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.

Comments

Oooh yummy!

[ollie_ob]

1.42GHz!

Still a long way to 3GHz but we're getting there, revision by revision.

Still happier with my silent 600MHz iBook than a roaring G4 monster though...

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Secret Chimp]

People keep on forgetting that Intel chips do a whole lot less with each clock cycle than PowerPC chips. The reason that PowerPC processors have remained at lower clock speeds than Intel chips is because they can get the same amount of work done, if not more, in less clock cycles than it takes for an Intel chip. If only we could get IBM PowerPC chips in G4s... they've been making ass-fast shizz lately, but we've had to stick with Motorola. Maybe Apple doesn't like the slight irony of using IBM stuff.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Znonymous Coward]

My 800 MHz iMac seems much faster than my P4 2GHz. Maybe it's just me, but MHz isn't everything.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[rot26]

My 800 MHz iMac seems much faster than my P4 2GHz. Maybe it's just me, but MHz isn't everything.

My 500mHz iBook seems about the same speed as my old PII-166. I'm not talking about number crunching or actual app speed, I just mean the SUBJECTIVE experience... screen redraws, windows opens, etc.

I really love it, but fast IT'S NOT.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[studerby]

"but MHz isn't everything".

Indeed. Processor MHz as a measure of performance is somewhat analogous to RPM as a measure of a car engine's performance... It's the gearing that determines at what speed the car will go (assuming the engine produces enough power to drive the load).

Re:Oooh yummy!

[jocknerd]

My 500mHz iBook felt slow too. Jaguar seemed to improve it a little though. But I sold it and got a 700mHz iBook with 100mhz FSB and better video and it rocks. Much faster than the other one. Hopefully this can hold me over for a while. I bought it in October and in November Apple released the 800mhz iBook with a bigger hard drive and dropped the price $200. Oh well.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[tRoll with Butter]

My 800 MHz iMac seems much faster than my P4 2GHz. Maybe it's just me, but MHz isn't everything. You must not be using it to compress DivX.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[slughead]

PowerPC was invented by IBM, and may I remind you that Apple's going to purchase a consumer model of the IBM Power4 (from IBM) fairly soon.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[trash eighty]

Naa Apple have been using IBM made PowerPC chips for ages, G3s used in iMacs and iBooks nowadays are IBM ones i believe

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Processor speed aside, RAM speed is still the main problem with G3/4s. It's just a matter of persuading Motorola to implement DDR properly onboard, then they might be able to completely beat x86 with no problems.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Directrix1]

OK, I'm tired of all this stupidity about how nobody knows exactly what MHz means, and how its not really a measure of speed. Here let me simplify your life:

Every processor has instructions that it understands. When executed, each instruction executes a sequence of microinstructions. Now these microinstructions execute at a rate directly proportional to the overall frequency of the machine (i.e. 133MHz ~ 133 million microinstuctions per second) with the following exceptions:
1) memory accesses in general are the largest bottleneck for any processor so it can decrease the speed of a processor tremendously without a sufficiently large cache and without a caching algorithm sufficient for the task
2) there can be, and usually are, parrallel microrocessing units inside of each processor, so this can increase the operational speed

Myth: Intel chips do a whole lot less per clock cycle than PowerPC chips
Fact: Intel chips have been extended to include all the same vector processing functionality included in most PowerPC chips. Furthermore, the CISC architecture is designed in a way where more work is theoretically done per instruction.

Myth: RISC is better than CISC
Fact: It all depends on the optimization and utilization of the available instruction set. CISC can theoretically do more per clock cycle than RISC.

Now, I'm not really advocating CISC over RISC. I personally hate CISC instructions sets as they are very hard to optimize for. But just because apple says something is faster and you want to believe it, doesn't mean you have too believe it.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the older graphics system that's most likely killing your performance. If you're using OS X, some hardware acceleration is really needed to get good performance out of Quartz. My 700 MHz iBook is far more responsive than my wife's 1.2 GHz HP laptop; she says her next machine will be a Mac.

As the original poster pointed out, MHz isn't everything... both your experience and mine confirm this, even though we come out giving the nod to different systems.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[First_In_Hell]

People keep on forgetting that Intel chips do a whole lot less with each clock cycle than PowerPC chips.

Same goes for AMD Athlon XP chips.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Anonymous Coward]

This may have been a valid comment years ago.. but I reeealy don't think people think a 1.4 GHz P4 is comparable to a 1.4 GHz G4. Even people completely ignorant of Apple computers understand that performance isn't uniquely determined by MHz by virtue of a 1.5 GHz Athlon performing like a 2 GHz P4. The bottom line is that Apple is still playing catch-up with the x86 world as far as raw speed is concerned.. and especially with the availability of extremely fast chips (just do a $$/megaflops comparison). So try not to hide behind the vague response that 'Macs are really just as fast because you can't compare MHz'. Even the benchmarks on mac-centric sites show x86 chips dominating the raw-computational tasks (3D-rendering, MPEG encoding, DV editing, etc). The reason that PowerPC processors have remined at lower clock speeds isn't because they do more work per clock cycle, it's because Apple's suppliers can't put out enough quality G4's. If the fastest G4 was faster than the fastest P4, it would be big, clear, and obvious news.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[fitten]

Who cares... If I had a chip that was 1000 way superscalar and had an IPC of 1000 but ran at only 1MHz, it would do 200x as many instructions per clock cycle as the G4 or the AMD processors but it would still be SLOWER than any of the mainstream machines today. IPC means nothing without also mentioning the mentioning the frequency. An Athlon or G4 running at 1Hz has more IPC than a P4 but would you then contend that the 1Hz Athlon was the machine you'd want on your desk?

Re:Oooh yummy!

[radish]

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.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[overunderunderdone]

...Now these microinstructions execute at a rate directly proportional to the overall frequency of the machine

This is *vastly* oversimplified - there are complexities to processor design & trade-offs to be made that make clock speed almost useless for the sake of comparisons between chips with different architectures - even if they DO perform the same number of instructions per cycle (which often isn't the case).

there can be, and usually are, parrallel microrocessing units inside of each processor, so this can increase the operational speed

And this is one of the differences between PowerPC and Intel architectures - in general PowerPC has chosen to sacrifice clock cycle speed to do more instructions per cycle while Intel has chosen to sacrifice the number of instructions to get more speed. In other words Intel usually chooses to do one thing at a time really fast while PowerPC chooses to do several things at once more slowly. Right there you have a *partial* explanation for the MHz (now GHz) gap.

Fact: Intel chips have been extended to include all the same vector processing functionality included in most PowerPC chips.

I'm no expert on this but most reviews & articles from fairly non-partisan sites have concluded that Altivec is superior to the Intel alternative and that this shows up in real world scenarios.

The final upshot is that *in general* the PowerPC does more per cycle than an Intel chip. How much more (or even if it's more at all) depends on what exactly it's doing. But the fact remains: for most applications, especially multimedia applications that use Altivec, the PowerPC outperforms Intel chips of the same clock speed.

BUT intel is so far ahead in speed that even taking the "MHz Myth" into account Intel is still far ahead of the PowerPC in overall performance. Apple has got to get it's old AIM partners to step up or it will have to abandon the PowerPC for Intel (or intel compatible)

Re:Oooh yummy!

[swordboy]

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...

Re:Oooh yummy!

[afantee]

>> 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?

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no expert on this but most reviews & articles from fairly non-partisan sites have concluded that Altivec is superior to the Intel alternative and that this shows up in real world scenarios.

I've actually programmed both SSE and Altivec, and you're right in one way: Altivec is far easier to program, provides a much cleaner vector instruction set, and does more per cycle.

The only problem is that it doesn't do TWICE as much per cycle in practice (save a couple of photoshop filters carefully selected by Apple), so the raw clock of x86 still makes Intel the winner in most cases.

Intel have also worked hard on getting their compilers to automatically generate SSE/SSE2 code, which really improves performance on _all_ programs. There is no such thing for the PowerPC - if you want altivec you will have to handcode it. (And no, all the new altivec support in gcc is limited to the compiler supporting the altivec C language wrapper instructions - it will not generate them automatically).

Motorola probably did the right thing FOR THEIR PRIMARY MARKET. Most PPC chips are doing signal processing in built-in systems where it is perfectly OK to handcode a filter for better performance/lower power consumption. The problem is that most general PC programs benefit more from Intel's approach which is more automatic.

Finally - Apple/Motorola has a bigger problem: it makes sense to invest time in handcoding SSE/SSE2 for a CPU with 95% of the market, but usually not for one with 5% of the market.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[harlows_monkeys]

The reason that PowerPC processors have remained at lower clock speeds than Intel chips is because they can get the same amount of work done, if not more, in less clock cycles than it takes for an Intel chip

No...the reason they have remained at lower clock speeds is because Motorola can't make them go at 3 GHz. If Motorola could produce a 3 GHz PPC, they would.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[geekee]

Our 800Mhz Sparc machines can't outperform our 2GHz Pentium4 machines. I seriously doubt your 800 MHz iMac has more than half the performance of a P4 at 2 GHz.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[fitten]

Umm... not to folks who know what IPC means.

I'll slow it down for you... Whether a processor runs at 1Hz or at 1GHz, the IPC is the exact same... Instructions per clock (notice the "per clock" part of that - it means how many instructions are retired per clock cycle of the cpu - note again that I have never mentioned frequency wrt IPC). So, an Athlon at 1Hz has an IPC of 3 instructions per clock. An Athlon at 1GHz has an IPC of 3 instructions per clock. If you fall into the trap of believing that IPC is the measure of performance, then you would be happy with a 1Hz Athlon rather than a 3.06GHz P4 to do your work because the IPC is higher with the Athlon than the P4 (again, regardless of clock speed).

Now, if you were to say that the Athlon is a 3 IPC processor at 2GHz which can be faster than a 1.5 IPC processor at 3GHz, then you have at least stated something that has some meaning as to performance.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[afantee]

>> Someone here said that CISC does more per clock cycle than RISC, but that because of the inherant simplicity, RISC could run at higher rates

You are talking shit through your ass. A CISC instruction doesn't do more per cycle, it may do more per instruction, but takes much more cycles, so the clock rate correlates very little with the real performance. In other words, CISC instructions may take anything from 1 to 40 instructions to finish, which makes them difficult to optimize, while most of the RISC instructions take 1 or 2 cycles, which is why the clock rate can't be arbitrarily increased like the P4.

The old Intel x86 instruction set is truly a piece of shit in terms of computer architecture, and actually not used very much by modern software. But for backward compatability and marketing reasons, Intel keeps patching it with new instructions and never bothers to remove the legacy, which is why the P4 gets so complicated and consume so much electricity.

>> But, all that being said, my 1GHz AMD, which may be running at any one time Photoshop, Outlook, Visual Studio, Kazaa, DC++, a web server, and a whole host of other crazy things in the background.. well, my system seems much faster than any Mac I've used.

What the hell are you talking about? Have you ever used a Mac and do you realize that Mac OS X is a real server grade OS with true Unix power and stability as well as Cocoa ellegence. My 700 MHz iBook can do more things than you mentioned simultaneously and runs weeks and months without Windows style crashes. What's more, a Mac can be put to sleep and wakes up instantly, so you never have to power down the system for months. In normal usage, my iBook definitely feels more usable than the 16" 2.6 GHz Sony Vaio I was playing the other day, and it's virtually silent with a single battery lasting smore than 4 hours, while my brother-in-law's Sony lasts 2 hours with 2 batteries.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[cudaboy_71]

i call b.s. there is no way an ibook 500 feels like a pII-166. i have both of these machines. ok, i'll concede that the 500 runs a bit sluggish running osx 10.2 (which came out 12 months after the ibook 500 was EOL'd). if that's the game you wanna play, then install XP on the pII-166 and tell me how it runs--oh yeah, cant run XP on that old thing....hmmmm

Re:Oooh yummy!

[smaug195]

Actually its far more like installing windows 98 on the p166. Which runs fine btw :)

Re:Oooh yummy!

[IamTheRealMike]

That's not really a very useful test.

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.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[IamTheRealMike]

Maybe it's just me, but MHz isn't everything.

Well that's interesting, because in a way it is just you, but in another way it isn't. Lemme explain.

The basic problem with debates (more like flamefests) like this is that people really suck at measuring speed. In fact, after psychological studies [1] showed just how bad people were at quantifying and comparing speed, and how easily those impressions were influenced, eye witness testimony severely lost face in the legal system, and in fact is now somewhat counter-intuitively considered to be very unreliable, especially for car accidents.

For instance, sometimes estimate of the speed of a car could be altered by changing one or two words of the question quite a lot, I think up to over 10mph.

This problem is especially acute in this scenario because you have a whole TRUCKLOAD of people who desperately want to think the Mac is fast. They have paid over the odds for it, so when people say Macs are slow that hurts, and people don't want to believe it. So, their perception of speed warps. If you were to put a PC and a Mac side by side and compare actual processing tasks the difference would be obvious, but as people rarely do that, it's more a case of "oh well i tried it last week and this feels faster" so obviously there's a lot of wiggle room.

So, basically your impressions of how fast the Mac is compared to your P4 tells us nothing. Apple realise just how subjective computer speed is, and pulls out all the stops to make its customers believe the machines are fast. Firstly there was the whole Mhz Myth thing, which was technically dubious to start with.

Now OS X uses a lot of psychological tricks to make it feel faster than it otherwise would. There's nothing wrong with that of course, it's all good stuff, but for instance the fact that graphics are done synchronously, so avoiding the tearing and swap popping you see on Windows and Linux, and the fact that there is lots of animation etc all combine to make it feel fast.

Well, if all you do is write letters in a word processor or browse the web all day, that's fine. For people who actually do make demands of their system though, there is simply no substitute for raw computing power - the difference between feels fast and is fast can be disguised, but only to a certain extent.

Rant: why on earth does a totally subjective impression of speed get modded up anyway? If I said, "My P4 2GHZ feels a lot faster than my iMac. I guess MHz does make a big difference" it'd be modded down, rightly so. It adds nothing to the debate. Stuff like speed, looks, even "quality" are so completely personal that it's interesting only in a casual way, if that. [1] I was going to be a smart alec and give a reference here to a study, but can only remember that it was done by a woman who's last name began with E. Oh well. The course was fun, clearly I didn't remember much of it though :)

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Alan Partridge]

I think that the real difference that you're seeing is the superb performance of the IBM PPC 750fx - if Apple took the brakes off this chip and ran it at 1Ghz+ with a 200Mhz FSB, there's little doubt it would eat the G4+ alive.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Golias]

The 500 MHz iBook felt slow, eh? Well, that's because your iBook uses a 4500 RPM HD, a slower graphics card, and unlike the 800 MHz iMac, it has no AltiVec processor. It also uses slower memory.

I have a G3 tower which I installed a 500 MHz G4 chip into, and it is faster in almost every way than my 700 MHz iBook.

Comparing an iBook to a pentium desktop machine, like the parent poster did, is just silly. I will gladly stand the iBook up against anything in the PC notebook world, though. IMHO, in terms of the total picture of performance, features, battery life and cost, Apple's iBooks and Powerbooks are the best damned laptops out there, and there isn't even a close second.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[hysterion]

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?

Because, I believe, enterprising individuals know it wouldn't be that level a playing field. Linux for PPC is a younger, less mature, and relatively resource-starved "minority" Linux platform. For instance, gcc itself produces less optimized executables for PPC -- although we're slowly getting there, with the integration of Apple's enhancements.

This is true across the board, BTW. Believe me, some of the installation headaches that were ironed out long ago on x86 (like configuring X11) are still more of a hurdle on PPC Linux. And when you run into such trouble, specific docs & howtos are harder to come by for PPC; and... etc., etc. You get the idea.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Aram Fingal]

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

Unfortunately, it is not as level a playing field as it should be. GCC is not as well optimized for PPC as it is for Intel. Under Mac OS, you get better optimization from CodeWarrior.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[jcr]

Fact: Intel chips have been extended to include all the same vector processing functionality included in most PowerPC chips.

I can only conclude from this statement that you've never written code either for Intel's MMX or Altivec. MMX uses the floating-point registers, which means that you can't do any FPU operations while MMX operations are happening. Altivec is a separate array processor.

Show me the MMX code that can perform an entire 3x3 convolution per clock cycle, please.

CISC can theoretically do more per clock cycle than RISC.

Which can come in handy if you're writing assembly code, which very few people do anymore. As it happens, RISC was started when an IBM researcher noticed that compilers only used a fraction of the instructions available.

-jcr

Re:Oooh yummy!

[cmacb]

I agree with much of what you say, but your opening remark taints the rest:

" OK, I'm tired of all this stupidity about how nobody knows exactly what MHz means, and how its not really a measure of speed."

I've found several contradictions to your assertion that micro-instructions must take one cycle. There is no "rule" to this affect, there is a tendency for it to be true.

If you have designed hardware you will know that it is possible to consume multiple cycles using ordinary "or","and","not" gates etc. In fact its hard to avoid doing so.

I don't think people are stupid (particularly in large numbers) for not all agreeing on terminology used to describe complex subject matter.

The debates over CISC vs RISC and how benchmarks relate to clock cycles won't end any time soon, nor should they.

Ultimately the best way to test the speed of a machine is by running real applications. For that determination nothing that goes on at lower levels, be it clock cycles or RISC vs CISC makes a bit of difference.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[PCBman!]

RISC instructions must retire in 1 cycle after the pipeline's been filled (assume no bubbles), this is part of the nature of RISC in the pipelined world. RISC is also fixed instruction length.

You are correct about SOME CISC instructionS as it may tell the processor to do something in a very SIMD fashion (fetch all data between these 2 memory address and do something to them then retire).

RISC was the move to load/store architectures (you fetch from memory to load, but you do real work in registers) and fixed length instructions that could be implimented in pipeline fashion--which means you're supposed to be able to arbitrarily push up clock speed. Pipelining, however, has penalties (hence some companies build very wide, very shallow processors--see ars-technica, Hannibal is VERY good at explaining this in detail).

Re:Oooh yummy!

[robertchin]

CISC only does more per cycle if you assume that it takes one cycle to complete every instruction. This is not the case. Intel chips take CISC code, break it down into their own microcode, which is then processed. The clock speed that Intel reports is the clock speed of the chip that processes this microcode. The smaller the instructions can be divided up, the faster they can run the chip at. Clock speed is not necessarily a basis for comparing two different chips, even when of the same architecture, especially when Intel is involved.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[rot26]

Well, at least you didn't call me a fucktard.

hahaha.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[jchristopher]

People keep on forgetting that Intel chips do a whole lot less with each clock cycle than PowerPC chips. The reason that PowerPC processors have remained at lower clock speeds than Intel chips is because they can get the same amount of work done, if not more, in less clock cycles than it takes for an Intel chip.

Why is OS X so slow then?

Re:Oooh yummy!

[jchristopher]

Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but Mandrake runs noticeably faster on my 700mhz PIII than on the 600mhz G3 I used to have.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[jchristopher]

Comparing an iBook to a pentium desktop machine, like the parent poster did, is just silly. I will gladly stand the iBook up against anything in the PC notebook world, though.

Sorry, but the iBook "feels" slow. Even $699 Wintel notebook blowout specials "feel" fast. Simple as that.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[jchristopher]

i call b.s. there is no way an ibook 500 feels like a pII-166.

Sorry, but it does. Install Windows 2000 on a PII-166. See how it lags? That's about how OS X feels on the iBook 500.

End-of-life or not doesn't really matter. It's not like we're trying to run the latest and greatest OS on 3 year old hardware - the iBook 500 ran OS X slow ON THE DAY IT WAS RELEASED.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Sethb]

I agree, I bought an iBook 500 the day they started shipping with OS X, but sold it after 18 months.

Why? I loved the machine, great form factor, nice fit and finish, and I loved OS X. But, the video card in the iBook 500 simply isn't up to the task of running OS X. Try scrolling through a big Slashdot post like this on a 500mhz white iBook, using IE or Mozilla/Chimera. It's a painful experience, the screen chugs like you're surfing on Pentium 166, which makes sense, because that's about the era of video card that Apple stuck in those early iBooks.

So, I sold my iBook, because I had access to a speedy 2.2Ghz Dell laptop from work. I miss the iBook, it was a nicer machine, but I don't miss the slow-ass video chipset in it. I know the newer models have faster chips, and I'd love to get one, but it's hard to argue with the Dell I've gotten from work for nothing. :)

Though, if I get to pick out my next laptop, it'll be a 12" PowerBook, small size of my old iBook, with the power of a G4.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Daleks]

Intel have also worked hard on getting their compilers to automatically generate SSE/SSE2 code, which really improves performance on _all_ programs. There is no such thing for the PowerPC - if you want altivec you will have to handcode it.

What about this?

Re:Oooh yummy!

[soulsteal]

One would hope the iBook would be a bit faster when compared to a non-existent chip.

The PII's started at 233 MHz on a 66 MHz bus and galloped up to 450 MHz on a 100 MHz bus.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[jchristopher]

Perhaps you'd care to elaborate on what OS X does that a "typical PC unix desktop" does not? (Other than draw useless animations and transparent menus?)

Re:Oooh yummy!

[commodoresloat]

OK, I'm tired of all this stupidity about how nobody knows exactly what MHz means, and how its not really a measure of speed.

Come on. It's simple. MHz = dick size. All other debates over RISC, CISC, etc., ignore this fundamental fact at their own peril.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Directrix1]

Who said anything about MMX? Intel has extended far beyond MMX now.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Directrix1]

No CISC can do more per cycle by taking into account that RISC instructions have to FETCH and DECODE the next instruction more often. Yes there is overhead associated with this.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Directrix1]

OK, sorry. I take back my 'stupidity' remark and replace it with a 'propogated ignorance' remark. And true microinstructions don't have to take one cycle. Hey I'm just stating what I learned in my Computer Organization class. I'm just saying there is no excuse for ignorance. And if it were up to me, this whole debate would have no real relevance because I have invented the ultimate in processor designs!!!!!

Re:Oooh yummy!

[overunderunderdone]

The only problem is that it doesn't do TWICE as much per cycle in practice (save a couple of photoshop filters carefully selected by Apple), so the raw clock of x86 still makes Intel the winner in most cases.

Yeah, that is basically what I said. I'm guessing that a PowerPC would be equivalent to something between 25% to 50% faster on the intel side depending on what your doing. It certainly isn't 100% faster (as steve claims) though in a very few select places it is.

Let me defend his practice of using Photoshop as a benchmark. Even though it is misleading as a benchmark of general performance it IS also the "killer app" of the PowerMac's core market of designers. Most PowerMac users don't really care about the performance of SETI@Home or Quake 3 but they care very much about the performance of Photoshop - I'll even go out on a limb and say that they ONLY care about the performance of Photoshop.

Finally - Apple/Motorola has a bigger problem: it makes sense to invest time in handcoding SSE/SSE2 for a CPU with 95% of the market, but usually not for one with 5% of the market.

I don't see this as a problem - IF a software maker has already decided to go after that 5% Mac market (which is still a lot of users & $$$ in absolute terms) they are likely to spend the time doing altivec if it will be of any real benefit. I'd say that almost all of the apps that really need it use it - I'm sure there are others that would see marginal benefits that don't bother but for the most part those aren't the apps that are slowing things down.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[overunderunderdone]

I would agree with just about everything you said - with a few of caveats.

1) The IBM PowerPC 970 looks good *now*. It might be Apples saviour - but I'm not counting on it until I see systems shipping. It's going to be a long time before any systems are shipping and by the time they ship x86 chips will be that much further ahead.

2) The 970 looks good *on paper* - but there is still time for IBM to screw it up and ship a product that doesn't quite live up to the hype - it happens all the time in the processor world & the 970 seems to have a lot of potential design issues they have to get just right (the "deep and wide" design and the way they group IOPs seem like performance killers if done poorly)

I totally agree that they aren't going to move to the x86 any time soon. They need to give their developers some time to recuperate from the last big change from the MacOS to MacOS X. But, if the 970 is a flop they will have to move pretty soon after, if it merely maintains the lagging status quo (which seems the most likely) Apple will still be crippled by the GHz gap but can stay the course and put their hope in the 970's successor. If IBM hits it out of the park with the 970 and catches right up to the x86 Apple will happily stay with PowerPC.

If Apple does move to the x86 they will just be using a different chip in their machines not producing MacOS X for all the wintel clones out there. It should be easier for their developers than the switch from the MacOS to MacOS X which is really a *completely* different OS. Aside from Altivec code most apps should only require a simple recompile to be ported from Mac PPC to Mac x86. Most of the work on Apples side has already been done. NextStep had to be ported from x86 to PowerPC to become MacOS X in the first place and back in the days of "Rhapsody" you could compile your Cocoa apps for PowerPC, x86 or as a fat binary to run on either. If I understand it right Marklar is just the continuing maintenance of all that initial work - very smart, it keeps their options open.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[SnarkDogma]

No, Intel chips (particularly the P4) break the execution of instructions into smaller chunks(pipeline stages) than PPC chips do.

This means that each pipeline stage in an x86 has less work do than each PPC stage. so.. the hardware designers are able to make the chip go faster, because the pipeline stages can go faster,

*each pipeline stage* does less work in an x86. but the pipeline itself does a similar amount of work.

Of course I'm ignoring the fact that a given processor may have N int pipelines and M float pipelines and O Vector pipelines, all of which may share resorces. But in a nutshell, PPC run at lower clocks because Mot/IBM have thrown less effort or hardware at them:
-smaller pipeline stages take more chip area than larger stages, for a given design.
-smaller pipeline stages and faster chips take more man hours than bigger stages and slower chips.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Golias]

Sorry, but the iBook "feels" slow. Even $699 Wintel notebook blowout specials "feel" fast.

And I give a fuck about your feelings... why?

The Apple notebook computers, even my "slow" iBook (which is now about a generation old) are plenty fast. Most pentium-based laptops nerf the shit out of the CPU in order to avoid chronic heat and battery life problems. (And yet, the Apple laptops still run cooler and longer while chugging away at full speed.) On my HP Pavillion, I couldn't even watch one DVD movie on a full battery charge, yet it ran no faster than my iBook, on which I can easilly watch two in a row if I'm on a long flight. Yet the iBook performs most tasks as fast or faster than the HP did, and both cost the same price at the time.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Shanep]

OK, I'm tired of all this stupidity about how nobody knows exactly what MHz means, and how its not really a measure of speed.

MHz is NOT an absolute measure of processor power.

Looking at my old Borland TASM x86 instruction breakdown book, I see each instruction with required number of clock ticks to complete (some variable). The same instruction is often done in less clock ticks on a i486 than on an i386 for example, meaning that a 100MHz i486 is usually faster than a 100MHz i386.

Therefore MHz is NOT a comparative measure (of CPU power) between a 486 and a 386, and they are so closely related (a 486 is not just a 386 with an integrated FPU). The difference between different CPU architectures is often HUGE.

The PPC IS usually faster per clock tick, than ANY x86 based CPU and when the Altivec shines it is blinding.

Here let me simplify your life:

A class of CPU design and you're simplifying our lives! Thank you!

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Shanep]

My 500mHz iBook seems about the same speed as my old PII-166. I'm not talking about number crunching or actual app speed, I just mean the SUBJECTIVE experience... screen redraws, windows opens, etc.

Screen redraws have a hell of a lot to do with your video card and overall system speed will also depend on how much RAM you have (especially if you're at the minimum).

I have a 128MB 300MHz iBook with OSX 10.1. The performance is OK, the overall experience is better than anything I have ever used before though.

Max out your RAM and get Jaguar if you don't already have it. Paging to a slow 2.5" HDD can be very painful!

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Secret Chimp]

why is it that G4s consistently out-test Intels that run at twice or 3 times their clock speed, then?

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Directrix1]

MHz is not an absolute measure of processor power. This is exactly what I explained above. Secondly, MHz is much a comparative measure of CPU power as top speed is of performance of a car. If you want to know the knitty-gritty you gotta read some specs. Thirdly, I don't care how fast the PPC is per clock cycle, Intel chips with their extended instruction sets operate faster. Lastly, I am supplying some information to people who know very little on the subject. If you want to write up a CPU Design FAQ for dummies, have at it.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Shanep]

Lastly, I am supplying some information to people who know very little on the subject.

I thanked you didn't I?

If you want to write up a CPU Design FAQ for dummies, have at it.

I don't design CPU's, though I have been designing digital devices since the late 80's.

Furthermore, the CISC architecture is designed in a way where more work is theoretically done per instruction.

Careful wording there, impressive. More work per instruction. Well that is the basis of CISC. But whether this is an improvement over RISC is hard to quantify, with individual implementations of both giving differing results that cannot say one is better than the other overall. These CISC instructions that do more work, also require more clock ticks to complete. But then RISC instructions, which usually take only a single clock tick to complete, usually need to be combined to do the same work as a single CISC instruction. The P4 though, does some impressive magic with CISC->RISC processing that blurs the traditional concepts.

But how about work per clock tick, which is what matters if we're talking about the MHz myth...

Here http://www.swox.com/gmp/gmp-speed.html are PowerPC's doing MUCH more work per clock tick than a Pentium 4. Seemingly many times (3.4?) more.

Hell even the old 603e seems to be substantially faster than the P4 per clock tick, in these tests.

BTW, the Itanium 2 would appear to be a rocket!

VCD encoding, G4 doing more per clock tick than an Athlon http://klicman.org/altivec/

I'm not saying a current model G4 is faster than a current model x86 based machine, BTW. But if the PowerPC 970 can get close to the clock rate of the P4 (or then P5), we might see "G5's" running "P5's" into the ground.

