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New G4s Coming Our Way
MasterOfDisaster writes "According to c|net, and this article on maccentral.com, Apple will release "four new, single-processor Power Mac G4 models, all using a 133MHz system bus, and ranging in speed from 466MHz to 733MHz" as well as MacOS 9.1 and several other things, next Tuesday at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco."
i don't think this is nearly as bad as you make it out to be. here's the thing: computers are getting too fast these days. there are very few people who need 1GHz computers. most people just need a pretty average machine, and even an "average" machine these days are pretty quick!
with processor speeds increasing they way they have, i predict that computers will start to sell based on other criteria, rather than just "speed." this is where you're going to see Apple really take off. it'll be similar to why people buy cars: they don't buy just the car with the fastest engine, they buy the one with the features and style they want.
you say the "average consumer" is going to pick the bigger number of Mhz. i say the "average consumer" doesn't even care! have you talked to "normal" people about getting a new computer? this is what they say: "I want to buy a computer." they don't say, "i want to buy a 1GHz Athelon." most computer-illeterate people i've met just equate a computer as a computer. as long as it's not "old" (that is, used), it's just a "computer" the same as a car is a car. they'll go out and buy the one they like the most after "test driving" it in the store.
it's mostly computer-savvy or at least somewhat-computer-intersted people who even look at "specs." it's the people who have a passing interst, but no really solid knowledge in computers that buy based on bigger number of Mhz. when you start selling to people who really don't give a shit as long as the computer does the job they want it to, then pretty Apple computers, with easy Firewire and USB port and the slick interface of Aqua is going to sell.
at any rate, i'm very much looking forward to the future of Apple. i love running Linux, but i still get all my "real work" done on a Mac, and i don't think that's going to change with Mac OS X (except that it may actually cause me to use my linux box considerably less)
- j
I remember having a conversation in 1994 about the future of windows. I remember two code names -- Cairo and Chicago. I think one of them was Win95 and the other was what became NT 5.0 The projected release for NT 5.0 was late 1995 early 1996.
All hearsay, of course.
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Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I'm betting kiam to kittycats that Steve will have an update to the Public Beta and a lot more info on OS X, I expect a release for MacWorld Tokyo in February, or at WWDC in May.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Let's not forget that MOSR was the same group that SWORE that we were *this close* to having a Mac-branded Palm at MWSF 2000. Grain of salt dude, these guys have ZERO reliability.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Has anyone read the Wired article yet?
This is probably the best thing I can ever remember them using... It's the best external connection to rival external SCSI I've seen... course if they could just modify the cost to be a bit lower (for devices) than it would be real sweet... FireWire = Digital Video. Hellllooooo Non-Linear Editing! Woo hoo!
So? Optical mouse may be nice at some things, but I know lots of desktop publishing people & artists that hate that part about the newest mac's I don't think that's entirely fair. As someone who spends a great deal of time over his mouse (NLE work, constantly) I'm a big fan of the new optical mouse. I didn't like the puck, which is where you could be getting confused.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Roll on MacOS X I say. I have a dual CPU 500Mhz G4 with 512Mb of RAM and MacOS 9 makes it run like a dog. Crash protection and multi-threading capabilities are pathetic and the UI looks very arcane compared to other operating systems.
My wishlist for this next year includes a lithium polymer battery for my 1999 series Powerbook. I would REALLY like to get rid of this 1.something pound Li battery. I don't really give a shit if I get more time to play games or type things up in Appleworks, I just want a damned lighter piece of equipment to carry around. Even halving the weight of the battery would be fine by me. With that out of the way I just really want to say yahoo! (in a non-proper sort of way that doesn't infringe on copyrights). I've been waiting oh so long for Apple to release systems with higher clock speeds. Motorola has demonstrated 1GHz processors and Apple is trudging along with their line of 500MHz G4s. The addition of a higher memory bus speed is also a plus. Now if they would only crank out boxes with 4x AGP enabled they'd be in a great position for games as well as hardware acceleration for Maya and other apps.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
In what way would that prevent it from being preemptive? Pre-emptive multitasking is when the scheduler can interrupt (and suspend) a running task to run another task. The Amiga had this. How the scheduler decides which task to run next is beside the point.
Not long ago you could go into the Store section of their site and choose to beef up a machine with more memory, larger hard drives, better monitors - but now you only get choices for software and peripherals like digital cams. What gives?
