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Apple Updates Power Mac Line
Phreck writes "Apple has announced an upgrade to its Power Mac line today. The new Power Macs all feature dual G5 processors, 512 MB RAM, and dual-layer 16x SuperDrives. On the low end is the dual 2.0GHz with 160GB HD and ATI Radeon 9600. The mid-range includes dual 2.3GHz processors with 250GB HD and ATI Radeon 9600. The top-end system has dual 2.7GHz processors with 250GB HD and ATI Radeon 9650. The processors are not the dual-core variety as has been rumored for weeks now."
Just a small speed bump. And no dual core G5 yet unfortunally.
How does a dual-processor compare to a dual-core processor? How do these powermacs compare to the latest AMD?
Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.
I just bought a Dual 1.8 on eBay a week and a half ago, and the bum took a week to send it out. I just got it last night. Now this news. Nearly the same damn machine is $1499 refurbished, and I paid $300 more than that, and didn't even get Tiger.
Word for the wise: listen to everyone and WAIT when you hear something will be updated soon!
In summary: FUCK!
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
(no, Taco, you'll never live that one down).
The new dual Power Mac G5 models complement the existing 1.8 GHz single processor Power Mac G5, providing customers with an affordable entry-level system priced at just $1,499 (US).
According to this the low end Power Mac is still the old 1.8 GHz single processor Power Mac, the summary indeicates that the lowest end Power Mac is 2.0 GHz dual processor. However asside from that one slip-up the Power Mac line is shaping up to be incredibly fast.
What sort of performance improvements will I see over my Apple II?
I've heard Apple will come up with a new one button keyboard, soon. Because it's so much easier to use.
Georg
So ... why would anyone choose such a device over the PC??
* Clicks 'Post Anonymously'
* Submit
* ducks
Perhaps you should start visiting the rumor sites. this powermac update was not a surprise
MacRumors.com
MacRumors' Buyer's Guide also keeps track of time since last release and a summary of recent rumors, and a buy or not-buy recommendation.
23" now $1,499
30" same $2,999
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
I do not understand their choice of base video card. Why would they use a 9600 series when the 9800s and X series are available? From a price concious view I can see it however the top end is Nvidia.
Also, are they still stuck on PCI-X? Is Apple going to move to PCI-Express anytime soon or will they be left behind for the time being?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
When Steve Jobs first announced the G5 chip, Jobs said they'd be at 3GHz by August 2004.
Where's the Gigs?
Sam
...my boss to announce an update to my salary. Until then my old school G4 will have to do.
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
Tell AMD that 2.7 GHz is "5 years ago", then.
Even Intel is finally figuring out that pushing the whole clock speed = performance myth is starting to cause problems.
I realize you have an irrational need to bash Apple products, but please, try to do so in an informed fashion.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
So buy the RAM from a third party and install it yourself.
If you throwing $2000-3000 into a computer, I somehow doubt $65 bucks to upgrade it by a gig of RAM is going to break the bank.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I noticed an oddity on the linked page to Apple's store: the older 1.8 GHz dual had a built-in modem, but the new ones did not. Sure enough, if you actually order one of the newer PowerMacs you find that built-in modems are now a $29 option.
I suppose nearly everyone who buys these machines is using them in a networked office or can afford broadband at home, and the not-so-recent advent of internet faxing has made the other role of the built-in modem obsolete.
Still, it's an interesting omission. Like the floppy disk, Apple's opinion now is that the POTS modem is sufficiently obsolete to remove it entirely and free up space inside the box, rather than leave it in and lose the $10 OEM or whatever it actually costs them.
Never buy a computer when it's TODAY.
Always wait until it's TOMORROW, because something better may come out.
God Damn! Last year they were saying 256mb wasn't enough and people complained, now Apple doubles it and the trolls are out again. Next year when they hit a 1GB for a machine, people are gonna bitch again and comment on how cheap 2GB of RAM is!
I prefer it (just like other people have said) to get my memory elsewhere and cheaper than Apple provides. I'd be pissed if they gave to much RAM and then overcharged on the entire system.
Jonathanjk.com
Hmm. Not sure how your math works out to 30%.
On my calculator (unfortunately, I don't have a G5 to do this calculation), 3.0/2.7 = 1.11 meaning 11% behind.
Still, it's clear someone at IBM was far too optimistic.
Uhh, these PowerMacs ARE the G5 towers. You can't reasonably like one and dislike the other. Apple has 5 computer lines:
Server: XServe
Professional "Desktop": PowerMac
Professional Notebook: PowerBook
Consumer Notebook: iBook
Consumer desktop: iMac, eMac and Mac Mini
Which division is redundant?
