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Apple's Dual 2GHz By The Numbers
mallumax writes "ComputerWorld has an exciting review of Apple's Dual 2GHz machine." An excerpt: "It's clear from two weeks of testing that Apple's new Power Mac G5 dual 2-GHz machine is the fastest thing the company has ever produced. And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side."
come to the other side of computing... join us... don't be afraid!
Esoteric reference.
The G5 is great, but it doesn't hold a candle to my Powerstack 5000.
Maybe because it's processor is based on this bad boy.
Tcd004
Stories like this appeal to the geeky "need for speed" undoubtedly ramoant at /., but offer little insight into real consumer thought/need.
That said, this is pretty cool; not cool enough for me to switch to Apple, but cool.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
"it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side."
Doesn't anything somewhat stable meet or beat anything running windows?
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Yea! Go Tux! He's just so dead Tuxy.
and i'm sure slashdot intends to.
So, to what productive end do we expect this particular slashdot thread, perhaps the third or fourth on the subject of the G5's supposed speed, to go?
After seeing benchmarks for the G5, I'm actually considering switching to Mac, which I once thought to be a mortal sin (or is it still?).
I certainly can't think of a better desktop machine that the majority of people are familiar with and yet kicks out that kind of performance. Then again, why should I care if anyone else can figure out how to use my machine?
Did this guy actually test anything????
The entire article is full of startup times.....
My xt booted faster then his setup which needed almost a minute is surely must beat anything apple has....
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
a question: how does this compare to a intel's hyperthreading processor.
any benchmarks on that?
When comparing against a hyperthreading (HT) processor, do you count a HT CPU as one or two.
Linux kernel sees HT CPU as two, so SMB kernel has to be used.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
New processor is faster than its predecessor.
Did any of you moderators click those links? LOL!
It's no more expensive than a similarly configured high end PC.
Ah, a common mistake. Most people forget that OSX is also shiny AND lickable, besides just being blazingly fast.
But that has always been the point about the latest and greatest - most people don't need it because the software that is sold in volume today is designed to work adequately fast on the hardware that is sold in volume today.
It is only the people that are pushing the edge that need the top end stuff. The rest of us will buy it at 1/2 the price in 18 months time.
And while you can debate benchmarks until eternity, it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side.
/. clearly has an agenda to push. Why waste our time like this?
Well, uh... what?
I mean, maybe I'm just "debating benchmarks" here, but how do you pull the above statement out of the linked article?
On the G5, Photoshop launched in 8 seconds, and relaunched in 4. Yes, 4. On the Dual G4, it launched in 24 seconds, and relaunched in 12.5. And on the Powerbook, Photoshop was ready to go in 25 seconds the first time around, and in 17 seconds on relaunch.
Yes, but what of it? This has nothing to do with Windows, Windows Desktops, or even anything non-apple. It compares the G5 to other, older Apple products. Unsurprisingly, the *new* Apple product beats the *old* Apple product. And clicking a stopwatch, and measuring how long launching a program takes, or how long a reboot lasts isn't that much of a "benchmark".
And, just to give you an idea of the technical competence of the reviewer who wrote the article, check out this snippit:
One final note: I whined in my first review about the G5's weak Airport wireless signal. Several readers promptly (and pointedly) wrote to ask if I'd installed the Apple-supplied external Airport antenna. I had not.
I'm sorry. The article is lousy, and the clown who submitted this article to
Did your XT run Os x?
Why hasn't someone benchmarked this? Or at least why would apple not publicize this one? I would think apple could use a benchmark with very large datasets that would show the G5 with 8GB Ram and a Dual Xeon with 8GB Ram(using PAE). The G5 would clearly kick the $#!t out of the Xeon in this case.
The fact that the G5 can handle more ram without resorting to the PAE b.s., is a clear advantage and I think Apple should market that a little better.
Try pricing out a comparable machine from Dell (w/ dual 3GHz Xeons). You'll see that the Dell is significantly more expensive than the G5.
thats that.
The review didn't (unfortunately) seem to compare the dual-proc Mac to a PC, so the "meet or beat" claim is simply conjecture on the part of the story submitter.
However, it's a reasonable bet (given that a 2Ghz G5 isn't competitive with a top-of-the-line P4) that the submitter intended a multi-proc Mac to be compared to a single-proc PC. Comparing a dual-processor system to a single-processor is ridiculous (and I'm not talking about price concerns, either).
The overwhelming number of times when there's a bottlenecked task, it's a single CPU-bound thread. Having multiple processors will provide only nominal benefits. Apple putting multiple processors on-board won't *hurt*, except in the wallet, but it's not going to give Quake 3 double the framerate. Most raytracers support multiple threads of execution when rendering or can be hacked up to do so (even if, like PovRay, they require multiple processes to do so). Very few pieces of 2d software (video, still, etc) can benefit from multiple processors, however.
The claim should be "this system is faster than Apple's older systems, and worth a look for Mac users". Comparing one of Apple's systems to x86 boxes on a CPU horsepower or bang/buck metric not only isn't particularly favorable to Apple, but doesn't make much sense.
May we never see th
I got the chance to play with the mid-model (single 1.8 GHz) G5 and it is VERY fast compared to the older models (roughly about the same if not faster than the previous top model). The owner of said machine (a video editor) uses it as a front end for some of his editing work mainly because he wanted a Mac to use for the interface. The back end is comprised of two large SGI's and dozens of linux boxes (all AMDs).
The best tool for the job. My hats off to Apple for a great machine.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Oh ferchrissakes, quit trotting out that lame old story about how macs are more expensive. They are actually CHEAPER than most of the PeeCees that they're benchmarked against. Macs now have a better price/performance ratio than PeeCees. Sure they sent out a high-end unit for review, just like all the other manufacturers. But the new G5 units are way cheaper than similarly performing Windoze CPUs from Dell, IBM, etc. Sure you can put together a piece o'crap whitebox for less, but what you won't be getting a seamlessly integrated hardware/software solution.
Of course it's the fastest ever, CPU speeds are increasing all the time. If I go out and buy a new AMD CPU it'll be the fastest ever....for about 2-3 months.
Plus there's the "it beats anything on the PC market", erm quad CPU Xenon? it's a PC ain't it? where do you want to draw the line?
Macs are cool but speed doesn't convice people to buy a computer, the price often does. Mac users were once ridiculed for knowing very little about computers, however I think this isn't true these days. Mac users know enough about computers to be able to choose between a computer running Windows and a Mac.
You speak authoritatively as an owner and user of a G5, OS X, and one buttoned mice, right?
Or are you *imagining* everything about a Mac without having used it?
GPL Deconstructed
This is they type of thing that shouldn't make front page. Its good for the apple section but not front page. It is only a good article for apple users (which I am). But then you get all these ppl saying 'so what' which if you aren't a apple user, is true. This article doesn't give hard benchmarks, and specifically says that. So when ppl come in here and say my xxx boots quicker then that, all I have to say is, So what? This isn't meant to compare different platforms, just Macs.
It's just fast fast fast.
hey, guess what? you don't have to buy a top-of-the-line, just-came-out mac for decent performance! apple still sells g4's!
Hah. It cost me about $1100 to buy a dual motherboard, two Athlon MP 2000+, 1GB of ECC DRR RAM, a Lian Li case and an Enermax supply.
None of the above components are cheap, and still the price isn't near what you said. Of course the hard disk, CD drive, video and sound cards aren't included, but I'd have to fill the case with drives and buy the most expensive video card to get near that.
Of course mine isn't 64 bit, but I didn't see Opteron motherboards being sold anywhere when I was buying the components.
Actually, Mental Ray does run ont he Mac. It's integrated into Maya 5.
There's plenty that utilizes the power the G5 has to offer, else there wouldn't be a market for the machine and it would not sell. Because you can't think of the software doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I, personally, am looking forward to Renderman returning to the Mac.
why do apple insist on trying to have the fastest, and not instead focus on widening their compatibility, which is their real enemy...
That's just a silly statement. It's not like all of the company's resources are focused on only doing one thing. Looking back over the past five years, I think Apple has made exceptional progress in regards to widening compatibility...
You know, if you get can find a free pencil lying around you'll have a tremendous price/performance ratio. Maybe you should make that your regular machine.
Not only that, but I happen to like having more than one mouse button. Fight the mono-button tyranny!!!
Give it up already. Buy a Mac, sell the mouse on eBay, and buy a new one for $20. Logitech makes very nice ones. Microsoft's have improved since their optical mouse was first introduced. Just to be different, I bought my last one from IBM. Seriously, quit whining. If you can afford a Mac, you can afford a third-party mouse to go with it.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
cool article but very short on useful information. we've already seen benchmarks, we've already heard specs, we already know it's fast.
from the article:
The obvious conclusion: The Power Mac G5 is a stellar machine for anyone who will be using it for serious processing work. If you're simply surfing the Web and editing the occasional digital picture, it's overkill, of course. One of the single-processor G5s or even a Dual G4, which Apple still sells, is more than enough for those tasks.
and the only conclusion they come to is what they themselves describe (and what i would describe) as 'the obvious conclusion'. yep, sure is obvious. is anyone buying a g5 for yahoo games and tetris anyway?
ok, there's probably one of you but...
And where in the article did he compare the boot-up time of a G5 and a PC?
By the way, are you claiming that your XT booted Windows XP in less than a minute?
This is why nobody else thinks your Transformers watch is cool, either. I'm sorry, but every "cool" PC case I've seen reminded me of the infamous "Homer Car" from the simpsons. I would rather hide my computer under the desk than actually flaunt something so awful. Sharp industrial design is not gluing some fins and flashing lights on the same old box, then spray-glossing it all to a high sheen. Please throw Apple this bone, at least.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
Still, it is true more often than not.
So buy one of the cheaper ones, the 1.6 or the 1.8 single proc boxes.
They're comparably priced to a similarly specced pee cee, but they run OSX not Windoh!s
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Actually the 1's and 0's throughput on the pencil would be rather poor. I think the pentium and perhaps even a G5 would beat it. Smile and run your Mac my friend, at least it is not windows.
Got Code?
you mean like all the guys in the city with hummers?
let's be honest.. having a fast machine (or a hummer) is just cool.
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|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
Hm... This article is a bit misleading
I just recently got a Sager Laptop (for any who haven't heard about them, check out PCTorque.com for some outrageous laptops)
Here's the specs:
P4 3ghz HT
1 gb RAM
Radeon 9600
Two 60gb 7200RPM HD's in RAID 0
I have Photoshop 7. It launched in 4 seconds off cold boot. Relaunched in 2.
WinXP boots in 20 seconds, loading just about everything I have (Gaim, Kazaa, TV studio (it has a TV tuner), antivirus, etc). If it weren't for RAID initialization, the entire computer would boot in under 30 seconds.
It can run a good game of BF1942, all settings up on highest, while playing a DVD on another monitor, and downloading various things off Kazaa.
True, the laptop was about $2800, but hey, it's a LAPTOP. Try getting an apple laptop at that price that can compete with mine...
...but real-world app tests have shown that the dual 2GHz G5 beats Dell's cheapest dual 3.06GHz Xeon sytem, both in performance and (when configured identically as possible to Apple's base 2GHz dualie) in price.
In fact, Dell's current price ($4372) on the comparison machine has gone up by $600 since late June, the first time I configured one-- but even back then, Apple beat them by hundreds of dollars.
And don't bother playing the "I can build it cheaper" card-- you cannot fairly compare a manufactured system with one that you cobbled together with the cheapest parts you could find.
~Philly
What a disappointing article. His "speed" tests consisted of the ridiculously unscientific "boot time" test and application launch tests. Lopped on top of that were hand crafted Photoshop and Bryce "tests" which verify that the dual G5 kicks the crap out of the 17" G4 and 1.25GHz PowerMac. My 12" Powerbook is faster than the Lombard I bought in 1999. Yay.
What about running real stuff like FCP's Compressor or Maya's mental ray renderer plug-in? Maybe even a After Effects render speed. Using iMovie to test anything isn't very fair to the people who would buy a G5. They're not using iMovie to work on SD video. Photoshop users aren't using a bunch of filters picked at random.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I'm very much looking forward to Discreet's Cleaner 6 being installed on our new dual G5 (typing on it right now). We're currently using Cleaner 5 on a Dual 450 G4 - I think that just maybe the Dual 2.0Ghz will encode into mpeg2 for DVD a little quicker.