I guess the only way this relates to the topic at hand is that the only time I look at Apple is when something new is about to come out and I can afford the old stuff. I am really in the mood to run a LinuxPPC/MacOS machine.
sig not found
The 450/500 MHz G4s they put in the dual systems had been out for almost a year, and are probably pretty cheap.
But these freshly baked 733MHz wonders will be much more expensive at first. And it would add a lot to the price of the system to add an extra processor.
The biggest problem with the Mac is not the megahertz the machine runs at but the perceived speed that it takes to do stuff. I have an outrageously specced Mac sitting on my desk and the UI acts as slow and retarded as the Mac I used to use at university nealy a decade ago. The single-mouse-button, single menu strip is just painful to use as it was then and Apple haven't picked up on any of the UI advances that other operating systems have made in that time. I don't think the MacOS X UI will be much better but at it will be a real OS under the hood and much more power-user friendly with access to shell prompts etc.
The techinical reason is that they're too busy trying to get OSX ready to take on a project as massive as a processor family switch again. The jump to PowerPC was a pretty amazing thing, and they pulled it off pretty well. It was also made possible by the fact that the PPC line offered so much power over the older chips, that emulation for backwards compatibility ran at a reasonable pace. I'm not sure that a switch to say, x86 architecture would provide the power to emulate PPC software and run it acceptably. And that would be a necessity.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Face it, speed sells. If the average consumer was to pick between a (top-of-the-line) 733Mhz G4 and a even middle-of-the-road 1Ghz Athlon, guess which one they're going to pick. Now, don't give me the crap about how Macs aren't for the average consumer or whatever, but face it, this is a problem for Apple. It's a shame that they're being held back by Motorola when their Mac OS X is so wonderful. But boy does it need it's CPU cycles.
I'm sorry, but clock-rating is not everything when it comes to CPUs, and the G4's are very fast clock for clock compared to Intel CPUs, and the P4 is the opposite, sacrificing performance per clock for a high clockspeed.
It doesn't mean that the P4 is bad compared to the G4, it just means that you can't compare them by looking at the MHz/GHz-rating.
They have taken different routes to high performance, but people seem to automatically assume that higher MHz == higher speed. It is often speculated that _this_ is the reason for Intels sacrifice on the Pentium 4 (something I find rather believable).
I mean has Apple given the okay for us to discuss new products? I would hate to talk about a Apple product before it was released. We all know what happened last time someone did that.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Maybe I have my info wrong, but the ADC is a littl e more than just power, DVI, and USB; the monitors hooked up to them (LCD and the like) actually use the USB port to transmit calibration data, IIRC, though you'll have to scroll down to the bottom of the PDF linked in order to get an inkling of some of this capability...
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Apple should just stick a divide-by-two flip-flop on the CPU's clock pin, then jack up the oscillator frequency until they're MHz-competitive with the x86 world. It wouldn't hurt the performance much, and it's no dirtier than some of the tricks that Intel's played over the years (487SX Coprocessor upgrade, anyone?).
if there is vocal opposition then surely a majority have heard it?
How we know is more important than what we know.
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Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
They also don't understand the difference between closed-source and GPL. I guess all those Linux proponents should just go home.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
computers still have a long long way to go speed-wise. it's as if you're in 1904 saying "why would a car ever need to go faster than 25 miles per hour?"
besides, people will always be drawn to the faster machine, both by internal competitive drive and by marketing pressure.
Let's try applying the automotive analogy to that last sentence of yours: "People will always be drawn to the faster car". Er, no actually: People base their car buying decisions on many factors, and speed is pretty far down the list for most people, because any car you'll buy will be more than capable of going as fast as you actually want to go in 99% of situations.
Sure, cars had a lot of room for increases in speed in 1904, but eventually those increases leveled off. Who's to say that the same thing can't happen to computers? How can you say with confidence that it isn't happening already?
Actually the Athlon is probably going to be pretty OK. What'll kill you is a 1.5Ghz P4. Ugly design, go with the AMD for general purpose performance if you're on X86.
Of course not. Mac OS X isn't ready to ship yet. Did you see the public beta? The user interface was a disaster. Hopefully they've fixed the design flaws, but there's still some debugging and polishing left to do. When they do release it, it needs to be perfect.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
That just woke me up _real_ fast. (wish I had a G4 instead of G3, too). The thing is, it's Linux- it doesn't have to be just a distribution, you can maintain things yourself. The important thing is the compiler because if you are a good little linux user and know how to compile all stuff with ./configure, make, make install (or whatever the RTFDirections says), you get all the software set up for your processor- given certain conditions.