Hmm lets see the fastest AMD 64 chip, the FX-55 is 2.6Ghz. AMD must be really be behind the times now.
And all of those multimillion dollar IBM p690 machines filled with dual core 1.7 GHz Power 4 chips(slower than these 970s even in single die form), what a waste.. They clearly should have gone with intel and bought 3+ Ghz Xeon based x-series boxes instead.
I really like the andantech's review of the mac OS from A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective
personally a $500 mac is a few hundred dollars to expensive to buy and so I'm just too cheap to even consider a mac. though i think emacs take too long to boot (remember I care for the lowend) but do have some good UI.
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
If I had mod points, I'd mod you a troll.
I know a million other people are going to say this, but...
The G5 at 2.7 GHz is significantly more powerful than a P4 at 3.8. The best comparison is to the Athlon64 or Opteron (also a 64-bit cpu.) And as has been said before, 2.7 is actually higher than the fastest current A64 (which appears to be the 4000+ at 2.4 GHz.)
And don't forget the whole apples to oranges deal.
http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html
Thats for the 2.0 GHz chips, but you get the idea. Thats been posted before too. Go ahead mod me redundant. Does it show the G5 is always faster than an Opteron. No. So what? Pick the tool you like/that does the job you need. If you like OS X, doesn't get better than that. If not, you can still get your x86-64 box for less.
Am I totally impressed by the G5? No. Too much money, and I don't need that much power anyway. I recently replaced my Powerbook G4 with a Mini. 80-90% of the capabilities but at 20% the price.
I'd love to have a G5 dual-core Mini with a Geforce 6800GT, but that just ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
It's an 8% CPU clock bump... 2.5GHz -> 2.7GHz and a new DVDR (DVDRW?). 8% is small.
:)) There are cases where dual-core will be faster than dual-chip (see the recent benchmarks of the AMD Opterons published in the last week or so). There are times when dual-chip is faster, for example: if each chip has its own memory bank and a NUMA aware OS and you put the data in the right banks.
Id take a true dual cpu machine over dual 'core' any day.
Good thing you can have both or either in the x86 world (even a true dual CPU machine where each CPU is dual core even
Not wanting dual-cores simply sounds like sour grapes.
Gee... if only Apple let you configure your system the way you wanted it... that would be great. Then you could add all the ram you wanted... or all the hard drives... or upgrade the video card to an NVIDIA 6800 Ultra DDL for $450... or add an Apple display... or two... or maybe an gigabit ethernet ($100) and fiber channel ($500) cards. Geesh.. if only.
Oh wait...
My God, how thick can you get?
The PM is designed for creative professionals.
Ever stop and look at the performance reqs for pro video editing, or pro audio, or even the new Adobe Creative Suite?
This isn't designed for PC users looking to move over without switching machine types. What the hell does that mean anyway?
(like last time ibook 800mhz g4 logic board failure grrr back on this g3 500mhz now)
Did you take it into the shop? The Logic Board failure is a known issue that Apple will fix at no charge. I had to have mine repaired, and they even replaced the outer casing on mine for free!
(The case got beat up after a bus driver stopped suddenly, throwing a woman who was in the back right onto my laptop. It bent the screen backwards (!), but the computer still worked fine. It didn't close quite right after that, though.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wait until the new revisions come out, then buy whatever you can afford. This allows you the maximum time to enjoy the "best your money could buy." Don't wait on rumours.
If you can't wait, you'll pay the cost of impatience.
That would be around the time you could get a bash terminal on apple machines...
The Logic Board failure you're pointing at is the one with G3 iBooks:
http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
The guy seems to have a G4
Not that you should ever put too much stock in any vendors quoted ads, and bearing in mind all the inherant problems with benchmarking as a figure of merit:
Apple has some benchmarks up that show a pretty significant relative performance advantage on Apple's side. This particularly on compute-intensive work such as rendering and scientific work. Makes sense considering where the chips comes from(IBM) and where they're being used (Virginia Tech's cluster, for one).
Not that you should use this to make a buying decision or anything, but it's probably better than MHZ at telling you what is what.
Yeah, and this is this year. Now that isn't good enough. Welcome to computers. I bet 5 years from now 1GB won't be enough either, huh?