Similarly, Final Cut Pro will benefit from decreased render times, although it's pretty impressive on a dual 450 - Apple worked hard to sqeeze performance out of older systems with FCP.
You can shunt all this processing to dedicated video hardware costing thousands and upward, or you can buy a standard Mac and put FCP, Shake and Cleaner on there for much less.
Quake III Arena, while dated slightly compared to the better visual quality games still rules the roost for gameplay and it ambles along happily on this machine as you'd expect (more a function of graphics card really).
Why waste our time like this?
I think it has something to do with the banner ads at the top this page.
Let's all take a nice deep breath, and remember that this is simply yet another offering, in a huge selection of products; that these products are different in many ways, for many people; that purchasing one or more of these products is not indicative of your mental health, penis size, sexual orientation, or anything else... okey?
G5 fast, mmm, nice G5. Athlon also fast, mmm, nice Athlon. I want both, for different reasons. They are not mutually exclusive.
(As for all the 'so fuckin' what' posts; this is Slashdot. No one made you click More.)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
...is all the Mac haters who used to say "yeah, the Mac is cool, but I need something a little faster than 1GHz, like my IntelAMDAthlonXP 5500MHz box. You should see how FAST Explorer pops up on that puppy!!!1111"
Now that Apple has a arguably *fast* machine, they've switched back to complaining about the price.
I guess those folks just go between price, speed, and the number of mouse buttons, in circles.
I think the Macs are great machines and reasonably priced. My 500MHz iMac is perfectly usable and sits aside my 1.8GHz P4 Linux box with pride. The iMac cost me $1300 and the P4 cost around $1400 (I bought all quality components like Intel mobo, Antec case, 1GB Crucial RAM, etc), and it was purchased about 2 years after I got the iMac, and didn't even come with a monitor, so I think the iMac was a good deal. *shrug*
I don't know or care precisely how fast the G5s are. I just know they are fast, well-designed machines with a beautiful operating system and tools (have any of you ever written a program using the apple devel tools? I had a harder time taking a shit this morning!!) and they are worth the few hunder dollar premium.
Well, of course.
If you're comparing Apple to a standard "build from cheapest parts by yourslef" PC then of course it's going to be more expensive.
Home brewed beer is cheaper than a pint in the pub.
Thats the true test! Can it beat my Water cooled overclocked Dual Athlon-64FX51 with RAID-5 20K SCSI drives using LFS with kernel 2.6.0-test-7-mm with 3dnow2 extentions enabled?
Cheap case, no support...nothing pre-installed... not a valid comparison. Build it yourself versus well designed, supported and warranted by a major company is comparing Apples and Oranges... Invalid comparison
Configure a Dell similarly and you'll see it IS competitively priced.
Food for thought:
Back in the 386 and 486 days, I was in the 18-month upgrade cycle, simply cause my comp couldn't run the latest and greatest apps. Now, I am currently using a computer from 1999 - a p3-500. And, I have no immediate plans on upgrading. I consider myself among the power users -- graphic design, MSOffice, many programming suites, even an occasional game. And ya know what? It all works like a champ. Tell me, what's the reason for upgrading? So Photoshop loads in 4 seconds and not 20? Obviously, a new system would be NICE, but I don't really NEED it like we used to (new version of windows wouldn't run, office would crash, etc).
Before you answer with "To play games!" Please note that you can buy a brand spanky new Gamecube for $99 now. I will never play games on my PC again at that price!
Obviously this also doesn't apply to video editting as that needs every drop of power you can get it.
Lian Li cases aren't cheap. Support--all the parts you order wil lbe under warranty for differing amounts of time. Nothing preinstalled--I've already got everything I want to isntall, why pay more for stuff I've already got?
Build it yourself vs well designed supported etc etc blah blah blah? No offense, but if you really think someone who knows how to build a computer is getting a better packaged deal from Dell or wherever, you're dead wrong. For speed, stability, etc, buying the best quality components can't be beaten.
You cant have you're gentoo box optimised very well, on my gentoo box open office loads in approximately 3-4 seconds. Adimitedly im running a dual Athlon MP & 1.4ghz.
Other startup times include
gimp , ~3 seconds
konqueror ~1 second...
put gentoo on that dualie G5 though it will piss all over OSX and my dual Athlon MP, for sure
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Perhaps not double, but Quake 3 is SMP-aware, and does see a significant frame-rate boost from dual-processor Mac boxes.
Startup and reboot
Er, yes, great. You do that what, once a day? And so are you telling me that by shaving 20 seconds you will now make the decision to sit and stare at the screen during the remaining 55 seconds of bootup rather than grabbing a beverage, finishing your sandwich, or going across the room to talk to someone?
Application launch times
Ok, yes. Again, wonderful. And so with your 512MB to 2GB of RAM you don't suppose you will just leave your email client and productivity app running?
Photoshop manipulation
"Rotating the picture took 2 seconds on the G5, 3.5 seconds on the Dual G4 and 5.5 seconds on the Powerbook. Applying the Gaussian blur (which, in essence, turned the photo into a blurry blob), took 4 seconds on the G5, 5 seconds on the Dual G4 and 8 seconds on the Powerbook. And applying the Pointillize filter took 3 seconds on the G5, 4.5 seconds on the Dual G4 and 9 seconds on the Powerbook."
Ah yes. Wonderful. I'm astounded at the practicality of testing operations which, "turned the photo into a blurry blob". And you shaved on average just over 1 second! Great googly-moogly!
Oh, and then we rinse and repeat for iMovie manipulation.
People, this is an absolutely unconvincing, entirely uninsightful article.
The G5 may be great, but all this article leads me to believe is that Apple users are about as detached from reality as a PC gam3r d00d pissing on about how Quake 3 runs at 178 instead of 172 FPS on their $2000 penis extension.
Say it isn't so.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
A benchmark of a Mac....
NOT done by apple.
wdd
Reading some of the comments I've come to the conclusion that they just don't get it.
Despite the review, the point of a Mac is not the horsepower (and comparing completely different CPUs using gigahertz is just stupid).
The point is: Macs and OSX just work and they're beautiful! If you don't value quality then you won't value a Mac.
But please, don't bore the rest of us with your attempts to justify sticking with an inferior product.
"Yeah my Ford Ka is just as good as any Ferrari - it can do the same speed in town AND does more miles to the gallon! That means my Ka is better than a Ferrari!".
The difference is at least the Ka owner pays a lot less for his car. The pee cee users PAY THE SAME PRICE and get an inferior product ! Got to love Michael Dell and Bill Gates. And people say Apple is great marketing company.
Edward
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Half Life 2? Way to try to bolster your agrument by including a game that's not even out for Windows machines yet.
RTCW? Yup.
C&C Generals? Yup, coming soon.
Halo? Yup, soon.
Sim City 4? Yup.
Civ III? Yup.
In conclusion, you need to take a break from the gaming and check your facts before you post. Otherwise you come off looking like a dumb shit when someone like me comes along to easily prove you wrong.
~Philly
How indeed? By copying the complete first paragraph of the linked article. The quote you criticise is right there in the article. The author promised to publish more test results in the near future. Kind of a sleazy tactic (and a guaranteed second /. frontpage). I don't disagree with your criticism of the article, but the submitter did not pull anything out of thin air and might not have a special agenda.
You seem to have confused "best" with "worst". Maybe I should re-read your post considering this new information.
640K is enough for anyone.
Sorry, had to be said.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Or wait for a port or use VPC or program a compareable program yourself.
I looked at the AMD Opteron Alienware box for digital video editing and set all the settings as close as I could to a mid range G5 (the AMD doesn't come in dual cpu config, so I selected the 1.8Ghz AMD and compared it to the 1.8Ghz Apple):
Apple Box:
18.Ghz G5
1Gb DDR ram
160Gb S-ATA drive
Superdrive (DVD-RW. CD-RW, CDR etc)
GeForce FX 5200 64Mb
Gigbait ethernet
3x Firewire (1x 800, 2x 400)
USB 2.0
SP-DIF optical inputs and outputs
Alienware box:
AMD Opteron 64bit 1.8Ghz
1Gb DDR ram
160Gb S-ATA drive
DVD, CD-RW combo (note, no DVD burning capability)
Nvidia Quadro FX 128Mb
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Prices:
Apple 1.8Ghz: $2,649
AMD Opteron 1.8Ghz: $3,101
This was as close as I could get the specs without digging around too much and I think it's pretty fair. I could add the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to try and get closer to the Quadro in the AMD box to add an extra $350 to the price - still comes in slightly less than the AMD.
These prices are from newegg.com
2.0 GHz Opteron $810 each (model 246)
Newegg didn't have any dual Opteron motherboards. Their single CPU motherboard was $240.
These alone will put you back $1860.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
I' personally, would rather have the G5, because it runs OSX and it's not ugly as shit. Also, it's 64-bit, which makes it a lot more future-proof than a P4.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
My friend has an ibook and often i have to struggle with her to find a software tool for the mac to do something for which there's almost certainly an abundance of windows tools somewhere on the net that'll do it automatically. Ironically even linux often had more options and essential software than the mac; i usually get her to download a linux tool that's been ported to os x. It's nice to have so much processing power but unless there's plenty of software the mac will be limited to running a specific function such as movie editing or photoshop, for which again there's more on the windows and what makes it even worse is that recently software makers, such as adobe, have been abandoning the mac; it just won't be a good machine for general desktop use, there aren't even many mac games. This is really such a niche machine.
If i had such a machine i'd install linux. But again, i'd rather have one that'll run both linux and windows. It seems unnecessary to abandon all the desktop apps in the wintel world.
considering the fact that you will need a machine of this power to run hl2 or any other high profile game of the next year, you should whine about this super duper powerful ubermacs wasting their time with word.
Btw: i have a magazine from 1990 in which 486s are tested. they costed between 12000-20000$, and the reviewer was eager to tell the reader that it would be a waste to use that much computing power for anything else than high end cad or database work...
times change
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Seriously.
X11 on a dual CPU box kicks the arse of a single CPU box, even when the X server itself is single threaded. Why? Client/server architecture, on a single CPU box it context thrashes between local client applications and the X server.
So if you run Linux with X11, go for a dual. You *need* it.
See, now I've given you an excuse go persuade your boss to buy one. You can thank me later.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I'm curious how it'll perform against the new AMD 64 chip. I'd love to see a comparison with a comparable dual processor AMD 64 chip.
I am right in saying this is the newest mac available.
I am right in saying, an Athlon 2200+ is NOT the newest AMD chip available.
Why are they making a big deal about stuff starting up so quickly? Internet Explorer starts is seemingly less then a second. Mozzila Firebirds is just over 1 second. Photoshop 7.0 starts in 4 seconds for me.
As for the tests, rotating a 33.3 meg image took about 4 seconds. Gaussian blur, a horrible 15 seconds. Same time for the Pontilize.
My point? The application starting launch time thingy doesn't mean anything. The only real reason the G5 scores higher is because it uses a SATA drive (If im not mistaken)
Yes it does to better in Photoshop. But thats comparing it to a 2200 Athlon, which came out in Quarter 2 of 2002.
I know of more people in the last year to 18 months that abandoned Linux as their desktop for OSX. I am one of those because at the end of the day, I like Photoshop much better than GIMP, and the ablity to develop PHP/MySQL apps on my iBook and still have powerpoint is exactly what I need.
I do come from a video/graphics systems admin background. I worked during college part-time at a friend's father's architecture firm where they had a small 24 unit ALPHA rendering farm.
Now I do indy technology consulting, mainly to small businesses and video firms. I had a number of clients switch to PC's (Dell's mainly) in the last two years because the hardware costs were so much less, however they quickly found out that programs like Premeire suddenly crashed a lot more and the time in lost work was far greater than what it would have cost for a mac. ALthough this was mainly due to Adobe Premeire 6 generally being a piece of junk, not really windows itself.