Altivec can be used for block moves, for a wide variety of big-data-handling operations. It can be _general_ _purpose_. Does this GCC simply allow for software to be written using Altivec (as if it was some sort of very specialised MMX) or does it dynamically take advantage of the 128-bit registers wherever possible? Whether or not it _does_, it _could_ in future do that: particularly if the C libs are written to be Altivec optimised where possible (again, such as using the registers to move large chunks of data).
Very cool, can't wait for it to become more generally useful- I sort of doubt that all of GCC can make use of Altivec (in the way that Quicktime and Quickdraw were rewritten to make use of it, and that OSX's rendering layer does) but it's just a matter of time because we _are_ talking about a current-generation powerful consumer-level architecture with special characteristics. Linux has a way of adapting itself to these. Eventually, not only will PPC look like a very sensible choice for Linux deployment, but Linux will look like a very sensible option for Mac alternate OS choice.
The Australian National University Considered using the G4 in the Beowulf cluster, but decided against it. Can't remember why.
err, not quite.
.0), apple started going "32 bit clean"
.) , and 32 bit registers (usable as high and low 16 bit registers). Motorola clearly labeled which registers/paths/whathave you would grow to 32 bits in future expansion.
Macos had 24 bit addressing from the start, although I think the early systems or hardware decoded anything with the high bit high as the roms (but it's been a while, and my little brother has my copies of inside mac).
At system 6.0.something (i don't hink it was
This comes from the nature of the early 68xxx processors. The original design had a 16 bit data path, 16 bit ALU (wait, it was 32, wasn't it? it could do 32 bit operations, but did it do that by using the same alu on each half? it's been too long . .
Given that a 32 bit register was addressing a 24 bit address space (there were only 24 pins for addresses; this was still DIP packaging for the processor), it left 8 bits which were tempting to use.
Apple told developers not to use those bits, as they were reserved. Programs that followed the directive were generally executable on later machines, while those that weren't needed to be rewritten. The two biggest violators, in order? Apple and Microsoft . . .
Sometime around the IIX and SE/30, the ROM's became "32 bit clean" and other
software was similarly designated. Such machines could generally (but not always, iirc) go past 16M of memory. Roms could be retrofitted to some models
to allow such software.
I want to say that it was system 7 that required 32 bit clean roms, but it's
been a while, and I'm not certain. There were certainly significant
differences between systems 1-6 and 7, but it really wasn't a 16/32 transition. The original 68k was a 16 bit chip in the same sense that the 8088 was an 8 bit--data path, and not much more. For most intents & purposes, the macos was a 32 bit os with a bit of 24 bit crippling from the start.
hawk, dusting off old memory cells.
I, like an idiot, suggested to my dad to get a G4, since he did alot of digital photography. Normally, I am a win2k/linux advocate, but I "Thought" from all that I heard, perhaps Apple had a better product for what my Pop wanted to use it for
Big, Big, Big mistake. I feel like a complete ass. My father has had nothing but complete trouble with the piece of crap. The mouse locks up every hour..no,the whole damn machine locks up every hour. The scsi card already had to be replaced and same thing with the HD..at least that is what CompUSA's shitty support said and did.
of course, it still locks up every bloody hour or so for no particular reason. My father has tried and tried and tried and tried to get Apple support and sales to either pay to have a complete diagnostic on it. (NOPE, they said "HE" would have to pay the 100+ bucks for CompUSA to run this Diagnostic crap on the Motherboard and only after that would they consider replacing the motherboard)
he also tried to get them to Replace the whole machine..again, the only thing they would offer is the damn diagnostic test which he would have to pay for.
and now here is the kicker, although there is a 90 return window, because he took into compUSA to get the SCSI card replace (took 2 weeks), then back again to get the HD replace (took 4 fucking weeks), he was push beyond that 90 day window...so now he cannot even get his money back and APPLE will not..NO, they REFUSE to remedy the situation
To give a comparision, when my dads 1 1/2 year old Dell Laptop went kaput, they [DELL] flew in a TEchnician to replace the motherboard, no questions asked. Now that, is unbelievable customer service. Something APPLE severely lacks
We are still trying to get Apple to do something, but everytime we call and try to move up the management ladder we always get "they will call you back" which they never EVER do. So frustrating
I feel so bad recommending this to my father who pretty much has a 5g paper weight on his desk. I will never ever recommend Apple again after this fiasco. If anybody has any pull at Apple, please let me know. I would love to bring some Closure to this.
Strange that you should choose that example . . .