PS, I have an old 300MHz G3 iBook, after about 15 years of x86 (currently have P3-500 amongst my currently 16 something PC's). I'm not a zealot of either, but I hold high hopes for the 970.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[jchristopher]

Nonsense. Even a casual observer can see that the iBook does NOT perform "most tasks or faster... than an HP". Web browsers, for example, are far slower on the Macintosh platorm, as is Microsoft Office, Photoshop, and other programs.

None of this makes Macs bad computers, but it does lower their perceived value.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Golias]

The HP in question was a Pavillion 5150. At the time I bought it, it ran for about the same price as an iBook, and no, the HP was not faster. It was slower, especially with heavy-lifting like photoshop filters.

Web browsers, for example, are far slower on the Macintosh platorm

Do you mean that piece of shit known as Internet Explorer 5.0 for Mac? Because Safari loads these Slashdot pages in the blink of an eye, while IE was dog slow. Let's see... was that the Mac platform's fault? Or is it just possible that Microsoft wrote a shittier version of their browser when creating the OS X version?

You want to say the latest Pentium desktop machine is faster than Apple's new dual 1.43 G4 tower? I am inclined to believe you, while I have not seen for myself. Intel and AMD desktops have been quite a bit faster than anything in the G4 line for the last couple years. Try telling me that the Pentium based laptops give more ! for $ than Apple laptops and I can't even take you seriously, because I know from experience that Intel laptops are shitty and slow.

(In the end, I was able to squeeze a little more performance out of that HP by dumping Windows ME in favor of Linux, but it still slower than the iBook, with a crappier screen, a smaller HD, and less battery life. Now that I've switched to using an Apple laptop, I don't intend to go back until the PC world figures out how to make a fast CPU run full-throttle while staying cool and using way less power, which doesn't look to be happening anytime soon.)

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Directrix1]

Itanium 2 is an Intel product correct? And when did I ever mention P4s. Just being nitpicky.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Shanep]

Itanium 2 is an Intel product correct?

Yeah... I said I was not a zealot. But, it is... mostly a RISC core.

And when did I ever mention P4s.

Am I not allowed to mention Intel's currently widely available finest (since you argue that Intels "CISC" design is better)? You said...

Myth: RISC is better than CISC

Take a look at those benchmarks I posted earlier. Now sort out the RISC and CISC machines.

What's that? They are ALL RISC based cores, bar the Pentium I?

The fact that Intel (the maker of the Worlds most successful "CISC" CPU's) has moved essentially to a RISC core (to exploit the easy pipelining benefits) with a CISC "frontend" (for legacy compatibility) starting with the Pentium Pro, kinda shows that RISC is better than CISC, don't you think?

CISC can theoretically do more per clock cycle than RISC.

Prove it.

If you said, "CISC can theoretically do more per instruction than RISC" and left it at that, I wouldn't be arguing with you.

Here is some reading that I think you'll be interested in, with your current course...

http://www-compsci.swan.ac.uk/~csneal/HPM/index.ht ml

http://www-compsci.swan.ac.uk/~csneal/HPM/risc.htm l

When we hit a performance ceiling due to minimum transistor size, we will have to exploit pipelining and multiple cores to the fullest and the easiest way to do that is to embrace RISC (due to predictable, uniform instruction lengths) as the better choice over CISC.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Directrix1]

When I stated:
Myth: RISC is better than CISC
I did not imply the converse. You assumed it.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Shanep]

When I stated:
Myth: RISC is better than CISC
I did not imply the converse. You assumed it.

Right...

CISC can theoretically do more per clock cycle than RISC.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Directrix1]

I said theoretically, and I was right. Assuming it does not get broken down into a bunch of RISC like microinstructions it may very well be possible for a CISC instruction to perform the same computation as several RISC instructions in fewer clock cycles. It all depends on the underlying hardware. But the whole premise behind CISC is to have the kitchen sink of instructions sets. So fewer instructions have to be fetched and decoded to do the same action. CISC has the potential to be faster thats why I said theoretically.

Re:Oooh yummy!

[Shanep]

it may very well be possible for a CISC instruction to perform the same computation as several RISC instructions in fewer clock cycles.

Can't argue with that.

fewer instructions have to be fetched and decoded to do the same action. CISC has the potential to be faster thats why I said theoretically.

Which is why the memory bandwidth of Macs depresses me. I know that this is especially a bottleneck for RISC.

But given the real world performance of high end RISC systems it looks like the theories don't translate very dramatically or most RISC systems have high bandwidth to memory.

Assuming it does not get broken down into a bunch of RISC like microinstructions

I would have thought that CISC breaking down to RISC within the CPU would be an absolute god send. Reduced memory bandwidth requirements AND potential high performance pipelining. As I've said before, I think Intels methods for retaining performance and legacy compatibility is pretty impressive.

I would absolutely love one of these

[rollthelosindice]

Uunforetunately, My budget likes the $400 EMachine 1.5 ghz (of sometihnkg like that) a lot more than even the entry level powermac at $1499

Re:I would absolutely love one of these

[planckscale]

Screw the eMachines, put together two machines - I just set up two complete 1.3 Ghz Duron PC's for just $210 a piece. For $400 you can set yourself up a mini cluster for rendering twice the speed of a $1500 Mac!

Re:I would absolutely love one of these

[CountBrass]

Yeah and my budget loves a £10,000 ford more than it does the entry model £150,000 aston-martin.

Guess which I'd prefer ?

Re:I would absolutely love one of these

[cbuskirk]

Of course you have to buy 5 or six of them over what will be the life of the G4. Ad a few more years on to that if your one of the people who knows that "You can't upgrade Macs" is a complete and total lie. You come out far ahead in the money department even if you have to go to your credit union to get a loan for the computer.

Wait for the IBM 970

[BoomerSooner]

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.

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[morcheeba]

Here's the info from IBM on this chip... it's mainly contained in this pdf

I hope that that long sequence of digits in the URL isn't a session key & this link will work for others... If it is, then go to the main IBM PowerPC page and select 9xx 64-bit processors.

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[phelddagrif]

I know I'm waiting for apple to stop releasing stop gap G4's. The G4 has lived a VERY long time, and it's time to send it to the grave. I mean what other consumer chip architecture is around for 3 years? Apple needs to get thier act together and start releasing PPC 970 based macs soon.

If your going to pay a huge premium for designer hardware, then it should at least be competitive, if not better than the non-designer models, which is far from reality right now.

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[jbolden]

I think you are confused here. For years Motorolla talked about another generation of chip. They had serious problems and then cut off development until very recently. That was the problem with the "G5". The i970 was an IBM plan to bring out a lower priced version of the Power chip line (and the Power chips have existed for years, Apple can't them at prices their customers will accept). IBM has already seeded the chip to developers. And they have a commitment to have the chips in mass production by Q3.

Incidentally the down the road on this chip looks very good. 2.5 ghz model may come out sometime in 2004 and IBM has already demod a buggy 6ghz model of the chip. At the same time the Power5 chip will be out soon....

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[Phroggy]

Apple needs to get thier act together and start releasing PPC 970 based macs soon.

Um, who needs to get whose act together? Apple doesn't make processors. From http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/products/powerpc/newsle tter/dec2002/newproductfocus2.html:

The PowerPC 970 is designed in IBM 0.13-micron CMOS silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology and will be manufactured in IBM's new state-of-the-art 300-mm facility in East Fishkill, NY. Sampling is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2003 with production expected in the second half of 2003.

How exactly is Apple supposed to release computers running the PPC 970 if IBM isn't producing them for at least another six months?

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[iomud]

The IBM documentation for the 970 states a 900Mhz bus for an 1800Mhz chip.

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[TheCrazyFinn]

Problem is IBM won't be shipping G5's in quantity until Q3. If Apple is aggressive, we should see an announcment of the new hardware at MWNY, shipping end of August. If they aren't expect the announcement in early september (Apple traditionally introduces most hardware in January & July, with smaller announcements in May & September, and occasionally in November).

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[Matty_]

You can always do a little research on it.

IBM has a Web page located here which has information and a PDF which backups the parent's claim of a 900mhz bus, as well as claiming that the chip will hit production during the second half of 2003. Of course, deadlines tend to always get pushed back. It also mentions target speeds of 1.4 to 1.8 Ghz. It looks like someone's PowerPoint presentation, but it is full of details.

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[be-fan]

The sad thing is that a 1.25 Ghz Alpha is competitive with the new IBM 970 (a 3Ghz P4 is slightly faster, both in integer and floating point). Damn it. Just release a 1.8 Ghz Alpha on a 0.13 SOI process and take over the world. How hard can it be!

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[John Bayko]

For years Motorolla talked about another generation of chip. They had serious problems and then cut off development until very recently. That was the problem with the "G5".

As far as I know, the "problem" with the G5 wasn't the core, it was the bus. Motorola makes almost all its money selling CPUs for embedded systems, where system cost is more important than for desktops, and a large part of system cost can be the bus complexity. Motorola did get the G5s working, and as fast as promised, but with the existing cheap bus that wouldn't have done Apple much good.

Apple had specifications for a CPU bus that would meet its needs, but Motorola couldn't justify the expense of making a special version of the G5 in relatively small numbers, for one customer (who, face it, would just keep asking for special versions of any good future PowerPC model - not just a one time cost).

So Motorola kept its G5 design until the embedded market is ready for it, and Apple took its bus elsewhere.

IBM is developing the PowerPC 970 for its own use - specifically in "blade" servers, which need a lower power, cheaper and cooler CPU, while keeping up performance, which is exactly the same needs that Apple has. I don't know if Apple is going to get its bus in the 970, but it would be a simpler design than the POWER4 which actually uses two busses, one in and one out, allowing the CPU to keep sending addresses out even before it gets the data back in.

Either bus would be very fast. Motorola will ba happy it doesn't have to make custom CPUs, IBM will be happy it can sell more 970s, and Apple will be pissed at Motorola but will at least be back in the performance race again so it'll end up happy. Finally.

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[jbolden]

Apple had specifications for a CPU bus that would meet its needs, but Motorola couldn't justify the expense of making a special version of the G5 in relatively small numbers, for one customer (who, face it, would just keep asking for special versions of any good future PowerPC model - not just a one time cost).

IMHO Motorolla could have handled it by say offering the G5 in two speeds and requiring Apple to use nothing but the G5 to get those volumes up. Lets say a 1.5ghz and 2.5ghz model where Apple does this:

eMac, iMac, iBook 1.5ghz model (lines seperated by extras)
powerbook 2.5ghz model (lines seperated by extras)
Powermac: 2.5 ghz, 2x1.5gthz, 2x2.5ghz models with extras.

That would have allowed Apple to fill out its lines and allowed Motorlla to get volumes on its chips for a year or more. Leaving Apple high and dry the way they did was horrible business for the long term. While it won't bother the embedded market any that Motorolla can't be counted on Motoralla is finished in the higher end market which is a hell of a fall from 20 or even 10 years ago when they owned the high end.

So Motorola kept its G5 design until the embedded market is ready for it, and Apple took its bus elsewhere.

Yes but they lost years. Had Apple not had so much success in other areas Apple would be dead now.

IBM is developing the PowerPC 970 for its own use - specifically in "blade" servers, which need a lower power, cheaper and cooler CPU, while keeping up performance, which is exactly the same needs that Apple has. I don't know if Apple is going to get its bus in the 970, but it would be a simpler design than the POWER4 which actually uses two busses, one in and one out, allowing the CPU to keep sending addresses out even before it gets the data back in.

I still think a top of the line PowerMac with the Power4 would have made sense. It would be hard for Apple to sell a computer with a $3k CPU but they need something great at the top and it really doesn't matter if they only sell 100 or so of them; the main point would have been the reviews and the benchmarks. But that's another issue.

Anyway most chip manufacturers can make great chips if they don't have to worry about yield/cost. I really think that Motorolla did fall over here.

Re:Wait for the IBM 970

[Hadlock]

'cause IBM already has developer seeds in the wild. i'm sure if apple hasn't decided on where it's going CPU-wise in the next 18 months, it's probably eyeballing that 970 processor sitting on the shelf IBM sent to them very closely right about now. it's not much of a strech to move from a G4 to the 970 in terms of technology, and by the time IBM announces final silicon apple will have been using a finalized version for circut design for the past month already and have some sort of product announcment in the next 2 months.

hold your tongue and say apple

[korea]

Think Differe-- BIGGER FASTER BETTER, Must...Catch...Up...

Re:hold your tongue and say apple

[jjsoh]

"pain is weakness leaving the body."

Nice sig. My friend says that all the time. You into TKD by any chance?

Re:Yeah...

[hcdejong]

Prices start at $ 1500, not 2000.

Do you know what kind of PC I could build for that much money??

One that won't run OS X, that's for sure.

Re:Yeah...

[BWJones]

For only $1999 ... Do you know what kind of PC I could build for that much money?? Then I just need the beowulf cluster..

Yeah, but can you get Firewire 800, Firewire 400, built in Gigabit, 54 MBps wireless networking, and a set of sweet applications like Apple bundles with their machines for only $1999?

The Bigger Story is the Displays

[Schlemphfer]

Maccentral has an excellent summary of the new Macs. To me, the most interesting part of the story isn't the incrementel improvements in the desktops, but the extremely steep price cuts surrounding Apple's flat panel displays. You can now get a 20" widescreen flat panel from Apple for $1299. That's just $300 more than Apple was charging yesterday for a 17" standard aspect model.

Re:The Bigger Story is the Displays

[alta]

Read the bottom of the story... there's a quote by a person named "Joswiak"

Oh my God that is scarry. Did Jobs and the Woz have an offspring together?

Re:The Bigger Story is the Displays

[MatthewRothenberg]

It sure looks to me like Apple's gotten ahead of its problems of last summer getting its hands on affordable LCDs. Apple announced that its future models would be LCD-based back in January 2002, but shortages forced them to back up a few steps. This pricing and the new range of laptop screens indicates that they're over the hump, I think.

Re:The Bigger Story is the Displays

[RobRancho]

Also note that the new 20'' display has a higher native resolution than the old 22''

Re:The Bigger Story is the Displays

[nfotxn]

You can get a 19" normal-aspect display from Dell for $719. It uses a standard interface (DVI or VGA) and has a better contrast ratio (350:1 vs 450:1).

The best part about Apple upgrades is . . .

[dgrgich]

. . . the fact that it immediately makes "last years" models much more affordable. Resellers like MacMall, Smalldog.com, & the others have great prices on these older models.

Of course, Apple may still have a problem selling these newer faster machines because they've managed to produce an OS that works fantastic on even older models like the dual 533 I'm writing this on!

Re:The best part about Apple upgrades is . . .

[jo_ham]

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!

Re:The best part about Apple upgrades is . . .

[3Bees]

dgrgich noted:

Of course, Apple may still have a problem selling these newer faster machines because they've managed to produce an OS that works fantastic on even older models like the dual 533 I'm writing this on!

That is one of the problems with Apple that has kept me using their machines for so long! :-) It is sooooo very nice to buy machines on a five to six year cycle instead of every one to two years! I was using my old Performa for so long that my friends couldn't give away PC's made at the same time! :-)

Re:The best part about Apple upgrades is . . .

[daviddennis]

Best answer to that is that the new machines do more of the effects in real time, which is a lot faster than even the fast rendering of the G4/dual 450.

Also, if you want to play with After Effects you really need a fast machine. I have a dual 450 too, but my new PowerBook G4 1ghz smokes it in After Effects - not even a contest.

The surprising lifespan of the dual 450 is thanks to the dual processors - I would certainly not buy a single processor desktop again.

Trust me, if you bought a faster machine, you'd love it even more :-).

D

Re:The best part about Apple upgrades is . . .

[wheezl]

Though it's not the latest and greatest. I grabbed an old Blue and White G3 and popped a G4/550 in it and hooked up my old 19" SGI monitor (Sony) to it. Didn't cost much at all, and now I have an excellent platform for editing DV, compositing, and everything else I do.

My AMD/XP box can only occasionally capture DV without dropping any frames and this is with cheetahs for drives.

So sure it's "slower" but not having to redo everything because it is f*cked up it comes out much much faster.

It's UNIX and runs all of the fancy apps. Yes I am running Final Cut Pro and PostgreSQL on the same box :P

"Expandible"? (Obligatory spelling snipe)

[pnot]

Faster, more expandible, and more affordable than ever... The Power Mac G4 also comes with a library of creative, productivity and communications-specific third-party applications that leverage the strengths of Mac OS X.

But evidently not a spell-checker...

Re:"Expandible"? (Obligatory spelling snipe)

[andih8u]

maybe they meant to say expendible?

Re:"Expandible"? (Obligatory spelling snipe)

[pnot]

maybe they meant to say expendible?

Do you mean that maybe they meant to say expendable?

Re:"Expandible"? (Obligatory spelling snipe)

[pnot]

Remember, always check sources before opening mouth

Indeed. You appear to have checked source instead of sources. While WordNet recognises "expandible", Webster's and OED appear not to (neither does OOo's spell checker). So to settle the confusion, before posting that comment I consulted the Source Of All Truth, i.e. Google. 2,430 hits for "expandible" in English, vs. 318,000 for "expandable". So since two respected dictionaries and popular usage appeared to back my opinion, I decided to stick with it. Especially since the comment wasn't meant particularly seriously...

to reduce the odds of sounding like a complete fuckwit.

Take it easy. It's only spelling, you know. Hardly worth getting worked up about.

Re:"Expandible"? (Obligatory spelling snipe)

[Alex Thorpe]

OS X has a system level spell checker, that works automatically in Mail and OmniWeb, but has to be run manually in Safari. I guess he's using Safari, and forgot to run it! ;-)

Re:"Expandible"? (Obligatory spelling snipe)

[bpbond]

I saw this on Apple's web page and had the same reaction--but "expandible" is in the dictionary as an alternate spelling of "expandable."

Re:"Expandible"? (Obligatory spelling snipe)

[Zoop]

Dictionary.com lists it as an alternate spelling. Apple is not immune to these things, but it happens so rarely that you'd best check thrice to ensure an untrod-upon crank.

cite

Re:Yeah...

[AssFace]

for $1999 you could build a pretty solid beowulf cluster out of Athlon XP 2000s (with half a gig of ram).

it would "only" have 5 to 7 nodes depending on your hardware choices - but that would still be fuckloads better than that single mac... well - depending on what you wanted to do.
a beowulf cluster is pretty worthless for running Illustrator.

Re:Why did they even bother?

[theloki42]

Yes, they should make the iMac G4s better, but posted eariler was the fact that Apple was rumored to be discontinuing them come June. Which leads me to believe something better is coming out in July at NYC...

excellent

[Boromir son of Faram]

It's great to see Apple leading the pack in new hardware. They are bringing 802.11g and FireWire 800 to the people just as they did with SMP (that "1.4GHz" sounds a lot more impressive next to a 3GHz P4 when you realize there are two of the suckers in there) and 1Kbase-T.

Funny, Macs used to be faster than Pentii, but crippled by their other hardware (SCSI, memory, ADB) and OS. Now they have the advantage everywhere except CPU speed, and I think they're a whole lot better off.

I see the new PowerMacs as a gift. With their power, used wisely, we might be able to save my people from the growing Shadow in the East.

Re:excellent

[overunderunderdone]

Funny, Macs used to be faster than Pentii, but crippled by their other hardware (SCSI, memory, ADB) and OS.

I'll agree wholeheartedly about the OS (which had a superior GUI but was inferior under the hood) and maybe the memory but I wouldn't say that ADB was "crippled" compared to serial ports. And SCSI, "crippled"? SCSI was a definite advantage over Wintel machines. I WILL agree they made the peripherals more expensive but you were getting more bang for your buck (in that line item at least).

Re:excellent

[kalidasa]

Pentii is not only annoying, but also wrong ;) The proper Latin plural of pentium would be pentia, cf. medium/media.

Yes, Pentium would be a neuter adjective of the second declension in Latin, and so Pentia would be the proper substantive plural. And virii is also wrong, as has been discussed many times before. I think that was his point.

Re:excellent

[jgerman]

SCSI was a definite advantage over Wintel machines

Errr, yeah, cuz you can't get SCSI on x86 boxes. Right.

Re:excellent

[johnalex]

Dont' know where you are, but from my location, Redmond is west.

Re:excellent

[pressman]

I'm actually in Seattle, so it definitely is the Shadow in the East.

Re:excellent

[neildiamond]

Shit onboard SCSI was the only reason I would have bought a Mac. When USB (an Intel invention) first came out it was soooo buggy. I can't believe that Apple relied on it entirely in the beginning. (USB 2.0 is much better.) Wow a Mac person saying that having an internal structure more similar to that of a PC is an improvement. On top of that, as a PC person, I always liked some of the features that Macs came with as standard equipment. Weird.

Re:excellent

[Datafage]

Sure you can, of course, but if you compare the PowerMac of the time with the prebuilt x86 machines of the time, guess what, the Apple had SCSI, the x86 didn't.

Re:excellent

[Datafage]

Where did he say the PowerMac should be called 2.84GHz? That's right, he didn't. What he did say was that the fact that it's dual should be taken into account, as it does result in an increase in speed. That increase is significantly more real than HT, which at best will enable an Intel chip to use all its cycles more effectively, but do not result in any additional cycles to play with.

Also, 2.4 * 2 * 2 = 9.6, not 16.8. Not only is it invalid, as you said, but incorrect mathematically.

Re:excellent

[Elwood P Dowd]

Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith said: "With their power, used wisely, we might be able to save my people from the growing Shadow in the East."

You said: "Dont' know where you are, but from my location, Redmond is west."

Mordor is in the East though. Of course, Faramir was the Steward of Gondor, not the King, but whatever.

Gotta run. The electrical tape on my spectacles is coming undone.

Re:excellent

[jgerman]

Pre built machines ... pshaw ;)

Both this and my previous posts are kidding around though, I'm not a x86 vs. Apple nazi, I like almost all machines... though what I REALLY want is a Lisp machine.

Re:excellent

[Quarters]

Where did he say the PowerMac should be called 2.84GHz?

I never said he did, genius. I was using sarcasm to point out that 2 CPUs * x speed != 1 CPU * 2*x speed.

There's enough overhead in running an SMP system that you will never have X + X = 2X

It's also a pure fanboi attitude to think that 2 mildly fast processor in a Mac will do anything to help the performanc deficit that Macs currently have against P4 machines. When digital video and image editing magazines start to do comparisons in Premiere, After Effects, and Photoshop that show P4 systems easily trouncing high end Mac boxes (and costing less, too), then you have to wonder why anyone would use a Mac. Especially in the digital content creation field, where most apps have identical UIs on the different platforms. At that point not even the UI presentation in the OS can be used as a deciding factor.

Re:excellent

[Datafage]

I definitely agree on that point, and I agree that both have their purposes, in fact I'm hoping I can manage a 17" Powerbook as my next machine. Now I'm glad I didn't make my reply as biting as I had thought originally...

Re:excellent

[bursch-X]

If you want to build the plural form for "Pentium" based on latin grammer, it would be "Pentia".

Re:excellent

[bursch-X]

where most apps have identical UIs

Yes and I'll start getting RSI because I'll have to hit CTRL+some_key all of the time on a Windoze machine, ouch!. Also the mouse acceleration curve that sucks on Windows is of course not important for designers, as well as the trouble you have to go through to get color management working properly on Windows.

Hey, they're all the same. WTF.

Re:excellent

[Datafage]

FUCKHEAD! First you claim you never said he said that the PowerMac should be quoted at double speed, and then you immediately go ahead and try to explain why it isn't so, even though he never claimed that. All that was claimed is that dual processors, given that OSX is designed for it, will help counteract the lower speed of each individual CPU. That is not up for discussion, it is a fact.

Now, further, in "embarassingly" parallel computation, X + X CAN = 2X, although this is admittedly rare. However, in any case where Intel's precious HT helps, dual CPUs help MORE. For practical applications, neither will double your speed. However, the original poster never claimed this, so your subtle sarcasm in pointing out that you can't add the speed of the two CPUs is completely irrelevant, and senseless arguing.

Re:excellent

[TheCrazyFinn]

And Boromir was the Brother of Faramir, not his son.

Re:excellent

[noewun]

The new G4s have 333MHz RAM. . .

Re:excellent

[overunderunderdone]

Errr, yeah, cuz you can't get SCSI on x86 boxes. Right.

We are talking about a pretty long time ago. SCSI came built in on the mac whereas IBM compatibles (in the jargon of the time) came with IDE built in. I'm not saying you couldn't add SCSI to the PC, I'm just saying that SCSI was better and more expensive and explained some of the Mac's premium price.

Re:Is a price drop at Apple news?

[Junks Jerzey]

Why dont you be fair and report on the next model eMachines, Dell or Compaq sells at Best Buy.

Because many people like what Apple is doing, and it's generally understood that if you could buy a Power Mac for the price of a Dell, then a whole lot of people here would get one. I mean, look, you get away from all the Intel/AMD nonsense, no crazy cooling issues, dual processors, flashy UNIX out of box with commercial applications available...this is the holy grail to a lot of people.

But no one wants to pay Apple's high-end prices.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[rollthelosindice]

I have an Emachine running 3 feet away from an "equivalent" HP. No performance difference. If you think brand name matters in the PC world, then you are obviously clueless.

read through it...

[mirko]

But I don't think that this part you included
was in the original article...

Steve Jobs announced that apple has joined Jihad against slashdot because of the stupidfucking pidity of the editors. "I thought I was some draconian shit, trying to censor people...but the editors at slashdot take the cake! My God, they're assholes." He said that $200.00 of every mac purchase would go towards the destruction of slashdot for the next 10 years.

Re:read through it...

[Textbook Error]

But I don't think that this part you included was in the original article...

You heard that whoosing sound? That was the sound of a joke. Passing over your head.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[YrWrstNtmr]

Just keep an eye on the power supply of that eMachine. They have to cut corners somewhere. My kids had one, and thats the part that failed.

Other than that, it seemed to be OK.

Re:This Just in

[Znonymous Coward]

Update:

Yes, Macs still more expensive than PC's... But they are worth it.

Highlights at 11.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[stratjakt]

I've bought 3 eMachines so far for various tasks. Swap in a new video card and some RAM and you're ready to go.

I just considered it a Mobo, CPU, Case, HDD, DVD-ROM, FDC and PSU thats cheaper than the components would cost by themselves, plus I didn't have to put it together.

Brand name fanboys deserve to go into hock to have their goofy 'Alienware' or other trendy-brand-name PCs. A fool and their money.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[jandrese]

We'll ask again in a year if your Emachine is still even running. I probably won't have to ask about the HP. Name brand may not matter, but quality of construction certainly matters.

Re:Why did they even bother?

[binaryDigit]

But, seriously, why did Apple even release this

True, why bother releasing new better competing products when you have new product coming out in 6 to 12 months (which we all know is nothing in computer time). People would be much more impressed with a jump from 1.25Ghz to 2Ghz vs seeing incremental steps and lowered prices along the way. Shame on them for not releasing new PowerBooks, after all it's been weeks since the previous announcment. Tying up those vast resources to bump up the processor speed and adding a few extra features, I'm sure this totally derailed any iMac or iBook efforts.

Look, I agree that they have soft spots that they have to work on, but laptops is not one of them. iMacs need to get cheaper, agreed. But they MUST continue to bump the TOTL PowerMac's to keep and hearts and minds of their high end buyers in the Mac camp. If they waited until the 970 to release ANYTHING in the PowerMac line, they'd be screwed big time.

If as some suggest that the new machines will be out in time for Summer MacWorld, then great. If not, don't be too surprised to see maybe one more bump if the new guys don't make it until the end of the year. I bet if Motorola can get them faster G4's, they'd put them out there pronto (as they did with these).

Re:This Just in

[the_Bionic_lemming]

And that explains why our economy is in the crapper.

(Laugh, it was meant to be funny)

Re:Why did they even bother?

[theloki42]

The article I was refering to is this, but the actual article is here. The Slashdot post is here.

A good day for Mac users

[rworne]

I am suprised no one noticed that the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is now a BTO option.

Still listed as "coming soon" though.

Checks the specs

[maceo1023]

Having yet to start repaying my $3500 Apple loan for my dual 1.25GHz machine, I couldn't believe the $1500 price drop. But check the specs -- no SuperDrive, less RAM, smaller L3 cache, smaller hard drive. Still, though.

Re:Checks the specs

[maceo1023]

Ha, true. Then again, I could have had your mom two or three thousand times for that kind of money, but why would I want that either?

I do.

[BoomerSooner]

But no one wants to pay Apple's high-end prices.

Until Linux has a decent desktop (where installing an application actually integrates with the menu) and has some decent apps (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, Premiere, ...) I'll be sticking with OS X on the client side and Linux/Solaris on the server side. Blue curve is a great try at a good desktop, maybe it will take off.

Linux has a long way to go to match the ease of use of even windows much less comparing it to OS X. I have no problems with linux b/c I've been using it since around '95 (ah slackware). However, trying to find all the workarounds to keep things playing friendly isn't fun on higher end or newer hardware.

Re:I do.

[ShavenYak]

Until Linux has a decent desktop (where installing an application actually integrates with the menu)...

Hmm, every app I install on my Mandrake Linux system gets integrated with the menu.

and has some decent apps (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Illustrator, Premiere, ...)

There are competitive GPL'd apps for all of those (saving you even more $$$), or you could run Wine and get the Windows versions of any of them to run.

Blue curve is a great try at a good desktop, maybe it will take off.

No, Bluecurve is a desktop theme. Gnome and KDE are still the desktops underneath it.

I have no problems with linux b/c I've been using it since around '95 (ah slackware). However, trying to find all the workarounds to keep things playing friendly isn't fun on higher end or newer hardware.

I don't have to 'find workarounds' for my hardware, and it's all pretty new stuff. Then again, I'm using a real distro that actually goes to the trouble of making things work, not one that just slaps all the software on the hard drive and says, "here ya go!"

Re:I do.

