gained improved connectivity and display options. Many of the the Duo’s advantages were negated, but it seems to me quite logical that the PowerBook Duo concept could be successfully updated, using a handheld instead as its “core module.”

Indeed, it’s so logical that it seems a wonder no one has yet acted on the idea. Segan thinks the reason is that Apple and the wireless carriers don’t want it to happen. Presently, folks who have both a smartphone and a netbook need two wireless service subscriptions, whereas our proposed dockable handheld hybrid device would theoretically only require one. As for keyboard-supporting iPhones, he thinks that won’t happen because Apple doesn’t want to erode MacBook sales.

All that sounds a bit conspiratorial, but also lamentably plausible. Even so, look at the issue from the angle of a similar new product category. While Microsoft has a complicated relationship with the netbook phenomenon, and Apple is downright contemptuous, consumers voted with their wallets and made the netbook the hottest-selling category in computers. Now that the dam has burst as it were, Microsoft is playing ball with the netbook-optimized edition of Windows 7.

I think platform convergence and rationalization between the smartphone and netbook spaces could likewise catch the consumer imagination and take on a life of its own. It seems just too good an idea to be able to keep suppressed indefinitely.

My friend and Low End Mac’s publisher, Dan Knight, posted a nearly 3000-word essay recently positing a “what’s the perfect Mac” conundrum: MacBook Pro or iMac. I share Dan’s enthusiasm for examining and debating such hypothetical questions, and I thoroughly enjoyed the piece, but for me, the matter is much more open-and-shut.

I’ve been advocating for more than a decade that laptops are the logical Mac for most users, and in my estimation the unibody MacBook Pros — particularly the new 13-inch model — come as close to personal computer perfection as has yet been achieved.

As his top laptop candidate, Dan Knight leans more toward the 15-inch unibody model, with a particular nod toward the $1,699 configuration, which would be my second choice for ultimate Mac notebook value. First choice is the 2.26 GHz 13-inch MacBook Pro at $1,199, which gives you almost everything you get in the lowest-priced 15-incher, with the obvious exception of display acreage, and for $500 less.

However, for Dan, screen size and finish are much higher priority issues than they are for me. He developed his computing style and habits working as a professional book designer on two-page 152 x 854 and 1280 x 960 resolution screens, and finds smaller displays — say 1034 x 768 (SVGA) or lower resolutions — too restrictive for his tastes and work.

I, on the other hand, spent my first three Mac-loving years on a PowerBook with a 9.5″, 640 x 480, passive matrix grayscale display. After that experience, anything larger has seemed generously roomy, or at least adequate. The highest-resolution screen I’ve had in any Mac to date is the 1440 x 900 display in my 17″ PowerBook, which I like a lot, but adapting to the 1280 x 800 resolution of my 13″ unibody MacBook when I upgraded posed no real problem. Leopard’s Spaces feature has eliminated much of the inconvenience of working with modest display real estate.

Today, I would draw the line at 1064 x 768, which is what my two still-in-service Pismo PowerBooks offer. That’s also the highest resolution any of my desktop computer monitors have ever had, which sounds quaint when the entry-level $1,198 iMac today comes with a 20-inch 1680 x 1050 screen.

Dan’s current production rig is a dual-1GHz Mirror Drive Door Power Mac G4 driving a 1280 x 1024 a Dell flat panel display — hardware that befits the theme of his website, and ideal for a guy who isn’t yet willing to give up Mac OS Classic Mode. However, Dan says he’s excited this week because now that Apple has just added an “antiglare” display option for the 15-inch unibody MacBook Pro, he thinks it could become the perfect production machine for him, even going so far as to suggest that the 15-inch MacBook Pro is probably the perfect computer, period.

I won’t quibble overmuch with that, although I do still champion the 13-incher, since I’m more than satisfied with the glossy display. As Apple notes, with a glossy screen finish you get graphics, photos, and videos with richer colors and deeper blacks, which is better for most users who don’t have to work in print media. But if having an antiglare option helps persuade folks like Dan Knight to dismount the fence on the laptop side, I’m all for it, and let’s have it available on the 13-inch model as well.

