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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."
Maybe with all the negative press that intel has been getting over it's P4, with the empty clock speed, at least a little more consumer awareness about the fact that clockspeed is just one of many numbers determining computer speed. Apple certainly is in a sucky spot with this whole motorola thing. I wonder if/when the computer world is going to end up more like the car world, where most any machine you buy will have plenty of power/speed, and other things can become a deciding factor in purchases. Apple would certainly like it that way.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
"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
What is with people equating speed with clock cycles? There is more than clock cycles at work here folks. (As the latest Pentium 4 debacle will demonstrate). I am sure that the enlightened ones here will agree with me when I say that there is more than one way to get performance out of a chip just as there is more than one way to get a car to go fast.
If you are assuming that more Mhz means faster chips, then you might be mistaken to say that the 400 Mhz SGI Octane is slower than the 500 Mhz Macintosh, or the Pentium system running at 750 Mhz. The reality is that the SGI will easily outpace both systems at most tasks just as a Porsche 911 will outrun a Dodge Viper that has a much larger engine than the Porsche. Its all about balance, and code optimizations and memory tasking and wait states etc etc etc....
Please lets not let Intel brainwash us all into thinking that CPU cycles are all that. There is more to chip design than making pipes deeper and cranking up the clock crystals. For instance, the R10k MIPS chip in my SGI will never be able to work in a laptop design as the G4 chip can. The MIPS chip would start a fireball in anything without a heat sink the size of a VCR cassette and big fans, whereas I expect to be working with the G4 in a Powerbook some time next month without using clock pacing tricks like Intel has had to implement in the Pentium portables. (a trick by the way implemented by Apple sometime back in 1991 for their powerbooks at the time). The chips are obviously designed for different purposes, but it is pretty cool that the G4 chip has the legs to run in a workstation, while at the same time having low enough power consumption/heat production to be used in a portable configuration.
Companies like Transmeta, Motorola, IBM, and ARM will show the way to more elegant chip designs and somehow they will have to compete with Intels marketing juggernaut. (I know, I know, Intel now owns a part of ARM. Perhaps this is a good thing?)
My point is simply that we should not buy in to Intels marketing thus making it harder for better/more efficient chip designs to come to market. So lets not let this misconception last much longer O.K.?
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