I have one customer that is going to order the dual G5 after 10.3 is shipping. He is semi-retired, but does some commercial and wedding video work. He has a six year old G3 400 with 1GB of ram to run Final Cut Pro and he has upgraded X.2 and some of his rendering output times are 6 hours. No big deal to him, clicks render, goes out the back of his house onto his boat and goes fishing the rest of the day. Well, the local apple store was flying a specialist from apple over FCP and DVD studio pro and we were in the store and had my client's last video, which took about 4.5 hours to render. We imported the file from a DVD onto the new G5 with an enhanced version of FCP and then on a single 1.8Ghz G5 and the difference was about 15% for the same footage in favor of the dual compared to the single G5 and about 1/3d of the time that it took on his G3.
Granted configured with a new 23" HD and 17" flatpanel, the dual box is about $15,000 with all the software he needs as well. Add in about another $3000 for upgrades over the next 5 years in software and and the new box he will be buying is cheaper that his old G3.
Now granted, in video production, you can spend $20k on a mac and it will do just about anything you want, or you can jump and spend $250k on an Avid. Even dedicated editing boxes are $3500, so this industry will & must spend the money and for many graphic/video firms, that 15% difference means 15% more money because they can turn around and start the next job that much faster. Couple the increase in turn around with the prices some of these firms charge, that can pay for a couple dual G5's real quick.
Then finally, there is TCO. Most small wedding video/indy video companies I know of tend to hang on to their equipment for a long time. I know a lot of people that purchased G3's and still are using them because they knew a year ago that the G5's were going to be out, so they decided to wait. Some have already purchased the G5's and have been extremely pleased with their purchase and the dramatic increases in speed. Another video company in town switched from their Casablance/Kron editing tools to FCP on G5's and after about a month, their turn around times for videos has gone from about 14 days to 7 or 8. Many of their editors are full time college students and FCP is what is being taught in the classrooms, so the cost of time in retraining was extremely low. Now they purchased Single 1.8Ghz boxes with 2GB of Ram, but it seems to be more than enough for them.
So will the average "user" need dual processors...um, no, but there are those out there were it such high end specs can be usefull and profitable.
I have to admit that I was not a fan of Apple until a year ago and bought this iBook. The main reason why I switched was I wanted something that worked and thus far everything has worked perfectly and I have no complaints.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
RTCW? Yes, I play regularly.
Halo? Yes, about a month behind the PC version
Sim City 4? Yes
Civ 3? Yes
Granted anyone who just wants to play games for cheap has no need for a Macintosh. But you could also argue that they don't need a PC either (get a console).
I agree that there is a lot to be said for compatability: it gotten a lot better in the past few years.
Sanity is not statistical.
Having a fast machine is cool. Having a Hummer just makes you look like a moron. If you can afford a Hummer, you can afford a nice luxury sports car, which would (a) be faster and more fun to drive, (b) be more comfortable, (c) not be horrendously ugly, and (d) not have a fractional MPG rating.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side.
Uhh, Windows doesn't make computers, nor does Microsoft...
poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side
Oh, so if this isn't an Apple computer I am using, then it must be a windows computer.
Who posted this story? Bill, is that you?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Just wonder if anyone out there actually buys things because it's "The Fastest" computer available. The Fastest Computer changes at least every month, plus most of us can get by with significantly less the the fastest. Not to mention that people always argue over just what it is fastest at.
Personally I look at MIPS / $$ and my $400 machine with maxed out ram does everything I could want super cheap. Even doing a full build every few minutes doesn't keep the CPU at 100% for more then a few seconds. I still have a computer shopper I keep for the "Blazing Fast 386 Systems!!!" cover. It helps keep things in perspecitve.
I've talked about this with my friends and the only thing that is going to make us upgrade our systems is going to be Doom III. Until then we buy cheap computers and just stick them around the house where needed.
That's kinda my point. Price/performance does not make a very good guide.
But the new G5 units are way cheaper than similarly performing Windoze CPUs from Dell, IBM, etc. Sure you can put together a piece o'crap whitebox for less, but what you won't be getting a seamlessly integrated hardware/software solution.
;))!
Uh, so a computer build from scratch using the same parts (or better) than the Dell counterpart, is a "piece o'crap"? Why is this exactly?
Oh, and I got a newsflash for ya: Dell computers aren't born assembled. Believe it or not, Dell PCs are built by buying the hardware, jacking up the price, and, gasp, assembling them! Just the same as doing it yourself (but without the price jack
Dell's computers aren't more "seamlessly integrated" than any other PC built by someone who knows what they are doing.
- Houdini
Why is this "Insightful"? He didn't give a single price comparison nor did he point to a link that does.
I priced out a top-of-the-line Dell (which is slower than the mac) and a top-of-the-line Mac. Here are the results.
Mac: $3395
Dell: $2917
Of course this doesn't include the fact that you get better case design (aluminum/super quiet) with the mac. Nor does it reflect the Unix based OS that you get with the Mac.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Bro, I feel your pain...
The closest most SUV owners come to off-roading is running over a fucking skunk on their way to a parent/teacher conference.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
It's not just you, it's everyone who hasn't done their homework.
For more or less equivalent dual processor systems I get:
Dell - $4,763.00
Apple - $3,623.00
Note that the Apple price does not include the $50 or less you would have to spend on a mouse to keep you happy.
Perhaps you missed the rather large part of the article where he timed several photoshop filters, iMovie clip transitions, and Bryce rendering.
Really? What would you say the fastest thing is on the Windows side? A top-of-the-line dual Xeon? They're neck-and-neck, and the G5 is cheaper. A top-of-the-line P4? The G5 smokes it, except maybe for gaming. An Opteron? Probably beats the G5 in a few cases, but costs more for a comparable system. The G5 is a far cry from being a far cry from the fastest x86 box.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
That's what game consoles and Windows is for. Doing actual work involves a better machine. Can your PC run the various mac-only software out there? nope. What's your point? That's why I own both platforms.
Go to Dell.com and configure a Dual Xeon with comparable features to a Dual 2 ghz G5. And then come back here and apologize.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
He tested the transfer rates of the HD that apple is putting in their G5 computers. It's pretty nice apparantly. It beat the Seagate in my AMD 1800+ by a whole second on the initial load of Photoshop! (The AMD beat the G5 by a 25% when loading from RAM though...)
I should cobble together a G3 with a SCSI RAMdisk and let him load Photoshop on it a few times. With luck, he'll trade me his G5 for it!
Granted, Apple isn't all neon lights and windows and crap like that, but Am i the only one who thinks the G5 case looks like a cheese grater?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
if u want to get locked into a proprietery closed source os. ill wait till yellow dog runs on it then i might think about it. apple types only care about photoshop but the new gimp devel version kicks ass and u dont need $5000 of cpu to run it
The G5, architecturally, is much more similar to an Opteron (64bit and 2.0GHz) than a P4, and a dual Opteron setup has been seen/measured to be superior to a 3.2GHz P4.
Points to consider:
G5 more similar than not to an Opteron
Dual 2.0GHz Opterons are equiv or slightly better than a 3.2GHz P4
Software can still be tuned for the G5 (plus IBM's autovectorizing XLC compiler)
G5 possesses Altivec, which is more effective, in general, than the P4's or the Opteron's SIMD offering
So considering I've never used either, but knowing what I do about the architecture, I expect the Alienware to perform slightly below the dual G5, for only $1k less. This is comparing a $4k machine with a $3k machine. If you strip out the ram to base levels, it's $2,999 vs $2,766, so you only save $233 and you get slightly less performance.
GPL Deconstructed
In the current Linux Format magazine (an UK mag), there's about a half page about IBM prepping a blade version and a rack-mount version of PowerPC 970 (or whatever they're called exactly)-based machines. They run Linux or AIX. I know IBM has always had POWER-based workstations, but these are supposed to start at $4k for 4-way systems. The idea to to bury HP and Sun, but this would be the first (practical) alternative (to Apple) PowerPC you can buy. And with all the good karma IBM's been accumulating with its defense of the GPL...
You're missing the point -- most Apple customers are people who do not wish to assemble their own computer from parts. Apple is not marketing their products to the technological kit-crowd. So comparing Apple's turnkey product to a do-it-yourself system is pointless.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I think that the G5 is great; if money started falling off of the trees in my front yard I would buy one without hesitation, but this article is just poor; no question about it.
Cripes man, it's only one page.
The submitter titled the story, "Apple's Dual 2GHz By The Numbers"! Well, I'm just pointing out that this is an awfully poor excuse for a "by the numbers" technical performance review of a processor.
Are you suggesting otherwise?
Yes, I'm having a little fun with the last line, but seeing the blatant agenda this story submission is pushing while failing to deliver on the evidence, I don't have any second thoughts about it.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
...it certainly appears poised to meet or beat anything now out on the Windows side.
Why are the 2 camps always debating Windows vs. Mac. That's like debating high octane gas vs. a sports car. I know that the two are monopolies, and people like to defend their respective masters, but wouldn't it be more logical to debate hardware vs. hardware? I haven't looked at the raw benchmark data, but wouldn't a 4 way P4 xenon box running a version of linux optimized for scientific workstations be able to keep up with a dual G5?
Oh and don't press the eject button on your CD-ROM drive when your playing a PC game, you might get a blue screen or even worse, you have flip the switch off then on on your machine to get back to Windows. And be sure to 'recycle' your files, afterall, we don't want that landfill filling up. I just hope Windows 95 will stop saying there's no CD in the drive when I click retry. Point here, use a newer Mac OS before saying something trollish.
Just for the record, Photoshop launched in 7 sec. and relaunched in 3 sec. on my laptop.
.....
P4 2.53 GHz
1 GB RAM
2300 $ 10 months ago.
And last time I checkeck, my laptop cost less than his bulky desktop system and way less than his PowerBook
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
Ahem, the poster clearly stated "best parts" which would rule out a Dell.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
Since when does super quiet beat completely silent? Well, considering when I first got to work on a new Dell I accidentally turned it off because I thought it already WAS off, I guess super quiet is a short term benifit. Maybe Dell just needs a brighter power indicator.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
But who really cares about boot times? My sister hasn't turned off her iMac in months. My iBook is always on and instantly wakes from sleep. You don't reboot a Mac nearly as often as you would a PC.
-
The new G5 runs at 35 decibels. What does the Dell run at?
And I forgot one other thing. I was comparing a SINGLE 3 Ghz Dell to a daul 2 Ghz Mac.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
For a group of users that prides itself on alternative operating systems, its simply hilarious that you cling to the old stigma that Macs are slow and overpriced.
OS X is far superior to any Linux GUI and definitely has a lot more going for it overall than Linux. Now when Apple produces machines that might (hard to tell from the somewhat shoddy article) be faster than what you have currently, you don't have to get so agitated about it. Yeah, the article is pretty flawed. But at least try to reconcile the fact that the Macs might be faster than a PC right now. Then you can follow up with endless rants about how ObjC sucks/one button mice suck/Apple sucks/other reasons that only make sense to you.
Let me guess... You just upgraded to a G5 running BSD-based OS X from an older mac running an older version of MacOS. Congradulations! You are now using a mordern operating system capable of basic multi-tasking!
Just don't ask how long Linux or even Microsoft users have been able to do the same thing. It will probably depress you.
How do you know that? Apple's third party hardware program was really taking off because many people loved Apples but couldn't afford them.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Startup and reboot
Agreed - A fairly pointless test all things considered.
Application launch times
This is even more pointless. Does the load time really depend much on processor power? Surely the CPU spends most of its time waiting for the data to get from the drive to main memory. Load times are affected by most of the components that make it a computer (including graphics card to a small extent), as well as software version, and fragmentation of the disk.
Photoshop manipulation
Now you're being too hard. Many image processing operations take a very long time. If you have to do a lot of operations, even a second can be a long time and a lot of people do work with macs to manipulate very large images. A lot of times. Waiting those 2 seconds can make it seem like a very long time.
Translation: "Macs don't have many games." Unfortunately for you, there are entire markets of software that (get ready for this) have no entertainment value whatsoever! What essential commercial software out there is completely unavailable for and has no open-source alternatives for the Mac? Macs have Office and plenty of software that can run under the X11 environment. In reality, there is very little Windows software out there that either isn't available for the Mac or does not have some sort of Mac equivalent.