For this specific example, 256MB running Mac OSX is damn near a joke. 512MB is fairly adequate - that's what I have, but I run a fair amount of stuff, and I get the beachball more often than I'd like. 1 GB is the "transparency point" for Mac OSX, so a good desktop priced over $1500 should come with that standard.
I've never understood why Apple skimps on RAM - I know the idea is to sell you an upgrade, but magazine articles usually compare machines "stock," and we don't want Mac OSX, a very nice operating system, to seem klunky because it doesn't have enough RAM do we?
I just ran Hardware Update, and everything is much snappier!
Apple's performance page: http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/
What would be interesting is if someone took that page and listed the total cost of each system next to each machine type.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
- Then did St. Steve raise on high the Holy G5 of Cupertino, saying, 'Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine Dell enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.' And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the renderings of lambs and toads and tree sloths and fruit bats and orangutans and lickable icons.... Now did the Lord say, 'Thou in 12 months, thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the GHz and the number of the GHz shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two-point-five, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the GHz, be reached, then thine will be great and powerful in my sight, however if thou shall have more than one button on thou mouse, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff thine's life.
Now has thy Matriarch of the Macintosh forsaken us or what here?Artist will always make art.
> 2.7 is actually higher than the fastest current A64 (which appears to be the 4000+ at 2.4 GHz.)
Close, but the fastest available Athlon is the FX-55 at 2.6GHz and 1MB L2 cache.
Sort of expensive though :-)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Apple makes CHUDs? We're all doomed.
Best Slashdot Co
Yes. The delay is a well-known phenomenon called the Longhorn Effect.
-- often wrong; never in doubt
Maybe the grandparent post was referring to the use of the Alivec? You can do lots of single-precision floating point operations at once.
I don't think there is anything more you can do, but you can't deny the amazing speed with which the Altivec can get certain operations accomplished. I've personally experience a scenario in which it was feasible to do a more accurate approximation because the Altivec made it easy and fast.
So, maybe speed can translate into ability when you look over a given unit of time? I dunno.
Oh, and the 970fx has about a hojillion registers when compared to the x86 world. The grandparent was right about that. I'm hoping that the GCC4.0 optimizations that Apple and the GNU teams have been working on will better leverage an architecture with strict alignment rules, more registers and a powerful vector unit.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Lot of people are complaining about the "just 200MHz" speed bump for the high end model. 8% may not be that much of a speed bump, but neither Intel or AMD has been able to pull off dramatic clock frequency jumps lately. Clock speed stagnation seem to be a general problem in the processor design industry.
As for the dual cores, obviously AMD and Intel have much more incentive. The entire PC world is built around a standard form factors: ATX motherboards and ATX cases. Intel's efforts to move to a new form factor (BTX) has been quite unsuccessful so far. It is very hard to put two "hot" processors on an ATX motherboard in an ATX case. PC market is also driven by cut throat price pressure and low margins. There is a huge price difference between the prices of single processor motherboards and dual processor motherboards. Given the stagnation in the clock frequency, the only practical way for Intel and AMD to drive the mainstream PC to higher performance is the SMP model through dual-core chips. This way, all of the rest of the system components (motherboard, chipset, case, cooling system) can stay the same.
Apple does not have this constraint. Apple has been manufacturing mainstream multiprocessor desktops for manty years. Overall, it may actually be more cost effective for Apple to ship multiprocessor system. It may be a lot cheaper for IBM to manufacture two instances of a small die like the PPC970 FX (less than 60mm2) than a larger dual core die. As for Apple, having the source of the heat distributed accross two chips makes thermal management somewhat easier than dealing with one extremely hot dual core chip.
I am sure Apple will eventually move to dual core PPC970MP chips, potentially later this year, but this will most likely be in the context of being able to offer quad systems (two dual-core processors) for higher performance.
As for the choice of the base graphics card, the 9600 or 9650 is a perfectly reasonable choice. The primary driving force behind high end graphics cards in the PC world are 3D games. PowerMac G5 is obviously not the best 3D game platform. Most people buy PowerMacs to use in professional applications. Many pro applications do not require super-duper 3D performance. For those who are planning to do serious 3D work, the 6800 Ultra upgrade is the reasonable choice. There is no reason to burden all customers with an expensive (and potentially loud) graphics card.
The problem with blogs is that anything can publish anything. It doesn't have to be true.
Apple is not going to use Intel compatible chips anytime soon.
Why is it front-page-newsworthy when Apple updates their product line, but it is not newsworthy when Dell, Microsoft, or Intel updates theirs?