So will Dan finally end up on a MacBook Pro, which would be his first production laptop since the original Titanium PowerBooks back in the early-to-mid ’00s? I think there’s a good chance he will, but he isn’t slamming the door on desktops by any means, noting that the perfect desktop computer would take the current iMac design, move some ports for easier access, and offer an antiglare screen option. Perhaps for him it will boil down to whatever Apple does next with the iMac.

How about you? Would you vote for either the MacBook Pro, the iMac, or something else entirely as “the perfect computer?”

How long should a Mac last? Mac360’s Alexis Kayhill posed the question recently, and it got me thinking on the topic, especially since Alexis framed her column around the experience of a co-worker who had purchased a new unibody MacBook (on her recommendation) only to have Apple upgrade the 13″ unibody to Pro status with feature enhancement and a lower price a few months later.

I’m in the same boat, having also bought a unibody MacBook last February. Alexis says her friend “got burned,” though I think that’s a bit harsh. I don’t feel “burned” at all — more like a bit disappointed that I didn’t wait four more months, but you can drive yourself nuts second-guessing such things. I love the MacBook, and am already becoming convinced that it’s going to be one of my all-time favorite Macs. I just wish it had a FireWire port, which the new 13″ MacBook Pro does have.

My target for intervals between upgrading my main workhorse systems has been three years ever since I bought my first Mac back in 1992, and I’ve done pretty well at adhering to it. That would put replacement time for my MacBook in early 2012, which seems a long way off.

The way it usually plays out for me is that the first year I revel in the greater power and storage capacity of my new machine compared with whatever it replaced. At 18 months, twinges of slight frustration and dissatisfaction start to set in, especially after upgraded models have been introduced, but I really have nothing to complain about. However, by the beginning of year three, the aging Mac is usually beginning to feel compromised in some respects, and the hunt begins, although for the last three machines I’ve managed to reach or beat the three-year replacement benchmark.

Of course it helps that I like the challenge of getting useful service out of antiquated hardware. We still have two nine year old Pismo PowerBooks in very active service, and they’re great for what we do with them — text-crunching, email, Web-surfing, and so forth — “netbooks” of a sort, I suppose.

Actually, I still have most of the Macs I’ve ever owned, and only a very few are not in working order. Our six year old iBook G3 died suddenly last winter, but had been a virtually flawless performer up to the day it completely refused to respond to the power button — presumably a terminal motherboard issue. One of my daughters is still using my old 1999 WallStreet PowerBook, and the 17″ PowerBook that served as my primary workhorse between the iBook and MacBook is still in fine fettle.

As Alexis Kayhill observes, there’s a line somewhere between the disappointment that occurs when a newer, power and feature-enhanced, and possibly cheaper revision is unveiled, especially if it’s only shortly after you buy a new Mac. But there’s also the pride you feel when your Mac still looks good and works well five years (or nine years!) after you bought it.

Macs being generally more expensive than typical Windows PCs, at least up front, it logically stands to reason that they should have longer useful lives.

How about you? How often do you usually upgrade your system, and what do you consider a reasonable service life for Macs?

Two abiding challenges of laptop computer engineering are the antagonistically complimentary objectives of packing more and more computing and graphics power, memory, speed, and storage capacity into thinner and smaller form factors, all while keeping power consumption, heat generation and heat dispersal to tolerable levels.

In the context of cooling, desktop computer designers have the luxury of fewer space and power consumption constraints making techniques such as large heatsinks, water-cooling and multiple, high-volume fans practical solutions. Laptops provide far less latitude in terms of cooling options, the most prolific solution being the crudeness and noise pollution of small, high-RPM fans blowing or sucking air rapidly over the surface of the processor core and other internal components.

More Elegant Solution

However, Tessera, a San Jose, Calif.-based firm that develops cutting-edge technologies aimed at next-generation wireless, consumer and computing products, has developed a potentially more elegant cooling solution that induces cooling airflow by way of ionizing air particles. It calls this technology an Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) ionic wind pump.

The EHD technique involves applying a voltage to a sharp electrode which ionizes nearby air molecules that are propelled by the electric field, transferring momentum to neutral air molecules, thus creating airflow across hot internal components and hence cooling those components.

Such ionic-cooling systems have been demonstrated in research labs before, but Tessera is the first to test the technology inside a working laptop by replacing the stock rotary fans with EHD blowers.