It's also a lot more future proof than a G4, or a G3. So people should stop buying those too.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Well, first you have to take the $187 editing system off the Alienware system. Then you can replace that with the Pioneer DVD +-RW drive. Now you have a problem of the Alienware computer having a far better video card (even than the Radeon 9800), sound card, and DVD burner, which I think makes up for much of the $300 price difference. If you're switching platforms you ALSO have to pay to get a new version of Photoshop plus another video editing solution if you aren't using an Avid software package (say Vegas or Premiere). And while you would be right to have seen FCP as an upgrade over all those packages a year ago, the playing field has vastly leveled. Even Premiere Pro manages to compete at the same level.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
No, but that is his point... The article says that the Mac on test boots faster than previous Apples, so must be faster than the fastest x86 box. At no point does the article actually COMPARE the two, except in the closing statement...
Learn to fucking read.
You're so right, because there's just no way for you to download thousands of UNIX utilities and run configure, make, and make install, and have it run on OS X.
And aside from the command line, there just aren't any software products, just as you say. Basically, with Macintosh, you get a word process, e-mail client, browser, and that's it!
And there's really no hope of that ever changing, what with the crappy, hard-to-use development enviroment Apple has released for their platform, and the total indiffernce from the developer community regarding the platform.
It's a wonder more people don't share the "insight" you do.
Thanks for the enlightenment!
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I never said that anyone should stop buying 32-bit computers. I merely mentioned that 64-bit computers do have at least that one advantage, which is quite true. There's no need to stop buying 32-bit computers, but, if you're planning on keeping your new box for a long time (as you would be with most top-end boxes), it's something you should consider.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
oh man, like 3 years ago your argument would have been ROCK SOLID. fortunately, since the switch to OS X -- macs have become a lot more compatible. a mac can compile and run almost any software that will compile and run on your average x86 unixoid box. there is also a pretty large user scene -- so your average win32 freeware/shareware app is going to have some sort of suitable equivalent on the mac side. so really, the macs just have trouble with win32 apps, with no mac counterpart. but then factor in virtual PC... sure, it's not as fast as a real pc, but it's more than adequate for programs that dont require heavy processor and realtime interaction (such as a first-person-shooter). i used to strictly use x86 machines, favoring linux but using win32 when i had to. OS X has very effectively bridged the gap between consumer and open-source OS -- and there's less "crap to put up with" [time-consuming tweaking to linux systems, or typical win32 bullsh*t]. though i still use win32 and linux on a regular basis at work, Mac/OSX has become my preferred platform for everyday computing.
Benchmarks aside, does the GUI of OS X still lag? What CPU speed is necessary on the Mac side in order for the GUI to be as responsive as Windows?
The Lian Li case cost about $120, more or less the same for the power supply.
Besides, at the risk of getting offtopic, this computer is the best designed one I ever used. For once, I have a computer that doesn't crash for strange reasons. Previously I had problems with the VIA chipset, SB Live sound card, and with some BIOS settings it didn't even boot.
The time I invested in selecting the components has more than paid off. Of course it's somewhat slower than the Apple one, but if I had the money for the Apple one, I'd just upgrade the CPUs to 3000+ or whatever is the fastest MP available, buy a second identical box, and still have remaining money to buy say, a decent UPS.
Tyan Thunder K85 (S2885)
1GB (2x512) DDR333 (ECC, registered)
2xOpteron 246 (2GHz)
DVD-R/RW/CD-R/CD-RW
160GB S-ATA HD
Radeon 9600 PRO, even 9700 Pro
(misc. retail tower case/supply, optical mice, keyboard...)
Windows XP Pro, and by having a copy you can get the 64-bit beta if you sign up.. or
Redhat WS, or maybe GinGin, which is free.
All this for less than the base price of $3000, and it's backwards compatible with your older stuff for IA32.
it's not much less, but if they're going to compare the speed or feel of a G5 to anything, it has to be AT LEAST to a rig like that.
The trouble is having the same apps with AMD64 support to compare speed of photoshop filters, etc. If that's the basis they want to compare across.
Anyway, there's a bunch of apple haters here talking about how much more it is, and who could afford that.
But the G5 is a huge leap. it really is, deal with it. It's got fucking DDR400 out of the box.
AND YET! For the same price, there's competetion. Where are the _fair_ benchmarks between two equally equiped setups?
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Well, in Apple's case, this "speed bump" was needed much more than the incremental speed increases seen every few months on the PC side.
Apple was lagging at least a generation behind the PC competition in system bus speed, RAM architecture, and processor power.
The whole debate of "can the new G5 beat the latest PC offerings?" is more of a side issue, only popular with the usual publications that are more interested in graphing benchmark numbers than real-world usability. The REAL reason the new G5's are so significant is that they boost the Mac back up to a competitive level - where everything works at the speeds users are used to seeing.
(If you work in Photoshop 7, or even Microsoft Office on a PC at work, you expect at least comparable performance of those applications on the computer you use at home. Apple was slipping on delivering that. Now they're not.)
go for it. seriously, I'm sure it would come out cheaper, but let's find out how much.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Just an observation: people who say a machine is a 'waste' to use for word processing and productivity apps probably shouldn't cite a video game as a less wasteful use of the machine.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Here's the link to their Apple resale site.
i'm the jedidiahmarkfoster your parents warned you about
And clicking a stopwatch, and measuring how long launching a program takes, or how long a reboot lasts isn't that much of a "benchmark".
According to Patterson and Hennessy's Computer Organization and Design textbook, "Time is the measure of computer performance: the computer that performs the same amount of work in the least time is the fastest." (Page 58, Second Edition).
Of course, just because it's the fastest doesn't mean it is the one YOU should buy, but I think the standard of 'performance' is execution time.
Of course, you CAN have an equally equipped machine if you're willing to go shopping.
You can do a lot better for a few hundred over $3000 too, like by doubling RAM, or getting the 9800 Pro.
It gets much cheaper if you compare an Apple 1.8 to the dual Opteron 244 (246's are disproportionally expensive)
Also Monarch Computers will sell you a dual Opteron workstation, if you want it built and shipped. They're priced about the same (a little more expensive).
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Morons? Nope. This calls for meta-mod 'Ironic'.
What did you really expect from CompuFluffWorld anyway? As far as I've been able to tell, they're just another one of those thrown together publications they give away for free to anyone working in I.T. who's willing to answer 6 or 7 page long surveys about all the aspects of their business. (EG. The publication is primarily a carrot hung over people's heads to collect data on I.T. and corporate spending habits.)
I'm not saying they don't occasionally have a good article. (They do.) But for real serious performance reviews of systems, I'd look elsewhere. These guys generally write watered-down summaries of things, digestable by middle-management.
(In this case, the author even admits he had to be told by readers to hook up the supplied wi-fi external antenna! He couldn't even be bothered to read the instructions after having poor wi-fi performance, yet you think he's going to give you a thorough set of benchmark tests?)
Also, comparing load time is more a benchmark of disk speed, and loading the second time would more than likely have pulled it straight from the disk cache, especially on a machine with 2gig ram..
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
It's clear from two weeks of testing that Apple's new Power Mac G5 dual 2-GHz machine is the fastest thing the company has ever produced.
Wow! That's really surprising. Nobody could expect that. After all, why the high-end new generation machine should be any faster than the low-end or older generation machines from the same company? This guy really did his homework, it took him only two weeks to discover this oddity.
The big problem with the dual and higher Xeons is that they're limited to a shared 533 MHz bus. For the wide class of memory-bound problems, the G5 will sweep the floor with them, since each processor has its own 1000 MHz bus.
My video compression blog
I'm not so sure about that. I ran some very quick informal tests (with other apps running in the background and such) of Photoshop and some other things that are comparable to the article's tests. My single-processor, 32-bit 2gHz P4 (2+ years old now) either matched, came very close to matching, or in some cases even outperformed, the dual-processor G5. (i.e. Photoshop takes 9 seconds to start for the first time, 4.5 seconds subsequent times). That's with all the G5's beautiful fast memory and cache and 64-bit eliteness. I'm pretty certain that if there were comparable startup-time tests that I could perform on my Linux machine, the disparity would be even more glaring. Hey, even my battered 600mHz Celeron laptop with only 128 MB of RAM comes alarmingly close to the times posted in the article. As someone who owns both Mac and PC hardware, the only conclusion I have ever been able to come to is that even outdated PC hardware beats the newest and best from Apple when it comes to things like startup times and application response times.
I don't think that IS the point.
The point is that you can't have it both ways--ie, the article can't say "fASTER THAN ANY PC" only to then qualify it by saying "well, compared to a similarly priced pc, bought from one of these three companies, and only storebought configurations. That is illogical.
Apple has always, consistenly, lined their product up against the most expensive first-line PC Clones. It's the only way they can compare price-wise.
Back in the day, they always compared their prices to those of the pricey Compaq boxes that nobody, anywhere, bought outside the corporate 'office machine' market. Everybody I knew at the time was running high quality (because everybody got to consider and rate each individual component that went into them) white box clones. Most people I know still are. 'Compaq' prices have dropped. So have Apple prices, for that matter. Just like all other prices in computer hardware. End result: Apple boxes are still just as over priced.
A Good Intro to NetBS
Hmmm... let's start some lively debate then.
On the G5 homepage, Apple lists the Spec fp and int scores for the 2GHz G5 as 840 and 800 respectively. On AMD's site, a 2GHz Opteron comes in at 1271 and 1335. If we look for dual processor scores, the dual 2Ghz G5 scores a 15.7 in specfp_rate while a dual 1.8GHz Opt. comes in at 24.7
I think the G5 is an awesome machine. But I also think the Opterons are pretty great, too. Kudos to IBM as without them we'd have neither chip.
As an aside, we could easily find an Opteron machine that would be cheaper than the Alienware one... for example they use the Opteron 2xx series which isn't needed for a uniprocessor machine such as this. Knock $340 off (newegg.com) for that. Then the video cards are polar opposites from each other. Knock another $240 off.
OTOH, I'd die to have either of those machines.
Well, I'm typing this on the new 1.33 GHz G4 17" PowerBook. I've got the same RAM and graphics card. You win on drive speed (I've got a single 5400 rpm). On a large but not complete set of tasks, your faster processor and memory bus will make it faster. Price was roughly comparable (a few extra $100 on my end).
:). And can use it in my lap without getting scalded. And when I open the screen, the machine is fully awake before I can get the lid all the way open. And the battery can last for 3+ hours. And its' certainly a lot lighter and thinner than yours.
But I run rings around you in Final Cut Pro
And I can't tell you how long it takes to boot, since I never have to reboot it. Once for the 10.2.8 update.
My video compression blog
Not aware of any... however, GNU/Darwin makes a pretty decent GNU/Linux surrogate... my major qualm when running linux on mac is the java support (or lack thereof)
Unless there are specific things you routinely do that can *only* be accomplished on Linux and not on ~BSD, you should probably give OS X a shot -- since you have the added bonuses of being able to run OS X apps (Apple's stuff in particular), and spending less time tweaking the system ("Linux is only free if your time has no value")
"My sister hasn't turned off her iMac in months. My iBook is always on and instantly wakes from sleep. You don't reboot a Mac nearly as often as you would a PC."
That depends on what OS you are using on the PC, I run Linux and very rarely need to reboot and it has no problem waking up from the sleep mode(its called Lock Screen in Gnome).
It's not just you, it's everyone who hasn't done their homework.
Well, I think the reason why most people claim it costs a lot is because they don't think of the high end G5 as a workstation. Apple doesn't make the distinction between personal hobbyist computers and workstations like most PC makers do (and Apple advertises the G5 as the fastest personal computer, so I can understand the confusion. That's where the two lower end G5's come into play. I'd say if you are looking for a hobbyist Mac computer, then go with either the lower end G5's, or some of their other desktop models. And if you really really want to get the best performance possible with a Mac, then go with the high end model.
The new G5 from Apple is more than merely "fast". It is a workstation in its own right. In "Byte of the Apple", "Businessweek" notes that the new Macintoshes are, in fact, UNIX workstations. The notebooks based on G5s are, in fact, portable UNIX workstations.
Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, would be marketing these machines as workstations instead of mere personal computers. With 64-bit processors, these machines are fully capable of handling engineering workloads like Verilog, HSPICE, fluid-dynamics simulation, etc.
Right now, a tidal wave of Linux-on-x86 machines is drowning Sun Microsystems in the workstation market. It sure would be nice to see a G5 take some market share bled from Sun Microsystems. In fact, it would be ideal to see a Linux-driven G5 take market share.
I agree that the article's idea of technical numbers is laughable.