[Junks Jerzey]

There are competitive GPL'd apps for all of those (saving you even more $$$), or you could run Wine and get the Windows versions of any of them to run.

Sigh. This kind of misguided advocacy gets so tiring.

Re:I do.

[ryanw]

Amen brother.. preach on!

Serioulsy. said perfectly.

I would suggest any one of you guys to go down to your local apple resalers outlet and buy a mac and take it back before the return policy expires. (15 days or 30 days, depends on where you buy it) ...

Thats what I did first. I got a mac, tried it for 30 days and took it back because I didn't have the money to keep it. But It was the excellent chance to see if it was something that was over rated, or whatever. I loved it .. I ended up going back 3 months later and buying a Powermac 933MHz with superdrive and a viewsonic 19" monitor.

I will never go back to any other operating system ever again. Wherever OSX goes, I go. I like the apple hardware. It is rock solid. I don't have to play with mix matching different motherboards with CPU's and settings in the bios, and tweeks here and there... and different fans, etc.. it's all integrated, I spent 0 time on hardware issues and 0 problems with software not working with the hardware (ie driver problems, etc..)

Its a dream come true.

It all comes down to what is more important to you. Is your time more valuable or is the money you save on the system more valuable to you? I have learned since switching to macs I have been 1000 times more productive. I do video editing, audio recording, perl scripting, c programming, bourne shell scripting, etc... Try to do all that on linux or windows and you're in a mess.

With windows you're either pirating a ton of software or you're spending a TON of money to do what you can do in OSX out of the box. On linux you really just can't do it unless your satisfied with the endless number of beta programs out there that crash more than windows itsself. It's getting there... SLOWLY.. and who knows if ever it'll be there.

My point is I've actually tried all the different routes for a computer system. Why don't you do the same and see what your results are.

Re:Is a price drop at Apple news?

[johnpaul191]

big price drop on the LCDs, but the towers are upgraded. being the first or among the first machines to ship with Firewire800, 802.11g ready/equipped. it also says blutooth-enabled and bluetooth ready somewhere else, i don't know what the means exactley but .... hrmm... it seems in the stoe the top of the line BTO is Bluetooth included and the others are "ready". i dont know if it's the same little usb nub or some slick integration, but overall the upgrades and price drops are nice.

Re:Yeah...

[cosmo7]

kinda makes me curious why you're here posting about the new macs then.

Re:Who's Hat

[calc]

You do realize that AMD Athlon XP 3000+ which is coming out in a few weeks only really runs at 2.16GHz right? ;)

A G4 runs at around 1.5x MHz an equivalent P4. So a 1.42GHz would probably perform about the same as a P4 2.13GHz. Also P4's can't run in SMP mode, although you can buy a Xeon for that, so a Dual G4 1.42GHz is roughly equal to a single P4 4.26GHz, currently the fastest P4 is 3.06GHz.

Now do you see why Apple is using SMP? ;)

Lower your prices, Apple

[vasqzr]

$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.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[adzoox]

There is no $899 machine from any other manufacturer that has the specs this does. Apple DOES have a $899 G4 with monitor called the eMac.

If I go to Dell, I can configure a system shipped (no 800 firewire) for $1640 that is comparable to the base model.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[zaren]

What do you mean, lower your prices? This is already (I believe) $100 cheaper than the low end machine they were selling YESTERDAY, and it's faster!

To compare: as of yesterday, in the .edu channel, this was what I had priced out on their low end model:

$1643.00
867Mhz PowerPC G4
256MG SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
Combo drive
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro
64 MB DDR video memory

(+ 17" Mitsubishi monitor and Apple Pro speakers, and - internal modem)

On that model there was no FireWire 800, no Bluetooth, no Airport 800...

Right now, I'm looking at a low end machine with a faster CPU (1 Ghz), 20 gig more drive space, GeForce4 MX (better?) video, and faster ram, plus all the bells, whistles, and ports listed above, for $8 more than yesterday. If they want to give me all of that for an extra eight bucks, I'm not going to complain :)

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[cenonce]

The $499.00 Dell (Gateway, HP, whatever) is a farce and borders on, IMHO, consumer fraud. Everytime, I go to Dell and try to configure a $499.00 Dell with the standard bells & whistles (that comes with a PowerMac, BTW), the price always jumps from 499 to 1100 or 1200 bucks (minimum).

Yeah, you can get a 499 dollar Dell, but it has the standard equipment of a four year old model.

What a joke!

I like building my own machines, especially for running Linux (webservers, file sharing and such), but when I want to get anything done (i.e., to make a living), I get it done on a Mac. I don't spend time configuring (as in Linux) and I don't spend time recovering from crashes or things just not working not matter what I do (as I do in Windows).

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[jmcmurry]

...and a ATI Radeon 9000 Pro. And faster memory, for what that's worth.

You can take the "Fast" model (single 1GHz G4, DDR266 SDRAM) and configure it with the same options as are the defaults on the "Faster" model (dual 1.25 GHz G4, DDR333 SDRAM). The difference is $454. Probably worth it, if you're seriously looking for a Mac.

You seem to be in the same market that I'm in; I don't want to "Switch", I want "Both", but a Power Mac is just too expensive to be a good value in my mind. If I were already a dedicated Mac user (which I was once), I wouldn't mind getting a nice new machine for these prices. But, since I'm only thinking about getting one "for fun", they seem like expensive playtoys that I can probably do without.

Too bad.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[Phroggy]

Explain to me again how a school buying more expensive hardware that isn't generally used in the real world is going to help my kid get a better education?

The whole "generally used in the real world" argument is utter nonsense. You should teach kids computing concepts, not specific applications or systems, because by the time they graduate, the specific applications and systems they used will be obsolete anyway, but the concepts still apply. It doesn't matter if a kid learns about computers on Mac OS X, Windows XP, KDE, Gnome, Mac OS 8, or Windows 95. They'll have to adjust later anyway.

However, there are two distinct advantages of not using Windows in school: first, since the student is likely to be using Windows at home, teaching them something else at school gives them a broader base of experience than what they might otherwise have exposure to, which will make it easier to adjust to other systems in the future. Second, it shows them that there are viable alternatives to Microsoft, so if they later choose to run Windows, it will at least be a real choice.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[constantnormal]

Please put together a Wintel PC with these same features at any price, so we can have a legitimate comparison. Then you can complain about Apple's "overpriced" products.

If you want Apple to drop the combo drive, integrated Bluetooth, 802.11g and 800 Mbps Firewire and sell that for $899 -- that's another matter. But you specifically listed these features, so you must want them, just not bad enough to pay a modest premium for them. Don't forget that iLife (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto) comes bundled with it, along with OS X and a "standard" gigahertz ethernet port. But you probably want to buy a machine stripped of all bundled software & hardware in order to keep the price down.

Too bad. I'd like to pay $899 for a trip to the space station, but the Russians have this silly notion that I'll have to pay them $20M for the trip. I'd say that was overpriced, but I see no better deals available anywhere.

Low interest loans are available everywhere. Put your $899 to work and borrow the rest. You'll recoup it as the machine stays useful for 5-6 years. I still use a PowerMac 7500 from 1996 -- admittedly, it's no longer the same machine, as it now sports a midrange G3, Firewire, USB and OS X, but my overall cost has been fairly small compared to the 3 systems my Wintel peers have gone through during the same interval.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[clmensch]

EXCELLENT post. Spot on, accurate, insightful, and lucid. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[rawg]

You all should also remember. Your not just paying for hardware. There is a ton of software that comes with the system. Even if you installed Linux or FreeBSD, you do not get all the software on a Mac. I wonder what the Mac would cost without the software? Say if you wanted to install Linux on it.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[LookSharp]

Yeah, you can get a 499 dollar Dell, but it has the standard equipment of a four year old model.

That's FUD, and it's WRONG. The Dell 2350 series ($499 and up) STARTS at a Celeron 1.7 GHz, 40GB hard drive, 256MB DDR RAM, a 48x CD-Rom, and a free monitor and printer. Includes Windows XP and other software bundle.

Four years ago, early 1999, our company was buying Pentium II 350MHz machines, with 64 megsabytes of RAM, 6 GB hard drives, and a 16x CD-Rom, with a 15 inch monitor, for about $1200. Add $150 if we wanted NT4.0 on it.

So let's see, you're getting a 1.7 GHz CPU (and spin all youw ant about engineer and how great OS X is; that Celeron 1.7 will bring it against a 1GHz G4), and a "free" monitor, for $1000 less?

That grand will be me a heck of a lot of blow, man.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[LookSharp]

That grand will be me a heck of a lot of blow, man.

Obviously I was doign some when I posted. I eamnt to say, BUY me a lot of blow. And "spin all youw ant about engineer" should be "spin all you want about engineering."

Oh well, back to the mirror and the razor blade!

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[phillymjs]

Explain to me again how a school buying more expensive hardware that isn't generally used in the real world is going to help my kid get a better education?

1) Macs remain viable computers much longer than Windows PCs. Hell, wouldn't surprise me if there were STILL a few schools with labs of Apple IIs that are plenty of machine for what they're used for.

2) Macs have been historically easier to maintain. Those schools that save so much money on their Dell hardware don't like to talk about the one or two dedicated Windows support guys they had to unexpectedly hire to keep the labs running. Mac labs were usually maintained by the teachers in their free time with little effort. Once OS X becomes prevalent in schools this should be even easier with the use of NetBooting and/or the utilities that automate re-imaging of the drive.

3) "Isn't used in the real world" is a bullshit argument. You shouldn't teach a child to use Windows, you should teach him/her how to use a GUI so they can apply the concepts to whatever they happen upon by the time they get to the real world. You shouldn't teach a child how to use Word, you should teach him/her how to use a word processing application so they can apply the concepts to whatever they happen upon by the time they get to the real world. Trade schools don't teach future plumbers only how to install Delta fixtures. They don't teach future carpenters only how to build stuff with Weyerhauser wood. Likewise they shouldn't teach children only how to use Windows and Windows applications.

~Philly

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[iJed]

I am (primarily) a Mac user and I agree that Apple systems are far to expensive. I would like to see a machine that does not include a monitor for less than $800. This would mean that I could upgrade my system far more frequently without wasting money on paying for another display.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[BigBir3d]

>>>If you want Apple to drop the combo drive, integrated Bluetooth, 802.11g and 800 Mbps Firewire and sell that for $899

Aside from the drive...

BT, FW800, 802.11g add little value, and little cost to this machine.

BT is not used by much of anything yet...

FW800 is a waste. Standard firewire doesn't use all the bandwidth available (sound familiar).

802.11g will not let you surf the net faster. Moving files from one machine to another on your subnet might go faster.

Again, little value and little cost (not accounting for development).

Speed bump is nothing special... especially when looking at the pathetic performance of the system bus.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[Stormie]

GeForce4 MX (better?) video

Nope, the Radeon 9000 Pro is unquestionably superior to the GeForce4 MX.. although how good the support or demand for either on a Mac is, I don't know.. (I heard a while ago that none of the OpenGL extensions for vertex & pixel shaders have been implemented for MacOS, but that might have changed)

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[HaveNoMouth]

Explain to me again how a school buying more expensive hardware that isn't generally used in the real world is going to help my kid get a better education?

Because your kids need to know how to dream. Because they need to understand they don't have to settle for second best. Because your kids are going to be the ones who finally invent a computer better than the Mac, if anybody does, and they need to understand the current benchmark.

When you fly somewhere on a business trip and rent a car, are you completely flummoxed when the car they give you is not identical to the car you own? Of course not. You drive a BMW or Volvo at home, and you rent a POS Chevy Lumina. Do you have to pore over the owner's manual or take a "training course" before you drive the thing off the lot? Well your kids are that way about computers. They can switch computers as easily as you can switch cars. And if they are experienced at driving a great computer, at least then they'll bitch to the maker of the crappy one they're forced to drive later and maybe improve it.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[tshak]

Yeah, you can get a 499 dollar Dell, but it has the standard equipment of a four year old model.

Or, you can buy a G4 which came out... 4 years ago!

Not to troll - I really want to convert to OS X for all of my music applications. But I _NEED_ the CPU speed of an Athlon 2100+ (~1.3-1.4Ggz G4)... I can get a cheap Athlon2100+ box for well under $999 (with Firewire and a Radeon 9500Pro). I'm willing to pay a little more for the quality of Apple hardware, but not much.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[Polo]

OLD = DUAL 867's

NEW = SINGLE 1Ghz

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[cenonce]

FUD? That's a little dramatic.

Today's Celeron 1.7 is yesterday's PII 350. A PII doesn't run ME very well (heck I have a PIII 800 that doesn't run it very well) and a Celeron doesn't run XP very well.

48X CD-ROM drives were standard in 1999. Combo Drives (or at least a DVD and a CD-RW drives) are standard in 2003.

64 MB of RAM runs Win 98. 256 MB RAM does not run XP very well (especially with a Celeron 1.7).

"Free" 15" monitor!?! No thanks... you can't even find a 15" CRT in the store anymore. A 20 dollar Lexmark printer with crappy printing and an ink cartridge I have to replace after 2 months? Are they doing me a favor by throwing that in, or just trying to ditch old inventory?

I just went to Dell's site to build a 499 dollar PC! There was no more 499 dollar one, so I went with the 699 (799 - 100 dollar rebate). It ended up costing 1488. Yeah it as a PIV now... 1.8 ghz. 15" monitor (flat screen too), but no free printer. I added 512 MB of RAM to run XP. I upgraded to full operating system, XP Pro (Note: OS X only has one version). I added a Combo Drive (since that is the minimum you can get on a Power Mac). Gigabit ethernet wasn't an option. Neither was a graphics card. That could have something to do with the Intel built in video motherboard they used to save money. There is no AGP slot to upgrade that either. There is also probably only 2 PCI slots in that machine. And not likely any room to put a second harddrive.

All that and the thrill of using Windows! No thanks! I suspect that the reason the G4 is slow has more to do with the OS than the CPU. I suspect PIV's are so darn fast is because Windows is so full of security holes.

So I'd say for 1488, I'll pony up the extra 200 bucks to buy a CRT for an entry level G4 and not waste my time trying to upgrade a PC with no expansion slots, nor configure and secure Windows XP. And a single 1 ghz G4 Power Mac probably is comparable in speed (whatever that means) to a P-IV 1.8.

Like I said. I got nothing against PC boxes. I build them and enjoy doing it. The 499 dollar PC is great for a basic business machine. But these machines aren't directed at businesses. They are directed at parents buying for their kid. And I do have a problem with pawning off underpowered, unexpandable, unupgradeable machines as some great home media/game box to unsuspecting parents.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[drsmithy]

Apple DOES have a $899 G4 with monitor called the eMac

What they need is an $1000ish headless desktop machine with limited expandability (1xAGP, 1xPCI, 1x5.25" bay, 2x3.5" bays) in a smaller case. That is what the 1Ghz G4 tower needs to be.

If I go to Dell, I can configure a system shipped (no 800 firewire) for $1640 that is comparable to the base model.

Yes, but your idea of "comparable" is probably a 3Ghz P4 Precision workstation and/or you're assigning ridiculously unbalanced "advantages" to things like FW800 and 1GB ethernet.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[bursch-X]

BT, FW800, 802.11g add little value, and little cost to this machine.
BT is not used by much of anything yet...

Except for some phone which might be of immense value to some.

FW800 is a waste. Standard firewire doesn't use all the bandwidth available (sound familiar).

Did you know that there are FireWire RAIDs, you can build them by daisychaining or better get an enclosure for an eight drive FW RAID. I bet you WILL max out FW 400.

802.11g will not let you surf the net faster. Moving files from one machine to another on your subnet might go faster.

Wrong. Here in Tokyo 100Mbps Fibreoptic connections to the internet are widely available (ca. 5000 yen/month). Although most of them will max out at about 30 to 40 Mbps, this is still about three to four times of 802.11b. So it will be faster for your browsing having AirPort Extreme.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[zaren]

No, I was comparing the low-end single CPU 867 model.

Hmm, now that I think of it, they were only offering that in the .edu channel, so you might not have seen it. But the 867 was the lowest end machine as of yesterday.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[damiam]

GeForce4 MX (better?) video

The gf4mx and radeon 9000 benchmark similarly, IIRC, but the Radeon supports all directx8 features, while the gf4 only supports dx7.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[Polo]

Sorry, I stand corrected. I was looking at the retail channel model for $1699. duh.

I was thinking it was kind of expensive since you could get a dual 867 for $50 more, but it has a monitor, etc...

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[TheCrazyFinn]

802.11g not worth it, Hmmm, 54Mb/s vs 11Mb/s for 802.11b. Well, now if I've got two boxes on that network sharing files, 802.11g just justified itself. And Apple's built in antenna's are much better than the ones on most PCI wireless cards, try 3-4x the range. Bluetooth is starting to take off, not a big deal. FW800 is also a big win, becuase it improves performance with multiple devices, also there's a fair number of Oxford911 based FW HDD;s that easily eat the entire available ieee1394a bandwidth. ANd the system bus is 167MHz, same as your Athlon.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[cenonce]

Completely irrelevant! We are talking about the desktop market, NOT the Server Market. What parent is going to buy MS IIS for their kid!?!

But OK, I'll see your Mac OS X Server, but I guess that means I get to add all of these servers in too then, huh? http://www.microsoft.com/servers/evaluation/overvi ew/default.asp

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[BigBir3d]

Did you know that there are FireWire RAIDs, you can build them by daisychaining or better get an enclosure for an eight drive FW RAID. I bet you WILL max out FW 400.

AFAIK you can have more than one channel per enclosure...

Wrong. Here in Tokyo 100Mbps Fibreoptic connections to the internet are widely available (ca. 5000 yen/month). Although most of them will max out at about 30 to 40 Mbps, this is still about three to four times of 802.11b. So it will be faster for your browsing having AirPort Extreme.

How many web servers spit stuff out that fast on a regular basis?

Except for some phone which might be of immense value to some.

Not me. AFAIK there are only 2 or 3 phones on the market now that use BT. BT has been around for a couple years now. It was supposed to "save" the pda market (check for details), and failed. Every printer was going to have it. Every cell phone was going to have it.

None of this BT stuff has come to fruition. This will prolly be the same as USB 1 was. Used by Apple and nobody else for so long that there were numerous better things to use (firewire) by the time it became popular/accepted.

Oh yeah... no Athlon here. If/when there is one... no 167MHz bus... the Intel/AMD x86 system has evolved far past 167, well before 167 was available from Apple (Motorola really). My personal machine has a screaming (not) P3 500 with a PC100 bus :-( Not that it matters for anything (for me) besides games.

One can only hope Apple dumps Motorola like the festering fruit that it is; and goes with someone who actually does R&D in the computer industry (IBM) still... Sorry for the bad pun.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[Chazmyrr]

Lets burn some more Karma since replying to a post is apparently offtopic around here.

I didn't ask how using Apple was going to help my kid learn about computers. I didn't ask how OS X would make my kid a better person. I don't even recall mentioning Windows at all.

The question is "How does buying more expensive hardware that isn't generally used in the real world help my kid get a better education?".

My kid doesn't want to be a Comp Sci major. He doesn't want to learn computing concepts. He doesn't care which OS is better. He doesn't care if there are viable alternatives to Windows. He wants to use his computer to help him do better in school. He wants to use his computer to do research. Write papers. Create presentations.

So how does an Apple do this better than an Intel/AMD computer? For the reading comprehension impaired, let me point out once again I did not ask why is OS X better than Windows.

The point of "not generally used in the real world" is that this isn't even a mitigating factor that would help the case for Apple.

And finally, as a taxpayer and a parent who has to make sure that my son can do his homework on the same platform used in school, I see some distinct advantages to using the Intel/AMD platform. It doesnt put nearly as much of a dent in my wallet. The computer might be useful for something other than doing his homework. I can give my son my old dev rig whenever I upgrade. My taxes don't go up just so that my son can see that there are viable alternatives to Windows.

I'm not saying Apple is bad. I'm saying answer the same question I asked. I'm saying back up your assertions with some facts that have relevance to the general public. I'm saying that if Apple wants to compete in the educational market, they have provide a compelling price point.

Re:Lower your prices, Apple

[rawg]

Exactly! And the fact that I can buy and install software or hardware and it works without tweaking anything. Just install and use. I know that Debian comes really close to this. I love Apt. I run Debian on all my servers. But my desktop is a Mac.

Re:What a ripoff

[MTUdork]

You might think you're paying a lot, but because Apple makes almost all of it's own products, it doesnt have to worry about upping the cost of products that other companies make, only to pass them on to you. This means that for more money, you are getting WAY more value!

Re:So....

[binaryDigit]

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?

Re:Who's Hat

[FleshWound]

Who's Hat

Yes, that is that question, isn't it? Who is Hat? And what does he have to do with PowerMacs?

;)

Re:So....

[jmichaelg]

Agree 100% - even if it will cost me karma.

How many dB does it pump out?

[jamie]

What I'd like to know is how noisy the new mirror-face Power Macs are.

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...

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[bwalling]

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.)

Better not put a GeForce FX in it, then!

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[mpeeters]

It is _very_ quiet.
I have a 17" model and it only makes noise when the convective cooling does not work. Even then, the fan makes almost no noise. Really.

No dB levels, though.

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[teamhasnoi]

Here is a website having to do with the madness caused by the noise of these new G4s. Here is a wav of the actual sound made by these monsters.

We can only hope that Apple changes the fans in the next rev... :(

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[jamie]

Thanks for the link, here it is clickable:

Apple updates Power Macs, releases 20 inch display:

The noise level was one of the biggest complaints many customers had with the previous generation Power Macs. According to Apple, this problem has been fixed and customers will be happy with the results of the work put into correcting this issue.

"We worked really hard and went over the systems to find every possible way to make the system quieter," said Tom Boger, Director, Power Mac Product Marketing. "I'm happy to tell you that we've done that -- when the systems get out in the marketplace, I'm sure our customers are going to be delighted at how quiet these systems are."

"They are significantly quieter -- these will answer the critics," added Joswiak.

I hope so... I don't want my next Mac to end up looking like this...

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[hcdejong]

That's an iMac you're talking about, not a PowerMac G4.

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[pi radians]

Here is a wav [autospeak.com] of the actual sound made by these monsters.

I bought a dual 867 in August. It runs in my basement 24/7. It has never made any sort of noise like that. Wow. I can see why some people who have the noisier systems are pissed off, but understand that only some of the G4's actually make that noise.

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[Pemdas]

This is a very important point that anyone thinking about purchasing a powermac should look into. I have one of the MDD G4s, which these are, and it's far and away the noisiest computer I've ever owned.

It cranks out a little under 50 dB of irritating noise. The iMacs are nice and quiet; the old Cube was silent, these things are beastly loud!

I feel like something of a fool for my purchase now. I went into the purchase thinking "oh, it's an Apple, they're good about making their boxes quiet". If I had known how loud this thing was going to be, I would probably not have purchased it. Apple is not doing anything significant to address the issue, even though virtually every G4 owner I've talked to is extremely unhappy with the white-noise machine they recieved.

So at this point, all I can do is warn anyone thinking about purchasing one of these boxes; if you are seriously thinking about it, make sure you go and personally hear one of these boxen running before you make a decision and plunk down several thousand dollars. Think very hard about whether you want to put up with the racket.

I would also highly recommend checking out this website, which is devoted to g4 noise issues to understand how other people feel about this issue.

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[tbmaddux]

What I'd like to know is how noisy the new mirror-face Power Macs are.

The really bad noise in the (old) mirrored-drive-door PowerMac G4s is the same source as in the Quicksilver 2002s. It's the dual 60mm power supply fans manufactured by Delta. You can get good results by modding the case to get rid of them or replace them. Then you can get more aggressive with the rest of your setup.

Unfortunately those fans spin at constant RPM and don't respond to firmware fixes that others have remarked on -- the firmware fix is just for the mid-case variable-speed CPU fan.

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[generic-man]

Not only are the new G4 towers loud, they're also very bright. A few months ago, a friend of mine bought a dual-1.25GHz machine with the 23" display (for about $3000 more than what it costs today). He put it in his dorm room. When the computer goes on standby, the lights on the front of the computer and monitor start pulsing in unison. The lights are so bright, they were actually preventing my friend and his roommate from sleeping.

One solution would have been to place tape over the light, but my friend wouldn't dare do that to his precious Apple equipment. Instead, he rigged up a little assembly of plastic cups to block out the light. At night time, the cups go on, and the annoyance goes away.

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[Mr. Spleen]

Or if you don't want to build a plywood case, you can always go for one of these things:

http://www.crywolfstore.com/cms/?action=BrowseCa te gory&category=Silencer

"The CoolMac Silencer uses heat pipe and air flow technologies to provide silent cooling while eliminating the need for external fans. The CoolMac Silencer reduces the noise of a Power Mac G4 from 65 dB to 37 dB. For comparative purposes, an empty 70 square-foot office with a computer, heat or air conditioning, and lights on typically emits 40 dB. What's more, the cabinet is airtight to prevent dust and dirt from contaminating the components."

There are several different models, including some that have built-in racks for Xserves (but you could put any rackable item in there).

They work really well. We have an Xserve in one and I didn't realize it was on until I sat on it and felt the vibration. =P

Re:How many dB does it pump out?

[damiam]

This yahoo article says that the new Macs are significantly quieter.

In Summary

[forged]

You get more for more !

I've heard that one before :)

Re:In Summary

[ruiner13]

You get more for more !

Actually, you get more for less, as they reduced the prices a bit, even for the high end systems.

ISP running on eMachines

[vasqzr]

*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.

Re:ISP running on eMachines

[Hadlock]

sounds more like they bought quality hardware for cheap to me. more power to them if they recycled last year's monitors and the old network cards

Re:Is a price drop at Apple news?

[binaryDigit]

It's news because Apple ships more *nix/OSS "based" machines than anyone else on the planet. And since this site focuses on issues in the *nix and OSS world, I would say that the news it quite appropriate. Why are people so surprised by the attention Apple gets here on /.? Are they forgetting that the /. editors deem them worthy enough for their OWN SECTION?

Re:Yeah...

[hcdejong]

Well, yes. But then why compare your 'roll-your-own' system with a PowerMac G4?

one highly desirable chunk of hardware

[martin]

and one huge CC bill when it arrives.

yes yes I know you get alsorts of yummy things on it, but when trying to get this past the "government at home" they only see how much it costs.

When I can all need h/w wise from Dell/../.. for under £1000 why should should I fork out all this extra and STILL have to pay extra for the display.

All I do at home is a little word/email/surfing and my 1Ghz PIII runs all the games I have fine....

OK if I was into video editing etc it would be worth it...

ya pays ya money ya makes your choice...

Re:one highly desirable chunk of hardware

[LMariachi]

When I can all need h/w wise from Dell/../.. for under £1000 why should should I fork out all this extra and STILL have to pay extra for the display.

You shouldn't. You also shouldn't buy one of these if what you need is a microwave oven or a fuel pump or a pair of ski boots.

Re:one highly desirable chunk of hardware

[choctotha]

Becouse if you really take a look at what you get from dell for 1000. I was out shoping for a machine and by the time I got everything together with some really nice stuff it was right around the same price as a new mid-range mac.

Re:one highly desirable chunk of hardware

[knoxer]

Ummmm, lemme think here...

How about a G4 iMac, or an eMac, or even a G3 iMac. If you don't do anything fancy with your computer that's more than you need.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[Twirlip of the Mists]

It still is laggy on the fastest machines.

No, it's not. I really don't know where people get this idea. I have a Mac that is, as of this morning, no longer state-of-the-art. It's got two 1 GHz G4's and a Radeon 9000 card. Is it "laggy?" No. It's faster than I am; the only time I wait on it is when I'm compiling.

I also have a 400 MHz G3 iMac, not a fast machine by anybody's reckoning. OS X is entirely useable on that machine for things like surfing and email, iCal, iChat, iTunes, iPhoto, and so on.

I think the people who still propagate the "OS X is slow" meme haven't used it in about a year.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[Goth Biker Babe]

Jaguar *is* Ford, well owned by them anyways. They are built in Jaguar plants (Halewood and Coventry) with Jaguar quality control but the engines are built in the Ford engine works in Bridgend, South Wales.

Re:Yeah...

[overunderunderdone]

For only $1999 ... Do you know what kind of PC I could build for that much money??

Actually that is a pretty good question - Assuming your time is worth nothing, how much would it take to duplicate this on the PC side? A dual 2GHz proc (I don't go for steve's "PowerPC is twice as fast" but it IS at least a little faster than intel) with 802.11g, FireWire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth etc. Or assuming your time IS worth something how much to buy such a configuration from Dell.

Just curious

Re:Is a price drop at Apple news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bluetooth enabled means it comes with it.

Bluetooth ready means it comes with it for $50. It's an internal module of some kind, same as the 802.11g one.

Dumb question

[captaineo]

Does anybody know if it is possible to drive one of these displays from a standard PC graphics card with a DVI output? Is there such a thing as a DVI-to-ADC adaptor?

Re:Dumb question

[Ponty]

You need a device called a DVIator (good name, eh?) http://www.drbott.com/prod/DVIator.html

It's a little expensive, but that's because it has to do all of the power stuff that you get over the ADC.

Re:Dumb question

[captaineo]

Thanks for the link... But do you know if it actually works? I am concerned about the odd resolutions of the Cinema displays (1920x1200 or 1680x1050). Since it's an LCD you need a video mode that exactly matches the pixel resolution and refresh rate the display wants... Windows display drivers tend not to be flexible in this regard (NVIDIA's recent drivers might work with some registry hacking though). With XFree I guess it might be made to work with the correct modeline.

The DVIator website doesn't actually state the details of how one might get it to work on a PC (understandable, since Apple might sue them...). So, I ask, has anyone actually done it?