A technological speed bump for engineers to overcome was to design a sufficiently compact voltage converter that could change the laptop battery’s 12 volts DC into the roughly 3,000 volts required to operate the ionic wind pump. They succeeded by using a power supply from a cold cathode fluorescent lamp to construct a supply that is only three centimeters square.

Advantages: Better Heat Reduction, No Noise

The payoff is that Tessera’s tests indicate that the ionic-cooling system can extract roughly 30 percent more heat from a laptop than a conventional fan and could potentially consume only half as much power to operate the cooling system. Another superiority of EHD cooling is that it’s entirely solid-state, involving no moving parts and consequently creating no noise. It’s also more compact, making it suitable for thinner, lighter portable devices.

In a paper (PDF) presented at the 25th IEEE SEMI-THERM Symposium, Tessera scientists noted that demand for ever-smaller portable devices has resulted in heat fluxes that push the limits of conventional fan-based air cooling technology, and that Electrohydrodynamic ionic wind pumps offer an attractive alternative to fans.

The researchers chose a laptop with a TDP (Total Dissipated Power) of ~60W as a test platform to demonstrate the EHD proof-of-concept thermal management system. The laptop’s two stock 65mm rotary fans were removed and replaced with two EHD blower systems and associated control electronics configured to fit in the space vacated by the fans, which was done for simplicity but does not necessarily demonstrate the full performance potential for the EHD thermal solution.

EHD vs. Fan Performance

In tests, the EHD retrofitted laptop was compared against a standard version of the same model cooled using the two stock mechanical fans. Major heat sources of the laptop were an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, GPU, and the chipset. In operation, the retrofitted laptop performed similarly to the stock unit with no apparent impact on laptop functionality. There was no discernible impact on electrically sensitive systems such as wireless communication and trackpad human interface. Thermal performance of the prototype system was measured by running several benchmark programs including Geekbench and a looped 1080P movie trailer. Hardware Monitor, an off-the-shelf system utility application, was used to monitor the real-time temperature of major components, such as the CPU, GPU and their respective heatsinks. The CPU and GPU temperature of the retrofitted EHD cooled laptop was found to be approximately 10 degrees Celsius higher than the stock fan cooled laptop, with an overall temperature rise of approximately 60 degrees Celsius.

Benchmark results demonstrated comparable overall performance scores, with a variation of less than one percent between stock and EHD retrofitted laptops while running at an 1800MHz clock speed, with skin temperature for both the keyboard and bottom surface of the laptop, showing a temperature difference less than 5 degrees Celsius.

Optimized Prototype

Design and testing of a second-generation prototype is now in progress, with a more optimized configuration in which the laptop’s shelf spreader, heatpipe and heatsink have been removed. The researchers report that this second-generation solution dramatically increases heat transfer while reducing overall size of the cooling apparatus by using the collector as the heat-removal surface and by increasing its total area with no additional weight or volume associated with a separate heatsink, as is the case with a fan.

Comparing heat removed using EHD vs. fan-driven flow, for a given flow rate and the same temperature drop, EHD generated air flow removed up to 38 percent more heat than a fan.

Remaining Challenge — Durability

A remaining challenge of EHD technology is longevity and reliability of the electrodes, specifically some unique failure modes associated with the emitter electrode. Electrode degradation can be caused by the corona discharge surrounding the corona electrode, leading to surface degradation from effects such as metal sputtering at high electric fields and surface oxidation. Proper selection of emitter material, which can overcomes these challenges, is necessary to meet the required longevity, which in laptops is targeted for at least 30,000 hours. Dust accumulation can also degrade EHD cooling performance, and Tessara is working on making its ionic cooler no more sensitive to dust than a fan.

The researchers summarize that even with an unoptimized design, the EHD system shows promising cooling performance with reduced thermal solution volume and acoustics. And by incorporating further design optimization and modification of the cooling solution, it is expected that performance can be further improved to exceed that of laptop rotary fans. Other valuable advantages would include effectively silent operation, a more flexible cooling system form factor able to fit around electronics, and reduced thermal solution height and volume requirements.

EHD Technology in MacBooks?

I expect it may be a while before we see EHD technology in MacBooks, but given Steve Jobs’ famous dislike of fan racket, it’s a pretty safe bet that Apple would be one of the first laptop makers to adopt EHD cooling when it becomes available.