Here are some application benchmarks that include the dual G5. For a lengthy discussion of each, head over to Ars Technica's battlefront forum... I believe each has its own thread.
Photoshop
Lightwave
After Effects
Cinebench
As you can see, the G5 is certainly competitive with the fastest x86 offerings.... better at some things, worse at others. I personally find this pretty amazing for such a new chip; I think the situation will only improve as developers further optimize for the G5. The promise of 3Ghz systems within a year (recently reiterated once again by Steve Jobs, who is usually very secretive about future products) is exciting as well.
I think the situation will be the same for the Opteron, which unfortunately just doesn't seem to be in enough hands to be tested thoroughly yet. I expect it to make a big splash, but to take some time to fully realize its potential as well.
Of course, you're right. If there were competition for Macintoshes, then the average street price would be infinity. Because, robbed of their revenue stream, Apple would go out of business, and there would be no Macintoshes available at all, at any price.
That would, indeed, be "a lot different." You warthog-faced buffoon.
I'm always startled to see people getting excited about three-digit price differences between base machines for things meant for the video market.
I'm building a HD editing/compression system. When you add in storage, displays, audio, etcetera, even a cheap setup makes a $500 difference pretty tiny.
For my needs, I'm shaving THOUSANDS off by going Mac. Why? Xserve RAID. I can get 2.5 TB for about $12K, that's fast enough for 1920x1080i60 at 10-bit uncompressed capture. I haven't been able to find anything that's close to that price performance on Windows.
This is an edge case, granted. But for anyone who bills by the hour, a few hundred bucks in a system that's going to be making you money for a couple of years is nothing - like a quarter a day. Downtime for one tech support incident could eat up the entire differential.
My video compression blog
Period.
Yes.
But I'm not going to say what it is.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Yes, you're right. Dell does not manufacture their computers, in any meaningful sense of the word. That's one of the reasons why Dell's quality and customer satisfaction are below acceptable norms.
Let's look at this two ways. If you don't buy a Mac, you buy a Dell or something comparable. You pay the same price or a bit more.
If you don't buy a Dell, you build it yourself from parts. You end up paying not just a little more, but CONSIDERABLY more, once you add up the dollar value of your time. Of course, if you have more time than money, then by all means, spend the weekend putting parts into a Fry's case. Most people do not have more time than money. For most people, it's just the opposite: money is precious, but time is much more precious.
Dells are FAR better values than computers built from parts, and Macs are FAR better values than Dells.
With the G5, Apple is finally competitive on speed with Intel/AMD. It's not "supercomputer" performance, but it's a little faster than the P4 and probably comparable to the AMD 64bit offerings. It's also still somewhat more expensive, although Apple's prices are more reasonable now than they used to be.
No, in reality the vast majority of PC software has no Mac equivalent.
This is true. I tried to get "Windows XP Tutor" from the Video Professor guy who's on TV all the time and they don't have it for Mac.
I bet all their other super high-quality software is PC-only too.
FTA:
One final note: I whined in my first review about the G5's weak Airport wireless signal. Several readers promptly (and pointedly) wrote to ask if I'd installed the Apple-supplied external Airport antenna. I had not. I did. And it took care of the problem. Even when setting up the easy-to-use-Mac, it always pays to read the manual.
OK so this guy couldn't RTFM and then bitched about a "crappy product" (obviously not the case) and we're supposed to think his very vague (counting fingers style) timings are some kind of "benchmark"?
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
"Windows XP Tutor" that runs on MAC?? Good point.
Out of curiosity, I just launched Photoshop on my windows machine (1700+ Athlon XP- 512 Megs Ram - Ultra-100 7000 RPM HD - Windows XP Professional).
Total time to launch? 4 Seconds.
So, the new Dual G5 2 Ghz's launch at the same speed as my Quasi-Old Athlon box. Granted, I wouldn't mark performace by how long it takes an application to launch, but those are the numbers in an apples to apples comparison.
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
true story though..
I got a 1.3ghz, running windows xp
when I copy over the network from my pb12"
the winxp computer slows like a dog.
7200rpm maxtor in the xp
5200 rpm whatever in the 12".
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
Yeah I agree.. the author wasn't particularly interested in scienti -
The G5 may be great, but all this article leads me to believe is that Apple users are about as detached from reality as a PC gam3r d00d pissing on about how Quake 3 runs at 178 instead of 172 FPS on their $2000 penis extension.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Then I'm not buying one any time soon.
While the Opteron might be great and all that, and as an AMD fan I'll almost certainly buy one at some point, they just came out and are *way* overpriced. Besides, even if I had the money, and the need to buy such a machine, I still probably wouldn't. Losing a $150 CPU (more or less the price of one of mine) of course sucks, but it's affordable. Breaking a $810 one though...
And given the prices you quote above I'd probably get better preformance by buying two dual boxes. My dual motherboard was about $240, btw.
Check Tiger Direct, Dual 2.4's with HT, with xppro and 2kpro for 1600+, Compaq systems, without monitors. But a damn good deal if you need a solid workstation.
While the tech guys who might actually need such horsepower will have 5-year-old boxes.
Face it, having such a box on your desk is like having a 4WD in the driveway that has never had mud on it.
Is the PD's hair pointy? Not yet, but it's sure going that way!
You must think in Russian.
My Mac shuts down 95x faster than a Windows machine. Therefore its processor is 95x faster.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
If I want a Linux box, I am free to choose both OS and HW vendor from plenty of sources. If I want a Windows box I have only one OS vendor, but lots of hardware vendors to choose from. If I want a Mac, I have only one OS vendor and the one and same HW vendor.
I am sometimes heard complaining about the defacto monopoly MS has in personal computer issues, but compared to Apple users HW/OS choices, Windows users situation actually looks better.
Note that I don't dislike OSX/Apple as such. It's a polished product. But, I won't leave one monopoly for an even bigger lock-in.
---
The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
granted. I wasn't thinking of Linux folk and should have made myself clear. I personally used Linux for years. Just those poor windows bastards don't know what they're missing. :)
-
I don't know about you but Windows XP consistently gets sluggish when copying large amounts of data (>5GB) on my Dell Inspiron 8100. I do agree though that OS has a bigger impact than the hardware for being responsive. In fact, my iMac 17" at home running OS X is much more responsive than Windows XP is on faster hardware. Just goes to show you how much Windows sucks, but we knew that already...
"The deluded are always filled with absolutes. The rest of us have to live with ambiguity." - Aristoi, Walter Jon Willia
If you spend your time building computers you don't have time for posting insightful comments on slashdot.
That's why time is valuable.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
Photoshop benchmark
Phillip
Geeze... this hardly warrented Flamebait... you made perfectly valid points, the 'benchmarks' here show nothing to suggest that this mac is faster than ANYTHING else... it just doesn't even try to, what a pointless article to link to.
It just shows that Slashdot editors will link to ANYTHING Mac related.
If you want think different" (run an application outside of the most common uses), you would be forced to ditch the Mac.
All you PC users are like sheep.
If you want to think differently, you program your own software. At the very least, you compile it yourself.
I dunno. How many people still have 386's from when they came out?
Sure, it's 32 bit computing, then they added things to improve it. The built-in co-processor (486). I forget what they added to the Pentium to improve it, but it's still a 32 bit processor at it's heart.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
"The point is: Macs and OSX just work and they're beautiful!"
I wish we could pass a law so that people like you wouldn't be allowed to use computers.
That would make everyone... both PC and Mac users... feel better.
Why would a G5-linux machine be ideal?
It's been a long time.
While these G5 systems are expensive for consumers, that really isn't your market.
Your parents should look at the consumer lines. The eMac starts at just $799. I'd probably toss an extra 256 MB stick in there, but you'll still have a complete internet/productivity machine, with monitor, for ~$850.
Sure, you can get the cheapest Wintel machine for less than that, but if you're providing technical support, it's probably worth a little of their money for them to have a machine without BIOS messages and effectively immune to viruses.
My video compression blog
What I'm saying is that, in a few years, all Mac software will be compiled for the G5 and its successors. Most companies will continue to compile versions for 32-bit platforms, but eventually they'll stop. At some point, probably within four or five years, you're gonna have to upgrade your perfectly-usable computer (and it will be perfectly usable, just as P3 450Mhz boxes are perfectly usable now) to run some program that's not compiled for your architecture. For many people, that won't matter, as they would have upgraded long before that time anyway. But, for some people it'll be a big deal.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The reason that OS X works so well (well, one of the reasons) is that the hardware is fairly standard across the line - ie, one iBook is the same as another in hardware terms.
You can upgrade most of the important parts in a tower Mac - hard drive, memory, graphics card etc. You can even upgrade the processor(s) on most tower macs (except the G5) with third party cpus - even the Cube (although it's expensive to do that paricular mod).
If Apple made an X86 port of OS X they'd die - they're a hardware company, and you'd lose what makes the Mac great. Competing directly with Windows isn't going to get them anywhere - MS has deep enough pockets and shady enough business practices to keep its monopoly for the time being (chip, chip, chip away though).
Building a mac from scratch would also lose some of the fluidity of OS X. Knowing that a powermac is going to have such and such a graphics card or a certain modem/ethernet chipset/other piece of hardware is why you don't have to faff about with drivers and incompatibility.
"And, just to give you an idea of the technical competence of the reviewer"...
Ok, so the guy didn't RTFM. That makes him stupid, I guess. We all here always RTFM, just as we RTFA, always. Cause we smart, yeh...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I think his point was that comparing things like boot times and application start times is not an equal measure of performance. Linux boots faster on my 400mHz box than Win XP does on my 850mHz machine. In order to actually compare performance the exact same task must be done by each, such as the application of a specific filter in photoshop, or creating an MPEG-4 video from an MPREG-2.
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
I agree with your points, I just picked the Alienware machine in reply to the parent post who said they'd be able to get one cheaper than a G5.
I'm all for the right tools for the right jobs. The Mac just so happens to be the right tool for me, and the fact that this Dual G5 is smoking hot in the performance stakes is a big bonus, it's replacing a perfectly adequate Dual 450 G4.
I have a PC that I use for gaming, although it's getting a bit dated now (Athlon 500 with a GeForce 2) but I only really place Quake III Arena and Q3: Team Arena anyway, which are well within the machine's capabilities, I don't need a 9800 Pro for Quake III.
If you can afford a Hummer, you can afford a nice luxury sports car
Yeah.... but... The Hummer has room for three skanks.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I agree, im sorry to see this modded down like that. It wasnt a +5 comment or anything, but him talking about an old 500 dollar computer beeing almost as fast as a new 5 thousand dollar one.
I thought the fact that his honda accord was cheaper than this computer kind of funny even.
Sorry i dont have mod points man i would have tryed to fix it a bit
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Slashdot seems to be attracting all sorts of riffraff these days. Imagine, a nerd who can't program....
It just so happens that the Mac has a superb development library, largely inherited from NextStep, that's ideal for rapid application development. It's also relatively easy to port and use Linux applications to this platform.
made me take a look at OSX. I had tried Linux but did not have the time to devote to really learning it. After talking with a Apple rep at CompUSA and a few people I knew who were using Mac's I ended up buying a g3 iMac. I was the right price, and if I didn't like it it seemed that they were still fetching a good price on ebay. I did end up selling it but now I own 2 macs. One 17" fp iMac and a 12" powerbook. MS Office X and Toast were the only programs I needed to buy since everything else I needed was already there. As for the price, I don't think that the prices were too high considering the software that comes with these Mac's.
New quieter fans for those? I swear I read that you could exchange the fans for an updated quieter one. I might be mistaken.
So would the Lexus, unless they're really enormous.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
You can choose your shell to use in OS X... I think it' just under the terminal prefs...
And I've used PCs all my life, until about 4 months ago, and OS X took something like 2 days to get used to.... I haven't turned on my PCs except to get some files from them since i got it.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I'm guessing you are referring to this machine. And it does look like a nice machine. But if you intended it as a dig at Apple's pricing (which I'm not sure you did) keep in mind that TigerDirect's own ad says it sells for $3400 from HP/Compaq. TigerDirect regularly buys random closeouts cheap from various sources (ie custom builds for companies that changed their minds) and sell them cheap. So saying a limited time/quantity closeout is cheaper than another company's retail price seems like an unfair/invalid arguement.
