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TETENAL · May 18, 2006, 05:08 PM

CharlesS, you need to learn to be content with what Apple gives you.

CharlesS · May 18, 2006, 05:18 PM

^ Is this meant to be satirical?

Eug Wanker · May 18, 2006, 05:20 PM

Video of Vista's Aero Glass running on Intel GMA 950

Salty · May 18, 2006, 05:39 PM

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

What like a gay version?

Actually I would totally get a MacBook if it had a nice pin stripe going

.

Seriously though like, a 13 inch with a decent graphics card and a few more pro features (though aside from the gfx and HD options the MacBook's pretty dang good!) and a 15 inch WITH integrated graphics and slower proc or whatever for the more basic markets but people who just don't want a 13 inch screen.
When I worked at BB people always bought 17 inch laptops with lower end specs, or 15 inchers with specs an iBook could have beaten.

Severed Hand of Skywalker · May 18, 2006, 06:14 PM

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

Video of Vista's Aero Glass running on Intel GMA 950

Wow pretty slick wouldn't you say GoMac.

goMac · May 18, 2006, 06:21 PM

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

Wow pretty slick wouldn't you say GoMac.

My Rage128 could do that. The GMA950 is going to not work so well when people start using Sparkle and Windows Presentation Foundation on Windows.

I'm guessing you don't really know what those are though.

Kerrigan · May 18, 2006, 06:30 PM

I think you're reaching, goMac. Your condescension doesn't disguise the fact that your gripes with the MacBook have no bearing on the average user.

Severed Hand of Skywalker · May 18, 2006, 06:32 PM

Originally Posted by goMac

My Rage128 could do that. The GMA950 is going to not work so well when people start using Sparkle and Windows Presentation Foundation on Windows.

I'm guessing you don't really know what those are though.

I'm guessing MacBook owners won't give a rats ass either.

No wait I am sure.

goMac · May 18, 2006, 06:34 PM

Originally Posted by Kerrigan

I think you're reaching, goMac. Your condescension doesn't disguise the fact that your gripes with the MacBook have no bearing on the average user.

I know the GMA950 is going to have a hell of a time handling Quartz 2D Extreme, which was a feature we were supposed to have already by 10.4. If Apple completes it for 10.5, watch it run horrible on the GMA950.

And you better hope Apple doesn't upgrade Quartz 2D Extreme so it matches Window Presentation Foundation's features. You've had two developers who know the OS internals come into the thread and tell you the GMA950 was a bad choice. Don't say we didn't warn you when the Macbook's start flaking out when interfaces become hardware accelerated (and not lame hardware acceleration like Quartz Extreme). The iBook's 9550 could have handled hardware accelerated interfaces. The GMA950 can't.

goMac · May 18, 2006, 06:36 PM

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

I'm guessing MacBook owners won't give a rats ass either.

No wait I am sure.

Great. We'll have you be the one when GMA950 users can't run applications build on Windows Presentation Foundation next year. Or when Apple implements Quartz 2D Extreme fully and it performs poorly on the Macbook. Or you can tell that to the poor user that tries to run World of Warcraft on their laptop.

Graphics acceleration on a computer is important for far more than games. If you had a smattering of an idea of what something like Windows Presentation Foundation was, you'd understand how bad this really is.

Kerrigan · May 18, 2006, 06:39 PM

Shouldnt the alleged inability to run WPF in a year's time be of more concern to the people right now who are paying upwards of $1,600 for similarly configured SZ VGNs, which also come with GMA950?

Severed Hand of Skywalker · May 18, 2006, 06:42 PM

Raise your hand of you give a crap what 19 year old GoMac the "Programmer of all things" thinks.

goMac · May 18, 2006, 06:45 PM

Originally Posted by Kerrigan

Shouldnt the alleged inability to run WPF in a year's time be of more concern to the people right now who are paying upwards of $1,600 for similarly configured SZ VGNs, which also come with GMA950?

Definitely. With Quartz 2D Extreme (or whatever Apple turns that into) and Windows Presentation Foundation especially (because it is more advanced), your interface is only as fast as your GPU.

