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iMacs Freshened with 2.0 GHz G5, Bluetooth, WiFi
amichalo writes "Apple has updated the popular consumer level Mac, the iMac G5.
So better support the now standard Mac OS X Tiger, Apple has made significant improvements to all standard configurations including 512MB RAM, Radeon 9600 128MB graphics, and on 2.0 GHz models (17" and 20"), a slot-loading dual-layer 8x SuperDrive is standard. The 1.8 GHz 17" model includes a slot-loading Combo Drive.
Also standard are Apple's AirPort Extreme 802.11g WiFi and Bluetooth. Pricing remains at $1300, $1500, and $1800 respectively for 1.8 GHz 17", 2.0 GHz 17", and 2.0 GHz 20", though 2.0 GHz models include additional upgraded features.
These improvements are significant as this line has not seen a refresh in about a year and the upgrade to a Radeon 9600 graphics card will allow the new iMac to take better advantage of Tiger features such as Core Image, which is significant because the video card cannot be upgraded. Lastly, Apple is continuing the interactive chat and QuickTime support program for the iMac G5."
just to clarify.
they've also update the emac
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Just change your preferences to block taco's posts...
I ordered my iMac in September and it arrived in October. I wasn't the first, but I wasn't far off. OK, it may be 7-8 months since the line has been introduced, but isn't that statement a little 'glass-half-empty'?
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Expandability?
I would agree that the low end Powermac is abit... MMhhh weak, but then the advantage of it is that you can expand it more, another HDD, GFX, more memory.
So for a "family" the Powermac really isn't the right machine but if you need an entry level Workstation for grafic work I'd say the Powermac is still the way to go.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
I'm very pleased to see they have finally started shipping 512 Mb RAM as standard as this has to be considered the minimum to see OS X in its full glory. The prices to go to 1GB are much better, $125 extra for 1GB using up both DIMMs and $175 for the memory in one stick, leaving you free to buy the additional elsewhere (if you need it on this level machine).
It leaves me puzzled why they are still shipping 256 Mb on the Power Macs (why, why?). However, this looks like a very sensible feature improvement which should provide the perfect all in one home machine and stop the iMac from having their sales canibalised by Mac Minis at the lower end. Sadly my previous generation iMac, which is now 4 years old, is still running perfectly, especially now it has Tiger, so this may still be a hard sell to buy this year.
Yes, with that video card. You don't need an X800 to run Photoshop and InDesign. They won't even take advantage of it if you have one.
"One of my gaming machines?" Would you please stop posting these thinly disguised anti-Apple trolls? If you're the kind of person who has a set of gaming machines, then you are not an Apple customer. You are a hobbyist. You are a child playing with toys. You have no more use for a Mac than you would have for an AS/400. Doesn't mean they suck.
Now stop trolling the Apple stories.
... The stuff that should have been built-in in the first edition (wifi,bluetooth) are now built-in, and the base memory isn't a joke.
The video chipset is still a bit jokey, but this whips the Powermac refresh like the family pig.
Still, I'm pretty sure I'm building a new box by hand this time 'round, I don't feel like waiting another year for Apple to get its PCIe act together...
"There are a lot of great games on the mac... like warcraft 3.................. uh .......... um..... that puzzle game with the apple logo! THATS a great game. I... I beat it, but it's still fun."
"The confusing thing about PC's is you go to the store, and there are just SO MANY games. EVERYWHERE you look! But on the mac... there are just six."
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I would add two things to this, to be fair. First, the cost of XP Pro should be added (which will offer the same range of software and usability (sort of on usability) as OS X). Second, the keyboard should be of the highest quality you can get for a PC, as Apple keyboards are very well built.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
http://cse.stanford.edu/class/sophomore-college/pr ojects-00/risc/risccisc/ this is probally what your refering to.
also try http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3997
When doing these comparisons, everyone always forgets one BIG cost: Windows.
Windows XP Home: $199 Windows XP Professional (Much closer to OSX): $299
So, now your $1095.00 computer just became $1394. Add in the other little things you forgot such as bluetooth, gigabit ethernet, and case and you've got a machine about on par with the Powermac.
You're misreading that page. The disk issue is real, but only affects disk-intensive tasks (of course this depends on what you intend to do with the iMac). The high/auto stuff is a software issue that's very easy to correct.
Or disingenuous, even.
Actually if you go to the site you will see that XP Pro is 159 and XP Home is 99. The quoted motherboard does have gigabit ethernet, and the case was included. So all you need is a bluetooth adapter if you really want one.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Now Apple needs to do something about the Mini. 256MB of ram is an insult, especially if they start shipping them with Tiger in the near future. It wouldn't suck to update the video to the 9600 too so CoreImage can be better utilized. Go ahead and leave the drives smaller and the CPU 2.0, but at least take care of the memory issue.
A "sub $500" mac looses it's luster real quick when you have to stuff memory on top of it just to get decent performance. When they almost never leave stock 1.25/Gh/40Gb models at 256MB in the Apple stores, Best Buy, and Comp that says something about the performance.
