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Updated Power Macs at Apple.com
Gropo writes "Same old 'scary cyclops' quicksilver face. Up to 1.42 Ghz, FireWire 800, 802.11g and entry-level pricing has dropped. " With the SuperDrive and one of those massive LCD screens, you have a one highly desirable chunk of hardware.
I would wait on the IBM 970 (G5 whatever) that is coming out this next fall/winter. 64bit, 900MHz Bus, Altivec(or whatever it'll be called), approx 2ghz...
Unless you want a laptop then a Powerbook is a good buy (except 15", there are new bodies for 15.4" powerbook and iBooks on the way).
Just my 2cents being an Apple/Linux/Windows/Solaris user.
$1,499.00
Image
1GHz PowerPC G4
1MB L3 cache
256MB DDR266 SDRAM
60GB Ultra ATA/100
Combo drive
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX
64MB DDR video memory
FireWire 800
56K internal modem
Bluetooth Ready
Sell this to me for $899. Please.
For $500 more you get 1.25GHz, dual processors, and a 80GB HD.
They just cost too much to justify buying, since I wouldn't be using it for DTP/other Mac stuff.
DIY Bigot: I could get a 60's chevy nova and put a blown 350 hemi in it with slicks and run circles around that BMW 7 series...
Yeah, but it's still a junky chevy. Rather go to the opera in the 7 series.
I think the reason why Apple stuff is tolerated a lot more (other than the fact that it is not WinTel), is that Apple is the #1 producer of *nix based machines in the world. Not only that, but the ship more OSS "based" machines in the world (not to mention OSS based OS). So in that regard, they are much more meaningful than someone like Dell simply bumping the speed of their boxes. Remember that /. actually has a separate Apple section, so why is it news to YOU that Apple stuff would get mentioned more frequently?
I have an older PowerMac by my left knee and at ear level it generates 44 dB of soft white noise. The new-style mirror-face PowerMacs also generate about 44 dB of noise. But it's whining, tonal noise. It's a note you can hum. It's a hum that cannot be ignored.
Also, apparently, when the mirror-face PowerMacs' auxiliary fan kicks on, it's described as a "leaf blower." It's a lot louder. (I haven't heard that -- the main fans are bad enough -- and it's possible that the recent firmware upgrade helped keep the leaf-blower fan mostly off.)
The hum is so annoying that there's a website devoted to complaining about it and trying to get rid of it: g4noise.com.
A friend of mine has a music lab with 20 old-style PowerMacs that he'd like to upgrade to newer models. He got one mirror-face PowerMac just to see what it was like. The noise is totally unacceptable for a music lab station -- there's not even any question -- I sat down in front of the keyboard and it took me three seconds to realize there's no way I would use this computer for music.
The best solutions seem to be building a plywood case, lining it with foam, and putting the whole PowerMac inside!
So I hope the new models have quieter fans...
*time travel back to 2000*
Ran over to Best Buy, bought 3 eMachines.
2 machines Celeron 366
1 machines AMD K6 400
One machine is the DNS server (RH 6.2)
One machine is the mail/web server (running Windows 2000, even)
One machine is the firewall (RH 6.2)
These machines still run to this day (we did replace the power supply in one of them though). Not bad machines at all, and they were like $189 each, floor models, no software, box, etc.
ISP that has about 700 users. Sure, not a big one, but the boss loved it. Cheap.
Okay, now explain that to Joe Home computer user. Yeah, that's the same problem that Apple is having.
Apple may be better, but the race is in the numbers, no matter how invalid they are.
How often do you upgrade your computers? One of the big selling points of a Mac is it's stability. Yet, they release new products all the time.
I come from a PC world where the next gen of OS and Games usually means I have to upgrade my PC or I can't run these applications. I'd like to switch(tm), but I don't want to spend $3500 for a Powerbook just to find out that it breaks down in a year and parts cost a bundle. I'd rather spend $1200 on an iBook. See if the wife and I like it.
Do these new machines mean that much to Apple users, or can they happily chug away on their old iBook or Powerbook?
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
CISC-based, no. But still they have plenty of CISC instructions (lots of the apps, the OS, etc), which it has to break down into RISC instructions, which takes processing time before they can be processed. The P4 has all sorts of requirements of the instructions to obtain performance anywhere near it's theoretical maximum.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Uh.. if Apple is a software company that makes their money selling hardware, then Apple is a hardware company. Not a software company.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Well, how about me then?
I'm an indian student and it's been three years since I even saw an Apple anything. (and that was through a shop window.) Guess we third world geeks will just have to make do with assembled stuff.
*Sighs, and rides his elephant off into the sunset *
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
Indeed, when I studied processor design, the mantra was that CISC did more per cycle than RISC (as the instructions are more complex), but due to increased simplicity in design RISC chips run at a higher clock rate. Having a slow RISC chip seems to be the worst of both worlds!