To give you an idea of what is wrong with an integrated graphics chip, in hardware accelerated interfaces, each font uses 2 MB of VRAM. You definitely want dedicated memory for that. You don't want that occurring in your main memory. Not to mention your main memory is going to be much slower than your GPU's memory. This isn't games. This is drawing letters on your screen.

goMac · May 18, 2006, 06:46 PM

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

Raise your hand of you give a crap what 19 year old GoMac the "Programmer of all things" thinks.

I'm glad your intelligence is really showing today.

- - e r i k - - · May 18, 2006, 07:39 PM

Gah. I don't care about GoMac's doomsday opinions either, but you are really taking your ad hominems too far SWG.

Dark Helmet · May 18, 2006, 07:54 PM

OMG the MacBooks might not support Microsoft Sparkle in the future? How will Apple sell even one of these?!!

Chuckit · May 18, 2006, 07:59 PM

^ Drama Queen of the Week ^

Take a chill pill, SWG. Others are welcome to their own opinions of what's important.

Dark Helmet · May 18, 2006, 08:04 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

^ Drama Queen of the Week ^

you can't stop using that line since I first threw it at you can you?

Do you feel like you're shedding the title from yourself every-time you throw it back?

goMac · May 18, 2006, 08:31 PM

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet

OMG the MacBooks might not support Microsoft Sparkle in the future? How will Apple sell even one of these?!!

Ironically there will be a Mac version of Sparkle. Fortunately the Mac version can't do any 3D graphics, so I suppose the Macbook is safe.

It's more Apple's answer to Sparkle I'm worried about.

Chuckit · May 18, 2006, 08:37 PM

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet

you can't stop using that line since I first threw it at you can you?

Do you feel like you're shedding the title from yourself every-time you throw it back?

Uh…that's the first time I've said that, as far as I can recall. (Unless you count "Coming from you? I'm honored" as a use of the line.)

wallinbl · May 18, 2006, 08:47 PM

Originally Posted by goMac

Great. We'll have you be the one when GMA950 users can't run applications build on Windows Presentation Foundation next year.

Next year? You're nuts. There still aren't that many .Net apps after all these years. .Net 2 just came out, so it'll be a nice long time before anyone gets around to using it. Developers take a long time to change what they're using. Even more so, the devs really have to wait until all the users get around to upgrading their computers and installing the libs for stuff like that. Hopefully MS has better luck with this than they did with Chrome. Remember Chrome?

To be honest, I'd really like it if people didn't use WPF. I'd rather they focus on making their app not suck, instead of wasting time on goofy eye candy.

Eug Wanker · May 18, 2006, 10:09 PM

Originally Posted by goMac

My Rage128 could do that.

No it can't. As you probably know, but have decided to ignore, your Rage 128 is not supported (unless you feel like reprogramming Vista for Microsoft).

The GMA950 is going to not work so well when people start using Sparkle and Windows Presentation Foundation on Windows.

I'm guessing you don't really know what those are though.

The condescension here is quite thick. It's all the more amusing considering how many times you've been dead wrong in this thread.

Shaddim · May 18, 2006, 10:58 PM

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

Raise your hand of you give a crap what 19 year old GoMac the "Programmer of all things" thinks.

More people than care about you, that's for damned sure.

/smirk

Shaddim · May 18, 2006, 11:04 PM

Originally Posted by wallinbl

Next year? You're nuts. There still aren't that many .Net apps after all these years. .Net 2 just came out, so it'll be a nice long time before anyone gets around to using it. Developers take a long time to change what they're using. Even more so, the devs really have to wait until all the users get around to upgrading their computers and installing the libs for stuff like that. Hopefully MS has better luck with this than they did with Chrome. Remember Chrome?

To be honest, I'd really like it if people didn't use WPF. I'd rather they focus on making their app not suck, instead of wasting time on goofy eye candy.

Computer users and "experts" were saying that about the GUI when they first saw it, now THAT goofy "eye candy" is part of everything we do.

"OMG, what are we going to do with 4MB VLB cards? My 1MB Trident ISA card is just fine!"

Salty · May 18, 2006, 11:14 PM

Fah... you people make me just want to keep my 12 inch 1Ghz PowerBook!

Eug Wanker · May 18, 2006, 11:21 PM

Originally Posted by MacNStein

My 1MB Trident ISA card is just fine!"

Heh. Funny you should mention that.