I think it was the 1903 sears catalog that offered a car capable of all speeds from 0 to 25, noting in the ad that they didn't think the average man had any use for going 45 or 50 as more expensive cars did . . .
While I'm at it, in law school we read a case about "reckless entrustment," in which the owner of the car was being sued for lending it to the driver when he should have known better. Part of the claim was that the driver had a reputation for "driving as fast as 50 miles per hour" . . .
Being an owner of a couple of macs, including a 9600 (old multiprocessor 604 computer) and a pc owner (1 dual pentium 166, 1 dual pentium pro, 2 dual pentium II 333 a single processor athlon and a partridge in a pear tree ;-) ), I'd say that my experience with multiprocessor computers is very favorable. Running Linux/FreeBSD or Windows 2000/NT, it really makes the machine more useable. Like if I encode a MP3 on my single processor computer, it will chew up all the processor time and make other programs running deadly slow (on my windows 2000 machine), but on the dual processor machine (windows 2000 or freebsd/linux) the machine can easily encode a mp3 and it will only chew up 50% resources.
I think Apple jumped the gun with dual G4s, but NOW IS NOT THE TIME to stop making them. OS X will take advantage of the extra CPU and make the thing fly!
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I think it has some potential. Granted, G4 Cube sales have been a disappointment. But iMac sales are starting to drop off. High-end iMac DV sales apparently did pretty well, because there is little inventory left on these. Given that the high-end iMac DV SE sells for $1500, maybe a G3 Cube would be a good product to replace the high-end iMac.
How about a bundle: G3 Cube + RAGE 128 + 15 inch flat screen? By bundling the screen with the G3 Cube, Apple might be able to sell the whole package for under $2000. Consider that Compaq and Acer are marketing flat-screen PC bundles for about that price. Such a product would address one complaint about the iMac, its all-in-one design.
There are reasons why Apple might not do this. For one, it might hurt sales of the G4 Cube. But my sense is that anyone who might stretch a bit to reach $2K for a G3 Cube would not go for the G4 Cube anyway. Since G4 sales are poor, it does not appear that the cachet of the trendy design is really moving the product anyway. So, why not market the design to another segment to try to recoup the investment?
MacOS X may be a different story, but until that appears, the Mac is stuck with an arcane OS and a pretty but stuck-in-time user interface. Neither of these things would make me compare the Mac to a Ferrari except for the exhorbitant price markup both logos entail.
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Poliglut.org: 75 Million gun owners can't be wrong
I submitted this in Oct. but was DENIED. hehe. No anymosity
:/
Motorola has hit 1 Ghz with the G4 Processor. Here's the story from CNET
I'm sure Apple's pricing might scare people away from a G4 too, unless they sell a kid
aztek: the ultimate man
No sig for you!!
"First of all, Apple is falling farther and farther behind on the performance race. "
Have you compared the speeds of say a G4/500 dual processor system and one using a high end AMD or Intel chip? The systems are very comparable. The Mac will easily hold its own, and in certain tasks, like in photoshop etc, it is much much faster. they are not "falling farther and farther behind."
"Second, software: I'm sure I won't have too much trouble convincing the die-hard command line users that MacOS is inefficient and hard to use, but even in terms of GUI, the once-proud Apple has been overtaken by BeOS and Windows ME, and has GNOME and KDE hot on its heels. Much like hardware, Apple is handicapped by its users' insistence that changes be minor and easy to adapt to. "
MacOS is inefficient? Hard to use? I believe most people will acknowledge that MacOS is one of the easiet OSes to use. It is criticized sometimes for not being "sophisticated" enough for the power user. This does not make it inefficient. Though it lacks features like protected memory, etc, is it a very efficient OS, in the sense that Mac users are very very productive. Ask a graphic artist or desktop publisher. the mac OS is not hard to use, nor is it inefficient. Compared to Windows ME and the various Linux GUIs available, the average new computer user will find the Mac OS the easier to use.
You also comment on Apple's lack of "innovation.". Lets see, I'll name a few. These are not necessarily all apple inventions, but Apple was the first to actually bring these to the masses:
1. Firewire.
2. USB as the main I/O interface.
3. Get rid of legacy ports
4. iMovie - video editing for the masses
5. iMac - an easy to setup, all in one unit that appeals to the "average joe" who doesnt always care about technical specs
6. Optical mouse standard on all systems
7. OS X
8. Innovative Industrial design
9. Colorsync technology
My dog ate my sig...
Been watching these boxes for a while, and I think there are a few things to note.