Well Microsoft and Intel (and AMD) get quite a bit of coverage when they release new products, even if they're just collections of bug fixes (Windows XP SP2) or minor speed bumps in their chips. Dell generally doesn't get coverage when they release a new product for the same reason that your local whitebox clone shop doesn't get coverage, it's just not that interesting to read about slightly faster PCs built around generic hardware components.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I'm surprised that this hasn't been brought up, but Apple is using a liquid cooling system on the 2.7Ghz model.
Details (including a cutsie animation) here.
It's much cheaper to buy the memory elsewhere, like 50% cheaper, and dead easy to install if you aren't stoned
The point is, that you shouldn't have to. You are buying a very high-end 3000$ machine, and it comes with the same size of RAM 1000$ PC's do. You are also getting a 2 year old video card.
IMHO only the bottom line power mac should come with 512MB, the middle one perhaps 768 or more and so on, and they should come with GF6800 Ultras.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
http://www.macworld.com/news/2004/06/28/liveupdat
See also this explanation from this very thread.
"Ad infinitem et ultra!" - Buzz Lightyear
I didn't go through the full list of options in excruciating detail, but by "slightly less" I meant that I noticed some minor changes in BTO configs.
Apple doesn't change their major pricepoints often, particularly in the Pro line - they don't have to. In the consumer lines, there's been a slow, steady lowering of price levels over the last few years as Apple's nosed their way down-market. But the major thing here is that (right or wrong) Apple has a market that craves their high-end gear, even if it doesn't provide the same raw horsepower as a nicely tweaked PC can. It just doesn't matter to them at all, and they've shown it consistently.
Mac users don't buy them (generally) for the raw performance, they buy them because they fill a need better - real or perceived. Sure, they market image in a way Dell and the like can only dream of, there's more to it. Apple doesn't really want the Slashdot crowd as their customers (and they don't have them) - the Apple market is still the graphics person, the end users who are sick of dealing with Windows, the science community, and the alpha geeks (just count the PowerBooks at a Unix conference).
They aren't pure enough for the Free Software diehards, but they provide a slick, functional Unix that adheres to most standards that matter, can do all the day-to-day tasks that most users would ever want, interoperate well with other systems, and are immune to pretty much all the woes that plague the Windows world. They don't build a slick bare-bones box that you can buy cheaply and tweak to your hearts' desire, but they do have complete systems that are clearly differentiated across the full spectrum of top-tier pricepoints.
For your purposes, a PowerMac would be great, but you don't need all that expansion to develop Java apps. If a mini doesn't float your boat, try an iMac G5, for instance - maybe it's still above your target price but you can get a nice one for under $1500, and then you get G5 goodness for your Java wants. Heck, I'd like a PowerMac too, but since I didn't win the lotto this week I'll just stick with my iMac G5 for now.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
When Microsoft comes out with security patches, let alone actually comes out with a new version of something, it's on the front page of Slashdot. Where have you been that you don't notice this.
Dell changes the computers it offers weekly, sometimes daily. I'm not talking about EACH machine, mind you, but something somewhere at Dell is always changing. In one memorable day they changed the same laptop TWICE in the same day, and I managed to order the middle one which didn't exist by the time my order actually got to our Dell rep. (They changed the CPU of the laptop, and then discontinued the model, in the same day. Frankly bizarre.)
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
oh wait, no games....... :P
j/k, but seriously they can't even include the 9800 Pro if not the X800? For $3K+ I want a damn good card in there.....
No problem, as long as it also has a 104-button mouse.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Huh? You're glad to be stuck with a 167 Mhz system bus and slow, limited RAM?
Well, whatever makes you happy. Personally, I love my G5.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
"Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. ...seriously"
Actually, it was "Yeah, seriously," which makes the sarcasm more obvious.
At this point, it seems like nobody is using Intel compatible chips except people who are tied into Windows legacy code.
GameCube: PowerPC
Playstation3: fancy multicore PowerPC
TiVo: PowerPC
XBox2 (or is it XBox360?) PowerPC
I'd find it easier to believe a rumor that Microsoft was releasing a version of Windows for PowerPC, especially in the wake of XBox2.
The plural of "thief" is "thieves." Posted from your Mac.
This guy is way out there
I agree with you. I never understood why Apple hobble the low end PowerMac. It should be PCI-X and 8GB Ram capable across the board. I would seem to me cheaper to just produce one board for all 3 Powermac systems and just set the bus speed accordingly.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
He's probably a college student working at an Apple store who somehow feels qualified to outline the entire business strategy of the company.