My 1 MB Trident ISA card still works. My Radeon 9000 in my PC died a while back and the only card I had sitting around was that Trident. I plugged it in... I was restricted to low rez and reduced colours, but otherwise it worked fine in XP the couple of days I needed it, until I bought a Radeon 9100.

Shaddim · May 18, 2006, 11:32 PM

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

Heh. Funny you should mention that.

My 1 MB Trident ISA card still works. My Radeon 9000 in my PC died a while back and the only card I had sitting around was that Trident. I plugged it in... I was restricted to low rez and reduced colours, but otherwise it worked fine in XP the couple of days I needed it, until I bought a Radeon 9100.

I'd like to see a person get by with 256 colors at 1024x768, unaccelerated. A couple days is all they could stand. But still, that's 1 more MB than the 950 has, and they both have about the same amount of HW features. hahaha

Shaddim · May 18, 2006, 11:33 PM

Originally Posted by Salty

Fah... you people make me just want to keep my 12 inch 1Ghz PowerBook!

Stick with it and wait until Apple puts a real GPU in the CrapBook.

voodoo · May 19, 2006, 12:09 AM

I will not buy a Mac with Intel's graphic 'solution'. Simple as that.

V

Mithras · May 19, 2006, 12:14 AM

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

Video of Vista's Aero Glass running on Intel GMA 950

What a totally retarded Exposé-wannabe they have going there. It's like Exposé -- except you can't see the other windows because the front one is in the way, and you still have to tap-tap-tap through them one at a time!

Glad to see that Microsoft is in no danger of actually putting its thinking cap on any time soon.

goMac · May 19, 2006, 12:47 AM

Originally Posted by wallinbl

Next year? You're nuts. There still aren't that many .Net apps after all these years. .Net 2 just came out, so it'll be a nice long time before anyone gets around to using it. Developers take a long time to change what they're using. Even more so, the devs really have to wait until all the users get around to upgrading their computers and installing the libs for stuff like that. Hopefully MS has better luck with this than they did with Chrome. Remember Chrome?

To be honest, I'd really like it if people didn't use WPF. I'd rather they focus on making their app not suck, instead of wasting time on goofy eye candy.

.Net has nothing to do with this. Windows Presentation Foundation is not like chrome.

Windows Presentation Foundation is like Quartz 2D Extreme on steroids. Sparkle is a GUI creation tool for programs that use Windows Presentation Foundation. It can also double as a animation creation program. Sparkle can create scripted interfaces and tie them together with 0 code. Imagine Flash crossed with Interface Builder (and despite the naysayers, yes, Sparkle does create standardized interfaces, but you can tweak them). This takes a nice chunk out of the code you need to write to create a program.

Quartz Composer is the closest thing Apple has to Sparkle. Unfortunately, Quartz Composer can't really create interfaces, as much as it can create little animations. It's not very useful for the most part. The problem even with Quartz Extreme is that interface widgets aren't rendered on hardware, they are all rendered in software. Because of this, interface widgets can't be mixed into anything that uses OpenGL, such as Quartz Composer. Under Windows Presentation Foundation, every font glyph, button, text field, video clip, etc, is rendered on hardware. While this inflates the requirements, in means Vista's window server is much more mature. The CPU does not get used as much to render the screen, and video can be cleanly run inside DirectX, you can render an interface in DirectX, you can grab a window and do 3D transforms on it, etc.

3D transforms under Quartz are pretty fake actually. They're actually 2D transforms done to look like 3D transitions. For example, the cube rotation is just OS X using something like Photoshop's perspective transform to make the image look like it's rotating. The Vista way to do this would be much cleaner, and much less CPU intensive. You can capture whatever it is you want to rotate as a DirectX texture (in since everything is output as a DirectX texture), throw it on the side of a cube, and then rotate the cube.

With powerful and easy interface creation, we'll see Windows developers move over to Windows Presentation Foundation real quick. Microsoft is going to release Windows Presentation Foundation for XP, so I don't think developers are going to worry about backwards compatibility.

You'd have to be crazy to think Apple is going to let Quartz fall behind Windows Presentation Foundation. Unfortunately, that would mean Apple would have to offload all drawing, down to the individual widget level to the GPU. The GMA950 would not be able to take this sort of abuse, especially with the high amounts of VRAM required, which on the GMA950 is all shared with the system memory. I could see Apple implementing their WPF response in 10.5.

