Apple Moves to All Dual-Processor Power Mac Lineup

Jason Siegel writes "Apple will no longer be selling single-processor Power Mac computers, according to GeekInformed. The company has officially dropped 1.8 GHz G5s from their lineup to pave the way for exclusively dual-processor Power Macs. The systems will range from dual 2 to 2.7 GHz G5s. This is the first significant announcement since the Worldwide Developers Conference declaration that Apple will transition away from PowerPC to Intel chips."

Comments

Why upgrade now?

[fembots]

Apple released a statement last month that the company would be transitioning away from IBM's PowerPC CPU's in favor of Intel's microprocessors. The shift to the new processors, however, will not begin until the first part of next year.

So who would buy dual PowerPC CPU now, knowing a major shift is happening in less than a year's time?

Re:Why upgrade now?

[LiquidCoooled]

People who need a mac will buy a mac.

It doesn't matter about the innards changing any more than it matters whether McDonalds uses fresh chicken nowadays.
If people want it, they will buy it.

Re:Why upgrade now?

[piecewise]

Uh... Because most people, especially professionals (and more so professionals whose companies pay for the equipment), don't like waiting an additional YEAR for a product they use every day, most notably when a lease term says you can have new equipment anyway.

The whole idea that announcing a transition will destroy Apple's market share is just stupid.

I won't be eating crow in a year, either.

Re:Why upgrade now?

[Mistah Blue]

Because they are still good machines and will be supported for a long time. Why hold your needs hostage if those machines solve them now? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to make a switch to the Mac line on rev 1 of the Macintel machines. I just switched to a PB 15" in Feb. and am actually pleased that I just did it as opposed to a year or two ago.

Had I switched a year or two ago, I would be at my normal refresh point when the new Macintel machines start coming out and would feel a little internal pressure that might cause me to blaze a trail on the first rev of the new line. Having just switched, that isn't going to be a problem for me.

I find it interesting that people allow things like this to hold up buying decisions. The fact is there are always technology shifts going on. Why not get a PowerPC now if you need it, and then you can jump in to the Macintel waters on your own timescale?

Re:Why upgrade now?

[MustardMan]

Who would buy a Dell computer now, knowing much faster systems will be available in less than a year's time?

This question has really bugged me every time I have heard it since the announcement. I just bought a dual G5 machine and don't regret it at all. I needed a new computer, picked out the one that best suited my needs, and brought it home. It's one thing to wait for a month or two if there's a major revision around the corner, but I see no reason at all to change your purchase decisions based on something that's going to START coming out in a year.

With the ease of x-code's fat binaries, there's very little incentive for a developer to write programs that will only run on intel macs, so why get all bent out of shape about buying a machine now?

Wait, now that you mention it, I'm not going to buy any machine right now, because I'm afraid it might not run Duke Nukem: Forever when it comes out.

Re:Why upgrade now?

[TrippTDF]

To elaborate:

The idea that people will wait for the next, better model that is right around the corner is outdated at this point. A speed boost to a computer means less today (in my opinion) than it did 5 or 10 years ago.

The transition to Intel is going to rock the Industry, but is it going to mean all that much in terms of the actual computers? I don't think so. Yes, it will mean they will get faster proscessors , but I don't think it will be so significant that holding out for a year on old hardware makes a good business descion.

Re:Why upgrade now?

[clarkcox3]

You don't understand what Universal Binaries are. They are simply a renaming of the old Next "fat" binaries. That is, they contain *completely native* code for two or more platforms. This is completely separate from Rosetta, and has nothing to do with emulation in any form. Please get your facts straight.

Re:Why upgrade now?

[Golias]

perhaps the odd app here and there will be incompatible, but at the same time, there does exist a very wide range of unique PPC apps currently that likely will never make their way to Intel.

I'll even put on my Carnac hat and break it down for you:

1. There will probably be a native WINE port for OS X within months of the first Mac-on-Intel release which will not run on the G5. This will allow the running of various Windows apps without rebooting or even leaving the OS X desktop. Geeks will love the fact that damn near all Windows and Linux software will in CPU-native mode within OS X, but old-school Mac heads probably won't care much.

2. It has already been announced that the Intel Macs will never be capable of running "Classic" applications. Fans of old Mac programs like Quark will be all a-tizzy about squeezing maximum life out of the remaining G5 systems, but nobody else will care.

Pretty much everything else is likely to work just fine on either platform.

Re:Why upgrade now?