I have blog like everyone else
A dumb move. Apple already markets their stuff towards professionals who need the beefiness of a workstation-quality platform. To overemphasize the workstation market would require that they cease to market the new boxes as consumer level computers.
OS aside, the only real difference between a workstation and a personal computer is the price tag and power. At just over $4K for the configuration tested in the review, you're talking about a lot of money for a PC. But the people who only need a box for home know that they can shop near the lower end of the scale, and the ones who are doing serious work know what they're getting at the top end.
I was just saying the other day how much my G5 notebook was like a portable Unix workstation. It's not as cool as my G6 notebook, though. I think of that as my portable TIME MACHINE.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The problem is from what I understand Mac OS X hasn't been compiled or optimized for 64 bits, it is still running in 32 bit mode. This is why Jobs has the sense to not market these as 64-bit workstations. There's no doubt that these are fast machines and great computers but until the software running on them actually takes advantage of the 64 bit processor these are no different than running Windows or Linux on the new Athlon64 in 32 bit mode (granted you can run Linux in 64-bit mode now and MS has some betas out than run in 64-bit mode as well but you could also run the 32-bit versions of both if you wanted).
Just to add my redundant opinion. I've used lots of fast machines, and all the Macs in the last few years, and numerous very fast PCs, and I've owned a dual-CPU system for years (6 years, 2 systems), and let me tell you all:
The G5 is FAST. The dual 2GHz is a monster, so fast that very often for reasonably complex task, I'd ask myself if it had done it since no progress bar even appeared on the screen. It's faster than any other Mac or PC I've used so far, and it's even faster running on 10.3 beta.
Oh it's not cheap. But if you consider the better OS (it comes with a UNIX BSD-based OS), the excellent FREE iApps (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD) for which I have yet to find equivalents on any other platform for less than mounds of cash, the sleeker design, longer life (don't deny it, I've seen it again and again, Macs are still usable after 4 years and more while PCs often see their end of life around 2-3 years), and higher resell value, as well as a nice, affordable extended warranty with excellent customer service (Apple won the latest consumer evaluation in that regard), you get back the additional money in better performance, better productivity, and longer usability. After 3 years, when the extended warranty runs out, you can seel your computer for a resonable amount and get a new one, or keep it as a secondary backup unit that can still do useful work.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
:O!
I stand corrected, it is rather affordable. I wish you could ditch the low-MTBF ATA drive for a nice U320 SCSI set-up though. (Can you?)
If you price it out against an Intel boxen, they are very close, though. Let's hope Apple can keep up with the next generation of processors and RAM speed.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Wouldnt say its limited, when its been selling at tiger direct for over 8 months. And tiger direct was just one place I noticed, im sure you can find other deals around the net. You can even buy Apple G5's cheaper when you buy them at another site. Maybe only save 200 bux, at places like the macmall, but they throw in free stuff also.
I noticed some Apple re-sellers offered G5's for 1/2 the price (only 2 at that price) to get customers to the stores. Ebay had Dual G5's with 21 inch LCD Monitors for 3K to get people to browse the store.
Same happens in town, the car dealers will let 2-3 cars go at rock bottom prices, to get people to the dealership.
The G5 is a nice processor and apple's dualie a great machine, but these "tests" are not exactly conclusive by any means. They're freakishly amateurish.
Its nice that the machine is more reponsive (given the author's configuration) than his older machines (also given the author's configuration), but there are faaaaaaaar too many variables left unaccounted for these numbers to be good for anything except a group hug.
Having just said that, there really needs to be a universal cross-architecture testing benchmark for user-oriented statistics! Spec doesn't quite cut it, since you can cheat and your average user has no idea what the score means anyways. Lmbench is nice, but I think linux/unix/solaris-only, and for your average joe the OS he/she is going to be using with the machine should be part of the test.
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, would be marketing these machines as workstations instead of mere personal computers.
There's loads of reasons why it won't happen, but I always thought that Apple should have bought SGI.
It'd be a huge engineering task, but having a consistant Unix with a good UI from laptop, to desktop, to machine room would be excellent, and SGI would give Apple the entree to research/corporate data centers they lack now, as well as some industrial-strength computing power they don't have now. This would give Apple a huge unified market in visualization.
The time for this would have been a couple of years ago when OS X was being developed so that it could have been developed for both platforms (and stuff from SGI merged into OS X). It's probably too late for it to be meaningful now.
The other option would be a merger/takeover by Sun. It's a poorer fit, though, as Sun is more datacenter/DB than visualization, but it would give Sun the ability to market a complete alternative solution to MS, including a really good end-user desktop.
Whenever I posit this, most people say "Apple's doesn't want to be a business/corporate platform". This may be true, but long-term its easier to see Apple's CPU development being less dependent on the good graces of a third party as well as having more compelling high-end computing driving their CPU development.
There's also nothing that says Apple should stop their consumer/botique marketing or market niche -- it would be important to a $UNIX+Apple company to keep the consumer/end user desktop viable, and staying in that market makes that happen.
It'd be good for "big Unix" as well, since Sun and SGI can't offer the lower end of the spectrum to the customers and end up bouncing off of MS-centric operations at a lot of places. With a total package that extended a viable, well-known platform to the desktop, their server offerings would get a better advantage, as well as giving them better lower end server offerings in Xserve variants.
Hey, news break for you jackass, WINDOWS DOESN'T MAKE HARDWARE!
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
I was just kidding 'bout the skanks..
I've never seen a Hummer at a trailhead. Hummer owners are posers who coulden't get to the top of a mountain unless their fat asses were air-lifted there.
Lexus owners ususall are too stups to fuggure out thet their buying a Toyota with extra fake wood paneling.
But I digress....
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Hmm, wrong crowd getting defensive, I think. On all the real tasks he gave it a twin processor 2 GHz machine was roughly twice as fast as a 1 GHz single cpu machine.
Wow. Not.
no fortran compiler? did you do 0 research at all? in about two minutes i found g77 and Computation Tools 4.0, so there are probably more out there.
couldnt find any speed difference in 3 days? it sounds like you gave each group a day a piece. given that your developers didnt have any experience with the platform, im not surprised you couldnt come up with anything.
and as for your preference for FVWM...well...im sorry. its not 1981 anymore.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
no fortran compiler? did you do 0 research at all? in about two minutes i found g77 and Computation Tools 4.0, so there are probably more out there.
Oh yes, and g77 compiles fortran 90/95 code, does it?
couldnt find any speed difference in 3 days? it sounds like you gave each group a day a piece. given that your developers didnt have any experience with the platform, im not surprised you couldnt come up with anything.
You'll be surprised by the number of mac zealots in the house - particularly the pulsar group. If anyone would be able to get the best performance out of the machine, it would be them.
and as for your preference for FVWM...well...im sorry. its not 1981 anymore.
Nice troll.
Show me something as configurable as fvwm? Just because it is 10 years old (not 22), doesn't mean it is any less functional than something more "modern". Just because it doesn't hog CPU and memory doing useless eye-candy shit, doesn't mean it is not as good a WM. To the contrary - it never crashes, it does exactly what I expect a WM to do, it doesn't make work harder than what it ought to be (ie, it suites my habits very well - the virtual pager is the best virtual pager any wm has come up with, most others are seriously lacking).
I expect my computer to do work, not look pretty, or like a windows box on steroids.
"What essential commercial software out there is completely unavailable for and has no open-source alternatives for the Mac? "
Let me see, just in the area I work,
Working Model 3D, aka Nastran 4D
ADAMS
MathCAD
Automotive Signal collection and analysis suites
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on engineering 3D solid modelling (IDEAS, Unigraphics, Catia et al), but note that Rhino doesn't count.
To put that into perspective, I could use the Mac OS as a text editor, web browser, Excel, and email. My AMD 400 MHz can and does manage that quite comfortably.
Nice to see Apple putting out parts this fast. Not that I'd buy a dual G5, or anything at that price (I'm a cheapskate DIYer), but I have to admit, there's some impressive technology in that box. Still... am I the only one who really wants to see a dual G5 compared to a dual Opteron? That'd be as close to apples to apples (no pun intended. oh, God, NO PUN INTENDED) as you could get. No sense in comparing a dual G5 to Intel space hea-- err, Xeons.
Ok, let's dispell the smoke and mirrors:
Case 120
Pwr 120
CPUs 600
Ram 200
HD 150
DVD 200
Video 400
OS 200
Mobo 200
Kybd/mouse 100
This puts the total at: $2290.00
This assumes you buy XP Pro as an OS. You can go Linux and save, but then, you can't do as much with Linux.
It takes me an average of 3 hours to build the PCs I build, plus and hour for an OS install. This involves careful mounting of the mobo and referencing the manual for any jumper settings, etc. I've built quite a few PCs in the past, although I'm sure someone that builds them every day and do it faster.
Add $200 for build/install labor, bringing the total to $2490. That's $509.00 less than the Apple System, although you'd need to spring for another hundred to add 512megs more RAM.
I call that pretty comparable.
Not only that, it's one stop shopping. If you build a PC, you invariably shop the net for the best price, meaning any problems involve lengthy ship times and multiple vendors, some of whom are more cooperative than others. One stop shopping brings peace of mind in that aspect many people prefer.
Macs aren't just for people that don't know squat about computers. While I'm certain I know less than many here, I'd lay odds have more knowledge and experience with computers than over 50% of the people that read slashdot. And yet a seasoned computer veteran like me likes Macs. Go figure.
I run all operating systems. I'm not foolish enough to believe that one tool is the best for every job. And Macs certainly aren't the best for everything. But they are for many things and the new G5 is excpetionally powerful, not to mention, reasonably priced in a bang for the buck manner, despite the typcally uninformed posts saying they can build a less complete, lower performing system for less.
DUH! I can also buy an iBook for less.
Wrong again. Apple has always lined up their Pro models against the expensive Wintel pro models. Apple lines up their low end iBooks and eMacs against the whiteboxes. In both cases, the Mac is not overpriced compared to the competition in its category.
Yes, a G5 might seem overpriced to someone who only needs an iBook, just as an Alienware box might seem overpriced to a college student who can only afford an eMachines crapola box.
I'm glad you've discovered that Alienware is expensive. With a very quick bit of shopping at newegg, you can match the G5 almost exactly (1.8ghz Opteron, DVD-RW, FX5200, 1Gb PC3200, 160gb SATA, etc) for $1455. Some of these choices I question (why on earth did they put an FX5200 in the G5.. sheesh) but thats pretty much as close as you can get to matching the specs. You could get even cheaper if you went with a plain Athlon 64 3200+, and more than likely still be beating the G5s performance, considering the 200mhz advantage. areas Don't get me wrong - I own several macs, and I love them - for a long time I *only* owned macs. But price is NOT one of the where they're even competitive.
Eh, some of us consider Mac OS X inferior to Linux. I run Linux on my Powerbook G4 because I couldn't deal with Mac OS X. That said, I love the notebook itself. It's of incredible quality. But, if you're a person who doesn't like Mac OS X, I can't see justifying the extra cost for a G5 workstation.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
Why not benchmark against Sun/sparc and rs/6000 systems? That's the real competition right now, not Win32 boxes. I'll bet that a dual G5 has a better price/performance than any of the sparc workstations, and maybe a better one than the low-end rs6k boxes.
I was more referring to the idea that running Linux on G5, of all the superpowered supercomputer chips and Sledgehammers and Merceds of the world which Linux has been ported to, why is the G5, presumably running on Apple hardware, the ideal?
It's been a long time.
You notice this is apple.slashdot.org? Prepare for the onslaught of -flamebait!
$200?! I bought a DVD-R/W in febuarary for around $200 and it was a pioneer. You can get them for around $100 now, I see adds for them all the time.
Yes, and was I the only one who thought that the boot times for the G5 were pathetic? That article was practically gloating about the G5's 55 second boot time from chime to desktop, which really isn't all that good. Sure, its a decent improvement over the G4, but it still falls far short of the 35 seconds that it takes my 2.5Ghz homebrew PC to boot Windows XP. And I only paid $1,100 for that system 6 months ago.
This article was comparing Apples to Apples (both literally and methorpically!), but Timothy seems to think that it also somehow proves that the G5 is better than Oranges, too.
Anyway, please show me some reputible benchmarks comparing a $4,000 Mac to a $4,000 PC if you want to convince me to switch. Otherwise, please don't waste my time with biased advertising.