Finally, Windows Presentation Foundation is not Vista's interface. Vista's interface was created with Windows Presentation Foundation, but it's a pretty light use of it. I consider Vista's interface a misuse of Windows Presentation Foundation by Microsoft's less than talented interface designers. That doesn't change that Windows Presentation Foundation makes Quartz look like a joke.

Dark Helmet · May 19, 2006, 12:56 AM

"What surprised me greatly, however, is that the MacBook with its integrated GMA950 video chip set, beat the MacBook and it's ATI Mobility Radeon X1600. Looking specifically at the Quartz graphics test, you'll see that the GMA950's score on the MacBook was roughly 170 percent better than the 9200 on the MacBook Pro. On the Quartz Graphics Test, however, the scores were much more similar, 51.21 and 57.20 for the MBP and MB respectively."

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook.ars/5

"A comparison with the iBook's ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 is embarrassing, to say the least. The scores were clearly not even in the same league, and I'm certain that casual gamers will be pleased with the performance of the MacBooks, in general."

Eug Wanker · May 19, 2006, 12:59 AM

Xbench is a useless test for these types of things.

P.S. The copy is totally borked. X1600 on a MacBook? Radeon 9200 on a MacBook Pro?

goMac · May 19, 2006, 01:01 AM

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet

"What surprised me greatly, however, is that the MacBook with its integrated GMA950 video chip set, beat the MacBook and it's ATI Mobility Radeon X1600. Looking specifically at the Quartz graphics test, you'll see that the GMA950's score on the MacBook was roughly 170 percent better than the 9200 on the MacBook Pro. On the Quartz Graphics Test, however, the scores were much more similar, 51.21 and 57.20 for the MBP and MB respectively."

[snip]

"A comparison with the iBook's ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 is embarrassing, to say the least. The scores were clearly not even in the same league, and I'm certain that casual gamers will be pleased with the performance of the MacBooks, in general."

Ummmm.... Either the reviewer does not have a Macbook Pro, or they're very confused. Given those scores I'm guess they either don't have a Macbook Pro, or they mixed up their tests.

Read what you just posted SWG. Maybe you'll figure out why.

Oh, also last I checked the iBook doesn't have a Radeon 9200... Was that reviewer just out to lunch or what?

dillerX · May 19, 2006, 01:05 AM

I don't know what makes me laugh more. The people that bash the product, or the people that bash the people that bash the product.

It's a ****ing computer. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Want to make a difference? Go work for the damn company.

Why have all the cool peeps left the lounge? OH THAT'S RIGHT.

nforcer · May 19, 2006, 01:24 AM

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

Video of Vista's Aero Glass running on Intel GMA 950

How can we confirm that was running on a GMA 950?

goMac · May 19, 2006, 01:30 AM

Originally Posted by nforcer

How can we confirm that was running on a GMA 950?

It probably is. Glass will run on anything DirectX 9 compliant.

That said, they didn't run anything that strenuous on it. It would have been more interesting if that had it running a nice big Avalon app.

krillbee · 02:39 AM

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

Raise your hand of you give a crap what 19 year old GoMac the "Programmer of all things" thinks.

I think that he has some great points. Face it, the GMA950 sucks!

Originally Posted by MacNStein

I'd like to see a person get by with 256 colors at 1024x768, unaccelerated. A couple days is all they could stand. But still, that's 1 more MB than the 950 has, and they both have about the same amount of HW features. hahaha

lol

Originally Posted by dillerX

I don't know what makes me laugh more. The people that bash the product, or the people that bash the people that bash the product.

It's a ****ing computer. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Want to make a difference? Go work for the damn company.

Why have all the cool peeps left the lounge? OH THAT'S RIGHT.

The better way to make a difference is to not buy the crappy products apple spits out, and to spread the word to others about apple's bad products.

And then maybe apple will change.

Don't get me wrong, I like the MBP, but the MB has got issues.

willed · May 19, 2006, 04:24 AM

All I know is that when this hypothetical average user (the one who doesn't care about specs) comes to try and play a game other than Solitaire, (s)he's going to be mightily pissed off. First tests by MacWorld show UT2004 running at 17fps on the high end MacBook. And that, guessing from the title, is a game that is at least 2 years old.