Sure it will play Doom3.
I've got Doom3 on an AMD box with a Radeon 9600 and it runs just fine.
And while Doom3 tends o run a bit slower on macs with equivalent GPUs, the gap is much wider on high end hardware (that benchmarking geeks tend to obsess over) than it is on something like a 9600, as Aspyr chose to spend their resources optimizing for middle of the road machines like this.
This is a common problem:= 665&pid=25 29
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid
I don't think they were using "quality" capictors.
I also have an entire series of imacs where I work that almost every one has had a hard disk failure. Granted they are 5 years old, purchased in 2000 and are only 400mhz. But started failing one by one after we purchased them, 1 or 2 every month until almost all 60 had hard drives replaced.
Both Xserves I had purchased has had bad slot loading cdrom drives that I had Apple replace. I tried the firmware update that supposidly fixes the problem, but the drives still did not work.
Powerbooks with the same type cdrom seemed to be having similar problems. Ended up sending the drives in to be replaced.
We have had several other Macintosh Computers that could not keep time even after firmware resets and battery replacements.
I have had lots of bad memory, capicitors, and power supply failures -- much higher than all other computers combined (PCs, PPC IBM Servers). Failure has increased with newer models.
Apple used to produce quality computers back in the early 90's that would last for years. Now they are on par with emachines or packard bell.
We purchase many computers and it is not uncommon to see entire series of Macintosh Computers to have to same failure again and again. That does not mean a consumer can see this because he or she may have the "lucky" computer that is not the lemon.
APPLE, PLEASE GET BACK TO QUALITY!
First, you might try getting ahold of an OEM copy of XP Pro since you're building a system from scratch.
As for whether XP Pro or OSX is better, that depends on what you do. And that's a different discussion.
OEM XP Pro from Newegg $139
(Adjusted Price $1234)
Gigabit Eth WAS included. As for bluetooth, I own an adapter for my PC (costs $10-20) and have yet to use it.
($1234+$20 = $1254) Still much cheaper than the Mac.
And before anyone flames me, I love Macs. Personally, I prefer OSX to XP, but that's because I do a lot of work with my Linux servers and like having something very similar to Linux at the command-line level while having a GUI that looks great. If I just wanted to play games and do basic thing, I'd probably pick Windows because there are far more programs/games available.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Actually, no...
This is a marketable point given that the 9600 will take full advantage of Quartz 2D extreme GUI acceleration, whereas the video card below this one will not. So it's a matter of Quartz 2D Extreme support or not. Quartz 2D extreme should make a very large difference in GUI speed, which being a place that OSX has lagged, is a big deal.
macgamestore.com, there are several other games. I read this piece of news from mac world this morning.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Ethernet was included before. It's been included in every iMac since the very first G3 IIRC.
The difference is with this version they appear to have upped it to gigabit ethernet. That's a major boon for using the iMac in a design studio as increasingly the iMac is used there. For Photoshop/InDesign and web work it's easily powerful enough with PowerMacs becoming increasingly less needed.
Keep in mind that there are only so many parts in the iMac G5 - you can basically break it down to: SATA drives, PSU, Midplane, Inverter, Display (+ memory). Things that are separate parts in many machines but not the iMac G5: video card, speakers, bluetooth, antennae, modem, fan(s), cables, and sometimes even the processor(s) and ports.
Considering that drive and LCD failures are unlikely to be heavily seen in any computer's first 6 months on the market, it's not surprising that most of the failures we hear about are the Midplane or PSU. PSU is an easy one - "won't power on/won't stay on." Inverter typically presents itself as a "no backlight" issue. That leaves a laundry list of problems that all reside on the midplane: Fans stop spinning, unit overheats. Fans spin too fast constantly, too loud. No AirPort signal. Bluetooth not recognized. Video scrambled. Ethernet port not working. Memory not recognized. Kernel panics on startup. Bad FireWire port. No sound. ALL of these require replacing the midplane.
My point? Not all iMac midplane failures are equal, and unless they are all failing for the same reason at the same point, there is no larger issue. Apple simply chose to put "the whole computer" on the midplane, so yes it gets replaced more frequently than many other parts (there are hardly any other parts to replace!), however from a customer service standpoint it makes repairing your own computer a heck of a lot easier. There are really only so many parts to go bad in an iMac, and surprise, a few of them have. Also realize that this computer has been flying off the shelves since day 1, so there's going to be a larger number of reports than usual. Add to this people who were shipped a PSU to replace and really needed a midplane, or vice versa, but consider the problem a 'dual failure' because both parts ended up being replaced (I've seen this case a lot online). This was a failure on Apple's support end to accurately identify the problem, but nonetheless does not constitute a dual-failure epidemic. The iBook G3 logic board recall, on the other hand, represents a specific widespread failure that manifests itself in the exact same way every time.
