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Updated Power Macs at Apple.com
Gropo writes "Same old 'scary cyclops' quicksilver face. Up to 1.42 Ghz, FireWire 800, 802.11g and entry-level pricing has dropped. " With the SuperDrive and one of those massive LCD screens, you have a one highly desirable chunk of hardware.
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
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.
Think Differe-- BIGGER FASTER BETTER, Must...Catch...Up...
--
"pain is weakness leaving the body."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.
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?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
. . . 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!
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...
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.
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.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
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.
Update:
Yes, Macs still more expensive than PC's... But they are worth it.
Highlights at 11.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
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).
I am suprised no one noticed that the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is now a BTO option.
Still listed as "coming soon" though.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
But no one wants to pay Apple's high-end prices.
...) 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.
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,
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.
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.
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?
I think the reason why Apple stuff is tolerated a lot more (other than the fact that it is not WinTel), is that Apple is the #1 producer of *nix based machines in the world. Not only that, but the ship more OSS "based" machines in the world (not to mention OSS based OS). So in that regard, they are much more meaningful than someone like Dell simply bumping the speed of their boxes. Remember that /. actually has a separate Apple section, so why is it news to YOU that Apple stuff would get mentioned more frequently?
I have an older PowerMac by my left knee and at ear level it generates 44 dB of soft white noise. The new-style mirror-face PowerMacs also generate about 44 dB of noise. But it's whining, tonal noise. It's a note you can hum. It's a hum that cannot be ignored.
Also, apparently, when the mirror-face PowerMacs' auxiliary fan kicks on, it's described as a "leaf blower." It's a lot louder. (I haven't heard that -- the main fans are bad enough -- and it's possible that the recent firmware upgrade helped keep the leaf-blower fan mostly off.)
The hum is so annoying that there's a website devoted to complaining about it and trying to get rid of it: g4noise.com.
A friend of mine has a music lab with 20 old-style PowerMacs that he'd like to upgrade to newer models. He got one mirror-face PowerMac just to see what it was like. The noise is totally unacceptable for a music lab station -- there's not even any question -- I sat down in front of the keyboard and it took me three seconds to realize there's no way I would use this computer for music.
The best solutions seem to be building a plywood case, lining it with foam, and putting the whole PowerMac inside!
So I hope the new models have quieter fans...
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.
Nae bother
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.
I write in my journal
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.
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!
.edu channel, this was what I had priced out on their low end model:
:)
To compare: as of yesterday, in the
$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
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
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.
,HP, or Dells') 200 watt PSU to replace the 145 watts they ship with. 20 bucks apiece.
As for the PSU, get a replacement (it's flex atx 5" wide, 4" deep - usually sold as 'for eMachines
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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).
Naa Apple have been using IBM made PowerPC chips for ages, G3s used in iMacs and iBooks nowadays are IBM ones i believe
Still, a bit expensive for the casual user. For a small business, this baby rules.
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.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
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.
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.
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.
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.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Indeed, when I studied processor design, the mantra was that CISC did more per cycle than RISC (as the instructions are more complex), but due to increased simplicity in design RISC chips run at a higher clock rate. Having a slow RISC chip seems to be the worst of both worlds!
Now, of course nothing is that simple, but the truth is that you need to devise a benchmark which represents your usage, and use that to decide - not some made up marketing numbers.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
...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)
People keep on forgetting that Intel chips do a whole lot less with each clock cycle than PowerPC chips.
Doesn't Linux run on both PowerPC and Intel hardware? Then why doesn't some enterprising individual go put together some various benchmarks comparing the two on this type of level playing field? I want to believe that the PowerPC is faster clock-for-clock, but I can't until I see some good benchmarks.
I just google'ed for some and all that I could find were some ancient BYTEMARKS.
It sure looks like it would be faster...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
>> the mantra was that CISC did more per cycle than RISC.
The opposite is true: most of the RISC instructions execute in a single cycle, while many CISC instructions take much more, which is why raw clock speed is only perhaps meaningful for RISC chips and means very little for CISC, but totally meaningless across platforms.
People keep forgetting that the G4 has a much higher raw clock speed than most of other very expensive high end RISC systems like Sun UltraSparc or SGI Mips or HP PA. How come other RISC vendors don't get blamed for their clock speed, while everyone screams at Apple everytime a faster system is introduced? Could this means that people just love to talk about Apple because it's cool and we all want a better Mac?
(Try taking a 5 year old PC & installing XP on it & see how it performs. Fun & games)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
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.
"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!
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
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.
Marko Karppinen