Your 'average user' may not know what Windows Presentation Foundation is (or whatever), but they're going to find it sucks not being able to play any proper game from the last 3 years. So yes, they will notice, and yes, it is a bad thing that it ships with such as sh!t graphics card.

wallinbl · May 19, 2006, 07:22 AM

Originally Posted by MacNStein

Computer users and "experts" were saying that about the GUI when they first saw it, now THAT goofy "eye candy" is part of everything we do.

"OMG, what are we going to do with 4MB VLB cards? My 1MB Trident ISA card is just fine!"

Yeah, and Windows 3.1 sucked ass. The transition to Windows 95 was slow as hell. You still rebooted into DOS frequently to run certain apps. Many apps really sucked in their first Win32 iteration. My point was that some as yet unreleased technologies from Microsoft will not be relevant to anyone in one year's time. Sure, people will be curious to see what they can do, but Joe User won't actually *need* them for anything.

I have no doubt that look & feel will continue to change and that new technologies will continue to be adopted. I just think goMac's schedule is too aggressive.

wallinbl · May 19, 2006, 07:34 AM

Originally Posted by goMac

Sparkle can create scripted interfaces and tie them together with 0 code. Imagine Flash crossed with Interface Builder (and despite the naysayers, yes, Sparkle does create standardized interfaces, but you can tweak them). This takes a nice chunk out of the code you need to write to create a program.

Get real. If you want to actually do anything useful, you'll be writing code. That's the reality of programming. They're not going to be able to anticipate what you're going to do, and you're going to write code to get what you want. Tools and frameworks have been saying this since the beginning. Only one (http://www.magicsoftware.com/bin/en....e=HomePage)has ever delivered, and it only works in a vary narrow environment (database applications). Even then, it starts to break down as you add functionality, but it really gets you quite far with no code.

With powerful and easy interface creation, we'll see Windows developers move over to Windows Presentation Foundation real quick. Microsoft is going to release Windows Presentation Foundation for XP, so I don't think developers are going to worry about backwards compatibility.

It's a 1GB download. Who the hell is going to download that? Enthusiasts and gamers. You know your mom isn't. Enthusiasts and gamers are a small portion of the market.

You'd have to be crazy to think Apple is going to let Quartz fall behind Windows Presentation Foundation. Unfortunately, that would mean Apple would have to offload all drawing, down to the individual widget level to the GPU. The GMA950 would not be able to take this sort of abuse, especially with the high amounts of VRAM required, which on the GMA950 is all shared with the system memory. I could see Apple implementing their WPF response in 10.5.

Don't think for a single second that most PCs have decent GPUs. Ever do tech support for family and friends? They always have whatever crap ass hardware that HP dumped in there to save costs. They don't know what the hell a GPU is and they don't care. On top of that, let's not forget that the majority of PCs are purchased by businesses. Businesses are certainly using on board, shared memory graphics cards. I'm certainly not going to have my company foot the bill for 1000 x $100 upgrades so that all the users can have DX9 compatible GPUs. You won't find many business PCs that can run Aero. Hell, the 9200 in my high end laptop from two years ago can't run it.

wallinbl · May 19, 2006, 07:35 AM

goMac:

My point is not that Sparkle and WPF won't come or they don't look cool, but that these things take time - plenty of time.

Eug Wanker · May 19, 2006, 08:02 AM

My MacBook is on the plane from Suzhou, China. w00t!

voodoo · May 19, 2006, 09:15 AM

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

My MacBook is on the plane from Suzhou, China. w00t!

At least you know what you're getting into.. (1st gen MB with a conspicuously bad graphic card)

If you still have the iBook G4 you can use it to play games.

V

goMac · May 19, 2006, 10:15 AM

Originally Posted by wallinbl

Get real. If you want to actually do anything useful, you'll be writing code. That's the reality of programming.

Just... wow.

I suppose this means a program like Interface Builder is useless. Or Cocoa bindings are useless.