Re:Dumb question

[henele]

I read on a mac message boards that 'proper' ATI and NVidia cards are the ones to check out for PC+Apple Display setups because the Apple and Wintel cards share big chunks of bios and are therefore likely to be cool with the slightly wacky resolutions. They also said to check the respective vendors websites for actual details, which I certainly recomend :)

RISC vs CISC

[digitalscoots]

You can't compare clock speeds for a RISC processor to an Intel CISC processor. The clock speed only tells you how fast each instruction is executed, not how fast the CPU runs an application compared to a different architecture. A 1.42 GHz RISC processor may well be faster than a 3 GHz CISC processor in actual performance.

Re:RISC vs CISC

[syadasti]

Get a clue, Intel CPUs haven't been CISC based for years...

Re:RISC vs CISC

[fobbman]

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.

Re:RISC vs CISC

[hcdejong]

Except that according to various recent tests, it isn't. At least not in the Apple vs Wintel case.

Re:RISC vs CISC

[Oculus Habent]

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.

Re:RISC vs CISC

[digitalscoots]

I don't disagree with you, but the average Slashdot reader should at least know that comparing a PowerMAC to an Intel based solely on CPU clock speed numbers isn't a valid comparison of performance.

Re:RISC vs CISC

[fitten]

Yes... and compilers can choose instruction sequences that help this process along.

Re:RISC vs CISC

[geekee]

Quit using CISC vs RISC. It's an obsolete comparison. All modern processors, including Intel, use a RISC core. Intel just needs extra hardware to deal with their old instruction in the pipeline to make sure they retire properly.

Re:RISC vs CISC

[PCBman!]

It's all part of the decode stage, simple instructions (the set that follow the RISC model in the first place) Can generally hit the lookup table immediately, the more complex DMA style instructions (string handling, etc.) need to be broken down and the microps ordered correctly. Much of this takes less time then you think, although if intel wanted pure performance, the entire process would be done without a lookup table (like alpha-all logic, no lookup). BTW all processors have an instruction decode stage, how it is broken up and how it works, as you can expect varies.

As for instruction reordering for performance, as stated before, the compiler's supposed to do the work, and intel's compiler writers are incredible at their job. In a lot of ways, the P4 was perfectly engineered to leverage intel's strengths all the way through the design and production stage, and the power of their compiler FOR THEIR processor is one of the examples of this.

Re:RISC vs CISC

[repetty]

Apple may be better, but the race is in the numbers, no matter how invalid they are.

I used to believe that and so did Apple.

No one gives a flying fuck that PC's have higher clock speeds than Macs. Your head is stuck back in the early 90's.

What people care about is not changing.

To quote Steve Jobs at MacWorld 2003 in SF, "People use what they know."

That it. That's all there is to it. All the rest is rhetoric.

Re:Display

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You say that like it's something new. Power Macs have always come without a monitor. Which is fine, because any third-party monitor will work, and lots of people like to save money by using an old monitor, or buying a non-Apple-branded monitor for their new G4.

Of course, now that the 17" display is down to $700, that becomes less of a point.

Re:Yeah...

[NineNine]

Yeah, but would it be as *pretty*??

Growing Shadow in the East?

[chunkwhite86]

Would that be Iraq or North Korea? ;-)

How about the memory?

[melvin22]

When the PowerMacs came out with DDR SDRAM support, I remeber a lot of people claiming (I don't know much about memory so, go easy on me if I'm wrong) that the PowerMacs didn't really take advantage of the DDR capabilities. I think they said the Macs actually operated pretty much like the regular SDRAM PowerMacs and that the DDR RAM was just wasted on the system.

Now I see that these are advertised as having DDR333. Can anyone elaborate on that? Do these PowerMacs make use of the advantages of DDR333 over regular SDRAM?

Re:How about the memory?

[davechen]

Apple's web page says the throughput between the system controller and main memory is 2.7 Gigabytes per second. The problem is the CPU's are connected to the system controller on a 167 Megahertz, 64 bit MPX bus. That's 1.33 Gigabytes per second, and the two CPU's share the same bus. So the CPU's can't push data out (or suck it in) as fast as the memory can. Note that it's because of Motorola, not Apple.

On the other hand, the nice thing is that the graphics card and the disks can be accessing main memory at the same time as the CPU's and you won't have to worry about stalls because of contentions. This would probably be most evident on graphics intensive processing (3-d games) and database/web server type apps with lots of I/O.

Re:How about the memory?

[nojayuk]

Now I see that these are advertised as having DDR333. Can anyone elaborate on that? Do these PowerMacs make use of the advantages of DDR333 over regular SDRAM?

Apple are using 333DDR memory because there are no mass market manufacturers of 166MHz SDRAM. The Motorola G4 cannot talk to DDR properly but the new versions of the chip have managed to up their memory speed from 133MHz to 166MHz. SDRAM and DDR are now comparable in price so the the motherboard memory interface has been reworked to use DDR at half its total capacity. Any new-design chips like the 970 will use DDR (or RAMBUS) to its maximum capacity.

Re:How about the memory?

[ivan256]

That's only half true. PCI devices can still use the extra speed for DMA, so while only half to the memory throughput can be used by the processor, the PCI and AGP busses can get to memory using the remaining throughput. It's not completely crippled.

Oh, and 133MHz SDRAM is still WAY cheaper than DDR.

Question for Apple owners

[Twister002]

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?

Re:Question for Apple owners

[aziraphale]

I still have an old Powerbook 165c, and a Mac IIci, both doing sterling work in one capacity or another around the house. Old macs age much more gracefully than PCs, and can generally continue to run the latest software for a long time after they're purchased. Apple have managed the two big transitions in their history - from 68x to PowerPC and from classic MacOS to OS X - in a very slick manner that ensures the minimum hardware and software is left behind. No need to fear the future...

Re:Question for Apple owners

[Doctor Beavis]

It kind of depends on what you mean by 'upgrade.' If you mean get a whole new computer, I probably do so about every 3 years or so. But even that is more because of the lust factor than that my older computer is no longer able to run contemporary applications.

In terms of upgrading an existing machine, I still have my first generation G3 desktop machine that I bought in 1997. I have upgraded this machine several times over the years to keep it semi-up to date. I put in a 400 MHz G3 for about $200 (probably 4 years ago now), tons of extra RAM, a bigger HD, and added a FireWire/USB card. This machine runs OS X (although the GUI is much slower than on my 500 MHz G4 Titanium PB) and is still perfectly functional. I have friends who own PC's from that same era and they have long since had to abandon them (or change them to linux boxes, e.g.). Games are another matter - I was a bigger gamer in the past, but now play games like Civilization 3 and Sims that run fine on my PB. Twitchy first-person shooters (Unreal, etc.) really do need the power and graphics cards that you can't get in a laptop. If you are big into those types of games, laptops are NOT the way to go. On the other hand, the desktops are very upgradeable, especially now that Apple has AGP, uses IDE drives, etc.

As far as PB's breaking down, that would cost a bundle (as would any laptop), but you can get a 3-year extended warranty (covers EVERYTHING) for about $300. I thought it was worth it but will also be happy if I never need it (haven't had to invoke it yet).

Hope this helps.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[cedmond]

I still have an old "Beige" G3 tower at home. 266MHz overclocked to 300MHz, 256 MB RAM, came with a 4 GB (Yes "four") HD and I dropped a 60GB in it recently. I also added USB and Firewire PCI cards and upgraded the video card ( free from a friend ). It does everything I want it too, but is a little slow with the latest games. My point is they are very upgradable machines and they definitely have staying power.

I also work in a graphic design shop where we still have many Blue and White G3's running Photoshop and Quark all day long. They hold their own against the G4's and are not seen as a burden to work on.

Overall, I think Mac's tend to hold their value for quite awhile. If your not looking for the highest Quake frame rates on your block you should have a machine that will last for years.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[duck_oil]

I've had my iMac since 1999 and I still love it. It has trouble with some of the modern games because of it's weak video card (Rage 128). I've though about upgrading, but my iMac still does 95% of what I need it for.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[mjolnir_]

I've been supporting and working with Macs in the publishing and advertising fields for over 8 years now and I can tell you from experience that Macs have a longer useful life than Windows-based PCs.

Mac owners tend to hang on to their machines through more than one product revision cycle; sure, they're expensive, I'd love to upgrade, but my G4/400 here at work does everything I need it to -- and my G4/500 single-cpu at home runs Mac OS X quite well.

An increase of a few hundred Mhz is not a compelling upgrade for most. But jumping a few generations and replacing hardware that has performed flawlessly for three, four, five years? That's where you'll see me.

Now if only my CFO would start returning my calls...

Re:Question for Apple owners

[alchemist68]

My first Macintosh was a PowerBook 520c with a 68LC040 processor running at 50MHz and the system bus running at 25MHz. This laptop is 8 years old and still works. I use it about once a month now to download/upload programs to my Hewlett Packard HP48 calculator. That old laptop has a REAL serial port on it where as the new Macs come with USB now.

My second Macintosh was a PowerMac G3 running at 500MHz. It is 5 years old this month. I added an IBM formatted 18GB UltraSCSI to it three years ago, and cranked the RAM from 128MB to 768MB. Just dropped in the HD, reformmated using Apple's disk utility and installed LinuxPPC 2000 on it. Ran great with Linux for one year, then Mac OS X was released and have been very happy with it ever since. This has been my experience with my PowerMac G3: it is rock solid stable with Mac OS X - no crashes, it is good hardware, you DO get what you pay for. I would recommend getting the top of the line tower configuration, you won't be sorry, and if you don't like it, sell it. Apples have good resale value.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[Mononoke]

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 bought a G3 desktop (the very first generation G3 Mac) back in Spring of '98. Since that time I've:

1. Overclocked the processor and the buss. (Was 233Mhz, now 292Mhz)
2. Added a Voodoo3 card.
3. Swapped-out the hard drive for something larger.
4. Added a USB card.
5. Added RAM, added RAM, added RAM. (It started at 32Meg, is now 512Meg.)

How often do I replace my Macs? Not very. I just add to the inventory.

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.

I'm running OSX 10.2.3 on the G3, and it runs just fine. Yes, it's not at snappy as I'd like sometimes, but many apps actually run faster now than their OS9 versions did.

Buy the Applecare service contract if you're worried about early hardware failures. Best investment ever. Saved me a bundle on an iMac whose ethernet had been zapped.

Do these new machines mean that much to Apple users, or can they happily chug away on their old iBook or Powerbook?

Pretty much the same as new cars, really. Sure, I'd like that new shiny one that just arrived on the dealer's lot, but my old one still gets me to work reliably.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[thatguywhoiam]

How often do you upgrade your computers? One of the big selling points of a Mac is it's stability.

You betcha. My upgrade cycle is 3 years. That's a long time in computer-land, but to be perfectly honest, I don't even need to upgrade every 3 years. Whatever Mac I have at the time is always working. I've never had one break down on me, ever. 3 years is my limit, my spendorphin count gets too high and I have to buy something new. It's never a case of 'my machine doesn't do X anymore', unless you're talking about whole features (CD-R, Airport, etc.)

Another way to look at it - I've noticed that every machine I've bought is 3x faster than the last in Mhz. So I figure my 466 G4 will be about ripe in the Fall when we see (approx.) 1.5-1.8Ghz 970-based G5s.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[berniecase]

I bought a PowerBook G3/500 about 3 years ago. Since then, it's seen a lot of duty, went with me for several trips, and been upgraded to a G4 CPU. I still continue to use it daily. Compared to my girlfriend's 300MHz iBook, the PowerBook is plenty usable in OS X.

A year ago, I bought a flat panel iMac. That's another computer I use on a daily basis.

It's important to note that I don't do much gaming on these machines. Instead, I use them mostly for Web browsing, and they do an admirable job at it, especially now that Safari's available.

So, I've managed to get a lot of use out of the PowerBook, and it's 3 years old and still kicking. I plan on eventually getting rid of both the iMac and PowerBook and getting a newer PowerBook G4 Titanium.

My mother's still using a PowerMac 7600 (upgraded to 255MHz G3), running OS9, for e-mail and web browsing. She's never complained to me that it was too slow. It's no speed demon, but it's no slouch, either.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[HarveyBirdman]

How often do you upgrade your computers?

Oh, I'm a cheap bastard. :-) I wait five to six years. I started with an Apple I (not II, a I), so that's still be a number of upgrade cycles. I went from a G3/266 with OS9 directly to a dual G4/dual 1000 with OS X.

You *can* upgrade Macs. There are processor card upgrades that could have turned my G3/266 into a fast G4 machine. I also added USB and Firewire cards to it a while before the upgrade.

One of the big selling points of a Mac is it's stability.

I think you mean longevity here. Yes. I give my old Macs to friends and family. My mum is writing her autobiography on my old Mac IIsi. That's a 68K processor running at something like 20 MHz!

Yet, they release new products all the time.

Um... this probably has something to do with the fact that, unlike women confined to the same living quarters, Mac users are not on the same cycle. My current Mac is a year old now. A friend of mine bought a new one 3 years ago. I don't really need to explain this, right?

Do these new machines mean that much to Apple users, or can they happily chug away on their old iBook or Powerbook?

We chug away fine. The PC gaming world is an exception even in the PC world. My sister & her husband have an old Gateway with one of the first Pentiums (they do email and that's about it).

If you aren't a pro user, and iBook would probably suit you fine. I've been considering adding one to my home entertainment center as it folds away a bit better than an LCD iMac.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[caseyc]

Right on. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", as they say. I've got a fairly recent Mac, but up until that purchase, I was getting by just fine on a 300mhz Pentium II with Win98. New versions of software and hardware being released won't affect my ability to perform the tasks I've been performing with my computer all along.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[HotButteredHampster]

I'm happy with my Powerbook G4 550. I bought it over a year ago (my first Powerbook). I get depressed when I think about not being able to play Doom 3 on it, but just think about all I have accomplished and will accomplish before it comes out. I haven't installed an AirPort card, so I don't know if the stories of bad reception are true. I have 256MB of RAM installed, and I'm starting to think about an extra 256, b/c things start to slow down when I'm running a few big Classic apps and X stuff at the same time.
My usual use for the Powerbook: surfing, email, coding web applications (BBEdit 7!) and Cocoa Dev. I use an old B&W G3 350 as my web server.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[TheRIAAMustDie]

I am quite happy with my year 2000 Dua 450 G4. I've only added another 256MB of RAM, for a total of 512, and a 6 GB drive on top of my 30.

Stock ATI Rage Pro 128 card, I can play all the latest games; Max Payne, Tony Hawk, RTCW, Ghost Recon, Quake 3, Giants (rocks), No One Lives Forever, I could go on but you get the point. I also run Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash and Director MX at the same time, with everything else happily chugging along in the background. (iTunes, Mail.app, etc.) Also running Win 98SE and Win 2000 through Virtual PC. (for testing)

My mac has been rock-solid throughout this time, mostly running oddball beta software, etc.

I have my drives in 5 partitions, with an OS X 10.1 install on one, Jaguar on another, and 9.2.1 on another. Works like a charm.

I won't be buying a new mac for another 2 years, if everything continues to go well.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[mttlg]

How often do you upgrade your computers?

As often as possible. However, most upgrades are just component upgrades: hard drives, RAM, video cards, connectivity, peripherals, etc. For full system replacements, I'm probably on a 3 or 4 year cycle. Here's how my primary desktop system has evolved:

1995: Purchased PowerMac 7500/100, added RAM, purchased laser printer.
1996: Added RAM, added hard drive, upgraded processor to 120MHz, purchased scanner.
1997: Added RAM, added hard drive (moved one to external case), upgraded processor to 150MHz, purchased 17" monitor.
1998: Added RAM, added hard drive (moved one to external case), added USB card, upgraded processor to 225MHz, upgraded CD-ROM drive, added video card, purchased 15" monitor.
1999: Added RAM, upgraded processor to 400MHz G3, purchased barebones Umax S900, moved contents of 7500 to S900, purchased CD-RW drive.
2000: Added RAM, added ATA/33 controller card, added hard drive, replaced video card.
2001: Added RAM, added hard drive, added Firewire/USB card, added video card, purchased 19" monitor, purchased photo inkjet printer, purchased Laserwriter 16/600.
2002: Purchased PowerMac G4 Dual 800, added RAM, added hard drive, added ATA/133 controller card, added hard drive, added hard drive.

And that brings us up to today. The 7500 and S900 are both still in use today, though the 7500 is only being used as a TV. The S900 sees about as much use as the G4; the G4 is primarily for video and graphics (and for playing around with Mac OS X), and the S900 is for most internet activities (web browsing, e-mail, etc.) and anything that requires Mac OS 9 or SCSI. I don't play games, so their requirements have not played a part in my upgrade schedule. 2003's upgrades will probably include an 18" LCD to replace the 17" CRT currently connected to the S900 and a TV to replace the 7500/15" monitor. I should be able to go for at least another two or three years without another desktop system, so the new line of PowerMacs doesn't mean much to me.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[SamTheButcher]

Unfortunately, like with many things, the answer is yes and no.

Yes, you can chug away with your old computer, until something so compelling comes along that you can't do without. My story? I had a 6100/66 (that's a 66 MHz processor, kiddies) that I bought in January '95 and used, happily, for about 3 years. Then broadband came along, and suddenly I didn't have enough space (upgraded to a 1GB drive, even), and the processor was too slow to display the pages that were now shooting down the pipe. So I bought an 8600/300. CRAZY fast, that thing was, even though the brand-spanking new G3 computers were out, I bought a machine with the 604e chip, because it was pretty durn fast and had audio in/out. And it was a refurb, so I got a good deal on it.

Flash forward to 2002, and I'm in a new house, stuck in the basement with my old computer, and there's all sorts of OS X stuff coming, and OS 9 is going the way of the dodo. So I upgraded, bought a TiBook with WiFi so I don't have to be in the basement to use the computer. Glad I didn't get one of the first revs, because I've heard of hinge cracking, paint chipping, etc. For me, the adage "Never buy 1.0 of anything" is still pretty good advice.

Actually, I guess you could say that my upgrades have been bourne from outside sources (broadband, OS changes), not necessarily from neccessity. That said, if I had the disposable income for an iBook (or one of the new 12" PowerBooks), I'd get one darn quick for my wife to use. Being an Apple user, I'm not a MHz queen, because it gets you nowhere, and in my days selling Apples, the answer to the MHz question was "Does your current computer do everything you need it to, as fast as you need it to? Then you're fine". People buying a new, faster machine to do basic word processing and play solitaire, not needed. Photoshop users, people editing novels, digital video editors, sure.

Oh, YMMV. :)

Re:Question for Apple owners

[mcwop]

I had a tangerine iMac for about 3 years. Bought it for $1200 with free printer. Sold it for $600. Worked great. I mostly used for making movies, photoshop (dig photography), programming classes, internet, music, and an occasional game. Now have a PPC 967mhz with Superdrive. It kicks ass, and I expect it to last a few years.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[RestiffBard]

hey thanks for asking the question. I'm edging towards an ibook and this is just the sort of thing I've been wondering about. I don't have any moderation to give out today so just take my appreciation of a great thread you've started. :)

Re:Question for Apple owners

[mbbac]

I have a > year old iBook that I use a lot. I recently aquired a > 3 year old PowerMac G3 450Mhz that is now my main computer. It is very responsive in comparison to my iBook and 1Ghz Pentium machine at work.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[rjung2k]

Still happily chugging away on my ol' 450 MHz G3 iMac. I'd like a new computer, but I definitely don't need one.

As others have said, Mac users tend to take forever before they buy a new computer. That's why I always take those "computer marketshare" stats with a big grain of salt, since they only count the number of new boxes Apple/IBM/Dell/Compaq sell in each quarter. Since Mac owners don't update their stuff as frequently as Windows folks do, the Apple userbase looks smaller as a result.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[dutky]

Apples really can chug along happily for many years, often performing the same tasks that they did when new, many years after they are, in all other way, obsolete.

Until very recently (the last three or four years) I have had to upgrade my PC on an annual basis (I had set price marks at which I would buy new components: a hard drive at about $150, a video card at about $100, a new motherboard and processor at about $80 each, etc.). In general, this meant that my PC didn't go more than about 2 years without a complete replacement, when you count both outright failure and forced obsolescence (often, the slightly aged motherboard wasn't able to handle the larger hard drive, or any more memory. Less frequently, I actaully needed to run software that wouldn't recognize some aging peripheral or card).

My Macs have been much less upgrade hungry, in general: I haven't maxed out a system in terms of memory since 1992, and I've never maxed out a system in terms of disks or removable media. Most of the video or CPU upgrades have been due to desire more than need, and half of the hard drive upgrade have been due to age related failure of my current device (that hasn't happened, actually, since 1997, but was common before that time).

As for price, I've never spent more than $2500 for a new Mac, and my used machines tended to cost around $400 (except for the first used machine, a Mac 512ke, which was about $1500 in 1987). My PCs have all run around $600 when new, but the replacement cycle is three or four times faster than the Macs, so it evens out. My Mac history looks something like this:

• 1985 new Lisa 2 (8MHz 68K, 512KB, 5MB HD)
  • upgrade memory (1MB)
  • add 2nd hard drive (5MB HD)
  • upgrade memory (2MB)
• 1987 used Mac 512ke (512KB, 400K FD)
• 1988 new Mac Plus (8MHz 68K, 1MB, 800K FD)
  • add hard drive (20MB)
  • upgrade memory (2MB)
  • replace hard drive (100MB)
  • upgrade memory (4MB)
• 1993 used Mac II (16MHz 68020, 4MB, 40MB HD)
  • upgrade memory (8MB)
    
  • replace hard drive (250MB)
  • upgrade CPU (33MHz 68030)
  • upgrade video card (Apple accelerated video)
• 1996 new PowerMac 8500 (132MHz, 1GB HD, 16MB)
  • replace hard drive (2GB)
  • upgrade memory (+16MB)
  • add Zip Drive
  • upgrade memory (+32MB)
  • add CD-RW
  • add hard drive (4GB)
  • upgrade video card (Rage Pro 3D)
  • upgrade memory (+64MB)
  • upgrade video card (Rage 128 VR)
  • upgrade CPU (G3/350)
  • upgrade memory (+128MB)
• 2002 used PowerMac B&W G3 (350MHz, 6GB HD, 64MB)
  • upgrade video card (Radeon 7500)
  • upgrade memory (+256MB)
  • replace hard drive (40GB)
  • replace CD with CD-RW
  • replace CD-RW with DVD/CD-RW

As you can see, the new machines last for about 5 years, the used machines for about 2. This is a pretty good lifespan for machines that serve as my everyday workhorses. I have used these machines for word processing/desktop publishing, graphics, telecommunications (bulletin boards prior to 1995, web and internet after), and programming (BASIC, then Pascal, then C/C++) for each of their entire lifetimes.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[GTIChick]

My collection includes a Performa 5200 from 1995, a Rev. B iMac from 1998 and an iBook from 2001. All of them are still useful, although the iMac has been transplanted into a mini tower due to video failure.

I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon, but I also didn't exactly plan on having to replace/rebuild the iMac. Apple's quality hasn't exactly been best, so I can't really count on keeping a Mac for years.

As for the iBook, it's a tough little machine that travels with me. I'm running OS X on it with no problem. I have a bigger hard drive waiting to be installed, and I plan on adding more RAM - all in hopes of it lasting a few more years.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[Satchel Buddah]

I started with a quadra 800 (68040 at 33mhz). This machine was the bomb in the early nineties (was it 92-93 ?). This box is now used once in a while in a log cabin in the alps as a web-email machine, although sadly it is pretty obsolete now (netscape 3.1 and Mosaic.. :-).
Next, I grabbed a powermac 7500 (around 96?), sweet machine with nice AV IOs, then an iMac 333 in 99, and a dual g4 450 in 2000.

Today the g4 is still my workhorse, the imac 333 is our web-mail-itunes station and runs OSX happily. Despite my job demands (2d compositor, motion graphics, animator) the dual g4 still churns data at a very acceptable rate. Actually OSX's multitasking goodness prolonged its life, since you can throw a bunch of heavy processes at the machine without noticing a decrease in reactivity.

I plan to grab a new multiprocessor mac with the next gen IBM chip, hopefully in september. The strawberry iMac it is still one of the cutest pieces of furniture that we have and we do not want to get rid of it, so I will have to find out something to do with it !

Re:Question for Apple owners

[Alex Thorpe]

I'm using an iMac DV/400 Mhz that's now over 3 years old, and it runs everything but recent 3D games, though I've done about as much upgrading as you can on a Mac without PCI or AGP slots. Though to be fair, if I'd gotten the tower case Mac available at the time instead, I'd still be limited to a PCI video card like an older Radeon. I've got the 45GB 7200 rpm drive, getting a bit full now, 320MB memory(PC100), iSub subwoofer, iPod, HP Deskjet 932C, Saitek Cyborg 3D Gold joystick(though all of my games that I'd use a joystick with are OS 9-only), Macally iShock II gamepad, Apple Pro Keyboard(bigger than what came with it), Logitech Mouseman Optical USB. Plus 1.2 megabit DSL.

I'd like to get a new system soon, to try out Quartz Extreme and newer games like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. But it's really not needed, and I'm unemployed anyway, so I just have to dream about it, and put up with the 8MB Rage 128.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[Van Halen]

Yet another data point for ya.

My first Mac in late 1996 was a PowerMac 7600 with 132 MHz PowerPC 604 with 48 MB memory, 1.2 GB disk. I added a DigiDesign AudioMediaIII sound card as this machine was mainly for my music hobby. In early 2000 I upgraded the CPU to a 350 MHz G3. Also at some points during that time I upgraded the memory to 112 MB (8 slots allow for some crazy combinations!), added 2 disks (1 GB internal, 9 GB external, SCSI), and a USB card.

My second Mac came a year ago, a 733 MHz G4 QuickSilver (newly reduced price for education only after the dual 1-gigs were released, woohoo) with 640 MB of memory and a 40 GB disk. Added an aftermarket SuperDrive (same Pioneer model). After the wedding, with 5 1/2 hours of digital video footage to edit, I added a 120 GB disk.

Also bought an iBook in October for the wife, but I don't consider that really an "upgrade" from anything previous. Great little machine.

The 7600 is still in use today, running OS 8.6 as my primary music workstation. That'll be the case until my main music application comes to OS X "very soon". The machine is in great shape and still does everything I need it to do. I use the G4 as my primary desktop machine for everything but music (web, email, iMovie/iDVD, Gimp, programming, ssh to the FreeBSD box in the corner, etc).

So depending on what you mean by "upgrade" I'm not sure how often I have done so. But certainly, it's happened far less often than the PCs in my life. And so far, I've had zero hardware problems with my Macs (knock on wood). Can't say the same for the PCs, though again mine is but a single data point in the sea of information.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[namespan]

I'm typing this post on a 1999 model Lombard Powerbook -- 333 mhz G3. It was put out one year before OS X went public beta, two before OS X actually came out. I'm running 10.1.5. The only thing I've done is upgrade memory from 96 MB to 384 MB. The only real problem I have with it is the cramped hard drive: 5 GB, but at this point, I'm jobless and can't afford the frivolity -- and actually, 5 GB is reasonably useful, even with the devtools and a boatload of legacy OS 9 applications. You just can't pack digital media on to your heart's content, and you have to actually manage your files.

There is actually one annoyance -- sometimes when I compile things, the whole machine simply freezes. No error messages, doesn't freeze in the same place, usually, it just happens. Nothin' to do but power down and reboot. I haven't met anyone with this problem on the newer hardware, so I suspect it's an OS/HW interaction issue that won't get fixed. :( You may not be compiling things, but there may be a few of these gotchas with older HW.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[cbuskirk]

Longevity of the Mac can be described like this. Until last I played Starcraft on an PowerMac 6100/66 with 40megs of Ram purchaced in 1994. Nuf said.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[Head]

I have been using macs since 1985 and I have had 6 different computers. I'm now lusting after #7 which, if I buy, would make it about 7 in 18 years... about every 2.5 years.

But I think that trend could be slowing a bit since my iBook seems to still be able to handle everything OSX throws at it and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon (it's 2 years old).

Re:Question for Apple owners

[goliard]

There's two questions here: how often do you have to upgrade to keep up with new software, and how sturdy is the physical machine.

A lot of people have spoken to the first. I will speak to the second: My home machine is a PowerMac 6100/66, with a Sonnet G3 upgrade card. I bought it used in the first place, back in 94 or 95. Periodically I drop a bigger HD into it, or get some random SCSI periph; I maxed out the memory at some point, and a friend gave me a bigger monitor. I've had to replace the battery twice.

I still use the same damn keyboard, and it still has exquisite response. I'd be using the same mouse if it weren't for CTS; I bought a $25 trackball at a fleamarket and have been using that for some number of years.

In short, the machine (including keyboard and mouse) is built like a tank. I'm still hammering away on it, and not one component (save the battery!) has failed in the 8 or so years I've had it.

Now, I'll warn you that about the time the first G3s came out, Apple lowered its factory standards, and machines today are comparatively more prone to defects than older Apple lines -- but I've given to understand that compared to PeeCees recent Macs are still have *much* lower parts failure rates.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[repetty]

How often do you upgrade your computers?

I'm cruising Slashdot at this very moment on a G3 300MHz minitower (beige!) in Mac OS X and Safari web browser. This computer is five years old.

It has never needed any repairs. I'm probably going to get a new Mac next year.

--Richard

Re:Question for Apple owners

[MoneyT]

As if you needed any more convincing:

My original mac was a PowerMac 8500/180. It was an all in one case design, 15 inch monitor capable of thousands of colors, 16MB RAM, no graphics card to speak of, video / audio in / out, SCSI, 1.5 Gig HDD, grand total of something like $2,600 with a printer.

