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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.
Moderators have somehow once again confused my valid comment with a "-1 Troll". C'mon, really? It's a reasonable point to make.
Why not?
Future is looking good!
Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need, not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.
Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.
Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.
There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.
Apple provides a technical note on how to remap the keyboard, but provides no solution to the hardware problems caused by the design of the ADB keyboard. This tech note helps foreign language users, but does nothing for the CapsLock/Ctrl problem.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 12 years. I expect that trend to continue.
Apple has now lost two opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.
Does it seem eerie to anyone else that such a story would make the front page (when other much more relevant tech stories are rejected)? Do I smell a paid advert in disguise?
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Maybe you're "sick of hearing this" because it's the truth, and people keep trying to get you to understand the facts?
I've used the older versions of MacOS quite a bit, thank-you. I'm not just talking from some magazine quote here. If you launch an application on, say, System 7.x, what do you get? The spinning ying-yang cursor and an inability to click on anything else until the application returns control to you! That is NOT the behavior in a Windows environment (except for the Win 3.1 days, with the dreaded "hourglass").
And yes, of course a reboot from Mac OS X into 9.2 feels "zippy"! Booting into MS-DOS feels pretty darn "zippy" on a Pentium 4 system too! That wasn't really my point.
The original discussion was dealing with the latest generation of system offerings from both Intel and Apple, and a perception of which seemed "faster" by the users. That means, we're basically talking OS X vs. Windows XP or 2000 on the OS side.
I've heard more than a few OS X users try to justify their Mac's supposed performance increase over a P4 by using the multitasking arguments. "Oh, sure, my OS X desktop seems to take forever to boot up and things don't pop right up when I launch them -- but the performance is really still there. I can keep launching stuff and have 6 or 7 things going at once, and it doesn't really get any slower than it is now!" Nope, sorry.... flawed argument! Any WinTel user could say this to the same degree. (In fact, if everything else was equal and the Mac and the PC user kept opening up the same apps at the same time, I suspect the Mac system would finally get unresponsive slightly before the P4 did.)
It *is* nice to see Apple finally selling a dual 1.43Ghz G4 though. I don't dispute that's speedy. Nonetheless, at 100% efficiency (which you never really hit on a multiprocessor system), that would equate to 2.86Ghz of total CPU power. You can buy an Intel P4 that goes faster than that....