I actually thought that was the best part of the article, the author admitting he was a doofus.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
i recently installed yellowdog 3.0 on an old bondi blue 233mhz/160mb imac. i was amazed at how zippy and quick it is. OO.org loads in about 20 seconds, moz in about 7. now, this sounds slow, but running jaguar on it was quite frustrating at times. now, i konw jaguar is optimized fo rthe g4, and even though it runs well on my 700mhz ibook, it is not the fastest os. i do like os x, and love apple's x11. i lose little. but i think my next purchase, a 15" PB (when i get my masters in the spring) will dual boot, or just run linux with MOL. my only concern is that i haven't found a good jdk for linux ppc. maybe IBM has one.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
This should not have been modded as flamebait. I disagree with zerocool, some of his info is not up to date, but he's basically being truthful. Hopefully, he'll get a nicer car sometime soon. Honestly, the G5 dual is too expensive for me at the moment as well. If I was back doing fcp/ae work for pay, it wouldn't be too expensive. But for just fucking around, I don't NEED a G5. However, when my mac lust wins out sometime next year, it's nice to know I'll be able to score a refurb for a good price.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Does sunblade run any high end film/video software? Will it run AE or Commotion?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Thanks, dude.
I was kinda pissed to see this modded flamebait. If it hadn't been modded in any way, I would have been ok with that, but, damn.
Posting a review of the G-5 which claims that it's fast because "it starts photoshop in 8 seconds" is flamebait. Pointing out that a year-and-a-half old computer, worth $500, can do the same thing, is not flamebait.
Now, notice that I didn't say "the G-5 is not fast". I'm sure it's fast. All I wanted was some meaningful benchmarks.
I go to Virginia Tech, and even our cheezy college newspaper had a rundown on the dual 2ghz G-5, cause we're the assholes that bought 1100 of them to cluster. It says they do 14 teraflops or something. Even that was more useful than this.
~Will
p.s. made you a friend.
sig?
This makes no sense: the dual G5 has PC3200 with two dedicated 1GHz buses, faster than anything you're likely to find from Dell. So how does a machine with better throughput have worse performance?
Methinks PEBCAK.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
"If companies wanted proprietary, they'd buy Sun, not Apple."
I really don't understand where you get this notion that companies don't want proprietary stuff. 99% of all companies run MS software. 90% of all companies run either oracle, DB/2 or sql server.
Companies thrive on proprietary stuff.
War is necrophilia.
I obviously can't read. Quote please.
The notebooks based on G5s are, in fact, portable UNIX workstations.
No such thing, yet.
I have discovered a wonderful
Get off your high horse.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
All you PC users are like sheep.
And you use a Mac. Wait, Steve Jobs is talking... ooo... I gotta get me one of those G5's! Because it's all nice and fast. Benchmarks, longer bars, higher numbers! It's soooo much faster than those lousy PCs! Look 64-bits! Let's all buy one!
Don't get too close to the cliff.
You're comparing an OEM solution (the G5) to your homebrew setup. Of course you can buy more in parts when you're designing, building, and supporting it yourself. As has been shown several times in the past, the dual G5 system compares very closely in price to a dual Xeon system from Dell.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
IIRC, Q3 is "SMP-aware" in that the sound system runs in a different thread than the rest of the game. Not a significant chunk of the processing, especially with hardware mixing...
May we never see th
"a.PPC is a much cleaner ISA than x86, FP performance is superior undeniably, anything using altivec will maul the pc equivalent"
The PPC ISA *is* cleaner, but, quite frankly, YOU NEVER SEE THE FREAKING ISA. Unless you're writing a compiler or programming in assembly, the ISA is transparent. Why does the average user care?
"Superior undeniably" sounds like another superlative without proof. "The Pentium4 offers undeniably superior FP performance". Wow. I can do that too. Now come up with some data to backup your claim.
"b.Apples motherboard designs allow for much higher throughput to the PCI bus"
Than what? A toaster? Most PCI cards don't even support PCI-X. If you really care, get a PC motherboard with PCI-X. For most people, 133 megabytes of PCI bandwidth is more than plenty. Not even gigabit can max it out.
If you really want bandwidth to burn, look at Athlon 64. 6.4gbytes/sec of memory bandwidth + 6.4gbytes/sec of I/O bandwidth. Smoking.
"c.64-bit goodness at a lower cost than AMD or Itanium, right now show me 2ghz dual 64 bit proc system that is cheaper than Apple's"
First of all, Itanium is hugely overpriced. Second of all, it's not x86, so that's not relavent here. Thrid of all, SMP only helps out with extensive multitasking or with highly-threaded programs. You *never* get 2:1, and you're lucky if you get 1.5:1.
That said, BOXX technology makes some very nice dual Opteron workstations for under $3000.
Furthermore, 64-bit is not really needed by most people. Unless you're designing an airplane, 4GB of memory is just fine.
"d.OS X has programing frameworks and RAD development tools that beat the bloody piss out of anything MS offers or linux has."
Ahh, here we are again with the opinion. Apparently, someone hasn't seen VS.NET. No matter, your statement is unsubstantiated opinion. No facts, no studies, just someone with an opinion.
I personally find Python to be head and shoulders above any other programming language. And PyGTK is quite clean. Bloody piss indeed.
"e.Apple supports the whole widget, if you have ever worked in IT you'll know how convenient this is"
By widget, I'll assume you mean computer. Yes, I have worked in IT. We had hundreds of HP boexes. HP was greatly helpful with the hardware, and so long as your hardware is on the HCL (if you buy business desktops it almost always is) Microsoft will help you out with sofware (and won't blame it on hardware incompatibility).
"f.OS X has fewer vulnerabilities than windows or linux"
Linux has few to zero veulnerabilities. Oh, you're talking about a Linux distro. You can't really compare, as most Linux distros ship with hundreds of network-connected applications. OS X ships with very little comparitively.
Again, show me the beef. I have not seen a detailed report of "linux" veulnerabilities. I've seen the OpenSSH exploit and friends, but those can hardly be blamed on "linux".
"Answer this why do people spend big money on suns which specbench so much slower than Intel chips, hmm."
Specbench? You're referring to SPECMark. And the P4 blows the "bloody piss" out of the G5. Only when you use Apple's benchmarks, only in FP, only with Apple using a special heap library, and only with GCC does the G5 beat the P4. Intel has released their SPEC results; they are in the 1300s. Look them up on SPEC's website. Apple's numbers don't impress me. Don't pull this "fair" bullshit either. Life isn't fair. Most Windows apps are not compiled with GCC, and if GCC is the best compiler for the G5, that's all that Apple gets to use. That's the way that SPEC works. It's not a measure of a processor, it's a measure of a platform: a processor, hardware, OS, and compiler. Apple defeated this.
"The PC architecture is a toy, it could be offered up as how not to design a system look at the insane complexity of the machine code."
Apparently, 95%+ of the PCs out there are "toys". You probably use this "toy" every day. Again, I st
A single 2GHz G5 easily beats a single whatever-the-fast-one-is P4, and finishes so close to a Xeon that it's essentially too close to call.
Remember NASA? They were benchmarking a custom-written PPC app for fluid dynamics. It was hand-tuned to exploit AltiVec for floating-point vector computations. It showed that an equivalently-clocked G5 ran about 30% faster than a P4. If this is what you're going on, I'm laughing. The instructions-per-cycle on a processor means nothing -- P4s run at a significantly faster clock. The problem is that the fastest G5 available on-market runs at 2.0 Ghz, and the fastest available P4 on-market runs at 3.2 Ghz. So the G5 loses if we measure by absolute fastest possible speed. Perhaps we should use a value metric instead? The best bang-for-the-buck you can get in a G5 from Apple is their $1999 1.6Ghz model. If I pick out a new P4 desktop at Dell using the Apple price as a guide, I can get a 3.0 Ghz desktop for less, which runs about half again as fast as the Mac...*with* a monitor, which Apple doesn't include, plus a bunch of other goodies, for over a hundred dollars less.
Wrongo, dimwit. The "overwhelming number of times" (speak English much?) it's I/O. Your computer spends more time waiting than it does working. This has been true for years and years now.
Heh. All right, you're right -- I wasn't very clear. I was thinking of long-running tasks (which *are* generally CPU-bound), not simply browsing through your filesystem -- the latency there isn't going to kill anyone. Trust me, you don't want to change the competition to I/O latency rather than CPU speed -- OS X is an extremely heavy RAM consumer, and Apple charges a notoriously high premium on RAM.
Is this a metaphor, or are you just an idiot? You know that Quake 3 isn't CPU bound, right?
It certainly was on my computer when I played it. I'm sure it's possible to build a system where that's not the case, but given that the rate of graphic chipset speed increases significantly outpaces that of CPU speed increases, that's a pretty weak claim you're making if you're considering an ordinary old computer.
You also know that nobody gives a flying fuck about Quake 3 frame rates, right? I mean, you do realize that the people who hang out in apple.slashdot.org actually do this for a living, and are more interested in Final Cut Pro or Logic performance than silly games. RIGHT?
You do realize that the majority of people on apple.slashdot.org (or any slashdot subdomain) are under 20 and care more about games than Final Cut Pro, right?
But, hell, since I've made assumptions to favor you all the way through here, I'll do so again. We'll go with your DV folks -- want to read their opinion? Apple's PR people are full of it WRT performance.
That doesn't mean that the G5 systems are bad, as I pointed out above. They're a great choice if you use Macs. But claims of them stomping x86 boxes are simply not true, and folks simply repeating false claims that Apple's made are not doing anyone any favors.
May we never see th
Last time I looked, Sun computers had the same issue as Apple boxes do, though more so -- they aren't remostly performance/price comparable to x86 boxes. With Sun boxes, you're paying for a system that you can get good support for, certain high-end features for, can easily migrate to more expensive systems from Sun, and are likely to be pretty reliable.
May we never see th
According to the Department of Commerce, you can only export four 2 GHz G5 machines to places like China until you need to get special permission.
:)
So the top end G5 is about 1/4 of a supercomputer. Now if they counted the GPU performance as well, it might be 1/3 of a supercomputer or even 1/2 in a double-headed configuration
"Ya but they like to run it on commodity HARDWARE if possible."
Again sez who? Name me one fortune 500 company that does not have either big unix boxes or a mainframe or two. I bet even MS has a mainframe someplace.
War is necrophilia.
because if you're not developing software for NASA, there is NO REASON to use a fast computer. Those pesky end users who want to run OS X on the fastest currently available hardware should just climb back into their BMW's and drive back to Soho!
Out of curiosity, how many times a day do you post to Slashdot from your high priced UNIX workstation?
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
Thanks! Say, does your OS have any sort of compatible spell check application?
Please keep in touch, and let me know when you guys finally stop gettting your machines repeatedly cracked by all those script kiddies out there! They say it's only Russian Roulette if you're Russian!
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
...that's just how it is, you're new here, aren't you?
And let's be sarcastic about a point I already made in my post. I said that the graphics cards were a wold apart and I mentioned that adding the best card available for the Mac would add $350 onto the price. There was no downgrade option on the Alienware - it was the Quadro or nothing.
Remember, the original poster said he could get this an Alienware Opteron box for less than a G5. If he's going to remove the expensive options to drop the price then fine, but the graphics card I chose for the comparison was the lowest model available in the build to order list.
"Sends other UNIX boxes to
"My PowerBook G4 is now running every major UNIX app that we had on our Suns, AlphaStations, and SGIS - and running them faster."
I agree. However, as the pundits in the Sun groups on Usenet keep pointing out, Apple still doesn't put ECC memory in these things. If the dual G5 had ECC memory, they'd probably shut up, and might even come down off their high horses and buy 'em.
The problem is that the fastest G5 available on-market runs at 2.0 Ghz, and the fastest available P4 on-market runs at 3.2 Ghz. So the G5 loses if we measure by absolute fastest possible speed.