It over the years recieved many memory upgrades to it's current state of 142 MB (which I do not think is the max). Memory upgrades really are the life blood of the mac. More memory will usualy do away with any slowdown you have. Arround the release of the first round of G4s, we bought a processor upgrade from Sonnet taking it to a 300 Mhz G3 and adding 256k of cache. It also took a PCI USB card, and a 40 Gig HDD upgrade. Total we've spent maybe $3000 on this machine, not counting OS upgrades (8 & 9 at roughly $70 a piece). This machine is still in use, still churns away and did me just fine while I was waiting for my new G4 Powerbook this year. So this is roughly 6 years of usage, the only other mac I bought inbetween this time was a returned open box iBook from sears for $800, which when the iBooks were going for $1,600 was a steal. THat laptop served me fine as a travel machine (durable as hell) till this year when it met it's untimely death when it found itself in an electrified puddle of water.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[Erik K. Veland]

I'm going to get the new 17" PowerBook to replace my three year+ old PowerMac 400 with a 21" StudioDisplay (beautiful monitor). Why am I doing this? Is it because I can't run the latest games, photoshop or final cut pro at acceptable speeds?

Not at all. I do video editing and photshop just fine. With a Radeon 8500 (Flashed PC edition - dirt cheap) I play the latest games with no lag. Oh, and even the genie is super smooth thanks to QE. In fact this three year old computer chugs along just fine, gaining uptimes up to 50 days before having to install updates, never giving me any problems at all. It's stable as a rock and fast enough that even high end video editing flies like a charm.

Heck, I just want a new computer. I want that sexy automaticly lit up keyboard. I want to sit and surf in my garden with Airport Extreme. I want a big screen that I can also snap shut and carry it with me. The faster computer is just a bonus. Yay, I can now do real time transitions in FCP instead of waiting for a five second render.

Case in point, Apple makes brilliant computers. I could have used this one for at least a couple of years more. My previous computer was a 6100 for cripes sake (now that's slow!). I just want to change it the way one want to change clothes once in a while.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[Knobby]

I had a Lombard G3/400 with the DVD that did the same thing. Jaguar was much much worse.

I recently passed the Lombard on to my father to replace his Dell (which is on it's 3rd HDD in two years) and he's happy as a clam.. I wiped the entire disk and reinstalled the OSs and everything worked great.. I'm not sure what happened.

Re:Question for Apple owners

[shekel]

As far as PB's breaking down, that would cost a bundle (as would any laptop), but you can get a 3-year extended warranty (covers EVERYTHING) for about $300. I thought it was worth it but will also be happy if I never need it (haven't had to invoke it yet).

Keep in mind that they won't extend it past those 3 years. When my old powerbook power connector came loose for the 3rd time I had to decide if I should fix it or upgrade. Of course, this was a $100 repair -- luckly it wasn't the display!

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[stratjakt]

They save money by bundling them with a boatload of adware, spyware, trialware, demoware, advertisements, ISP offers, etc. About 7 gigs on a 15 gig HDD was full of ad-ware bloat. A quick format and reinstall and you're all set.

As for the PSU, get a replacement (it's flex atx 5" wide, 4" deep - usually sold as 'for eMachines ,HP, or Dells') 200 watt PSU to replace the 145 watts they ship with. 20 bucks apiece.

The PSUs in there arent really 'cheap' per se, but if you want to add HDDs and whatnot, it's worth 20 bucks. At least that's what I did with the P3-era machines I bought.

My only hassles with eMachines was trying to retrofit a real drive cage into one of 'em so I could mount more HDDs. But thats generally par for the course with boxed brands. I also had trouble getting the goofy HSP modem in the little riser slot to work since they only provided ME drivers. I didnt need or use it anyways, I like my external USRobotics, so no biggie.

The mobo is micro-atx form factor, with a fairly low profile CPU cooler, I just finished moving all of an eMachine into a slick looking little VCR-style case with a cheap TV out card. Makes a nifty media player.

You get a lot of bang for your buck in those cheap boxes. Usually cheaper than the components would cost seperately. And like I said, the cheapness is because of kickbacks from all the spyware bloat thats preinstalled, so install your own OS of choice over it.

I dont think it's fair that only the editors get to slashvertise stuff. Buy an eMachine.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[Ponty]

Amusingly, Jaguar quality went way up when they were bought by Ford. My dad had an older Jag and the running joke was that you needed a mechanic in the trunk. I love British cars, but reliability is not the reason you buy one.

Re:This Just in

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Troll and Flamebait? My first one - I guess I should be proud.

Anyway - I did a rough pricing on a system for around the same amount of money.

I could get -
Dragon Full-Tower Case 75.00
Enermax EG651P-VE 550 Watt Power Supply 130.00
Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 2.8GHz 533MHz FSB w/ 512KB Cache 361.00
Hi-Performance Heatsink/CPU Cooling Fan 22.00
ASUS P4T533-C Intel 850E478-pin Pentium 4 Motherboard 157.00
Standard 1.44MB Floppy Drive 5.00
1GB RDRAM PC-1066 512.00
200GB Western Digital UltraATA 7200RPM 8MB Cache 285.00
16/48x IDE DVD-ROM Drive w/Software MPEG-2 Decoder 40.00
Lite-On 48x12x48x CD-RW - IDE - Black 61.00
Hercules® 3D Prophet 9700 Pro 128MB AGP Dual Monitor 366.00
KoolMaxx Video Cooling System 22.00
Sound Blaster® Audigy 1394 - 5.1 59.00
Intel® PRO/1000 MT Gigabit Desktop Adapter 37.00

if I wanted - (and I used some of the better stuff out there) for around the same amount as this apple.

I'm sorry a funny comment got modded into hell by folks that like Macs, but seriously - for the same amount of money - pc's still are the better value.

Re:Display

[kyrre]

Okey. Just wondering. I never considered a PowerMac before due to its price, so I did not know this. However as they now are getting cheaper I think its time to look in to this machine. It would be nice to be able to go dual display. Yesterday was thinking that the 12" PB would do the trick, but the price is high considering that I own a less than 1 year old iBook 600.

Will the Radeon 9000 be able to dual display on a pair of 19" and 17" crts?

RAM controller?

[Choco-man]

I believe that the last iteration used a controller that didn't fully make use of the speed of the RAM. Does anyone have insight as to 1) what processor is in here and 2) if there's an updated controller that's able to fully maximize the new faster RAM?

Re:RAM controller?

[val1s]

It was not the RAM Controller but the G4 itself that does not support DDR. Yeah I dont like it either

Re:RAM controller?

[red_dragon]

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:

• Up to 167MHz system bus supporting over 1.3GBps data throughput
• 256MB or 512MB of PC2100 (266MHz) or PC2700 (333MHz) DDR SDRAM main memory supporting up to 2.7GBps throughput

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.

Re:RAM controller?

[robertchin]

Counter-balanced by the multiple heirarchy caches, though. Most x86 architecture machines don't have an L3 cache. The mere fact that there's a 2MB L3 cache should make the processor a lot faster. In fact, Apple probably doesn't even actually need DDR memory onboard, it's probably just for show. I'm willing to bet that the bottleneck is *not* at the memory bus.

Re:RAM controller?

[red_dragon]

The mere fact that there's a 2MB L3 cache should make the processor a lot faster.

Yup, and said cache uses DDR SRAM, along with there being 2 MB for *each* processor.

I'm willing to bet that the bottleneck is *not* at the memory bus.

You'd win the bet, though this is academical. The real issue is the system bus (a.k.a. front-side bus), which is shared by both processors on a dual-G4 machine. In the case of a hit in the L3 cache, each processor can transfer the data at 4 GBps (and each processor has its own L3 cache bus), but on a cache miss the data goes from memory (at 2.7 GBps) through the system controller, then through the FSB (at 1.3 GBps) to the processor.

Re:Sheesh!

[chunkwhite86]

Amen. Chevy Nova's (and most other Mer'can cars too) belong in the trash can (or recycle bin).

Nova means "No Go" is several other languages. Might as well name it the "Piece-O-Crap".

It's a mystery why so many of those mer'can rednecks haven't yet realized that German cars are the best cars on this earth!

These are test systems...

[mitchell_pgh]

We all know that the IBM 970 chip is going to come, but these systems are testing new technologies (FW 800 and BlueTooth to name a few - plus, some people will buy them, they are the same price as the old stuff - if not a little less so)

When the 970 does come out, they should have ironed out all the bugs with FW 800...

yes, laggy?

[Lovejoy]

What's this "laggy" people are bandying about?

I have a PBG4 500 with 512MB of RAM and it runs OS X beautifully for everything I need. The only thing that kills me is WORD. Hmm.. Everything else is fine.

I love this PB w/ OS X. It's an absolute dream compared to my ThinkPad running XP. The XP machine has innumerable problems.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[Tomah4wk]

Your right there. You buy an aston marting db7 for two reasons:

• So you can say "Shall we take the Aston"
• Because it is the most beautiful object ever created by man. There simply is no man made "thing" that is more pleasing to the eye than a db7

Re:This Just in

[CitizenDynamo]

This just in! High End BMW more expensive, full featured and luxurious than beat ass AMC Eagle! News at 11. If your going to compare Apples and Oranges (PC's)at least do it well.

Drop one of the new GeForceFX cards in and

[ZipR]

You'll have a helluva a fast graphics machine. Of course, you'll go deaf in no time, at least if they're both as loud as reported. I guess it's all about compromise, right?

Re:Pricing. (Spot the rip-off.)

[Lovejoy]

Apple is a hardware company that makes software to run on that expensive hardware.

Re:Who's Hat

[Zathrus]

Also P4's can't run in SMP mode

Depends on just how much hacking you're willing to do, but it's a pretty safe assumption that most sane people wouldn't be willing to draw new traces...

a Dual G4 1.42GHz is roughly equal to a single P4 4.26GHz

No it's not. SMP does not give you 2x the horsepower. If you get 80-90% of the horsepower you're doing well... and even then you only get the horses if you're actually doing something that take advantage of SMP. Which most users don't. Ever.

Frankly, most of the time your CPU is sitting idle waiting on you to do something. Or waiting on the I/O bus if you are doing something. SMP doesn't mystically solve this problem... usually it just makes it worse.

Are there applications for SMP? Sure. No question. But even most geeks who lust after SMP won't ever actually utilize it to the fullest.

currently the fastest P4 is 3.06GHz

Yes, and it can simulate two CPUs in one, which according to your SMP math makes it 6.12 GHz. Of course, even in the latest linux development kernels nobody's seeing a speed improvement of more than 30-40% in optimal conditions. In most scenarios it adds nothing, or actually slows things down due to I/O contention (which, admittedly, is more severe in a hyperthreading situation than a true SMP one).

Frankly, for the price of the Dual G4 1.42 GHz I can buy more than 2 P4 3.06 GHz boxes, which is a much better solution for most cases.

Spellcheck

[greasypeso]

Did anyone notice that "expandable" is spelled "expandible" in the main header graphic on http://www.apple.com/powermac/ ?

Re:Spellcheck

[jaavaaguru]

expandible

adj 1: able to expand or be expanded syn: expandable, expansible

I got that from WordNet. I don't have a real dictionary handy.

Re:Spellcheck

[berniecase]

The grammar nazi's right. There is no such word as expandible, at least according to Merriam-Webster.

Re:Spellcheck

[jaavaaguru]

Has anyone got a copy of the latest Oxford English Dictionary handy?

Re:Noice level

[Ponty]

My understanding is that the noise was a software issue that has been addressed by one of the recent OS maintenance releases. (I don't have one, so I don't know for sure.)

Re:What a ripoff

[petej]

It's supported on some ATI cards, too. Not the real low-end stuff, but it includes Radeons as well as some non-Radeons.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[guacamolefoo]

I just finished moving all of an eMachine into a slick looking little VCR-style case with a cheap TV out card. Makes a nifty media player.

What case did you use? TV card? Did you add an IR unit of some kind for a remote or just a wireless mouse/keyboard?

I think your idea is pretty cool, and I have considered doing the same, only I'm thinking alng the lines of a via chip/mobo in a low-profile case. That or an x-box with the new mod chip.

GF.

Have one at work

[mao che minh]

We have a dual 867mhz model running Jaguar. Before recieving this gift from our corporate masters, I had had little experience with Mac OS X (or Macs in general, other then loading Netware clients on them and running off before graphics design people could start asking for pretty flower things and such). This hardware is for real. The performace of one of these units as a small business file sharing server (for both other Macs, Windows clients, and Linux clients) and firewall while still being able to manipulate 400mb Photoshop files quickly is amazing.

Still, a bit expensive for the casual user. For a small business, this baby rules.

Slashdot FAQ please?

[BenjyD]

Could somebody please add a posting FAQ to slashdot including (at least - additions anyone?) the following points:

1)"Apple Macs are more expensive than a decent x86 box. "
We know that, you're paying for the engineering that goes into their design and their quality.
2)"Kde3? I use blackbox/ratpoison etc. Kde is slow! "
No, KDE3 runs very fast on a reasonable machine. If you don't want to use it, that's ok.
3)"In every discussion about either MySQL or Postgres, I must mention how much better Postgres/MySQL is at $FEATURE."
No, you don't. Anyone who needs to know the differences can go to the relevant websites and look them up.
4)"A new graphics card is out. When will it end!/I only just upgraded/they're too expensive"
This has been said many times, and is generally said about 100 times in every relevant story. I'm guilty of this one too. Please stop.

My only worry is that nothing at all would be posted to slashdot, and I'd have to start doing some work occasionally.

Re:Pricing. (Spot the rip-off.)

[zapfie]

Uh.. if Apple is a software company that makes their money selling hardware, then Apple is a hardware company. Not a software company.

Re:This Just in

[hcdejong]

Nice machine, but 'value' isn't just about the hardware. The machine you listed can't run OS X, which immediately halves its value.

Re:Pricing. (Spot the rip-off.)

[imperator_mundi]

As well as 5.99 shirts dominate over Armani's ;)

Re:Though shit!

[entrylevel]

Are the mods a little biased this morning? I'm the biggest Apple zealot ever, but the parent comment is not "-1, Flamebait", it is "+5, True". Apple has some excellent, forward-thinking, state-of-the-art external connection technologies, as well as the best designed hardware and one of the best looking and most capable operating systems available today, Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that the G4 chip is lagging behind (though not terribly), Apple's bus speeds are still pretty slow, and they still don't use DDR RAM to its full capacity.

Indian student blues

[thesilverbail]

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 *

Re:Indian student blues

[kalidasa]

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 *

Just keep at it, man. You'll be buying us in 35 years.

Re:Indian student blues

[DrMaurer]

All I have is a ferret.

You obviously haven't learned anything from the Beastmaster movie. You should have one of those innate sense of connection things installed so you can steal keys and so forth and sneak into the evil priest's fortress.

Not that an elephant wouldn't be cool, but that's a more front-end assault kind of thing.

Re:Indian student blues

[DesScorp]

Dude, I'm in the US, and I use a Celeron 300 in an AT case that I cobbled together with spare parts. I was pulled kicking and screaming from my beloved old 3-button Mouse Systems serial mouse to a PS2 mouse. Old hardware RULES, especially on Linux. And as pretty as the Apples are, I have to use MS at work, and I can tell you that I'm in no hurry to trade one lock-in vendor for another, no matter how much Unix is underneath. I'll take my junky old retreads and Linux, thanks. So make room on that Elephant, I'm climbing on....

Re:Indian student blues

[Paradise Pete]

I'm an indian student

Really? How's the job market for that field?

Re:Indian student blues

[jcr]

There's Macintosh work going on at InfoSys in Bangalore. Tata Elxsi, too.

-jcr

Re:Indian student blues

[Hadlock]

they have serial -> ps/2 adapters, and i think windows will boot using a serial mouse, at least 98 did. you might want to give the old bugger a try.

Re:What a ripoff

[slughead]

I think the Quartz Extreme technology is only supported on NVIDIA cards.

Quartz extreme is supported on any AGP video card for mac.

I even got it to run on my sister's Beige G3 with a PCI ATI Radeon 7000 using PCI Extreme

Re:So....

[Gropo]

The reason I found it worthy of submitting to /. was due to Apple's shifted tack in her product announcement strategy. They seem to be announcing more consumer hardware and software at high-visibility events such as the 4 points of the MacWorld compass, whereas Pro-sumer announcements have been offset to strange laggard periods. (the Aluminum-skinned PowerBooks were the first MW Pro HW announcment since MWNYC 2001)

Unless you also plan to bitch about /. eds posting the "Hammer is SHIPPING" story coming soon to a browser near you or the "H-paq announces Banias-based TabletPC" then you should re-think the nature of such criticisms.

Re:This Just in

[nevershower]

Sigh.

Does that include jukebox software? Does that include movie editing software? Does that include photo editing software? Does that include an OS with commericial AND open source support? Will that computer integrate with an iPod right out of the box?

I didn't think so. And do give me any crap about being about to install Linux on there for free. I'm not talking about the cost of the OS.

If you don't care about any of those things, fine buy a PC, Macs aren't targeted at people like you. They're targeted at people that place a value on the things that I listed above.

Re:Who's Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again

Apple Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz
VS
Dell Precision Workstation 350 Intel P4 3.06 GHz

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/rev iews/cw_macvspciii2.htm

If by "equivalent" you mean "50% slower" than you are correct.

Re:What a ripoff

[grue23]

Quartz Extreme is supported on any video card that's come with a Mac for the last two years or so. From Apple's site:

Quartz Extreme functionality is supported by the following video GPUs: NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 MX, or GeForce4 Ti or any AGP-based ATI RADEON GPU. A minimum of 16MB VRAM is required.

It significantly improves the performance of the GUI. I don't know the numbers, but the feel of it is much smoother, especially when you get into a situation with lots of windows at once, transparances, video in windows, video in windows behind transparencies, wiggling transparent windows back and forth really fast over other transparent windows over video, etc.

Re:Noice level

[mikerich]

It's not that the machine is noisy per-se, but just that when the fan cuts in you really notice it. Quite a lot of the time, the machine is incredibly quiet.

Mind you it was only a couple of weeks ago I realised that my iBook had a fan - until then it had been so quiet I assumed that something had failed inside.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Invalid

[jbolden]

It wouldn't be hard to explain at all if the numbers were genuinely invalid. Apple could pull out the specmark, the MFLPs, topmark, or any of fifty other benchmarks (or all of them) and show people the numbers were invalid. For the Pentium I and the pre 3ghz Pentium IV apple had the advantage that the chips had problems with non optomized code, so you could use some alternate benchmarks. But even using non optomized code you get the following:

The G4 was equal to a Pentium 3 that is 20% faster so
800mhz g4 ~ 1ghz PIII

The first edition of the Penium IVs were very fast but terrible chips so
1.4 ghz G4 ~ 1.75 ghz PIII (if it existed) ~ 2.6 ghz PIV.

The problem was really that the 1.4 ghz G4 wasn't out to this year while the 2.6 was out last year and at a lower price. Now however at the 3+ghz range the PIV have instruction reordering of the PIII + hyperthreadng. That means it is at least as fast as the PIII and probably faster. That is a 3.0 ghz PIV would test somewhere between 2.4 ghz G4 and a 3.0 ghz G4.

So you really can compare ghz with a high degree of accuracy relative to Intel's consummer x86 line. Now if you want to play the cache game Intel can play that too since the Xeons are available for a few hundred dollars more.

Apple has a serious CPU problem. Motorolla has done horrible damage to Apple, lets stop trying to deny the problem exists. It is by far the single biggest flaw in the line.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[Ponty]

Shit...okay...how about buying a Range Rover? Yea, there's some classic British quality. Buy a Range Rover. The pride of England is intact. Rule Britannia!

Re:Noice level

[Anonymous Coward]

The newer G4's (with the 4 intake holes) have a firmware revision availble which will vary the fan speed by load. So the fan noise is reduced, but it's still annoying sometimes.

Re:This Just in

[val1s]

A better value? Maybe Initially. I purchased a refurbished Mac when I started college. (lets not get into the value of a Used PC) I still use this PowerMac 8500 daily, granted it's been upgraded (g3/300, $300) since purchased. However I bought the machine in 1997, it was originally built in 1995. How many PC's that you know of are running photoshop, Quark, Illustrator daily of that age? If you depreciate it over the 8 years, that's like $250 a year, alittle better than replacing your $1000 PC every two years.

Joe Longneck!

[rogueroo]

Okay, now explain that to Joe Home computer user.

I think you mean Joe Longneck.

Re:This Just in

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Yes. Those types of programs are freely available on the net.

They take about 5 minutes to install and configure.

Re:Why did they even bother?

[imperator_mundi]

Because everybody would sit down in peace, happiness and living harmony with the sky waiting for the next quantum leap ... and Apple would sell no hardware at all...

...no one would like to be the one that yesterday bougth the last 3500$ 23" Cinema display, would you?

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[joshsisk]

I don't like eMachines because they are LOUD as hell, and I can already tell the HD in the one I bought for my parents is going to fail... Its getting that noise when it accesses...

Not quite

[coinreturn]

Actually, Apple has been offering a $400 rebate on the 17 inch for quite some time (well, you had to buy a CPU, too).

Re:Who's Hat

[phelddagrif]

Sure theoretically the macs should smoke any PC around, but I've seen numerous benchmarks PC vs Mac digital photo benchmarks that indicate elsewise. This is mainly due to cruddy ports of PC software to mac. But still the speed just doesn't multiply by some magic factor, and there is no point in comparing Mhz.

Look at real world performance to see how fast the machine is. Because when your working away on an image or rendering process, it matters not how fast your machine should or could be going but how fast it is going. And since apple's machines aren't up to snuff with AMD/Intel they need to do something about it.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[First_In_Hell]

That was an ignorant statement, I am willing to bet that you have never owned an Emachine. The IT department that I work for has a very STRICT budget, so when we needed to buy 30-40 PCs for our expansion 2 1/2 - 3 years ago we bought EMachines.

We never shut the workstations down and most of them have been running rock solid the entire time. Sure two or three have had dead power supplies, but I am sure that would be the case with any brand bought in such mass quanities. And even if we have to buy an extra power supply, the value is still there.

There is a market for these things and they serve that market well. Not every company is a Fortune 500 company that can afford to buy new P4 Dells with 17 inch flat panel monitors every 6 months.

Re:Apple and AMD

[jokell82]

Apple and AMD? Not bloody likely. The only way that's going to happen is if IBM and Motorola suddenly stop making CPUs. The software would have to change dramatically to make a switch to x86, and every single application would have to be updated. It would be like the switch to OS X all over again, and I doubt many people would be up for that...

As for OS X for any x86 box, not gonna happen.

Wrong there. T&L + 16MB VRAM

[oscarmv]

It is supported by any card supported by apple (I know, oxymoron) that has T&L and at least 16MB of VRAM (32 recommended).

Which includes everything ATI from the Radeon forward.

Re:Though shit!

[whovian]

I kind of disagree about the bus speed. Yes, they aren't using DDR (i believe), but they are using 166 MHz. It *used* to be that their FSB speeds were waaaaay behind the x86 world. When x86 was more or less around 100/133 MHz, apple was still hovering around 50 MHz.

Besides, IIRC it has been argued that adding DDR doesn't automatically double performance.

Re:Display

[oscarmv]

It should be perfectly able (as long as you get the ADC->VGA and DVI->VGA adaptors).

You can even add a third (and fourth?) monitor by plugging a second card in a PCI slot.

Plus you might still keep considering that PB12", if you can get a good price for your iBook 2nd hand. I know I'm selling one for around ?1000 right now (you probably will get less in the US, but then again the new computer will also be almost 20% less).

Re:This Just in

[the_Bionic_lemming]

You've got me beat by a few years - My four year old PII-400 (not upgraded) is still running strong - Using Photoshop and and .Net daily...LOL

Re:Who's Hat

[MmmmAqua]

You're an idiot.

Let's begin:
1) Code must be written for a SMP architecture.

For an individual application to use both processors at the same time, it must be threaded. If the application is not threaded, the scheduler will run another process on the unused CPU (this is of course greatly simplifying things).

3) The PowerPC is dated, and built on a process that cannot compete. So what if a PPC is slightly more efficient - its still slow.

The PowerPC is dated how? It's based on a more modern and efficient instruction set than the creaking x86 of the P4. As for the design of the processor itself, do you know how much a cache miss costs on a hyperthreaded P4? It's pretty spendy to flush a twenty-stage pipeline with two separate execution contexts in it at the same time. Meanwhile, Motorola is continually refining their manufacturing process, and getting higher and higher yields of faster and faster chips. Oh, and if the PPC is so dated, why does IBM ship so many Power4-based machines? Surely if the x86 was sooo much better they would be shipping Intel-based mainframes like mad, wouldn't they?

Re:Why did they even bother?

[binaryDigit]

...no one would like to be the one that yesterday bougth the last 3500$ 23" Cinema display, would you?

Actually if you did it yesterday, then you're fine. The Apple store has a 10day refund/return policy (and of course most of the retailers have some sort of price protection whatnot). It's the people who bought towards the end of the year that are a bit miffed right about now.

Absolute lies!

[Reality Master 101]

This turbocharged Power Mac rips through digital video and 3D projects faster than Pentiums can say "uncle."

I'm not a big fan of Apple in many ways, but this is what just burns me. I will never, ever deal with a company that is this dishonest. Benchmark after benchmark shows that a top of the line Intel KILLS the Macintosh, and is half the price to boot. How can Apple get away with bald-faced lying to the public like this?

Can't they just sell on the merits of their hardware and software, and just stick to the truth?

Re:Absolute lies!

[Anonymous Coward]

Most Pentium machines don't come with a Turbo Button any more. Apple's use of turbochargers gives them an advantage.

Re:Absolute lies!

[bnenning]

How can Apple get away with bald-faced lying to the public like this?

Because it's not a complete lie. There are a number of real-world tasks where G4s beat Pentiums due to Altivec (e.g. distributed.net's RC5 cracker). It is weasel-like, but no more so than Intel's assertion that a P4 makes the Internet faster.

Can't they just sell on the merits of their hardware and software, and just stick to the truth?

Marketroids...truth...that just doesn't work.

Re:Absolute lies!

[Reality Master 101]

but no more so than Intel's assertion that a P4 makes the Internet faster.

I have to admit, you've hit on another of my pet peeves. :)

This is the problem with literalist geeks who focus on a tree while ignoring the forest. Intel never claimed that a P4 makes your bandwidth higher. They claimed the Internet was faster -- which it was. The "Internet" is a set of services, not just a stream of bits. Particularly that this claim came in the era of Netscape, which was a horribly slow renderer. A faster CPU made page rendering much, much faster. You can also make the same argument about video over the Internet. More speed == smoother video.

So cut Intel some slack. To the average end user, a faster CPU means a faster Internet. It's completely unlike Apple's baldfaced lying.

Re:Absolute lies!

[TheRaven64]

This turbocharged Power Mac rips through digital video and 3D projects faster than Pentiums can say "uncle."
No, I've owned a Pentium for many years, and it's never once said 'uncle'.

Re:Absolute lies!

[coolmacdude]

Lol, that turbo button was the funniest thing.

Re:Absolute lies!

[bnenning]

This is the problem with literalist geeks who focus on a tree while ignoring the forest. Intel never claimed that a P4 makes your bandwidth higher. They claimed the Internet was faster -- which it was.

Actually I'd have to say you're ignoring the forest for the trees there. The "average end user" was/is on dialup, where transfer time is nearly always far greater than rendering time even on a slow CPU. Maybe a P4 would make for a tiny performance improvement, but nowhere near the extent that Intel implied.

Of course it would be even easier to pick on Microsoft's current ads ("Hey, let's run a database query and spam our customers! However could we have done this without .NET?") Marketroids are constantly walking the line between mere deception and outright lies, no matter who they work for.

Re:Absolute lies!

[bcwengerter]

Benchmark after benchmark shows that a top of the line Intel KILLS the Macintosh, and is half the price to boot.

Care to provide some links? I'd be interested in reading more. Thanks.

Re:Is a price drop at Apple news?

[Seehund]

Apart from Macs, there aren't that many consumer priced/targeted PPC computers around.

Yes, it's news IMO.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

Try again, They to are owned by Ford.

Re:Who's Hat

[ickypoo]

Given the propensity for posts like this, why haven't the admins graced us with a "-1 FUD" moderation?

Re:Who's Hat

[droleary]

... and even then you only get the horses if you're actually doing something that take advantage of SMP. Which most users don't. Ever.

You never run more than one app? Or are you saying that threading on the OS you'd use is screwed up? On Mac OS X, threading is done at the Mach level, and it is dynamically shifted between processors. For those situation where an app can take advantage of multiple threads, adding support to a Cocoa app can be simple call to an NSThread object. I've had single processes suck up 180% of the CPU while 40 other ones ran just fine on my box. Buying a 2x Mac is something I have not regretted, but thank you for letting me know it would be a regrettable thing to do if I ever upgrade my Linux server.

Are there applications for SMP? Sure. No question. But even most geeks who lust after SMP won't ever actually utilize it to the fullest.

The truth is that no CPU architecture that's popular is being used to the fullest. Computers are sitting idle 95+% of the time waiting for the user to do something. And the other 5-% is unlikely to be a burst that pegs usage at 100%. All those 3GHz Intel boxes aren't any faster really, they just idle faster; that's not something to brag about.

Frankly, for the price of the Dual G4 1.42 GHz I can buy more than 2 P4 3.06 GHz boxes, which is a much better solution for most cases.

Please point to a major manufacturer that offers two PCs that are similarly spec'd to the one Mac, with the addition of the high revving engine, for the same price. Note that being able to hobble parts together in your parent's basement doesn't make you a business on par with Apple.

Re:Pricing. (Spot the rip-off.)