Now, of course nothing is that simple, but the truth is that you need to devise a benchmark which represents your usage, and use that to decide - not some made up marketing numbers.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
The new systems, while considerably faster, don't appear to be much different from the previous models that you point to. From their tech specs:
Hhmmm... 1.3 GBps vs. 2.7 GBps... sounds like the front-side bus on the new processors is running at single data rate, just like the previous iterations.
This is the same issue that the previous models had: the memory bus runs at double data rate, while the processors' FSBs run at single data rate, effectively half the speed of the memory bus. While this allows the remaining components (AGP, PCI, Ethernet, IDE, Firewire, etc.) to use DMA without stepping in the way of the processors, it also holds back the processors, specially when running Altivec-optimised code.
Don't blame Apple for this, BTW; this is Motorola's problem.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Someone @ MacNN noticed that the Apple home page now features a Space Shuttle on the cinema display, ironically on the aniversary of the Challenger incident:
d id =142864
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?s=&threa
Ironic? Coincidence? Intentional?
People keep on forgetting that Intel chips do a whole lot less with each clock cycle than PowerPC chips.
Doesn't Linux run on both PowerPC and Intel hardware? Then why doesn't some enterprising individual go put together some various benchmarks comparing the two on this type of level playing field? I want to believe that the PowerPC is faster clock-for-clock, but I can't until I see some good benchmarks.
I just google'ed for some and all that I could find were some ancient BYTEMARKS.
It sure looks like it would be faster...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
>> the mantra was that CISC did more per cycle than RISC.
The opposite is true: most of the RISC instructions execute in a single cycle, while many CISC instructions take much more, which is why raw clock speed is only perhaps meaningful for RISC chips and means very little for CISC, but totally meaningless across platforms.
People keep forgetting that the G4 has a much higher raw clock speed than most of other very expensive high end RISC systems like Sun UltraSparc or SGI Mips or HP PA. How come other RISC vendors don't get blamed for their clock speed, while everyone screams at Apple everytime a faster system is introduced? Could this means that people just love to talk about Apple because it's cool and we all want a better Mac?
(Try taking a 5 year old PC & installing XP on it & see how it performs. Fun & games)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Regardless, the Macintosh is light-years ahead of anything else I've used. As a very experienced Unix programmer and admin I know the OS will behave predictably and reliably. The GUI is simply second to none and blows anything available on Linux out of the water. The laptop itself is very fast and sleekly designed. The battery life routinely gives me 4+ hours of honest useful work, unlike the 2 hours or so from PC vendors. The screen is fantastic and closing the lid allows the system to sleep in under one second and opening the lid causes it to wake up just as fast. Not a big deal, but considering that most Windows laptops fail to even go to sleep after using them for a few months and the poorly designed drivers hang the system, you'll understand why this matters. The CD/DVD Superdrive is excellent and fast. The slot loading feauture of the drive is classy (just as your automobile CD player) and less prone to breakage as happens to PC laptops (everytime you open a PC laptop CD the lens and mechanics are exposed - a disaster waiting to happen). The default applications are functional, stable, and easy to use with no manual. The graphics are superb and fast for any task that I do, and the programming environment is dynamite. On top of that you have access to Microsoft Office X (which is far more beautiful than the PC version) and Quicken which is what most people use anyway. I simply have no complaints about the machine and fully intend to sell my Windows system to some other sucker.
Windows is predominant, but OS X is going to put up a really good fight. Linux isn't even in the running (Really, how many GUIs does one OS need and who wants to update their system every two months with a new OS version? Get real).
Indeed, we have a Meida 100 system as our primary edit suite and aside from the very expensive (approx £10,000) specialist editing card it's a stnadard single processor 867 G4.
We just bought a an old Mystic (Dual G4 450) and a copy of Final Cut Pro 3. We were dubious about it being able to work with full frame DVCAM but it's a little gem of a machine - so far we've had it playing back timelines with 4 video streams on along with 3 audio tracks.
It renders transitions in seconds.
I don't know how Apple expects to sell these new machines when we can produce broadcast quality edits using a three year old Dual G4.
Final Cut Pro 3 is too good on those old systems!
For one, PowerPC chips can outperform Intel chips at the same clock rate, but they only do so reliably (as far as I'm aware) if you start using stuff like AltiVec. Most stuff can't be optimized in this way, but a few things can. So, if the Intel chips did outperform the PowerPC chips in a particular benchmark, then some people would just jump up and down and claim it's not fair because AltiVec wasn't used, or something. I've seen this before.
Secondly, testing clock-for-clock is interesting in an academic sense only. The subjective speed of a system can be affected by so many things, slight performance differences at the same clock rate make very little difference.