Sorry to go on a bit of a tirade, but I really feel that - like with the iPod 'battery issue' - the majority of iMac owners are happily enjoying their purchases and the fact that anyone with a sad story and no technical knowledge can post to a website really tends to have a run-away effect in the Mac community. It would be nice to see more people address these failures with some consideration for how the thing is built.
http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html Looks like it is still 400
10 Dell PowerEdge 1750 servers. Dual Xeon, gigs of RAM.. 2 were DOA.
I've had caps on supposedly "quality" PC motherboards blow, from Soyo, Abit, and Asus. I've had ECS boards die. We've gotten hardware from Sun that was defective.
To say that Apple is on par with Packard Bell or eMachines is just ridiculous. Computer stuff can and will fail.
We've had excellent luck with the Apple stuff.
Wow. You can't take a joke, either.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Also might want to check out:
http://www.pangeasoft.net/index2.html
http://www.udevgames.com/
http://www.apple.com/games/
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/cat/games
http://www.macupdate.com/games.php
As a side note, the Mac platform has never been known for a wide range of shrink-wrapped software; the main place to find software has always been "online", even before the internet was popular, and people got their software from BBSes.
A number of "quality" capacitor manufacturers have been having problems recently. There wasn't much Apple could do about it.
0 207018535.htm
0 3/ncap.html
References:
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Feb/bch2003
http://home.earthlink.net/~doniteli/index27.htm
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb
Um. Yeah. I know. But I've never heard the name "Quartz 2D Extreme" inside the company. It's possible that it's just a new name that never made it over this way.
In any case, it doesn't really matter one way or the other. Because Adobe doesn't use Quartz 2D at all. They use QuickDraw. And we're hardly going to stop supporting QuickDraw. We've deprecated it, sure, but it's not going away, specifically because there are thousands of applications out there that depend on it.
Long story short, a fancy-ass graphics card is not going to make Illustrator any faster.
(On a sidebar, I'd be careful about taking things that Siracusa says as gospel. He's certainly one smart cookie, but there are some things he's written lately that are just plain wrong. His fascination with extended attributes is an example. He concluded that it was part of some bizarre filesystem-dependent metadata scheme. It's not. It's something we added at the API level to support POSIX ACLs. So just let the buyer beware regarding his stuff, okay?)
Wow, even my typos are denoted as informative. ;)
:)
And it ~was~ a typo, 'i' is right beside 'u' on the keyboard.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Mostly it seems like it will get cleared up in short order, only VPC users will have to wait very long. Mid-May is not bad for a Cisco fix which is probably the majority of users having an issue now.
In general Slashdot could have a story of Tiger incompatibilities but that seems a little off-target for Slashdot. Those kind of stories are more a thing you'd go to Macslash for, or mentuion it in the context of some other article as you've done.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, I'm a true ./'r! If you want facts and statistics , I am afraid you are in the wrong place. May I suggest you buy a Mac mini and try it out for yourself. If it's not true for you you can always sell it on ebay.
System Shootouts does a more realistic comparison between processor lines.
Worth bookmarking.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
You'd need a complete lack of a story line and a complete lack of quests for a game to be non-linear. That being said, the last "non-linear" game of any sort that I can remember playing was the Sims. (And sadly, it's available for XBox, PS2, and yes, even the Mac.) In addition, button mashers and 3rd person platformers are a privilege of owning a console. Another great benefit of consoles is the friends perspective. See, I'm not your typical nerd. I have friends. Now I know you PC users love your LAN parties, and I did those when I used to own a PC too. However, taking an hour to get everybody set up and their (unstable) PCs running just to play one of the many crappy FPSs out there all night long. It's a lot easier to just switch the CD out and have an 8-player game ready to go. As far as the FPS thing is concerned, I could try the Halo defense, but I realize that Halo is a crappy game, though it's also available for the Mac. Other FPS games available on Mac include: UT2K4, Doom 3, and STILL my personal favorite FPS, Raven Shield. So what are we missing out on for not owning a PC? Half-life 2. Maybe Guild Wars. Thanks, I'll keep my stable mac and my enjoyable consoles around the house.
You can add a new HD to an iMac, and upgrade the RAM. Both are user installable parts. As is the airport card if you don't already have one.
And yes, the HD and RAM are standard parts, not proprietary Apple stuff. The Airport card is proprietary though.
Actually, as a DVD player (using Apple's DVD Player software), the iMac sucks ass. I'm sure this will be fixed in the future, but the scaler and de-interlacer are horrible. Since the iMac's native resolutions are 1440x900 and 1680x1050, scaler performance is very important.
Here's Anand's take on Apple's DVD player:
Maybe thats because you dont work for the company, ANYONE with developer tools installed can load up Quartz Debug and select 'Enable Quartz 2D Extreme' from the Tools menu
There has been discussion that you are just a troll sucking down mod points, I tend to believe them since you have no clue about this technology.
For the uninitiated, its a lot like offloading graphics rendering (and not just compositing) to the GPU, rather like NeXT used to do in some of their more expensive systems.
But it's not one I've ever heard before.
Which doesn't actually mean anything, because you're employed by Apple the same way I'm employed by Apple - as an end user, and nothing more.