[Fulkkari]

Apple makes a great OS, and their systems are way cool, but the prices are insane! Apple is a software company that makes their money selling overpriced hardware. Their business model is crazy! Is it any wonder that Wintel boxes continue to dominate Apple in the market?

The prises are not insane. I think they are actually quite fair. Even tough you get on the paper better hardware from Wintel at the same price, I'll bet the Mac will be better as a computer. Personally I'm tired of those PC "high-quality" components lasting 13 months, poor compatibility etc. I still have over 10 year old Macs that work like new with no broken hardware. You can't say the same about my PC's. Furthermore, when you want to sell your computer, you'll actually get some money for used Macs. PCs are worthless after you bought them. I see no reason why not to pay some extra for stable and working computers.

BTW. why is /. so slow nowadays?

1Kbase-T?

[waterbug]

That's the ugliest abbrev. I've ever seen.

I prefer GbE.

Re:This Just in

[Znonymous Coward]

Get a life man. Slashdot is for fun, not profit. I can give a shit about karam. The only reason I don't post AC because I like to see replys to my comments easily.

Karma can suck my balls for all I care. I just want to talk geek, not run for office or start a war.

IMHO macs are worth it. If you want to mod me down then sign in a request moderator access.

Challenger Remembered

[digitalgimpus]

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:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?s=&thread id =142864

Ironic? Coincidence? Intentional?

Re:Sheesh!

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

>> A Chevy Nova in a properly restored form, built between the years of 1962 and 1979 are never junky! I think most would only agree with you up to 67, after that they look like ass. Before that their very nice.

Re:Yeah...

[Chazmyrr]

Lets cover these in order.

I've used my apparently already obsolete regular firewire port exactly zero times. So Firewire 800 will let me transfer nothing how many times faster? It's a stretch, but someone, somewhere might have a use for this. I'll give you this one.

Gigabit?. Sure. Just as soon as I plonk down another $500 for an 8 port gigabit switch to replace my $50 8 port 10/100 switch.

Wireless? Not included in $1999 price point. The antenna is included. Add $100 for the card. Add $250 for the base station. Did I mention that Amazon lists Linksys WMP54G PCI card at $70 and Linksys WAP54G access point at $130? And your workstation needs to be wireless why? You can't carry it around with you. With all of the normal cables what's one or two more?

Sweet Applications? You mean iTunes and iMovie? You have to upgrade to the superdrive for iDVD to work. They are nice applications but PC owners can get nice applications with all the money they saved and stil have some left over.

These features are like Picture in Picture on a TV. All they do is maintain a price point without adding any real value. You want to convince someone Apple is worth the extra money? You have to come up with a convincing cost/benefit analysis based on benefits they will actually use. Based on the actual benefit to me, Apple would have to cut the price on that $1999 model down to under $1000 w/o the superdrive or around $1200 with.

Re:Pricing. (Spot the rip-off.)

[jbolden]

Spec out a Dell, IBM or Compaq relative to a whitebox shop. There is a much higher markup for companies that are going to provide support and honor warranties. Further because they actual have to fix things minor parts (like fans) tend be of higher quality so that they don't end up having to do a $200 repair because they saved $.50 on a $4 part.

Hooking up PCs to the cinema displays, ...

[so90s]

... can the Apple-supplied DVI-ADC adapter be used or is "DVIator" from Dr. Bott the only option? Any experience to share? Thanks Ralf

Re:Hooking up PCs to the cinema displays, ...

[Surlyboi]

Either one will work, though I believe the
Apple solution is cheaper at the moment.

AMD PPC tho!

[danboid]

I heard AMD had a license to make PPC chips (despite the fact they haven't done so). Hence, the AMD based Macs may not be such a ridiculous suggestion- damn good one actually!

Re:AMD PPC tho!

[jokell82]

Well that seems much more likely. But OS X on x86 is just not going to happen anytime soon, as it will more than likely be the end of Apple as a hardware company (like it or not, that's what they are).

Re:and don't forget you intel worshipers...

[mcgroarty]

don't forget that the 1.42 GHz, yeah that's right, 1.42, will still operate better than the latest greatest overclocked crap intel spits out

I'm sure this is a troll. Regardless, I'm more than willing to look at any benchmarks which show this to be true. To date, the best anyone's been able to point to has been select features in old versions of Photoshop and Premiere which hadn't yet been optimized for SIMD instructions.

Speed of calculations aside, the Mac is also in dire need of a faster memory bus. DDR266 (PC2100) goes into low-end PCs. You won't likely find a PC with that slow memory at the Mac price point.

The Mac isn't about performance. It's about having a consistent and intuitive UI where you can focus on getting things done without spending half your time fanning out fires.

Re:Yeah...

[labratuk]

Yeah, but can you get Firewire 800, Firewire 400, built in Gigabit, 54 MBps wireless networking, and a set of sweet applications like Apple bundles with their machines for only $1999?

Yeah, but do I want Firewire 800, Firewire 400, built in Gigabit, 54 MBps wireless networking, and a set of 'sweet' (read: 'useless to me') applications like Apple bundles with their machines?

Every three/four years or so...

[alispguru]

... that's for the machine at home, which is primarily used for AppleWorks/Quicken/web browsing/email.

Our home Mac history:

1994 - Quadra 605
System 7.1 - 8.1
1997 - UMAX C500
System 7.5 - 9
2001 - 466 MHz G3 tower
System 9, OS X to the present

And I expect to not need to upgrade the current machine for at least another year or two - OS X runs just fine on it with 384 MB. We tend to buy machines near the end of their production runs - they have a little less performance than the front of the line, but cost lots less.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[iocat]

As with Jaguar, reliability of the Range Rovers went up dramatically after their aquisition by Ford!

Re:Lower your quality, Apple

[zaren]

And it still doesn't even come close to the price/performance of an Intel or AMD box.

Doesn't come close to the quality, either. (Price is a non-starter, as has been proven by other commentators on this article.)

How many Macs do you see that need liquid cooling for their CPUs? For that matter, how many need to have extra fans or heat sinks installed? Hmm, that may not be as valid of an argument, considering the reputation of these new "Windtunnel" models... but still, how many Intel / AMD enabled boxes could you have run in the last few years without having a cooling fan?

And to attempt to poke a hole in your "educational use" argument... how much more competitve do you want in an .edu environment than to have a single box capable of running MacOS, command line Unix (apache, perl, etc.), and Windows (in emulation) at the same time?

Re:I Know I'm Gonna Get Flamed for this, but...

[zentec]

Well, yes and no.

I agree that in the scheme of hardware manufacturers and OEMS, it is irrelevant. But for the hordes of Slashdot readers that are very interested in commercial desktop Unix/Unix-like operating systems, this is far from irrelevant.

I'm now on my second round of "switching". My first attempt at Apple was an iBook, which I dearly hated. OSX wasn't quite "there yet", I wasn't patient enough and the opportunity to unload it at close to what I paid was too much to resist.

I now own a G4 and this thing is totally awesome. And coming from a Unix desktop background (still run Linux on the desktop at work, before that used Irix), OSX is pure heaven.

So your point is well taken, but I think the post is made as "Hey, Unix freaks, check this out" as opposed to "Hey computer users".

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[good soldier svejk]

All MV Augusta GP bikes and the Vincent Black Lightning are more pleasing to my eye than a DB7. Frankly almost any Italian bike made between 1946 and 1980 is. Not to mention most British bikes made between 1919 (can't neglect the Brough Superior or Flying Squirrel) and 1970.

Actually, I prefer the DB5 to the DB7.

Re:Yeah...

[BWJones]

I've used my apparently already obsolete regular firewire port exactly zero times. So Firewire 800 will let me transfer nothing how many times faster?

Whose fault is this? I use Firewire 400 on a daily basis to back up many hundreds of gigabytes of data (soon to be terrabytes if the next grant goes through). Firewire 800 would save me and those who deal with large amounts of data or video lots of time. Also, I suppose that Firewire could be used for large scale interconnectivity. See an editorial I wrote here for details.

Gigabit?. Sure. Just as soon as I plonk down another $500 for an 8 port gigabit switch to replace my $50 8 port 10/100 switch.

There are those that use gigabit networking you know. Apple is not making computers *just* for you.

Sweet Applications?

Yes.

You mean iTunes and iMovie?

Yes.

You have to upgrade to the superdrive for iDVD to work.

Yes, but I also use the Superdrive for other data as well.

They are nice applications but PC owners can get nice applications with all the money they saved and stil have some left over.

And you end up at the same price point if not more for a kludgy inelegant solution that does not run UNIX applications along with Photoshop, Office, etc...etc...etc...

You have to come up with a convincing cost/benefit analysis based on benefits they will actually use.

I along with at least a few million other folks on the planet seem to think that there is a convincing cost/benefit analysis to purchasing a Mac. For me, I was able to buy a single dual G4 and replace a Windows box, an older Mac *and* my SGI Octane with a sweet display that saves much money in terms of software licensing, hardware purchase and maintenence contracts (SGI).

Based on the actual benefit to me, Apple would have to cut the price on that $1999 model down to under $1000 w/o the superdrive or around $1200 with.

Yeah, its called the iMac or eMac which can be had for educational customers at that price. If you are not a student or faculty member somewhere, it will cost you a little more, but for the money there are almost no other machines that will match feature for feature with a Mac.

Try this and show me the app.

[BoomerSooner]

rpm -Uvh openssh*.rpm

Where is the menu item? Look at all the kick ass gui tools for OS X Server that make running Apache as easy or easier than IIS.

Until everything is integrated it's not there for the end user. I have no problem with linux on the server side (with the exception of a thread error in the smp kernel that comes with my rocket raid 100, killing my server dead using ssh/sftp).

Re:Who's Hat

[necrognome]

They won't mod you +1 informative because the truth hurts.

Re:Yeah...

[BWJones]

Yeah, but do I want Firewire 800, Firewire 400, built in Gigabit, 54 MBps wireless networking, and a set of 'sweet' (read: 'useless to me') applications like Apple bundles with their machines?

Well, I guess that I would respond that there are other people in this world that do want/need/use those features and can be more productive because of them. For those millions, G4 towers are a good solution. For the others, there is the iMac. {big grin}

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[Draoi]

I'm running on a very early (pre-production) blue iMac which has been hacked to 333MHz with just 128MB. Runs like a champ on X.2.3. Sometimes the dock genie effect gets choppy & pixellated but it still works just fine. And hey - it's got to be approaching 5 years old now ....

(Try taking a 5 year old PC & installing XP on it & see how it performs. Fun & games)

Re:Lower your quality, Apple

[BJZQ8]

Why does a cooling fan or the absence of it make any difference? Does the fact that one car might be air-cooled or liquid-cooled make any difference?

I've said it before, and I will say it again: Apples are made of the same cheap Taiwanese/Chinese shit that all the other machines in the world are made of. Reliability is psychological now, unless you buy Fujitsu or IBM hard drives.

When kids come out of school not knowing how to use a two-button mouse, there is something wrong.

I recently switched.

[Anonymous Coward]

I purchased a PowerBook G4 1GHz/1GB RAM two weeks ago and am very happy with the decision. Windows XP has been a slowly decaying piece of garbage and the Dell hardware it runs on enjoys locking up at random. Perhaps Dell should stop having the same stoner they use in their commercials putting together the machines.

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).

Re:I recently switched.

[yancey]

I'm in the same situation. I replaced my Win2K box with a PowerMac 1Ghz G4 w/ 1GB RAM and could not be happier. It does everything I need and it does it fast enough for me. I don't see myself ever buying Windows again.

I also agree that the developer tools for MacOS are excellent. Cocoa is an amazing framework to build upon.

Having the SuperDrive is also very sweet, especially since the Mac comes with burning tools that are extremely easy to use and do everything
I need. It is so nice to be able to double-click an ISO image and have it mount just as if the CD was inserted.

Re:Yeah...

[labratuk]

For the others, there is the iMac. {big grin}

Y'mean the ones starting at $1,200?

And only have 128MB of RAM?

Which is the minumum possible amount of RAM for running OSX according to Apple?

Let alone for doing anything serious with it.

Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[TwitchCHNO]

"My 4 THz Intel Pentium IIIVIXXX is father then your 16 KHz G101"

For those of you who have not read ALL of the CPU articles at ArsTechnica. Go there now and do so. Before posting any of your inane babble about clock speed and processor power.

It IS true that Motorola has fallen behind Intel - sort of.

There are other advantages to hardware other then Intel based systems.

Since this is an Apple thread I'll focus there - One of the most note worthy (My opinion) Is apple's System controller.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Rather than re-writing I'll simply cut & paste.

Fast system controller: The system controller, first introduced in Apple?s highly-regarded Xserve line, coordinates and transfers data and instructions among the processor(s), PCI bus, memory, graphics and I/O buses of the Power Mac G4. Controller speeds in the new Power Mac G4 configurations run as high as 167MHz.

The PCI bus is what really impressed me.

Direct PCI bus: In another example of superior architecture, the Power Mac G4 optimizes PCI performance by connecting the PCI bus directly to the system controller. In a typical PC architecture, PCI devices connect to the I/O controller through a bridge, a bottleneck in the data path where all connected PCI devices are slowed down to avoid overloading the system controller. Going through this bridge constrains PCI throughput to 133Mbps (the bus speed on Pentium 4 systems), even with otherwise fast PCI devices. This slowdown of data to and from PCI devices results in greater overall system latency. The Power Mac G4, on the other hand, features a direct 266-MBps bus to the PCI slots to guarantee high throughput and low congestion ? in effect, lowering latency. The Power Mac G4 also supports write combining, which allows write instructions to be grouped into one large instruction, further increasing data throughput.

Then Apple oficially slams PC architecture.

On the Power Mac G4, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet and even the ATA/100 bus are built into the system and integrated directly into the system controller. (The ATA/66 bus has its own controller.) This dedicated connection reduces PCI congestion and guarantees low latency, resulting in optimal FireWire, Ethernet and hard drive performance. And as a side benefit, it also keeps the computer?s PCI slots free for your specialized audio and video cards instead of using them to provide basic technologies.

I got this info here.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

Apple is not the end all - be all of systems. Two of the greated systems are made by DEC & H/P. The UltraSparc kicks the crap out of anything Motorola & Intel have to offer.

And let's not forget the Alpha. The Pentium - Pentium III architectures were based on technology stolen from DEC. Technology that Intel is still paying for today.

It basically falls down to system preference. Mac users DO NOT CARE if you can build a PC for $400. Mac users DO NOT CARE if only a few of the best selling game titles are ported to the system.

Having more game titles available is a Good Thing - naturally -but I find myself being... PRODUCTIVE instead of having my time eaten away by games - Linux users also what I'm talking about - unless they've downloaded BZFlag or Crack Attack.

Go READ the articles at ArsTechnica!

IBM 970

[jtilak]

Fall of next year is about 1 and a half years from now. Thats an eternity in computer years.

Re:IBM 970

[Datafage]

He said "this next" which means fall/winter 2003, which is still 6 months off but not as bad as fall/winter 2004.

No USB2?

[harlows_monkeys]

No USB2?

Yeah, I know Firewire 800 is way faster than USB2, and Firewire 400 (which is what most people will be using for quite a while, since there aren't many Firewire 800 peripherals) is slightly faster in real life (USB2 is theoretically faster than Firewire 400, but the benchmarks I've seen have Firewire actually getting a little more out of things like disks), and that Firewire's isosychronous ability and latency guarentees is essential for some applications.

However, when I go down to stores like Best Buy or Circuit City I see a busload (pun intended!) of USB2 hard drives and CD and DVD readers and writers, and just the occasional Firewire drive.

For those of us who like to buy the small things locally instead of mail order, and don't live in one of the areas where there is a nearby Apple dealer...we need USB2.

Re:No USB2?

[phillymjs]

If you want it so bad, buy a USB2 card. Jaguar has built-in support for it, Apple just doesn't include it in their machines.

Most if not all of the USB2 peripherals can be connected to a USB1 bus as well (but will just run at USB1 speeds), so there's pretty much no reason why you couldn't buy them if you REALLY wanted to.

~Philly

Re:No USB2?

[klui]

I don't have a USB2 card but those in Macintouch said that Jaguar does not contain USB2 drivers (EHCI) and that you'd need to rely on the third party's drivers to enable USB2 speeds (they mentioned Orange Micro's product).

Re:No USB2?

[wheezl]

I have USB2 on my G3/333 from 1997. I think it cost me about $35 and 2minutes and 35 seconds of my time. (Apple Cases are SWELL)

Works great under OS X :)

Re:No USB2?

[shylock0]

Somebody ought to pick up the market by designing a Firewire-to-USB 2.0 external converter. Somebody like TI should design the chip -- I think it would be a good seller. Remember the Firewire-to-SCSI converters of yore?

Re:What a ripoff

[natas823]

is quartz extreme supported on the older 400 and 500 mhz titanium powerbooks?

Re:Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[aderusha]

not that i don't like arstechnica - but you're getting a bit spammy. anyway, try a different news source, like this.

i know you're too busy being productive to play games on your mac, but according to these results using real world productivity apps (photoshop and after effects), you're going to be waiting twice as long for your mac to finish the job (and paying $600 more to boot).

apple makes some great software and some great looking machines, but they're hamstrung by motorola's inability to compete with intel and amd on research, development, and manufacturing. until they find themselves a new core cpu architecture or motorola somehow figures out how to build a cpu that can clock into the stratosphere apple will never be able to produce a machine that can run as fast as a wintel (or lintel :) system.

and apple was right, megahertz don't matter - but gigahertz do...

Re:This Just in

[Znonymous Coward]

Ok, so we are still friends then? Good.

Re:This Just in

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I was hoping someone like you would iShowup.

I took a top of the line system as a rough killer.

We could back the specs doswn to a 2.2 pentium, with 512 megs of ram - with a radeon 9700 and chop a good seven hundred off of that price. Go with a normal tower and Power supply and you chop another 150 off of it.

Leaving me with a faster system and plenty to buy a choice of software - as opposed to the limited iSeries.

or, as previously stated. 120 for win xp gives you most of the functionality you're looking for.

Hey - I'm not knocking Apple. But to get the same functionality they are still overpriced.

One thing that Apple does better is to cater to the clueless. They make a PC that's perfectly easy to use, and hard to screw up. It's a tradeoff. And I would rather not suffer the limitations of a platform because of its design.

Oh, and earlier BMW was compared to a cheap car.

Well, you take the cash for your top of the line BMW and buy one - I'll take the same amount of cash, buy myself an 18,000 baseline mustang and use the rest for parts.

When I'm done - I'll have a better looking, much faster car.

But that's just me ;)

In other news from the front-page-worthy dept...

[hendridm]

The following companies have also released new products recently:

Microsoft,
Compaq,
3M,
Dupont,
Disney,
Adob e, ...

There is more to the Mac than just GHz

[afantee]

How about Firewire 800, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, Superdrive, 2 MB L3 cache, 2GB RAM, 4 internal disk drives, Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X, dozens of free programming tools, iLife, the style, the reliability, the lower TCO, ...

Come on people, I thought /. readers are intelligent enough to look beyond the box.

Re:There is more to the Mac than just GHz

[TheRaven64]

Come on people, I thought /. readers are intelligent enough to look beyond the box.
You did? Umm, why? I assume you don't have any evidence of this behavoiur...

Or BBEdit

[alexhmit01]

BBEdit, with CVS integration, is an amazing experience. Combine that with a built in copy of Apache, a double click install of mod_rendezvous, and I'm all set. I can work on my files and view them REALLY easily with rendezvous + Safari.

Then, check into CVS, check it out on the Linux or OpenBSD server, and I'm in business.

Double click installation for PostgreSQL and for PHP, and I have a mobile development system. On an airplane? No problem, I'm fully productive.

Sure I could get more horsepower on a PC, but I'm more productive on my Mac. The only thing missing is Quickbooks... the Mac version isn't feature complete w/ the PC version. I also need to share the files w/ PC users. Hopefully next year I can stop using an old machine as a Quickbooks machine, but no biggie, all in good time.

OS X has done tremendous things for my productivity, so I don't complain about the costs. The Xserve was a questionable purchase, but not if you don't think of it as a Unix machine. We've used it for what its been designed for, and we're happy. LDAP is great... we can now get a Linux workstation (or a Mac OS X one) in no time, and give authorization.

BTW: if you want a mod_auth_ldap that authenticates against Apple's Netinfo-style LDAP bindings, drop me an email. We haven't packaged it up for release yet, but WebDav + HTTPS + mod_auth_ldap is a pretty slick remote file access solution.

Alex

Alex

A specsheet is a specsheet is a specsheet...

[HaverOfPeculiarBox]

All the posts with the drawn-out spec sheets comparing the $1500 PC to the $1500 Mac are a little silly. It's no mystery that you can get more stuff thrown in your PC for less money. Unfortunately, when people see these side-by-side spec sheets with price tags on the bottom, that usually makes their decision for them. And more often than not, it's the wrong decision. As an example, my friend bought some no-name sweatshop-made Intel crapbox a few years ago, because he got an insanely speced-out machine for under a grand. And as months rolled by, everything in it started breaking one by one... not to mention the fact that it would BSOD all day long. Apple's quality is evident not only in looking at the hardware design, feeling the strength of the assembly, looking at how the inside is layed out, etc... but also in the lifespan of the machines. It's not uncommon to see people using 5 or 6 year old Macs on a daily basis, with little complaint. (Incidentally, this is what often skews the often-published statistics on Mac marketshare. Market research companies often base these numbers on number of computers sold, ignoring the fact that Macs tend to remain in use much longer than PCs.) Apple could easily compete in the cheap computer market, but they've decided not to. I don't know whether it's a good decision or not, but it's a decision that they've clearly made and are sticking with. Now the question is, when will we be seeing G5 machines from Apple? When those hit the market, Apple just might have a huge lead in the specs department. And with that lead, maybe they'll unleash Marklar on the world (OSX for Intel hardware). It would make OS X available to everyone, while still retaining a compelling enough hardware edge to get people to shell out the extra cash for Apple computers. I hope Marklar's more than just a rumor... it would cause the biggest shakeup the industry's seen in years

Re:Who's Hat

[geniusj]

I'd mod the parent up if I had any points.. He's right about applications having to be built to be multithreaded. Dual CPU does help a lot though when you have many processes doing things at the same time. I own a dual 1ghz powermac and will agree that a p4 3.06ghz would be faster. Do I care necessarily? No. But it's true none the less. Things like Quartz Extreme definitely help make things snappier though. If I could run OS X using a p4, I would. But I can't, so it doesn't matter. There are other reasons that people choose platforms besides just speed. I personally have many platforms at home (2 x86, 1 alpha, 2 G4s) and they each serve their own purposes. The G4s serve their role as desktops/laptops very well. It's all just a matter of choice. The OS was the major determining factor for me and the processors were 'fast enough'. I'm rambling. EOP

Cheers,
-JD-

Re:Lower your quality, Apple

[phillymjs]

When kids come out of school not knowing how to use a two-button mouse, there is something wrong.

Oh, please. ADULTS don't know how to use a two-button mouse. Kids today are far more adaptable when it comes to technology and will pick it up in about a minute. You have just won the award for the most weak-ass argument I have ever read on Slashdot.

If I only had a nickel for every time this exchange has taken place during a tech support call I have taken from a Windows user:

Me: "Okay, now right-click on that icon to bring up the context menu, and
select 'Properties' from it."
Them: "Ok, I clicked on it, but the icon just goes dark."
Me: "Did you click, or right-click?"
Them: "What do you mean, 'right-click'?
Me: "Right-click, as in, click the right mouse button."
Them [astonished]: "You mean, it does something else?"

Mind you, these were all people who had been using Windows computers for years in the business world, and were still clueless.

I really wish people would just drop the God damned one button mouse argument altogether, because it's 100% bullshit. The one button mouse has been PROVEN in usability testing to be the way to go for the uninitiated user. People who aren't new to or afraid of computers who want more bells and whistles on their mouse will just buy whatever trackpad/trackball/mouse they want and toss the Apple one in a drawer.

If Apple left this input device choice up to people by not including a mouse at all with their systems, you trolls would be all over them for THAT, too.

~Philly

If you think Gimp == Photoshop you're not the ...

[BoomerSooner]

intended user of Photoshop. How about InDesign/Quark? Do you have anything for those. Oh yeah btw I tried to get PS 5, 5.5 and 6 (havent bothered on 7) running and they wouldn't run under Wine (I do run Textpad in Wine).

Bluecurve IS a desktop since the theme is what the user interfaces with and not the underlying Window Manager.

Apparently you don't have any hardware that is unable to work on your "real distro", however in the "real world" I don't have time to fuck with tweaking the system for several hours when on another system it just works.

Try running a Highpoint Rocket RAID 100/133 card on a SMP Intel based system. There is a kernel error that is caused in the smp thread implementation that I don't care to trace down. Also I have a new mobo using "Chipset: VIA KT400 / VIA VT8235" and it will not install 7.2, 7.3 or 8.0. How's that for "stable".

Like I said I'm a huge linux fan having used it since '95. It amazes me every day how far it has come. It also reminds me daily of how far it needs to go.

Re:Question for Apple owners - 4 years (sort of)

[victim]

I upgrade every 4 years, but that is not quite true. Since I have a desktop and a laptop, a wife and kids it goes roughly like this...
Even year: upgrade my iMac, give old one to kids, give old kids iMac to my brother
Odd year: upgrade my iBook, give old one to wife, give her old laptop to my mother.

So each computer does 4 years service in my house but it migrates from my more demanding uses (development, multitrack audio recording) to the less demanding users.

What you need to do to ensure timely hardware upgrades is a bunch of dependents that don't need the fastest computers. :-)

(And no, the 17" doesn't mean I can dispense with my laptop. I value "small" for many of my laptop uses. An iBook AND an iMac cost about the same as a 17" powerbook. Still, I'd like a superdrive in the portable...)

Re:What a ripoff

[bnenning]

Quartz extreme is supported on any AGP video card for mac

Except the ATI Rage 128, because it can't do non-power-of-2 texture sizes. Although Macs with those cards can easily be upgraded to a Radeon 8500 or 9000.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[Draoi]

Sure, but;

• You beefed up the memory considerably. I'm still running with 1/4 of your RAM.
• You had to screw around with the config. Mine installed and ran out of the box.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[Draoi]

Have you ever tried XP on a 5 year old PC?

For kicks, I tried installing it on my old 200 MMX from around that era (hey - it runs RH7.0 just fine!) but it refused to install cleanly. I ended up putting Win98 on & leaving it at that ...

Re:Who's Hat

[jweatherley]

No it isn't. How many multi-threaded programs have you written? It is nowhere near as simple as just creating a thread and setting it loose in a program that wasn't designed to be multi-threaded.

I don't know about the grandparent but I have written a Cocoa app with threading and it was pretty simple. Not every multithreaded app is a shedload of worker threads all modifying the same database - sometimes the task to split up is fairly trivial.

In my case I was applying filters to an image to convert it to Sinclair ZX Spectrum format. To take advantage of dual CPU's I simply split the image in to two parts when applying those filters and have a simple lock to make sure that the job is truly done before moving on to the next filter.

Re:Who's Hat

[droleary]

What the hell does that mean?

It apparently means you couldn't bother to educate yourself before posting. Here's a starter link: Mach Scheduling and Thread Interfaces. The long and short of it is that each process is run in a main thread that may start other threads, none of which are tied to a particular processor and all of which are given time slices at a priority. So if I have four things going at once, they (and any other threads they start up) will be pushed to whatever can handle them, and quitting two doesn't lead to a situation where one CPU is left at 100% and the other is idle.

No it isn't. How many multi-threaded programs have you written? It is nowhere near as simple as just creating a thread and setting it loose in a program that wasn't designed to be multi-threaded.

My guess is that I've written more than you, but I've used an API (Cocoa) that doesn't penalize me for the use of threads unless it has to. I'm sorry you're stuck with something less elegant, but I look forward to you writing a single OS X app and seeing what OpenStep made possible over a decade ago.

They don't just idle faster. They do work faster as well. Why would they just idle faster?

Because, as those who actually read my post saw, they are unlikely to be pegging the CPU at 100% even when they are in use. Do you think your word processor (unless it's a really crappy one) really needs 3GHz to keep up with your typing? Unless you're talking about something specialized like a render farm, your argument isn't valid. These are desktop systems, and being twice as fast as a Mac only means your computer is twice as wastefully idle as mine. I'd estimate that I'm hitting the burst limits of my system less that 1% of the time.

Further, if you are talking about something like a render farm then you will find that one of the abstractions provided by Cocoa for threads is called an NSConnection, which also allows the processing to abstract to another machine altogether! If you won't get a Mac for whatever reason, at least look into something like GNUstep so you can actually start taking advantage of the systems you already have.

A lot cheaper now

[coolmacdude]

"entry-level pricing has dropped" Actually all the prices have dropped.

apples dont care about worms

[mattlamb]

I know its a touchy subject with all these microsoft slash-dotters but I slept fine at night knowing that my apple was safe from the worms...

There is much more to the Mac than GHz

[afantee]

How about Firewire 800, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, Superdrive, 2 MB L3 cache, 2GB RAM, 4 internal disk drives, Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X, dozens of free programming tools, iLife, the style, the reliability, the lower TCO, ...

Come on people, I thought /. readers are intelligent enough to look beyond the box.

Re:There is much more to the Mac than GHz

[Imazalil]

Yes we are intelligent enought to look beyond the box, we are also intelligent enought to look beyond the marketing material.

When it's 3 times better

[Gorimek]

I buy a new Mac when there is a model that is three times faster than the one I have at the same price I paid for it. I'm on my fourth since 1996.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[moosesocks]

Ah.... finally someone that understands that Macs end up being CHEAPER than pcs in the long run.

