Dual 1Ghz G4 PowerMac With Extra Yummy

A huge number of readers submitted the new Dual Ghz Power Mac that Apple has announced. Includes a Geforce 4 and assorted other bells and whistles that will ring and blow for the Mac Junkie. They start at $3k and seriously make me want a Mac.

Comments

"the keyboard that gets with the program"

[archen]

"The Apple Pro Keyboard also comes with full-sized keys for Page Up and Down, Home and End, Insert and forward Delete.."

Oh wow!

Nice to see apple finally backed down from having stupid irregular key sizes. I think using the idiotic small arrow keys (along with the small F keys) along with the stupid puck mouse on a G3 scarred me for life . Now for the mouse button thing...

Re:"the keyboard that gets with the program"

[superpeach]

First thing I checked was 'what kind of mouse does it come with'. One of these aparently. What is it mac people have against mouse buttons? I remember thinking macs were silly for only having single button mice ages ago but I thought that had all changed now. I was looking at the pics on that page for ages trying to see how many buttons it had, none from what I could see..but the text explains its not a mouse, its just one big optical-motion-tracking-button.
Of course, I guess you could always just buy a new mouse :)

Pity

[prisoner-of-enigma]

It's a pity that even in a dual configuration it will get spanked by a dual Athlon. Or perhaps it isn't a pity if you've got Athlons ;-).

The article notes that the PPC chip can perform more operations per cycle than it's PC counterparts. They are comparing themselves to the P4, which specifically DOES NOT try to do a lot per clock cycle (deep pipelining prevents this). If they were to compare it with an Athlon, things would be different.

And let's not forget the staggering (for PC's anyway) power of the Athlon FPU, which spanks the P4 quite cleanly. Even though I'm sure Apple will again claim their system performs a Photoshop blur 500 billion times faster than any computer ever made, real-world testing will probably end up showing this dual system to be marginally better than its predecessor. Software that can take advantage of dual CPU's isn't found everywhere. Even Photoshop doesn't use dual CPU's (although some of the plugins do).

You can get better system responsiveness with a dual system even if your app does not support duals, but it does not necessarily translate into faster programs.

I've got 5 dual Athlon's right now in a rendering farm, and they absolutely stomp any system I've ever seen in 12 years of being in the 3D industry.

We are many, they are few

[Perdo]

We /.'ed apple... I think legoman's DSL lasted longer. And he had big pictures of his lego mural.

Re:Apples software sucks

[Toraz Chryx]

well, what, in your opinion.. IS a friendly OS?

It sure as hell isn't linux+KDE (as much as certain people would like to claim it is, it's just nowhere near polished enough)

AmigaOS?

Speed

[Lomby]

Now compare these speeds:

New Mac Quake III

PC Quake III Speed

You can notice that an AMD Athlon XP1800+ with a generation 3 card (Radeon or GeForce 3) is about twice as fast a the new dual 1Ghz Mac with the GeForce4MX.
The only possible explanation is the relative low memory bandwidth of the card, that cripples the performance.

The end of Linux as a desktop OS?

[garoush]

You may mode this as Troll or Famebit -- but seriously, since OS X came out every time a topic gets posted on /. regarding Mac, I keep seeing post on how wonderful the Mac is and that /. readers are ready to buy one. The driving force for doing so has been the underlying Darwin kernel with the Max UI support as the key factor.

Now here is the bigger question for the /. readers. If this trend continues, are we seeing the end of Linux as a desktop OS? Is OS X the "next" Linux desktop going head on against Windows?

In my view, this is a real possibility once Apple ports OS X to the Intel platform or comes up with some sort of OpenSource license to OS X.

Re:Moore's Law in effect?

[Sebastopol]

You must have money to burn: you spent $6k in 1 1/2 years when you could have originally bought an Athlon system for $1.5k that would still outmuscle both Mac systems...

Apple Speed, Power, Reliability, and Options

[Dokujaryu2]

With the combonation of OSX and Dual 1ghz processors, Apple now is staged to show the world what it is made of. For all you nay-sayers that think Macs are only for Photoshop filters, I got news for you.