Anyway, I'm sure you're aware of all of this, but there are so many confounding factors it'd be very hard to get undisputable results.
Where are you reading that the 3000+ will only be 2.16GHz? Right this minute, you can buy a 2700+ (2.17Ghz, with a FSB twice as fast as that dual G4 I might add). Tom's estimates the 3000+ to be a 2400Mhz chip:a thlonxp -02.html
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http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20020821/
So, buy your logic, dual 1.25 G4's should run about as fast as a P4 3750. Funny that they get DEMOLISHED by the P4 3.06, even in Adobe benchmarks. There's no way that those dual G4's are scaling well with that puny little 167MHz FSB. My Athlon 750 from TWO-AND-A-HALF-YEARS-AGO had a 200MHz FSB. Apple's 333MHz memory interface is irrelevant when your FSB sucks so hard (See single channel RAMBUS, dual channel RAMBUS, and DDR on the P3 for an example).
Barton is coming out the first week of February (this one isn't a paper launch), next week. These chips are rumored to overclock to 3GHz according to HardOCP. Apple's new G4's aren't coming for 4-6 weeks. Where will that leave Apple?
You do realize that each processor in an AMD SMP system has it's own 266MHz FSB to the northbridge chipset, right? Nevermind that each Clawhammer chip will have it's own memory controller built-in to the core as well as it's own FSB. Can you say scalability? I thought you could.
Clawhammer will be here Q2:
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTA0
Early estimates I've seen show the next Power chip to be hitting Q3/Q4.
Imagine ordering a Powermac G4 867 MHz a week before the new models come out... It was after the Expo so I thought there wasn't anything new pending. Someone at the Apple store decided to give me a break, phoned and offered to deliver the new 1,25 GHz DP instead for the same price. What would have happend if I had ordered a week earlier?
I had the extreme pleasure of being surprised by an original Bondi Blue iMac.
A friend was trying to get his cable modem to work with the iMac, and Comcast told him his Enet port was broken. So he came to my house to have it checked out, because I use Comcast too.
This is an ORIGINAL iMac people. 233 MHz G3, only 192 MB of RAM. I booted it up expecting at the very latest 9, more likely 8.6, but lo and behold, there was OS 10.2.3. And let's be clear about this: this was NOT a speed demon of a machine. However, all basic user actions were almost instantaneous, app launch times were very reasonable, and it could handle quite a bit of activity without slowing down.
I was shocked and amazed. This model came out in '97 for crying out loud. Anyway, his Enet port was fine, Comcast just had their heads up their butts.
Running more than one app doesn't utilise multiple processors, as 99% of the time if you're not interacting with an application it's simply sitting in an event loop waiting for input.
As I pointed out, that is true for any common architecture. A single processor isn't used 99% of the time it waits on input. You're actually supporting my point when you start talking idle times (which is kinda why I brought it up :-).
How responsive the system feels has little to do with how many processors it has.
Tell that to anyone who has ever owned an Amiga, or currently owns an accelerated video card. Co-processing, in whatever form you can get it, puts in place an abstraction that you can potentially derive great benefit from. Alll I know is that when I run a single, compute-bound thread, I'm happy to have a second processor around that isn't getting hammered at 100%.
No, very few people have machines that constantly utilise their processor, but when they DO utilise it, they want it to be as fast as possible.
See, now here you have something that is testable. Burst processing can be an issue, but the question is whether or not it's an issue for you in reality. To test it, you can simply put a process in place (or mod the kernel to log similar) that snapshots when the system is at >98% (or whatever) CPU usage and for how long. Then you could reasonably determine how much of your burst potential you're actually using. Only if those stats support your point could you can reasonably say a PC would be a better choice than a Mac based on the CPU gap alone. Otherwise, you're just trying to start a pissing match for some unknown reason. For what is done on the desktop these days, the Mac is plenty fast.
This line is getting tired.
Then maybe PC people should shut up with their own bogus claims that Macs cost twice as much. As for claims of not wanting Firewire, how about me not wanting to shell out for a floppy drive or PS/2 port when I buy a PC? At least when Apple includes technology with their system, it isn't some shit I haven't used in 5 years. This coin has two sides, so why flip it?
If you are able to build machines yourself, why is that not as good as buying a machine from Apple?
Because then it isn't a parity comparison. Just because you've spent a lot of time and effort picking out and building a system for yourself (at some hourly rate which you will no doubt leave off of the bill for the cost of the PC) doesn't mean anyone who wants a computer can do the same. If you are so certain you can system build for the masses better than the likes of Dell, go into business and get rich. Now point me to the URL of a name brand that shows you can get a built PC that is on par with a Mac for half the price. Otherwise, it's you guys that have all the tired lines.