I have a 450mhz G4 tower running OS 10.2, and I couldn't dream of better performance (there is nothing about the machine besides which appears "slow"). On the other hand, the windows PC which I purchased after the mac, and paid significantly more for is beginning to feel slow even after numerous hardware upgrades. (Gentoo is the only system which runs faster than my mac at twice the clock speed).

It's not uncommon for a mac to last 7-8 years (being used actively). About a year ago, I was called to fix a person's Mac, to find out that they were still using an Apple ][e as one of their main computers!!

The latest version of Mac OSX runs like a dream even on 4 year old hardware. Try XP on that old 500mhz PC, and see how it holds up.

Buy one mac, or buy two PCS. (Macs also seem to hold their resell value quite well)

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[Eccles]

Amusingly, Jaguar quality went way up when they were bought by Ford.

There was an article not long ago in USA Today where Jaguar was listed as one of the most reliable brands. I almost fainted on reading that.

Re:Is a price drop at Apple news?

[mbbac]

But no one wants to pay Apple's high-end prices.

Apple is a heck of a lot cheaper than Sun.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[b1t r0t]

As long as we're on a "my Mac is older than yours" DSW, I should point out that my Power Computing Power Tower Pro (originally a 225 604e), which now has a 400 G3, 360MB RAM, and a Radeon PCI, is happily running 10.2.3. I think it even runs better now under 10.2.3 than it did under 9.1!

Re:Is a price drop at Apple news?

[ElGanzoLoco]

"no crazy cooling issues"

'You kidding or something? Have you only heard the noise those stupid G4 dualprocessor towers make?

Why use the new GeForceFX cards ....

[z-kungfu]

...when every test puts it right w/ the Radeon 9700.
I read all the benchmarks in the article yesterday. It went back and forth between the 2, and it was on a windows box, it'll even perform better on the Mac w/ native open GL

"...one highly desirable chunk of hardware.."?

[dwater]

I prefer ArsTechnica's analysis :

"The very slight increase in performance, the addition of two good connectivity options, and the steep price cuts combine to make the PowerMac line's price/performance ratio a little less embarrassing than it has been previously."

Seems more accurate to me. I own a couple of Mac's and they won't be getting any more of my money until they fix some stuff :

"The FSB still clocks in at a pitiful 167MHz SDR, and of course the dual-processor machines in the line still use the same old shared-bus topology."

http://www.arstechnica.com/

Re:Lower your quality, Apple

[BJZQ8]

Lots of software packages like AutoCAD are overwhelmingly run on PC's...and use a two-button mouse. Before you get out your flaming napalm, lets have a calm discussion. I'm not trolling, I'm stating my firm beliefs. Thanks for the award, too. But I don't think it's a "weak" argument. Kids that use Apples in general transition to the PC world and are lost. The one-button thing is just the tip of the iceberg. They have to learn all over again how to use a computer. The Apple interface might be nice and user-friendly, but I used to work in an architectural office...there were no Macs there. Summer-working kids came out of high school and suffered immediate PC-itis because of their limited exposure. I want what's best for the students just as well as the next...and in my view, they need to learn on the same machines they will eventually work on...PC's.

Re:So....

[IamTheRealMike]

It's picky, but you are assuming it is tolerated.

I for one am getting rather sick of it, and I know many other people are too. Every single story about Apple it seems is just a bunch of posts saying "I have one and love them" or "I tried one for 5 minutes and want one but don't want to pay" or "MacOS X is Unix and it's open source wow cool aqua r0xors" +5 Insightful.

So people reply. "No, OS X isn't open source", "Yes, PCs are much faster and cheaper and yes, you can get high quality PCs too", or "No, MacOS is riddled with usability flaws" but they practically never get modded up, regardless of the validity of the post. If they do by some chance get high, you can bet that within an hour it'll be back down under a load of "Overrated" or even "Troll" mods.

In particular the attitude "it's unix, so it must be good" is a dumb one, yet people take it anyway. Unix isn't even that great, there are better OS designs floating around. Why is UNIX an end in itself?

So in that regard, they are much more meaningful than someone like Dell simply bumping the speed of their boxes.

No it's not more meaningful, Apple is fashionable and Dell is not. That's it. Apple making their machines slightly less slow is only news to people who fanatically follow the company, for which there are dedicated rumour sites.

I expect this'll get modded down. I've posted similar things before, and been modded as troll. Yeah, because I really am a professional troll, everybody knows that. The idea that everybody loves Apple because they, ooooh, used Unix and woweee, took some open source code to do it with, is just plain wrong - the difference is the ridiculous groupthink here means that dissenting opinions only rarely get seen.

Re:Lower your quality, Apple

[Eccles]

If Apple left this input device choice up to people by not including a mouse at all with their systems, you trolls would be all over them for THAT, too.

Apple could end the whole issue by having multi-button mice as a purchase option. I'm sure Logitech would happily whip up an Apple logo mouse in a week. I'm using a Dell-branded Logitech mouse with my PowerMac G4 and it works great.

Re:Sheesh!

[chunkwhite86]

My wife's 3 week old German car (Audi) has already incurred more repair costs than the '72 Chevelle incurred in the 13 years I owned it. Obviously it was under warranty and I didn't pay it..

I'm no mathematician, but if it was under warranty so you didn't pay, your repair costs were $0. Obviously.

One of my vehicles is also an Audi. A 1984 Audi 4000S Quattro. It has 239k miles on it and in 19 years of heavy service, it has never broken down or required a tow. It still starts immediately on the first try and runs smooth as silk. It's never incured any major repair bills. I use 0W-30 oil in it as it doesn't burn or leak a drop.

Most American cars are on their last dying breath at around 100k. An example of American automotive "quality" is a former co worker of mine, Carl. He had a Ford Taurus. ONE month after the sickeningly short warranty expired, it blew a head gasket (at only 39k miles) and the transmission died completely two months later. Another fine example is my girlfriend's Father's '98 Cadillac. Transmission died completely in that one at only 58k miles. Warranty was also expired and he had to eat the 3k repair bill. My last tribute to American automotive quality is my good buddy Mike. He had a Pontiac 6000STE. The crankshaft broke at 98k miles! The repair costs were more than the ugly car was worth, so he gave it to charity for the tax writeoff.

What does war with Iraq have to do with car quality? Please come back when you actually have a real argument to make! Sad. Very sad.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[Bob Abooey]

Ah.... finally someone that understands that Macs end up being CHEAPER than pcs in the long run

This is one of the most delusional statements that out of control Mac zealots like to claim in defense of them being forced to spend upwards of 33% more for slower machines.

I've got a two year old PIII 800 Mhz as my main machine which until the past year was probably as fast as any Mac that rolled off the line and I paid less than a grand for it. It hasn't "sped up" nor "slowed down" a bit over the past 2+ years, nor would any PowerMac 300 that came out back then. It was faster then and it would still be faster now than any Mac that was sold at the same time.

It wouldn't be very bright of me to claim that "I couldn't dream of better performance" for it because obviously I could dream of owning a P IIII 4 Ghz, but I will say that it's a more than capable machine for me. It will not slow down any more than any other machine as time goes on, that is to say not at all. It runs RH 8.0 very nicely and I anticpate it will serve me for another year before the upgrade itch overtakes me.

I suspect if I had paid two grand for a Mac two years ago it would certainly not be "speeding up" as time goes on and would certainly run slower than my old PIII which means that the upgrade itch would most likely come quicker as speed is usually the driving force behind an upgrade itch. Your argument holds no water what-so-ever and is void of logic.

It's not uncommon for a mac to last 7-8 years (being used actively).

Just so you know, that's one of the hand waving non-factual mantras that really tend to turn people against Mac zealots. You have no facts to back that up. Oh sure, you may have some anecdotal claim about your buddies Uncle who is using his Apple II or whatever, but that's hardly scientific proof. I would ask you to provide me with some cold hard scientific facts that show that statement to be true or else I'll assume you to have no credibility.

I was called to fix a person's Mac, to find out that they were still using an Apple ][e as one of their main computers!!

I have a number of old computers that I still use including an RS/6000 with a 233 PPC from 1997 and a Sun Sparcserver with a 150 Mhz hypersparc from 1995 and while both are functional (they have lasted 6 and 8 years thus far) I wouldn't want to use either of them as my main machine because of the obvious speed/architecture limitaions. If I were to use them as my main computer it would only be because I'm a freak, not because there was no compelling reason to to upgrade.

Re:Who's Hat

[IamTheRealMike]

You never run more than one app? Or are you saying that threading on the OS you'd use is screwed up? On Mac OS X, threading is done at the Mach level, and it is dynamically shifted between processors.

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. The parent post was quite correct, SMP does bollocks all on most desktop machines, regardless of how many apps you run.

FYI the microkernel nature of MacOS hurts it more than it helps. Communication between processes carries a heavy overhead even on single processors, and if the two are on different processors that overhead is massively increased.

In fact CPU affinity algorithms will mean that if you have several desktop apps open, they'll probably be running on the same CPU anyway due to the comms overhead.

I've had single processes suck up 180% of the CPU while 40 other ones ran just fine on my box.

That's meaningless. How responsive the system feels has little to do with how many processors it has.

but thank you for letting me know it would be a regrettable thing to do if I ever upgrade my Linux server.

No, SMP can benefit servers far more than desktops, because servers are typically doing many many things at once. For instance Apache can distribute itself over the processors pretty well, and uses that to serve more requests simultaniously. It makes very little difference for standard desktop use unless you frequently put the machine under very heavy load.

All those 3GHz Intel boxes aren't any faster really, they just idle faster; that's not something to brag about.

That's pretty wierd logic. People prefer 3Ghz boxes on their desktops because when you need the machine to do something, you don't want to be hanging around waiting for it. 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.

Please point to a major manufacturer that offers two PCs that are similarly spec'd to the one Mac, with the addition of the high revving engine, for the same price. Note that being able to hobble parts together in your parent's basement doesn't make you a business on par with Apple.

This line is getting tired. 90% of people don't need the frankly bizarre components Apple put into most of its machines. I've never even seen a FireWire device, let alone used one, and I've not met anybody who has one either. If a PC user does for some reason want FireWire support, then they can buy that as an optional extra, instead of being force to pay for something that chances are they'll never use.

The last line is good. If you are able to build machines yourself, why is that not as good as buying a machine from Apple? You get exactly the specs you want, often (though not always these days) cheaper than you could buy in the shops. "Hobbling together in your basement" is a ridiculous view on it, it's more a case of getting the parts and slotting them together on your kitchen table in about an hour. If you can do it, why not? Apple doesn't have some secret fairy dust it sprinkles all over their boxes to make them special, if you know what you're doing you too can build an "integrated" box, with the hardware and software matching well.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[Bob Abooey]

I have a Mac that is, as of this morning, no longer state-of-the-art. It's got two 1 GHz G4's and a Radeon 9000 card. Is it "laggy?" No. It's faster than I am

Isn't that kind of like saying that purchasing two slices of pizza for $20 is fine instead of $20 for a whole pizza because two slices is all you need to fill you up? While that may be true I would think that paying $5 for two, if that's all you needed, would make more sense.

My point being, why would you want to buy something that cost more and is slower? If you want somthing that's just "fast enough" that's fine but that hardly makes it a superiour platform. It's just not a compelling marketing statement.You don't see Dell selling a Pentium II 266 on their website claiming that "It's fast enough!!!"

If you like your Mac because you think it's cool there is nothing wrong with that but don't try to justify it by making inane statements which 95% of earth people snicker at.

Spec'd out a Dell

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a spec'd out Dell so as you can compare:

$2676 gets you:
3.06 GHz P4 w/HT
512MB RAM
60GB HD
DVD-R/CD-RW Combo Drive
19" monitor
Radeon 9700 TX graphics card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz DSP Sound Card
Harmon Kardon speakers
a couple apps
Windwos XP Pro
56K Modem
Ethernet
802.11b adapter
3 years support

The main advantage over the Mac being the addition of a monitor and 2 more years of support. I would imagine that Dual 1.42GHz G4s are roughly equivalent to a 3.06GHz P4 w/HT.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[good soldier svejk]

I loved the engineering on those 851-916s, but the look never really grabbed me. I can see why others liked them. Among the Cagiva era Ducatis I have a soft spot for the 1990 750S (a.k.a. the Nuevo Sport). I got a leftover one brand new for $6700 in 1993, but it was stolen several years ago. sniff.

When I was in college my local welder offered to sell me his near perfect Laverda 750 SFC for $1100. I happened to have exactly that much in the bank but stupidly chose to spend it on food and rent. Consequently, I ended up an old fart with a BMW R100S. But at least it has R90S paint, rear sets, a lightened flywheel, 40mm Del'Ortos and an R100S solo seat. There is hope for me yet.

Now that I think about it, I think the SFC is my favorite bike ever. From an asthetic standpoint anyway.

Re:Why subjective speed talk modded up?

[King_TJ]

You ask why a completely subjective comparison on CPU speed would be modded up?

Answer: Perception is 9/10's of reality. This holds true in the courtroom every day (as any good lawyer can tell you), just as it does when it comes down to people using their computers.

No benchmark can account for the millions of combinations of hardware/software people run on a given platform. Why do you think most of the PC benchmarking sites (Tom's hardware, etc.) typically pick a few games like Quake 3 as "standards" for comparison? They simply chose popular programs that seem to heavily tax many aspects of a system.

I have a theory, too, when it comes to long-time Mac users. They've been stuck in a basically non multitasking environment for so long, they often get an overrated perception of their newer system's overall power in OS X. (Quite simply, their eyes are opened to how much more they can get accomplished on their new computer because things put in the background really do process in the background.) They forget that over on the "Intel" side of the fence, people have been doing this (and expecting it to work that way) ever since the days of Windows '95 and NT 3.5, not to mention all the Linux and BSD users).

When you put aside any personal efficiency gains obtained simply from the OS allowing true multitasking - I think you find OSX lacking in speed compared to Linux or even Windows XP on a P4 class computer.

(Not that OS X isn't still pretty cool.... I've got it running on a Mac system at home myself. I just accept that the hardware isn't as powerful as my PC's, and use it for other reasons.)

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[Pinky]

HP and eMachines are aproximately equals is crapiness. Especially at the low end. I have two low end HPs. They are evil little things. I also have a custom built PC and a mac wintunnel. They are far superior in quality (keyboard, mouse, screen, vid card case powersupply are all better). I will grant you that the processor speeds are were you would expect, however.

Re:If you think Gimp == Photoshop you're not the .

[ShavenYak]

intended user of Photoshop.

Perhaps I'm not. Then again, neither are 90% of the desktop users out there. The absence of Photoshop is not an indication that Linux isn't usable on the desktop. Now, if you said it's not usable for graphic artists, I might agree with you.

Bluecurve IS a desktop since the theme is what the user interfaces with and not the underlying Window Manager.

By that logic, I could say that my mother runs the Dangerous Creatures desktop on her computer.

The theme just changes the look and feel a bit. The user interfaces with the desktop. Whatever features and limitations are in KDE or Gnome will remain regardless of what theme is selected.

Apparently you don't have any hardware that is unable to work on your "real distro", however in the "real world" I don't have time to fuck with tweaking the system for several hours when on another system it just works.

No, I don't have any hardware that doesn't work. That situation can usually be avoided by spending five minutes checking your distribution's hardware compatibility list.

Try running a Highpoint Rocket RAID 100/133 card on a SMP Intel based system.

Again, not exactly a common piece of kit for a desktop user, and thus not something that proves Linux isn't a decent desktop. Also, since this thread started off as a comparison of Linux and OS/X, does that card just plug-n-play in a PowerMac? Obviously you couldn't put it in an iMac!

Also I have a new mobo using "Chipset: VIA KT400 / VIA VT8235" and it will not install 7.2, 7.3 or 8.0. How's that for "stable".

I know for a fact that OS/X won't install on that, so obviously it isn't ready for the desktop either.

Re:So....

[binaryDigit]

No it's not more meaningful, Apple is fashionable and Dell is not. That's it.

Well I would agree with you up to a point. Apple does have the cult behind it, and therefore is more "pc" to swoon over. HOWEVER, this does not change the fact that Apple, primarily due to OSX, does have the strongest ties into the OSS/*nix community of all the major hardware manufacturers. Yes, they're fashionable and cool, and the posts responding to articles about them tend to be the same thing over and over, but then again, what somewhat repetively themed articles on /. don't end up being that way.

The idea that everybody loves Apple because they, ooooh, used Unix and woweee, took some open source code to do it with, is just plain wrong - the difference is the ridiculous groupthink here means that dissenting opinions only rarely get seen.
Well _I_ wouldn't mod you down ;) I understand your point, but I also disagree with your statement, it's no more "ridiculous groupthink" than the whole OSS movement and the prevelant view of it here. I think the reason you get mod'ed down is that your opinion is not stated in a way that directly addresses the statements (at least it was in this case). I said that I think that Apple articles are more on topic than some other hardware manuf. because Apple utilizes a somewhat OSS as it's primary OS and because they ship more *nix boxen than any other manuf. Now you might have a disagreement with my facts, but you did not state it, instead you claim that those facts have nothing to do with it, and it's just groupthink. Well, you never countered my statements, you just dismissed them and proffered an opinion that can't be validated. That in many peoples books is a troll. One interesting test would be to see if these type of Apple articles appeared with their current frequency pre-OSX, if so, then your statement holds more water. If not, then that would tend to lend more weight to mine. But again, offering up something that can be intelligently discussed/checked/debated, vs a simple "ya'll are a bunch of anti-WinTel sheep" (but then again I guess if the shoe fits ;)

Re:Yeah...

[b1t r0t]

Y'mean the ones starting at $1,200?

What drugs are you taking, and where can I get some? The low-end iMacs are $800 and the low-end eMacs are $1100. And the reason to buy a Mac with only 128M of RAM is that you can add more cheaper via mail-order.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[be-fan]

Just used it the day before yesterday (10.2.1) on a G4-800 MHz. Still bloody slow. The 2GHz P4's running Win2K next to it are much faster, and were probably cheaper... If you think OS X on a G3-400 MHz is usable, you must either be very old, or already dead.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[Alan Partridge]

I also run OSX 10.2.3 on MY dual450 G4 - it runs pretty good, but my 733DA at work is a little snappier, and our Athlon XP 2100+ Winders machines are a LOT quicker. I also run Win2K on my 5 yr old Tosh PII 266 laptop, and it runs like a champ. The only SLOW computer I use regularly is an IBM 1Ghz PIII machine which is so slow it hurts to use it.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[Golias]

All this Ford/Jaguar/Astin/Range Rover talk reminds me of a joke:

Q: Why don't the British make PC's?

A: They couldn't figure out how to make one leak oil.

Entry level price AND speed of entry machine drop!

[mactari]

I thought I was looking forward to this announcement. I'd been eying an 867 G4 dual processor Powermac built-to-order with a Superdrive for a while, but wanted to hold on to my cash and wait for the next speed bump, hoping a DP 1 GHz model at yesterday's 867 DP price was right around the corner.

Well, the speed bump hasn't come. The entry level model, incredibly, has less "power to burn" now than before, with a single 1 GHz G4 processor. Sure the price is lower, but from what I've seen at the Durham, NC Apple store comparing single processor e & iMacs against the DP Powermacs, OS X still needs that second processor and its extra processor power. Now I have to shell out for the much more expensive to "Faster" Powermac to get the power I want (programming Java with iTunes and other apps running in the background, running iDVD, and, well, okay, I admit it, playing Doom3).

You can get 867 DP Powermacs for cheap at MacMall et al now, sure, but with built-to-order Superdrive? Nope. Entry-level options that include Superdrives have just gotten a lot worse, not better.

(Mind you, the "true power Powermac users" still get a great speed bump. I just wish it'd trickled down to people looking at the look end. And if I can hide the receipt from the rest of the fam, it might do exactly as Apple intended as have me throw down an extra $200 on my next Macintosh [to get the DP].)

Re:Who's Hat

[afantee]

>> Why would they just idle faster? That wouldn't make any sense.

The P4 has built-in thermal control which would slow down the clock rate if the chip gets too hot. Ironically, the chip only gets hot when under heavy load but not when it's idling, hence the nice slogan - GHz power when you don't need it! What's more, Wintel laptops don't run at full speed at all on battery power due to Intel speedstep technology, so you see all that GHz stuff is really a marketing thing and looks good on paper.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[macmurph]

That's interesting, my Moms eMachine power supply just died. Shes not even much of a computer user. I just put her on a Powerbook G3... her first statement: "I plugged the printer in and it just worked!?". Apparently she had been unable to get the printer working on the eMachine PC, poor woman.

Re:Who's Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

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:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20020821/a thlonxp -02.html

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=MTA0M zYxMT A3Mk1UWjBtOEE3N0hfMV8xX2wuZ2lm
Early estimates I've seen show the next Power chip to be hitting Q3/Q4.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[Maserati]

I can top that ! I have a 300MHZ B&W G3 that, for a time, was running 10.1.5 with only 64MB RAM. It made a great iTunes jukebox and it could even run Explorer. Apps took upwards of 30 seconds to launch though.

One day I had iTunes blaring away, and jumped online to make a visit to http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/0/trance_control.h tml to look for new tracks. iTunes skipped once while Explorer was loading.

I found some new stuff and started previewing it. Then I realised I hadn't paused iTunes. I had two MP3s playing, in different applications, on an OS X box with the aforesaid 64MB RAM.

Not too shabby for Apple.

Apple Store Fairy

[opwierde]

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?

Re:Who's Hat

[benh57]

My CPU monitor app would tend to disagree with you. OS X uses SMP very, very well.

Most people who bash Apple's dual CPU machines haven't actually used one.

Re:Who's Hat

[omegadva]

Normally I refrain from commenting during such PC vs Mac flamewars, but...

1) Macs are as fast as PCs.

False. (For the majority of tasks)

Check out this comparison of Dual 1.25 Ghz G4 vs single 3.06 HT P4.

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/r ev iews/cw_macvspciii.htm

In fact the Mhz metric largely holds true for comparing G4 to P3 and slightly less for P4 secondary to it's pipeline design.

2) Macs total system architecture is faster.

False.

Again reference to above article.

Firewire 400 is faster on PC depending on the PCI card.

3) Macs are beautiful, intuitive, and easy to use.

True.

Try editting multiple hours of video and music on
your PC using Premier/Ulead/Pinnacle software vs
Final Cut Pro.

Macs are great at what they do, and 90% of the time they are fast enough that you will not notice a significant difference in daily use.

BUT, when rendering video, editting photographs, running 3D simulations etc they are slower than the cutting edge Intel hardware as shown in multiple head to head comparisons.

Re:Who's Hat

[Glock27]

If by "equivalent" you mean "50% slower" than you are correct.

Well, no. According to the article you linked, the Mac was 56% as fast as the P4. Pretty bad on the face of it, but those programs are most likely testing the parallel processing functionality of those processors (Altivec, SSE2 etc.) as opposed to general purpose computing power. It is also not at all clear which of those functions (if any) took advantage of the second CPU in the Mac.

Unfortunately, no one seems to be posting SPEC results for G4 systems these days. The closest I can find is for a 1.45 GHz. Power4 system from IBM, which most likely has similar IPC. It comes in at an impressive 909/ 1251 SPECint/SPECfp, vs. 1085/1092 for the 3.06 GHz. P4 from Dell (Precision Workstation 350). Note that the IBM system outperforms the P4 at floating point at less than 1/2 the clockspeed.

I'm not claiming that the Apple machines are as fast as the IBM implementation, but I also wouldn't expect them to be all that much slower. Anyone willing to post SPEC numbers for the new Apple boxes? :-)

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[thedbp]

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.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[Tychoma]

I've run XP on a P266 Laptop (Panasonic CF-45) with 96 MB RAM & a PII 233 (no name) with 128 MB.

Both ran fine with the visual efects set to best performance.

I had to take the laptop back to Win 98 though, cos I wanted it to be able to play full screen MPEG (which XP choked on)

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[Ponty]

Dude, that was the joke.

Re:Who's Hat

[droleary]

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.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[drsmithy]

No, it's not. I really don't know where people get this idea.

Probably from experience. I've used OS X on everything up to a Dual 1GHz Xserve, and the GUI *still* chunks up under trivial load. This is before we get to what I can only assume are deliberately inserted delays like the ones before menues appear.

I use OS X(.2.3) all day, every day. It's slow. If you're used to and/or reminded of other systems on a regular basis, it's borderline unusable. Compared to even a dual 1GHz G4, my Celeron/450 at home is blazingly responsive.

Re:Yeah...

[labratuk]

The New iMacs on store.apple.com start at $1200.

And while the eMac would be better, I'm still paying for an integrated monitor and a load of other crap that I don't want.

I don't know about you, but I just can not afford to spend $1100 on a computer.

People are always harping about how good MacOS X is, how it has succeeded in doing what Linux has failed to do, and claim that the machines to run it aren't all that expensive for what you get.

But they always overlook the fact that if you ignore the 'for what you get' bit, it remains that they are still expensive.

Urban legend

[Markonen]

You know, the 1.25GHz macs were never overclocked. Take off the heat sink and see "7455A 1250" on the chips. This rumor started to spread after Motorola didn't update their G4 specs to include 1250MHz availability. The likely explanation is that these parts are only available to Apple.

Re: sorry for the typo, I meant to say grammar

[bursch-X]

Sorry for the typo, I meant to say grammar

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[FVK]

All of you need to stop boring the crowd with your pedestrian configs and trivial os x achievements.

I have installed Mac OS X 10.2.3 on no less than a mac color classic stuffed with a PowerMac 8500 MBD that I hacksawed the pci slots off of and upgraded with a 550mhz copper G3 OC'd to 667mhz.

The 8 ram slots are all populated with 8MB DIMMS. I have upgraded the onboard video to full 4MB of VRAM. The 10" screen is 512x384 so I can't actually see the dock or the right half of the desktop but I am using this machine in a beowolf cluster of DuoDocks II's and Centris 610's to encode MPEG-2 streams of the Screen Savers (TechTV) that are dumped onto my 2TB fibre channel SAN comprised completely of 1GB Iomega Jaz drives, for later editing and archiving onto Fujitsu DynaMO Optical media in RealMedia format.

Now who wants some???

Re:Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[tupps]

The thing is that most people don't utilise 100% on any of these machines. For most people the fact that the system is stable and that it works predictably is more than enough.

Personally I find the fact that I have never had to rebuild my mac (my machine) from scratch has been a huge saving as I have had rebuild my PC several time (gets slow after installing crap).

The fact that I can move all my apps and preferences from my old mac to my new one in about an hour is a great saving. This includes all my prefences etc. It would take that long just to reinstall all my PC software.

These are the things that make the Mac fast for me, not how fast the CPU is every once in a while when I do some rendering.

Re:Noice level

[wadetemp]

It's not true. There was a fix for excessive fan noise in OS9, where evidentally the so-called "leaf blower" CPU fan mode came on more than needed. The fix didn't change the noise level of my MDD G4, which doesn't have OS9. Mine is fairly loud even without the leaf-blower sound (which I have personally never heard.) I've tried temporarily unplugging the CPU fan to make sure it was not the culprit... because I was thinking it is possible my machine is *always* in leaf-blower mode, which it very well could be since I've never heard it at any other sound level... and it's not that. It's the set of fans as a whole that are the problem.

I have heard PCs that are twice as loud though. So take all this with a grain of salt.

Re:If you consider an EMachine on par with a PC

[Dopeskills]

I have an eMachine 667 Celeron; or rather, I had one. I've since upgraded the mb to a nice Athlon XP2000+. Before that, the computer worked fine for me, although I must admit the accessory parts were a little cheap. Of course, at $499 including monitor, I can't really complain about that.

The single most irritating thing about the old motherboard was that there was no AGP slot per se, so I couldn't upgrade the video without replacing the mb. It wasn't much of an issue, though, it served my needs (even if not my wants) up until it simply wasn't a fast enough computer anymore.

If you're considering getting an eMachine, my advice would be to invest in halfway decent offboard video and sound cards sooner rather than later, just because upgrades are cool. Keep an eye on the hard drive; they tend to be cheap Taiwanese pieces of crap (although I AM still using mine, no problems yet).

I don't know what the power supply ratings on some of the newer boxes are, but mine was *only* 120W. Even so, there's been no issue with it. If you're going to runa bunch of high-power stuff tho, you'll obviously want to replace it.

The best feature it compactness. Nice small, rounded cases, easy to carry under one arm. Add in a flatscreen monitor (eventually) and you'll be all set. LAN party, anyone?

Sean

Re:Help

[coolmacdude]

WTF? LMAO!!! You are posting in a thread about brand new dual 1.42 ghz powermacs complaining about why you have problems on 6 year old machines. I think its time to upgrade.

This is a good point

[acomj]

Apple really made usb one by not including any other port on the original imac.. USB which had been on pcs for a while and never caught on finally did.

Now for the towers its not a huge issue because of the pci slots but for the notebooks its just annoying.

I know apple is pushing firewire and you can buy firewire hard drives (I have one and it works great). And I've heard even though it has a slightly slower speed firewire actually works ever so slightly faster than usb2, so for speed we'll call it a draw..

But choice is good.. Most digital cameras will probably come with usb2 instead of usb1. Camcorders all are firewire and will probably stay that way.. the post is correct there are bus loads of usb2 stuff out there... Its built into every PC so its not going away.

My family paid 3000$ for an Apple //e

[acomj]

Green screen, TWO! floppy drives,128k , 80 column card, and dot matrix printer..

Welcome to the wonderfull world of computer depreciation.. Sometimes when you buy a new machine its best not to look at new hardware prices for a couple of years..Saves a lot of malox moments..