1. The dual processors... Apple can go back to dual processors again when OS X is on them mainstream. Right now with 9.04 multiprocessing is barely useful for most users (photoshop users being perennial exception. Meanwhile a 733mhz G4 at 133mhz is pretty big news since what it will do is make everything faster in the short term.
2. MacOs X is not gonna be truly ready until September (a year late but hey, Win95 was supposed to come in 93 and we know NT 5 was supposed to come out in 95.:)) At that point I hope to see Dual 733's at 133mhz bus.What will the Win world have? WinME running Pentium III's?
3. It would be great if MacOS ran on more boxes than just Apples but they didn't do so well with that. Asking them to move to cheap commodity hardware is not really rational.The real deal here is that folks don't recognize true cost of ownership with computers until they have owned a few. The real shame is that Apple HAS reduced costs by using crappier equipment and it bit them.
4. The biggest problem Apple had was that no one wants to buy a new machine until OS X comes out. Apple was ready with a whole new set of boxes that would have looked really perty with the perty new OS but instead they are running same old OS 9. If Apple really wanted to get new models sold and empty it's inventory, finish the OS in the 1Q...
I am a longtime Apple user and Linux user and I hope to use both for a long time to come. As long as Apple makes machines that last me 5+ years I am not gonna bitch much. Since I am still using a 7600 with a g3 upgrade card I am definately waiting. I like the idea of a dual processing 733mhz, but in truth there is a sweet spot right now with dual 450....1999...No matter what anyone says about comparing 300 dollar pc's with this, the G4 is a better chip than anything Intel makes. Athlon might manage to screw that up if they keep raising the mhz but sheerly for media related stuff, the G4 rocks.Just RIP a few CD's...
dlg
If you read the article, they point out the issue that these faster chips may not be available for a while....
On the other hand, if Mot really can cough up a 733 G4, I would much rather be running Photoshop on that than a 1Ghz Athalon (or After Effects, or ...)
The real down side to the story is the comment about how most of the systems are likely to be single processor. This is going in the wrong direction. Alot of potential buyers are going to be quite disappointed. Frankly, I was hoping for a base single processor system, a mid-range dual processor, and a high-end quad processor system. If you've had to sit for an hour while AE renders 3 freaking seconds of footage, you'll know why I was hoping for quad processor towers....
But for what most of the Hertz whiners out there do with their systems, no, quad processors won't quadruple the frame rate of Doom.
Aren't G4 RISC-type chips of some sort?
PowerPC is a RISC archtecture. Same family lineage as IBM's POWER chips.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
MacOs X is not gonna be truly ready until September
What is the world does this mean? I use OSX every day as my primary OS. Except for incompletely 24-bit color support, it works great. Since I start using it in September, the OS has never crashed on me (though Classic can get a bit unruly at times).
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
It's about damn time.
As for Apple (or more specifically Motorola) lagging behind AMD and Intel in terms of speed. This will keep more current Mac users with the platform, but Apple is going to need Mot to kick out 1Ghz chips real soon.
they've sued the few websites that support them
This is garbage. Most rumor sites publish rumors for personal gain -- whether it be for fame or money. They are taking advantage of 6-12 months worth of hard work on the part of Apple and blowing it all in one day. I don't see how this is "supporting" Apple. It's not as if Apple is going to sell more boxes because of the rumor sites.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
All i have to say is i better be able to make my toast in this one.
Great, GCC with Altivec code. When I was running LinuxPPC 2000 on a G4, I was told that Linux couldn't use the Altivec unit because the kernel didn't understand how to save and restore the registers properly. Is this fixed, if so in what kernel revision, and if not, how does an Altivec-aware GCC help Linux?
Where the fuck are you getting this? MacOS has supported multiple processors for years. You used to be able to get 9600 MPs that had dual 604e processors. That was back in the days of OS 7.x. Besides that Apple sells it's hardware on a much higher margin than PC manufacturers like Dell or Gateway. They have much higher volume production contracts than most PC makers as well as exclusive deals with people like Motorola. You don't see G4 (MPPC 7400) chips or motherboards in anything else do you? Since the chips don't go through any intermediaries before they get to Apple's assembly facilities they get them at about cost. I don't know if you know but Athlons and Pentium chips cost only a fraction of their retail (or whole for that matter) coming out of the factory. Prices like this vastly decrease the production cost for Macs and that money goes into Apple's cauffers. PC manufacturers often are forced to buy their hardware at wholesale prices which greatly reduces the profit from selling hardware. Oh yeah, Unix is a 31 year old idea. DOS almost as old, MacOS is a baby compared to the two. No OS is perfect, Unix still has lots of areas where it could use some work.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What is really significant about these new machines is the faster bus speed. While PCs have been humming along with 133mhz+ busses, the G4s have been hindered by (100mhz?) busses. But even more so, the dual G4s have been hindered. Apple has shown than plunking two G4s into a box instead of one is easy, so future machines (spring? summer?) may even feature two 733mhz (1ghz?) G4s in them.