Oh, come on - I don't really believe that Apple has caught up with PeeCee's quite yet but you know very well that MHz is not equivelent to "absolute fastest possible speed" becuase processor design is so much more complex than that - To make a very simplified example which has a "faster absolute possible speed" a 3GHz machine that processes 1 instruction per cycle or a 2GHz machine that processes 2? Or a 3GHz machine with a deeper pipeline that requires 10 stages to produce a result or a 2GHz machine that only requires 5? In both cases of course the 2GHz* machine has a MUCH faster "absolute possible speed". This is roughly the situation between PowerPC and X86 - the processor designers for the PowerPC have tended to favor slower chips that do more in each cycle, while the X86 designers have always preferred to go faster but do less. While it may not be *quite* the case when comparing the 2GHz PowerPC and the 3GHz Pentium or Xeon it is as far as I can see pretty darn close. Apple (or more accurately IBM) have definetly gotten themselves back into the ballpark after several years of falling further and further behind.
*(Pretending a myriad of other factors doesn't enter into the equation)
my only concern is that i haven't found a good jdk for linux ppc. maybe IBM has one.
Blackdown makes the one I use on my Yellow Dog box. I don't know how hardcore it is -- I only use it for my undergrad CS programming assignments -- but it seems nice enough to me.
--saint
Because it's all nice and fast. Benchmarks, longer bars, higher numbers! It's soooo much faster than those lousy PCs! Look 64-bits! Let's all buy one!
A perfectly sensible reason to buy a Powermac G5, if you ask me.
In the era I am talking about, Apple didn't HAVE a 'Pro' line to differentiate. I am talking about back when Apple was hyping, say, a Mac IIci and comparing it to a Compaq Deskpro 386. Both were overpriced salesman-boat-payment boondoogles.
A Good Intro to NetBS
You buy at really expensive places. An Athlon MP 2000+ when I bought it was about $150 each. RAM cost me $70 for a 512MB *registered ECC DDR* module. I can get a hard disk for $100 or less. A $400 video card is way overkill, I use a GeForce 2MX. Very good cards can be found for $200. My motherboard did cost $270 though.
Btw, $4198 - $2490 = $1708, not $509.
You end up paying not just a little more, but CONSIDERABLY more, once you add up the dollar value of your time. Of course, if you have more time than money, then by all means, spend the weekend putting parts into a Fry's case.
This is a rediculous argument. Here's a little fact for you, your time is worth nothing. Unless building a computer somehow prevents you from doing work, you're not wasting "billable hours" building a computer on a saturday afternoon.
Do you hire a maid because she makes less money than you do and you "save" money by not doing it yourself?
Of course not, because your time is worth nothing outside of the 9-5 workday.
I don't know what's with you Apple users. I've been sitting at this dual G5 trying to copy a 17 Meg file for... holy fuck was that fast!
Ok, I get it now.
"If I want a Mac"
...
By that I meant "If I want a Mac with MacOS". I thought that was obvious, but obviously not.
Newsflash, I can install Linux/BSD on almost any windows box too, if you are going to read it that way.
---
The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
"If I want a Mac"
By that I meant "If I want a Mac with MacOS". I thought that was obvious, but obviously not.
Newsflash, I can install Linux/BSD on almost any windows box too, if you are going to read it that way.
.
---
The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
I was going to say the same thing.
I didn't assemble this machine myself, I got it from Cyberpower, short a few parts I didn't need or already had lying around from old systems (CD drive, an extra HD). It's NOT top of the line, I know, but some cheap upgrades I'm working on now are helping out. Now, I spent $532 on this. $433 before shipping.. For everything but the monitor and the CD drive. I have no DVD burner, this I regret...But, you know what, I have the bill here. I'll copy this over. Some of it is crazy. I know. I so reccomend Cyberpower...
This is exactly what the bill says. And it's what I have, and it's what I paid.
$0 Leadtek K7NCR18D NForce2 MB
$0 EVGA GeForce4 MX440 64MB
$351 AMD XP-2100+
$0 256MB DDR
$10 Maxtor 60GB HD
$0 CPU fan
$0 Case fan (x2)
$35 SBLive! 5.1
$0 3.5 Floppy
$0 Black ATX Medium Case
$0 PS2 Mouse (silver)
$0 PS2 Keyboard (silver)
$9 Fan LED's (Heh. Heheh.)
$9 Mechwarrior 4 (Hey. I like it.)
$0 1-Year Onsite Service
That totals at $433. This was in February of this year. Oh yes.
Here's a really beefy MC9 rig (3+ TB, RAID-5, 5 zones, 75MB/s sustained stream).
Da Blog
I see. So you're saying that Macs were overpriced way back in the 1980s, but now they're not. Thanks for admitting your data is 20 years out of date.
I withdraw my previous remarks. Back when you say Apple didn't have a pro line, they had the MacIIcx through the IIfx, and they also sold the MacPlus models. They had clearly differentiated pro and consumer models. And they were all price competitive with PeeCee models in their target niche.
Apples hardware is STILL overpriced, within it's market segments. Their 'consumer' hardware is priced significantly higher than other 'comsumer' hardware. You never see an Apple machine priced competetively with the cheap boxes at WalMart. They'd never be able to even penetrate the WalMart-level market and maintain their margins.
Similarly, their 'professional' line has to be compared to the more expensive 'professional' lines to be competetive.
They can't compete in the white-box market, and they definitely can't compete in the home-builder geek market. Their only means of competing there is putting on airs of snobbery, etc.
This hasn't changed. Same as it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago, though, they had teams of lawyers actively driving anybody out of their market, i.e. the Apple II cloners. Hell, a few years later they tried to own the whole GUI concept, until they got smacked back to reality in the courtroom.
It's probably not possible for Apple to ever be price competetive. They've just got too expensive a business model. It's too dependent on effete designers and the most expensive marketing agency they can buy.
A Good Intro to NetBS
way less as in 600 bucks more?
Like anyone can even know that
maybe it has something to do with the G5 costing 3000 bucks, not 5000
Like anyone can even know that
You mean you can get a G5 laptop for $1700? sign me up :P
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
As for the $40, well, once I tested the configurability and the really, really, really cool Vis Studio IDE, I registered the shareware edition faster than any other software I can recollect. If the price is a sticking point, go with the earlier MJ8, which has a free edition with most of the functionality.
Da Blog
Google is your friend, my friend :)
Here are a few OSX-compatible bar-code readers. Check both the search results links and the sponsored links at the top and to the side, you might get lucky there too :)
What prompted me to do the search is that i know there had to be some solution out there for macs, because all Apple stores' cashier terminals are iMacs linked to a barcode *and* digital-credit-card processors. Cool huh? :)
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Acually application load time is somewhat relevant in demonstrating the effects of, NOT the CPU, but rather, the overall I/O susbsystems architecture. Same for booting.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
So you don't think it says anything about human folly that this guy made a post saying 'but it doesn't hold a candle to these thingies here!' and putting two links to silly and amusing parody sites, and then was immediately marked as insightful and informative, when that was obviously the exact opposite not only of wht he actually was but of what he was actually intending?
*woosh* (Wow, all in one breath.)
Note that I make that last distinction because it is still ironic if someone makes a post that is 100% false and someone marks it as informative and insightful, even if he DOES think it's true. It's just that it's partly his fault too.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
A top of the line mobo runs about 150-200 and this was a dual proc, so I estimated about 200.
512k of lifetime warranty, reputable brand RAM runs about 100.
A reasonable size HD that is SATA (same as the Mac's) isn't under 100.
The Radeon 9800 is about $400, the card in the Mac.
Sure, you can drop the price by going with fly by night RAM companies, smaller, slower drives and an inferior video card, etc, but I say again...
For comparably equipped systems, it's price competitive to go with a Mac.
I benefit every time someone buys a Mac before they're fully stable. (So does Microsoft, which is unfortunate.)
:-)
Why? Because I'm going to buy a G5 in six months.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
So your claim is that if one company has a competitive advantage over another, then it automatically instantly wins and all of its competitors go away?
Additionally, are you somehow claiming that speed doesn't give you any competitive advantage at all?
I revise my claim. Dumb *and* obnoxious.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
What you originally said was If I want a Mac, I have only one OS vendor and the one and same HW vendor. Newsflash: Your post was highly unclear and highly unsucessful if this many people understood it. If it's obvious to you what you meant, it's not so obvious to others. Question: If you install Linux/BSD on a "windows" box, do you still call it a windows box?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Which aren't Apple numbers, by the way.
According to the ones I've seen, blast runs approximately an order of magnitude faster on a single G4 1.25 than it does on a single Pentium IV 2.8. Now, I don't know about the Xeons, but I'm going to hazard a guess that they aren't much different. So you'd need ten 2.8 Pentium IVs to match a G4.
Now, you might say that these numbers are wrong. I say in turn, I haven't seen anyone claiming that they're wrong except you. Have you run tests? If so, did you use the BLAST app that Apple provided, since it's been heavily altivec-enhanced (to match the vector-enhanced Intel versions)?
If so, show me your numbers.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
A valid point, except for two things.
One, MacOS 8 (circa 1996, so don't even compare it with Win98) and 9 are much more stable and pleasant network citizens than Windows 95 and 98, in my experience (having run three different networks, two corporate and one university, in the last ten years). (And the dramatic majority of machines in a corporate environment are certainly able to run 9 anyway. Which is definitely a better citizen than 8 is.)
Two, the earliest machines that run MacOS X are vintage 1997, and despite some griping from a few people here and there, I can tell you that on my vintage (early) 1998 beige G3 300 mhz (upgraded to 512 mb RAM), it runs *just* *fine*, including the internet sharing, web site-hosting, file serving, DNS, and a number of other server tasks, plus checking email, web browsing, etc. (Admittedly, I do my dev work, and my IT admin work, from my 400 mHz TiBook). So maybe comparing an OS that your vintage 1997 machine can be *comfortably* upgraded to, and Windows 98 (which is all that some similarly-aged machines can run with any reasonable level of performance) is not so irrational as you claim.
And yes, I know that 10.3.0 won't support the beige box. I don't know if I'll buy a new desktop then, or just continue using 10.2 on that machine and just upgrade my laptop.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
One thing that is missing that I would like is bandwidth throttling and on-the-fly lower-bitrate transcoding.
Da Blog
I blew $3,000.
Why?
Because I really love the Apple operating system, and it's the best in the world, especially if you're a Unix geek who also likes doing arty stuff like video editing and compositing.
Because I'm working on some projects requiring heavy compositing and special effects, and I really wanted to have the most powerful Mac I could find.
Because the aesthetics of the Mac make me happy and make me enjoy work, and life, more. This is more important than one might think; considering all the time I spend in front of the screen, and the value of that time, it's well worth the bucks to get a computer I really like instead of one I don't.
Hope that helps.
D
The only benchmarks I've seen are from PC Magazine...
Here is a page listing about a dozen different G5 benchmark examples...
http://www.titleofsite.com/archives/000042.html
The PowerPC 970 supports a bridge mode that allows minimally modified applications (photoshop uses a plugin) to take advantage of some 64 bit features, such as accessing more than 4 GB of memory.
The Athlon64 may offer something similar, but unfortunately, the marketing jargon associated with both chips is impenetrable at the moment
Stop trolling here and put your facts streight.
What specifically more usable with OSX that I cannot get with Windows or Linux? I have asked that question many times to Apple zealots and the only answer was: "it's more usable. period. no comments." Personally, I use all three (Win2k, OSX and Linux/GNOME) and haven't find anything more usable in OSX. Some details are even annoying.
What specifically makes you to think that the developement using OSX is faster than using Windows or Linux? I don't see that development shops (telecom, web, java, databases) have recognized OSX and moved to it. Personally, I develop on all three (Win2k, OSX and Linux) and I face most of problems on OSX (lack of dev tools, slow with Java, lack of database libraries), rather then on Windows and Linux.
So, stop trolling and put you facts here. If have any. In what I doubt.
Less is more !
Exactly right. Many people that whine about Macs and other OEM machines being too expensive enjoy the process of putting machines together as much as actually DOING anything with those machines. Analogous to car hobbyists who spend lots of time in the garage messing with carbs, valves, suspension, etc. all supposedly in the name of having a higher performance vehicle - which they will then use to cruise around town impressing other motorheads and using all that high-performance gear to race from stop light to stop light.
People who need a van, taxicab, or truck to actually DO something want to spend as little time messing with the vehicle as possible. Analogous to movie editors, book publishers, etc.
For some reason, many people seem unable to separate those who enjoy messing with the computer for its own sake from those who never want to mess with the computer but need a computer to get their work done. Both are valid markets. Apple is aimed at the latter group.
- Jasen.