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[noewun]

I'm posting this from my Newton, which is running a slimmed down version of 10.2.3. I had to compile my own kernel, but it works now. I have an iPod ducktaped to the back, attached with a home made Firwire-to-SCSi cable, which feeds the SCSI slot I welded (soldering is for wimps!) onto the back of the Newton.

I usethe iPod for storage so the Newton's RAM is free for application space. Word runs like a pig, but I can surf the web, check email and listen to iTunes. At home I have a Beowulf cluster of PDAs which I use to running as a combo firewall/router to my in house network of Apple //s and Performas, which I use to take the signal from my digital cable and stream it through my house.

600+ channels in the bathroom!

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[noewun]

My first Mac lasted ten years of daily use before the mobo fried.

My friend's seven year old DuoDock is still going strong. It just went with her to Sundance and performed like a charm.

You have no facts to back that up. Oh sure, you may have some anecdotal claim about your buddies Uncle who is using his Apple II or whatever, but that's hardly scientific proof. I would ask you to provide me with some cold hard scientific facts that show that statement to be true or else I'll assume you to have no credibility.

I do. Walk into any printing plant, pre-press house or design firm and you will see four, five, six and seven year old Macs hard at use. One plant I worked at in 1997 was using a Quadra 700 (25 MHz 040, disconinued in 1994) as a PDF crunching machine. It sat on the newtork, monitoring a hot folder, and PDF'd any postscript file which appeard there. I went back to visit the place in 1999 and they had finally replaced the Quadra with an original iMac, which they are still using. They were also still using a //ci (built in 1990) to keep an eye on the Fiery ques.

At the job where I just finished a gig, my daily machine was a dual 450 G4, built in 1999. The production people were using various vintages of iMacs (1998 and forward). The scanning station was am original beige, desktop G3, EOL'd in 1999. There was an 8600 in the hallway driving a smaller scanner for quickie jobs for the art directors. I could go on.

Now, my personal favorite: I worked in a small pre-press place. The owner replaced an old AGFA RIP with an 8100/100 (EOL'd 1995!) running a Viper RIP and stuffed full of RAM. That sucker chewed through postscript files which would cause the older RIP to error out and didn't miss a beat. I actually laughed the first time I ran a job to it and watched the progress bar zip across the screen.

That's all from my knowledge of one industry. Check into other industries and I'm sure you will find similar stories.

I am sorry is your hatred of "Mac zealots" requires you to see anyone who would dispute your view of the world as, somehow, delusional. However, your solipsism doesn't count as evidence.

Re:Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[tshak]

For most people the fact that the system is stable and that it works predictably is more than enough.

Can you quantify this statement? As software becomes more usable, more and more people are finding the benefits of MP3 and Video encoding, Home video editing, and other multimedia activities that are not fast enough even on the best Nforce2 based Athlon.

Re:Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[tshak]

The problem is that you can't compare Apple to Intel all the time. Look at AMD with NVidia's Nforce2 platform. Look at Hypertransport. It looks a like some of the benefits that Apple has, with a faster CPU (real world performance, not ghz) and cheaper price tag.

Don't get me wrong, a part of me want's a MAC, but my audio editing has strict performance requirements. These performance requirements are easily met by my ~$800 1.5 year old Athlon (firewire, UWSCSI (10K rpm), etc.) and can barely be beat by a $1500 G4 TODAY. Sure, the powermac is much more elegant, and has a cooler OS (for A/V, at least) but I still can't justify the price/performance margin.

On the flipside, for a casual user who would be just fine on a "low end" G4 with 256MB of RAM, I'd recommend a $1199 iMac over a $899 DELL any day.

Re:Yeah...

[appleprophet]

Uh, that wasn't a troll. As you might gather from my user name, I'm quite the Mac fan.

However, I've built a few PCs myself and I'm very aware that FireWire isn't a Mac exclusive, for example. You can pick up a FireWire PCI card for $20 at Fry's or get a motherboard with it built in. Hell, my Audigy soundcard has FireWire in it. FireWire 800 will be just as ubiquitous very soon.

Gigabit Ethernet: again, $30 at Fry's.

Wireless networking: AirPort equivalents are everywhere.

iChat, iTunes, Safari, etc... Well, I sincerely hope you don't believe that there are no decent MP3 players, chat clients, web browsers, and other core components of your computer available for PCs.

Re:Entry level price AND speed of entry machine dr

[JonathanF]

The eMac and iMac don't have L3 cache or a 133+ MHz system bus; both of those are major factors in why the PowerMac is faster, as the G4 depends heavily on having lots of bandwidth (memory and otherwise). Even the 667 MHz PowerBook from last year can beat the current eMacs or iMacs in some cases, simply because of how much room it has to work with.

If you can, wait until the iMac is updated (which should be soon, possibly within a week), and compare their speed to the dual-processor PowerMacs. If the iMac gets a 133 MHz system bus, you might not see as much of a difference between it and a similarly-clocked PowerMac.

Re:Yeah...

[constantnormal]

Well, I made a stab at it. While I can't guarantee that I selected the most comparable Dell system or navigated their awkward customized system configurator correctly, here's what I got:

• I selected a Dell Dimension 8250 as my starting point
• I wasn't able to find a dual-cpu Dell, but estimated that a 2.8GHz P4 was in the ballpark of 2x1.25GHz G4's
• couldn't get 2M of L2 cache on the Dell to match the 2M of L3 cache + however much L2 cache comes with the Mac G4's -- had to settle for 512K of Dell L2 cache. Oh, and I'm pretty sure that the G4's L1 cache is larger than the P4 L1 cache as well.
• I couldn't find ANY Dell option for Firewire, of any speed.
• No onboard Bluetooth for the Dell, either.
• 10/100 ethernet was the best I could do with the Dell. No gigahertz ethernet.
• I couldn't exactly match HD sizes, so I let a 60G Dell HD = an 80G PowerMac HD.
• Omitted monitors on the Dell to match the Mac. Also omitted secondary CD and zip drive on Dell to match the Mac.
• added the Dell combo drive equivalent
• went with the Soundblaster soundcard Dell option
• Assumed the Dell 64M GeForce4 MX video card was equivalent to the Mac's 64M ATI 9000 video card.
• No onboard 802.11g available for the Dell. Went with an external USB-connected 802.11b unit
• selected the basic Musicmatch player, HK-395 speakers, the recommended Picture Studio, Paint Shop Pro option, and the Movie Studio Plus option.
• selected the basic Win XP Home Edition OS.
• cheapest s/w app bundle.
• 1-yr warranty.

The Dell came in at at $1747 vs the PowerMac's $1999. I think I gave the Dell more than a fair shot.

For myself, either the integrated Firewire 800, 802.11g and Bluetooth or the combination of OS X and the Apple iLife bundle is worth $200. Getting all of that for $200 over the Dell is a bargain. I don't even need to go into the free OS X Developer's toolkit, which is worth a lot more than $200 all by itself.

YMMV.

Re:Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[tupps]

I will give you an example, I have a mac, my friend has a PC, he is a systems admin (unix) I am a software developer (web based and .net). We both rip MP3's (him for his car (eg no wmf), me so I can listen to it on my computer).

He spent 2 hours trying to find an MP3 encoder for his computer, trying different software etc. I drop my CD into my machine and iTunes imports it into my playlist for me. Now the CPU advantage his machine has over mine was all but lost when he had to spend more than a couple of minutes trying to find MP3 software.

I find this over and over again. I organised a new iMac for my Dad, who is computer literate, but not a developer or anything like that. He picked it up in the middle of the day, had it setup, printer working and had installed MS Office. All within 30 minutes of arriving home with the computer. I might have spent an hour with my Dad fixing stuff on his computer. My sister with a PC, took longer than that just to get MS Office installed. Office on the Mac's software installation routine is this: Drag these folders to your computer, click application. I am sure you know the PC routine. Moving computers, just drag all your files and app s from one computer to the other. I did this and 1 or 2 apps prompted for license keys again, but apart from that a painless process.

I develop and do support all day on a PC, I use a mac at home because I don't want to have to spend my time fiddling with setting and pissing about. It just works.

Re:um yeah

[TheCrazyFinn]

Nope. The start of the Pentium II(i686/P6) architecture was the Pentium Pro. The P2 is a PPro with MMX and a different cache interface and some optimizations so that 16bit code didn't run like ass. The Pentium MMX is not a P2 core (Despite the fact that it did outperform the original Cacheless Celeron).

The same old debate

[Anonymous Coward]

Must it always come down to the same discussions, in no particular order:
* Performance, or lack thereof
* The Mhz/Ghz gap with Intel
* OS X on Wintel
* Price (why are Macs compared to eMachines when they are more comparable to Sony VAIOs?]

and, oh yes
* the one button mouse (although no one seems to care about this so far)

The Mac platform has value to those that value what it has to offer; bundled applications, innovative technologies, style, and ease of use.

Its critics can easily dismiss those things and can instantly point to spec sheets, market share, and applications availability, notably in games. There is no denying that this is true and the trends are not encouraging.

To the cynics that consider stories like this to be insidious attempts at advertising, they should realize that Apple is, arguably, one of the most visible PC manufacturers whose R&D efforts (others that come to mind include HP, Dell, Sony) often find themselves adopted soon after by other "me too" makers *cough* Gateway *cough* and thus a portent of what may soon find its way into PC cases.

So, what I would like to hear more about and become more informed about, given the (often) informed qualities of the Slashdot crowd, are the implications of the new G4 on the computing community:
* PC users have been slow to adopt Firewire, will Firewire 800 spark any interest?
* will the newest Mac unleash pent-up Bluetooth integration and applications?
* is there any interest in the new technologies and how they might play into Apple's current efforts with open source?
* will the new machine and its new features make any difference whatsoever in the PC market?
* does the USB2.0 omission bother anyone?

FWIW, I am still chugging along on a 433Mhz G3 running OS X but the last computer our family purchased was a 2Ghz P4 for my wife who, as the primary user, wouldn't need more than what a bargain PC box has to offer. For myself, as the family's dominant Mac advocate, this new machine carries a high lust factor and punctuates Apple's commitment to keeping their product line fresh, but I'm not in the market for a new Mac. At least not yet.

Re:Display

[kyrre]

Thank you. You might be right about the PB12". The price of a pb 12" and, the powermac I am considering is about the same. (I just can't resist that DVD-R). If I buy the powerbook I can sell my iBook, which then totally makes out to less cash. I think of seting the price to about 1000 euros. I even know of two people drooling at iBooks. They might not like my 8mb ati card.

I'm no apple insulter

[otisthegbs]

I dont hate apple or anything, i have one, an iBook. but the fact is when i got OSx.2 installed with that new apple X11 fully quartz enhanced shit, glxgears only gets 70fps while my two year old PC gets 900+FPS so i couldn't give a flying rats bum as to what's technologically superiour. All i know is that my PC is faster. oh, and p.s. i work in a used mac store, and i can honestly say that there's no lifeform lower than a mac zealot.

Re:I'm no apple insulter

[MrOrn]

p.s. i work in a used mac store, and i can honestly say that there's no lifeform lower than a mac zealot

See, there I go proving that I am no Apple insulter.

...My Mac upgrade history

[espilce]

1992: Parents purchased a Macintosh LC. Worst. Computer. Ever. Me: "Fuck this shit I'm never buying a goddamn Mac again!!!!!"
1997: Parents (finally) purchase a PC from a local shop. Windows hard locks and corrupts video driver within first hour of use. Me: "Fuck this shit I'm never using goddamn Windows again!!!!"
1998: Purchase UMAX prebuilt for $900. Absolute crap. Me: "Fuck this shit I'm never buying a prebuilt again!!!"
1998: (a month later) returned UMAX, spent the $900 building 1337 Pentium-II 400 box. Installed Linux. (sigh of relief). Finally I am happy...
2000: Huh What? OS X is Unix based? Hmm...
2003: Powerbook for ~$2000?? w00t! Purchased 12.1" PB, waiting for it to be shipped (2 to 4 weeks... grumble grumble).

My PII is still runnin' strong after 5 years, a testament to the saying 'If you want something done right, do it yourself.' I can't exactly 'do it myself' with a laptop, so here's to hoping Apple can do it right this time.

Re:Lower your quality, Apple

[Surlyboi]

Kids that use Apples in general transition to the PC world and are lost. The one-button thing is just the tip of the iceberg. They have to learn all over again how to use a computer. The Apple interface might be nice and user-friendly, but I used to work in an architectural office...there were no Macs there. Summer-working kids came out of high school and suffered immediate PC-itis because of their limited exposure.

Either the interns rode to work on the short bus
or you're full of shit. The pickup from Mac to PC
is virtually nonexistant and has been since MS
"innovated" the interface world with Win 95. I
went from Mac hardcore to 'doze user in about 30
seconds flat. Most of the Mac users I've known
who've had to transition to PCs for whatever
reason, especially those under 30, have also had
absolutely no problem.

I want what's best for the students just as well as the next...and in my view, they need to learn on the same machines they will eventually work on...PC's.

Take your "real world" arguments to somebody
who'll actually buy that crap. Kids should learn
on as many platforms as possible so they actually
have a choice, rather than having one option
rammed down their throats and being ignorant (as
you seem to be) of the validity of other OS/
hardware choices.

Re:So....

[IamTheRealMike]

Well _I_ wouldn't mod you down ;) I understand your point, but I also disagree with your statement, it's no more "ridiculous groupthink" than the whole OSS movement and the prevelant view of it here.

Oh I don't know. I see plenty of comments bashing open source software these days. Sure, it used to be the same way, but nowadays saying you can't use the Gimp because it's not usable enough or whatever is usually modded up.

I think the reason you get mod'ed down is that your opinion is not stated in a way that directly addresses the statements (at least it was in this case).

Well often they are, but in cases like this yeah I went off on a tangent. There's not really a place you can put a rant, or let off steam, where it is on topic so it might as well be at least a little bit related. Anyway, I frequently point out flaws in peoples arguments esp when they are talking about Apple stuff, and often it gets modded up, but then 2 days later there is another story and all the comments are saying exactly the same thing, so I can't really be bothered doing it all over again.

Now you might have a disagreement with my facts, but you did not state it, instead you claim that those facts have nothing to do with it, and it's just groupthink.

That's because the facts are (as far as i'm aware) accurate. I'm sure they do ship more UNIX boxes than other manufacturers. And my rebuttal was - so what? Shipping a proprietary Unix doesn't make a company so special, Sun do this too but I rarely see stories about Solaris.

Well, you never countered my statements, you just dismissed them and proffered an opinion that can't be validated. That in many peoples books is a troll.

IMO a troll is a post that doesn't actually reflect the posters thoughts, it's just clearly designed to stir up a flamewar. Unfortunately the term has been widened on slashdot to mean anybody who gives an unpopular opinion without bulletproof arguments. It doesn't matter if the responses give relatively weak rebuttals, if 95% of your points are valid but the remaining point has a mistake in, some people consider you to be a troll.

I for one never mod down comments I don't agree with, posts that are actually are trolls (as posted by the wierdo losers who simply enjoy trying to get lots of responses on slashdot) deserve it for sure, and posts that are pure opinion without any attempt to back it up (aqua r0xors, or gnome armageddon etc) are flamebait.

One interesting test would be to see if these type of Apple articles appeared with their current frequency pre-OSX, if so, then your statement holds more water.

No, I never claimed they did, and my arguments weren't based on such a claim. Before Apple underwent their image makeover and adopted unix, they weren't cool. Now they are, and moderation has been severely warped because of it. But really that's all that changed, Apples business is fundamentally the same, simply using a POSIX compliant kernel and using various unix tools doesn't change anything really except peoples perceptions.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9 - Anecdotal

[Bob Abooey]

I hope you understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and scientific proof becasue you don't seem to based upon your post.

I happen to work for a software company and I am looking at an old Pentiom 133 that I use for a print server which has to be from 97-98. This thing is as generic as you can get for a cheap PC from that era and it runs 24/7 with only occasional reboots. (NT4) Does that mean that I go around telling people how great PowerSpec PC's are and how they're better than Macs because they cost 1/3 of what a new Mac cost and run for 5-6 years with no maintainence???? No, of course not.

I deal with clients (government) who are still running old 486's with DOS on them. I see lots of old pentiums with Win 95 on them. Does that mean I run around telling everone how great 486's were? No, of course not. Christ, I still have a commodore 64 that was given to me in 1984 that boots up so by your method of proof it was the best computer evar.

Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you? Is any of this making sense to you?

Re:Yeah...

[hcdejong]

How, indeed, when only one of those systems runs the OS I want (OS X)? The 'build your own' option may be free but it won't do me any good. Comparing a Mac with a BYO PC is pointless.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9

[darien]

I'm posting this from a 600MHz G4 with 128Mb running MacOS 9.2, and Word runs a pig for me too. So does Photoshop, actually. And Illustrator. And Mozilla. And Acrobat. And in fact just about every fucking progamme I use.

(I really, really, really wish my boss would fork out for OS X, but since I have to do most of my work in Quark XPress it's kind of hard to make a good case for it...)

Re:CPU performance - Quartz

[jbolden]

This debate was about CPU speed. As for dragging windows and so forth, Quartz is terrific in offloading graphics primatives from the CPU. The problem is that the OSX desktop is more graphically complex so basically you are getting pretty for free not a CPU enchancement. In fact you can tell be the design of the OSX 10.2, as well as some of the alpha desktops they are playing with, that Apple would like to make the desktop much more complex but they don't have the chip speeds to support it.

Re:Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[tshak]

A) If you are a .NET developer, how do you use a mac? I primarily code in C# (a little Perl, Java, Cold Fusion, etc.) and I use VS.NET. If I could get VS.NET on OS X with reasonable speed (emulator?) that may be enough to push me to buy a mac.

B) You can't compare the 2 hours that your friend took to find an MP3 encoder. It's an innacurate comparison. A "PC" is not a "PC" as a Mac is a Mac. So what if he bought a poorly equiped PC? If he bought a Dell (for example) all the software is included. Maybe the software isn't quite as slick, but the CPU difference would easily make up for a minor usability difference.

C) Most of your evidence is Anecdotal (thefore, you haven't quantified as I asked you to). So what if you spend an hour fixing your dad's stuff? It's an isolated incident with too many variables. My machine at home has been running fine and I don't waste time "fixing it".

In my experience, Mac's are definitely slicker out of the box. But you can't compare it's usability to the significant performance gap (for the price). For the most part certain tasks like MP3 encoding will always be faster than the mac, until Apple finally goes to a closed, proprietary, but x86 based solution.

Until then, I'd like a Mac for all of my audio software. The problem is, my 1.2Ghz Athlon is not quite fast enough for complex software synthesis (only super complex songs in Reason - 90% of songs only use only 50% of the CPU). If I knew that a dual 1Ghz G4 could beat the pants off of that, AND that I could get one for ~$1600 WITH a 17 or 18" flat panel, then I'd be sold.

Re:Yeah...

[b1t r0t]

Starts at $799. Not $1200.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9 - Anecdotal

[noewun]

Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you? Is any of this making sense to you?

I understand perfectly.

The evidence I have given you is perfectly acceptable. Were I called on to testify in a court, my 13+ years of experience would more than satisfy any judge's requirements as to my knowledge, as would the last five years I have spent teaching and consulting in production and pre-press.

This said, I do not understand your call for "scientific" evidence, as in all of the Slashdot threads I have read, almost no "scientific" evidence is given. People offer their experience, and that experience is taken at face value. If, in another thread, I say that I have worked with such and such a tool and that it behaves like X and Y, people do not say, "Show me scientific evidence!". They say, "well, when I worked with such and such a tool, if behaved like Y and Z," and so forth.

So, I have no "scientific" evidence, but I will bet $1000 that you don't, either. You have your opinions, which are clear, and, it seems, nothing but your own conviction to back them up. I have my experience, and the experience of others in the thread to show that Macs stay around for a long time and remain useful for a long time. Do they do this more than PCs? I don't know, and it was never part of the argument.

Now, as to your "logic": it was said that :

Ah.... finally someone that understands that Macs end up being CHEAPER than pcs in the long run

to which you responded with a long attack that computers don't get faster as they age. This is undoubtedly true, but has nothing to do with the posters comment, which was talking about utility, not speed.

Then it was said that:

It's not uncommon for a mac to last 7-8 years (being used actively).

To which you replied with another long comment, beginnig with an ad hominem attack on all Mac users, ending with asking for "scientific" evidence, which, as I've already said, is not the standard here at Slashdot.

Then was said:

I was called to fix a person's Mac, to find out that they were still using an Apple ][e as one of their main computers!!

To which you responded with a list of some of your older machines, proceeded to give your own antecdotal reasons for why you wouldn't use them, and then used you subjective judgements as a standard of measure fort the whole world.

Having said all this, the burden of proof is on you. Read on in this thread and you will find a lot of people offering their own experience as to the longevity of Macs. As you have offered neither antecdotal or "scientific" evidence to the contrary, I think the ball's in your court.

Re:Why subjective speed talk modded up?

[mbbac]

I have a theory, too, when it comes to long-time Mac users. They've been stuck in a basically non multitasking environment for so long, they often get an overrated perception of their newer system's overall power in OS X. (Quite simply, their eyes are opened to how much more they can get accomplished on their new computer because things put in the background really do process in the background.) They forget that over on the "Intel" side of the fence, people have been doing this (and expecting it to work that way) ever since the days of Windows '95 and NT 3.5, not to mention all the Linux and BSD users).

I've actually heard a lot of them say that the don't like OS X's multi-tasking. They prefer the multi-tasking model of Classic Mac OS because the foreground application had the CPU almost dedicated to it.

I disagree, obviously, but I was just stating the fact that your assumption is incorrect.

Re:Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[tupps]

A) Not sure if I said, but Work == PC Home == Mac B) None of the Dell's here at work came with an MP3 Decoder, maybe the home editions do. MS Media player I beleive decodes to wmf files but that does not help his in car MP3 player. C) Sorry I didn't have the time to do some significant statistical analysis. I go on my own experience. BTW Using your own logic your finding are flawed because your answers aren't quantified. How many people do you know where "reinstalling the OS" is the solution to there support problems?

Re:Yeah...

[labratuk]

Oh. You were taking about the old iMacs. I see. But still you're just paying less for an even more underpowered machine for OS X.

Two heads better than one, aka "I'll buy used."

[mactari]

From xlr8yourmac.com come a few benchmarks.

Straight benchmarks
"Real-world" apps
Quake 3 and friends

I think you can follow links to the rest of the review as easily I as I can paste them. :^)

I believe the most interesting bit is how well the dual processor 533 G4 holds up against the 800 MHz and 1 GHz G4 upgrades with many tasks. In Quake 3 and many other tasks that can take advantage of multiprocessing, the 533 DP comes out ahead of one or both of the two upgrades (depending on how efficient the DP support is).

Apple has not done the entry level any favors taking out the second processor, I'm afraid.

Re:So....

[binaryDigit]

No, I never claimed they did

Oh, I wasn't implying that you made that claim. Just thinking out loud, it would be interesting to see if the frequency of articles posted increased with OSX (which _could_ support my position), or if's at basically the same level, or say the level around the time of the iMac intro (i.e. nothing concerning OSS) which would support your position more.

But really that's all that changed, Apples business is fundamentally the same, simply using a POSIX compliant kernel and using various unix tools doesn't change anything really except peoples perceptions.

Well their POSIX compliant kernel is OS (even if it's not GPL), which is saying a lot more than any of the other larger manuf. I can't see how you can say that there hasen't been a change. Sure Apple does basically what Apple has always done, but like it or not, intentional or not, Apple has adopted, and somewhat embraced, the ways of the *nix world. Before that, they were COMPLETELY proprietary, they are breaking out of that, as Safari is a good example of. In the old days they would always completely do things in house to have complete control, they are realizing that they can't remain profitable with that attitude, so now their shifting. I think Pink then Taligent taught them some valuable lessons in this regard.

Anyway, I agree with most of your assessments about /. and the types of posts to these types of articles (can't really argue there, the proofs in the reading). We have a small dissagreement about Apple's position in the OSS/*nix world, that's ok too, if Apple can help push OSS and continue to provide resonable alternatives to other OS's, then I say more power to'em. If they do this by having a "real" OS at it's core, then I'll say even more power to'em.

Re:Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[tshak]

Well, as you can probably intuit Home machines are vastly different then Corporate machines - esp. from major players like Dell and Compaq.

Using your own logic your findings are flawed because your answers aren't quantified.

No, because you were the one who made the contention. I'm not saying that you are right or wrong about that contention (although my anecdotes contend the antithesis), I'm saying that you didn't provide sufficient basis for it.

So, if you have a Mac at home, do you not do any .NET development at home? What is your development platform of choice on OS X (for web applications particularly)?

Re:CPU performance - Quartz

[Zhe Mappel]

"In fact you can tell be the design of the OSX 10.2, as well as some of the alpha desktops they are playing with, that Apple would like to make the desktop much more complex but they don't have the chip speeds to support it."

Interesting. Where can one see these, pray tell?

Re:Yay! The CPU debate begins! Again...

[tupps]

I don't do any .Net development at home, although if I need to I can use Citrix and hook into a development server in our Citrix farm. Also I have a v. crusty IBM thunkpad which I can use to do .net on the move (although I consider it for emergencies only!).

As for MacOSX development, I dabble in the Cocoa framework which is a lot of fun to use. This is a direct decendent of Nextstep (most of the classes are still prefixed with NS), uses ObjectiveC which is some OO extensions added to C. I have been told it has a lot of features that smalltalk has, and is no where near as strict as Java or the .net languages.

As for web stuff most of it is done in PHP, mySQL, and a bit of Java. I also do a bit of work with Flash. Nearly all of the sites I deal with are FreeBSD or Linux based so any of those solutions can be emulated on the MacOSX.

Re:CPU performance - Quartz

[jbolden]

I saw them on mac rummor sites, MacOSrumers perhaps (?), about 6 months back. I'm not sure where you can find them now. If you would like to see an OSX 3D file manager, that is not the Apple alphas I was talking about but kind of looks similar, it's here.

Mod parent up

[Zhe Mappel]

Hardly a troll - what an imbecilic moderation that is. He's merely pointing out what everyone who owns both Mac and Wintel boxes knows: pound for pound, the Windoze boxes run faster (and have done so for some time).

There are plenty of good reasons for running OS X even with the Mac speed penalty - as I'm doing right now, indeed - but making exaggerrated claims will only mislead consumers and hurt Apple's sales in the long run.

Re:Help

[TracerJPN_USMC]

You posted this exact same shit in a previous mac thread a while ago. Maybe someone with more energy than me will dig it up. either way, you are full of it my friend.

Re:I hope you mean OS 9 - Anecdotal

[Bob Abooey]

Ah Ha, my delusional friend, the burden of proof is upon you as you are the one making claims and I was simply pointing out your lack of logic and how you have based your faulty conclusions upon false positives.

Using slashdot as a means for a proof is just silly when you consider that slashdot caters to a very small percentage of people on the planet (althogh most slashdotters seem to think otherwise) who tend to have strong biases one way or the other (Mac zealots, Linux zealots, Windows zealots, Amiga zealots, etc.) In fact my whole point relates directly to debunking the person who has a 5 year old Mac that's still running so they think that that means that Macs are the best value or "Cheaper in the long run" or a better long term value proposition or whatever. I pointed out how this means nothing and gave similar anecdotal evidence from my experience showing old PC's that were much cheaper that are still servicable. Yet you don't seem to think that has any bearing on the discusion....

The fact that my evidence is anecdotal, which I readily admit, IS THE WHOLE BASIS FOR MY POINT. You provide anecdotal evidence and I provide anecdotal evidence yet you claim that yours has more value because it's yours???? That's basically your argument as I understand it.

Now to address a few of your latest points:

to which you responded with a long attack that computers don't get faster as they age. This is undoubtedly true, but has nothing to do with the posters comment, which was talking about utility, not speed

I need you to define what you mean by "utility" here. As I understand it a computer is a tool and I can install software on that tool to accomplish a certain goal(s). I'm not sure how an old slower Mac would offer me more utility than an old slow PC or a cheap new blazing PC. I need a little help with that.

To which you responded with a list of some of your older machines, proceeded to give your own antecdotal reasons for why you wouldn't use them, and then used you subjective judgements as a standard of measure fort the whole world

Then you did miss my point. My RS/6000 has a PPC 233 Mhz chip and is actually a very functional box. I could use it as my main computer if I had to. The reason I wouldn't is simply because I can buy a PC for less than a grand that would quite simply blow the doors off that old box, thusly making me much more productive and offering me much more utility.

The premise that a Mac has some kind of magic associated with it that would keep it modern as it grows old versus that of an aging PC is severely lacking in logic.

Boromir Son of Faramir?

[alacqua]

It's been a while, but wasn't Boromir son of Denethor and brother of Faramir? And wasn't Denethor a Steward (i.e. not king), hence the "Return of the King" - Aragorn?

Re:Lower your quality, Apple

[BJZQ8]

I am not ignorant of the benefits of a multi-platform education nor am I opposed to Macs in education. But for the most part, school boards and teachers want a real-life computer experience. Which means that the vast, overwhelming number of computers in a school should be PC's. As they are in the school district I supervise. There are Macs, but they are few and far between. Now as for all of the people that called me an "intern" and "full of" various things, how many school districts have YOU been the head computer honcho of? I am in them all day, every day, and I see what problems kids DO have. They DO have problems transitioning between them. They transition to PC's, and end up pushing in the MIDDLE of a PC mouse, rather than the left button as they should. There are many more problems than that. Are they insurmountable? No. But all of my experience says that the majority of their education should be in machines they are going to use in their future lives. Your multi-platform argument could just as easily support the use of Amigas, Commodore 64's, and VAX's. Again...for all of the people that would rather talk trash than have a legitimate debate...I do not hate Macs...but until the majority of the world uses them, they will continue to be in the minority of machines that make up my school district.