Maybe the tortoise is catching the rabbit?
Good point. The only thing that makes me sicker than the Megahertz race in PCs is the Megapixel race in DCs. Yes, our camera has 2 megapixels. All the images are recorded as 4 by 500,000 JPEGs with a strong skew towards pink. :)
Anyway, this is not unexpected news from Apple. Many expected that the price cuts on older models were signs of newer stuff coming out. It doesn't sound like anything revolutionary here; just improvements on existing designs. On one hand, it's good for them to be cautious after the Cube debacle. On the other, it won't rejuvinate them like the iMac did. With the still somewhat cloudy PC market, it's hard to fault them for being conservative.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Still deciding what to get; the iBook, all cute and cuddly like, the PowerBook, all serious and stoic, or the G4 Cube, suave and classy.
In terms of performance, PCs seem to be fast enough that faster just doesn't matter. Why would I need a 1.5GHz system? I'm running on a 500MHz system, and plan to be running it for another few years yet. Heck, even 800MHz would seem to last for at least 5 years, given my track record with my last computer.
Still, I'll probably think a 500MHz Apple sucks, right? I dunno, I don't have enough experience with the G3/G4 to say; do they age particularly better than a x86?
On the other hand, I am enamored with Apple's drive for innovation.
The USB IO adoption
The Firewire IO adoption
The use of Airport and wireless networking
Mac OSX (in the near future), and Unix stability, without the ugliness of Linux!
Well, Linux isn't quite ugly, it's damn functional, but sorta a pain to set up. Win2k is such a breeze to use.
Then there's the quiet fanless iMacs and G4 cubes.
There's the firewireness of the iBooks and Powerbooks.
Optical Mice. Everywhere
*Really* nice LCD screens.
Other hardware coolness I'm looking forward to; More snazzy designs!
A Newton2!
Wireless PCs; at least, as much as possible...
OS X!
Pervasive computing!
Inclusion of mic and USB cam with *all* computers!
Instant Messaging type usability in the OS
Other random cool stuff...
Still, they aren't dead yet, and they're still doing okay...
Maybe I'll regret writing this post in a few months, when I have my Apple. I'll post and let everyone know!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
This is extremely depressing to me. I've greatly enjoyed the fact that my 500mhz powerbook that i bought about a year ago is still the fastest clock speed you can buy in a macintosh. None of that silly next door neighbor buying the newest faster chip every two weeks for me. Way to make your computers appear to become obsolete a little less quicky apple!
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Obviously I'm going to be taking a little shit for the fact that my email is from mac.com... so I must be *clearly* Apple baised :p BAH. My very first comptuer was a 286 laptop, followed by a 386 desktop, and a Pentium 120. It wasn't until I left for college that I got my own Mac. Why? Because it fits my computing needs and desires.
Now you are probably wondering... "Gee thats great, get to the fucking point." My point is that regardless of what you like, what you know, and whom you support, a little research is clearly in order. I'm really growing tired of watching people spew misinformed posts on to the boards and positioning them as fact.
funkdat.
The reason for this is that the G4 has 1 MB L2 Cache, which the Athlons and P3's have reduced in size to push the MHz. Why does this matter?
The L2 Cache has a bandwith of ~10GB/s whereas accessing the main memory is 10 times slower, (PC133 has a bandwith of 1.08GB/s). When you're doing effects in Photoshop, a large L2 cache makes a huge difference, simply because the processor can load 1 mb chunks of the picture into the processor cache and perform the effect on it while the Athlons/PIIIs only have room for a quarter of that. In the very specialised problem that Photoshop is a huge L2 cache matters a lot more than MHz. (Most other apps benefit little from a L2 >256kb)
It would be interesting in seeing a benchmark comparing intel's Xeons (which also has a big L2) and the G4. Also, photoshop optimized for the P4, which thanks to rambus has a high memory bandwith (but small caches) would be interesting.
(As for the other apple "innovations", they're mostly interesting from a design perspective, not technical, so i'll leave them alone :) )
-henrik