First of all, Macs cost less. SHUT UP! They do. If you compare an iMac to an equally equiped Dell, the iMac is 400$ less than the CD-RW version of the Dell and 400$ less than the DVD-R version. Dell 8200 vs. iMac, I tried the slower versions of the PCs on their website as well, but first off the speed comparison isn't fair to the PC, but the iMac still beat it in value until you go to the 1.1ghz Celeron version, which doesn't have graphics acceloration or a hard drive larger than 40 gigs. I haven't started with the new PowerMacs, but eventually I will have a website proving that a Mac costs less than any of the competition. Feel free to verify the numbers: iMac CD-RW 1299, dell, 1663
iMac DVD-R 1699, dell 2032

Now, past that, Mac is currently getting all the advantages of the BSD and open source software community since the Developers Tools, which look strikingly like Visual C++, come FREE when you buy OSX. They nativly compile OS 9, OS X, and BSD/Linux applictions, I currently develop a Mud server in Project Builder, which runs on BSD and Linux.

As far as graphics and video are concerened, it's OBVOIUS to anyone who KNOWS anything about processors that a 7 step G4 with the FPU unit used is going to be over twice as fast as a 20 step P4 using an FPU unit. Games, being an unfair arena to a superior processor which runs cooler at a lower voltage and clock speed, the Mac still matches the PC in most arenas. http://www.barefeats.com So speed isn't an issue.

Resale value is also better on a Mac. And if you haven't noticed, most new Mac software runs on hardware 3 years old! The staying power of a PowerMac is obvious. There's no need to upgrade at all till processor speeds almost tripple. (I upgraded from a G3 233 to a G4 733, with no problems)

SO, a special note to all you PC idiots. If you want to spend more money on slower computers, with hot running parts, bad operating systems, Microsofts invasion of privacy, and oh, let's not forget all those WONDERFUL games on PCs, that's fine. The best day of my life was when I left the 4000$ game system market and got a Mac. I much prefer GTA3 and FFX on PS2. Not to mention with OSX I have one click webserving, all the advantages of BSD, including the fastest SMP of any OS, and a huge open source community that is only growing with each Unix nut converted. What I don't get are you Unix/BSD/Linux junkies who don't see the joy in a Mac. It's BSD with the arguably the greatest User Interface made! There is an easy way to boot to console only ( click Other as login, ">console" as username, no password ), and everything made in Project Builder is easily portable to any other flavor of Unix or Linux, even MS-DOS for the sheep.

So PC people, get a clue, get a life, and get a Mac. Maybe then you can appreciate style, user interface, and speed, and if not, I'm sure you guys will never run out of reasons why you don't have a Mac. You have plenty of time to think about it while you wait for your PC to finish crashing and reboot.

Dokujaryu

YOU, sir or madam, are an ASS

[Anonymous Coward]

"Accessing data from main memory is significantly faster than accessing data from the hard drive..."

You flamebaiting punkassbitch, you posted that out of context and you know it. Apple is explaining to the less-than-completely-fucking-geeked-out that accessing data from RAM is faster than accessing data from a hard drive. So FUCK YOU, ok? And watch out for the piano that is about to fall on your bloated ass.

Re:Moore's Law in effect?

[Ravendon]

"RISC rules? That argument died a decade ago. What are you, one of those 15 year old republicans who jerks off to macworld?"

What the fuck are you talking about? Do you just talk so you can read your own words and jerk off to how bright you sound? In what possible retarded world do you live in? Cisc is better then risc, I see. That's why there are no mission critical servers running on cisc. That's why intel, amd, via are all moving to risc. Do you realize that when you have a risc core with a cisc interface, that there must be a latency involved? Does this not make sense to you you fucking stupid idiot?

Re:They do not *start* at $3k

[fmaxwell]

Some people can afford the best, some people can't.

I paid cash for my new (2002) car, so get off of your high horse about "some people" not being able to afford a Mac.

I don't own a Mac because Macs are not the best. They are slow, expensive, and have a dearth of hardware and software available for them. They are designed around the user-as-idiot paradigm.

I recently had the "opportunity" to use Photoshop on a Power Mac G4. I was stunned at how slow and unresponsive it was when compared to its performance on my Athlon XP system. Same thing for the OS/X GUI. It was glacial compared to the snappy response to which I have become accustomed. Games that fly on my PC look like slide shows on most Power Mac G4 systems.

So, buy one if you want, but count me out.

A Mac by any other name

[56ksucks]

A Mac by any other name is still just a Mac.