The point of Sparkle is not that you won't be writing any code. The point of Sparkle is that you won't be writing any code for your UI. I agree that "codeless" languages or IDE's are not a great idea, but if you think that's what Sparkle is, you're fundamentally misunderstanding Sparkle.

While PC manufacturers can ship Vista systems with a GMA950, they can't ship them with Premium Vista PC sticker or whatever unless they have a 128 MB graphics card. When PC makers start rolling our Vista PC's, I doubt you'll see many over $1000 that use a GMA950.

Windows Presentation Foundation and Sparkle will start to be widely used by Windows programmers because they're easy to use. Programmers like easy to use things. They can also include a Windows Presentation Foundation installer with all their programs, just as most PC devs include an installer for DirectX with most of their programs. I think we'll see Microsoft ship WPF for Windows XP as part of a service park too.

Eug Wanker · May 19, 2006, 10:19 AM

Originally Posted by voodoo

At least you know what you're getting into.. (1st gen MB with a conspicuously bad graphic card)

If you still have the iBook G4 you can use it to play games.

I don't have my iBook anymore, but it's a poor game machine too anyway. The GPU is OK, but the CPU sucks azz. I'd probably use my G5 2.0 iMac with Radeon 9600 128 MB for games. Or better yet, my Xbox 360.

goMac · May 19, 2006, 10:22 AM

Originally Posted by willed

Your 'average user' may not know what Windows Presentation Foundation is (or whatever), but they're going to find it sucks not being able to play any proper game from the last 3 years. So yes, they will notice, and yes, it is a bad thing that it ships with such as sh!t graphics card.

I don't care about Windows Presentation Foundation. I care about whatever Apple is going to release to compete with Windows Presentation Foundation. Whatever it is, they're probably going to want to have it out by around the time Vista ships. Quartz 2D Extreme was Apple's first attempt at taking on WPF, and that was already supposed to be out by now, so we already know that they've started work on something.

Honestly, by 10.5, if Apple finished up Quartz 2D Extreme, and adds a bunch of features to make it just as nice as Windows Presentation Foundation, GMA950 users could be in for a world of hurt. I'm sure Quartz 2D Extreme Extreme could run on the GMA950, but I think the snappiness factor would decrease pretty rapidly when you put it under intensive use.

This is OS 10.5 we're talking about, not Windows, or some OS three years away.

Eug Wanker · 10:56 AM

Originally Posted by goMac

I don't care about Windows Presentation Foundation. I care about whatever Apple is going to release to compete with Windows Presentation Foundation. Whatever it is, they're probably going to want to have it out by around the time Vista ships. Quartz 2D Extreme was Apple's first attempt at taking on WPF, and that was already supposed to be out by now, so we already know that they've started work on something.

Honestly, by 10.5, if Apple finished up Quartz 2D Extreme, and adds a bunch of features to make it just as nice as Windows Presentation Foundation, GMA950 users could be in for a world of hurt. I'm sure Quartz 2D Extreme Extreme could run on the GMA950, but I think the snappiness factor would decrease pretty rapidly when you put it under intensive use.

Translation: "I'm just guessing, like I did with Quake 3 and other things."

Anyways, the performance question could be very easily answered simply by having somebody enable Quartz 2D Extreme on their MacBook or Intel Mac mini. Not that it's a major concern to me, as long as it runs without video glitches...

goMac · May 19, 2006, 11:00 AM

Originally Posted by Eug Wanker

Translation: "I'm just guessing, like I did with Quake 3 and other things."

Anyways, the performance question could be very easily answered simply by having somebody enable Quartz 2D Extreme on their MacBook or Intel Mac mini. Not that it's a major concern to me, as long as it runs without video glitches...

Quartz 2D Extreme still isn't complete, and it's still not as powerful as WPF though.

I'm saying that given that Apple has already tried once to release a WPF competitor, it doesn't seem unlikely they're going to give it another go for Leopard.

TETENAL · May 19, 2006, 11:12 AM

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/

The GMA950 supports Windows Vista. As far as I can tell it supports everything that is needed for Aero support. When Apple has Q2DX ready for 10.5 the absolute worst thing that could happen to MacBook users would be that it is not enabled – which means nothing. The computer will continue to work exactly the same as before, ie. a whole lot better then the iBooks it replaces.

Your scare scenarios are completely unfounded.