[amichalo]

I just bought a new iMac on Saturday for the following reasons:
(1) I needed to upgrade
(2) The iMac line was just upgraded last month
(3) PowerPC software will continue to be produced for years
(4) The first Intel boxes from Apple will be 12 months from now
(5) The first Intel boxed from Apple will not be iMacs (for a variety of reasons)
(6) I would rather be the last to own the PowerPC iMac than the first to own the Intel one.
(7) After using Macs for four years, I have never been disatisfied and don't see any reason I would be with the iMac G5

Still dual processor when they go Intel?

[gbulmash]

Here's a question, and my apologies if it's been asked and answered before. Will Apple stay the dual-processor course when they move to Intel? I don't mean dual core Pentiums. I mean two slabs of silicon, like a dual Xeon setup. And with Intel moving more and more to dual-core across the lines... Dual core, dual processor, OS/X... Dang.

Then again, who knows where desktop Linux will be in 16 months with the Mandrake/Connectiva/Lycoris mergers, the rise of Ubuntu... And think of that on dual core, dual processor... ohhh... Someone get me a tissue!

Regardless, next year's going to be interesting if you're in the market for a new box. :-)

- Greg

Re:Still dual processor when they go Intel?

[Ath]

Yes, but they specifically said "Intel"... not "x86"... "Intel".

No, they said Intel on the IA32 platform. That is x86. Phil Shindler said it and explicitly used the example of whether Apple would do anything to prevent people from running Windows on Apple machines. He said no, but that it would not be permitted to run OS X on non-Apple hardware.

For once and all, Apple is moving to Intel chips using the x86 architecture. Want to know which ones? They said to look at Intel's roadmap for mid 2006 to see the likely chips they will use.

Questionable Apple News

[WatertonMan]

OK. I love Macs. I'm terribly interested in the future of the platform. But come on. Half the Apple stories the last few months haven't been news at all. This one certainly isn't. I bring this up because I kind of worry about the Mac losing it's nice Karma due to some of the silly hyping of the platform.

Re:G5 vs P4 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use Photoshop: G5
If you use anything else: P4
If you run spyware: G5

Encouragement for good SMP support?

[Sv-Manowar]

With the impending move to x86 architecture, this could be Apple posturing to encourage developers to work on the SMP capabilities of their programs. Intel's chips obviously feature things like HyperThreading and dual cores, making extracting the best possible performance require good SMP code. Obviously by phasing out the idea of a non-SMP 'Power' mac, Apple can encourage developers of scientific, processing and even mainstream applications (to an extent) to take better notice and make better use of SMP capable systems.

Orphan Machines?

[Greyfox]

Surely once Apple moves away from the PPC architecture, the developers will not continue developing software for the platform, will they? Will Apple provide an emulator so you can run X86 binaries on that spiffy PPC Mac you bought today? Wouldn't it be a performance hit to run programs that way?

Doubt it

[Joshua53077]

My guess is that the single processor G5 had a similar price point to the iMac, which has similar specs, plus a built in LCD. MacMall lists the 1.8 Ghz power mac at $1495 and for the same price they offer a 2 Ghz iMac. My feeling is that they want to keep the lines between the iMac and the Power Mac pretty clear to eliminate customer confusion. Plus, dual processor Power Macs have been available for about 4 years and there have been several times that they've only been available in dual processor configurations. I wouldn't read much into it and I think its too early to start thinking about clearing inventory of Power PC chips. Remember that the high end chips are rumored to be transititioned in late 06.

Going Dual

[WindFish]

We're still waiting on that dual-button mouse.

Re:Going Dual

[DrWhizBang]

I need to write a bot that will auto respond to this stupid statement.

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Re:G5 vs P4 ?

[forkazoo]

I am almost tempted to wonder if this is a troll. Is there really anybody left who doesn't understand that this isn't a useful question?

What do you want to do? The G5 will be excellent at some things. The P4 at others. Some server apps which use lots of system calls, thread management, and such will be hampered by the architecture of Mac OS X. Some compute intensive apps will run incredibly well on the G5 compared to the P4. If you want to use Final Cut Pro, the G5 will run it faster, and if you want to run XSI, the P4 will be faster, because you would have to run under emulation to try and run FCP on a P4 or XSI on a G5.

Anand Tech recently did some benchmarks, which you may find interesting.

Are you planning on running your own code? I quite like the XCode IDE because it uses gcc as a backend. Is all your legacy code MSVCPP MFC projects? Then it will be more hassle to get it running on the G5.

So, yeah, it all depends. I use an iBookG4 as my primary system, because it is fast enough for 90% f what I do. It's light, it's portable, it has UNIX guts and a top notch UI. My secondary system is my Athlon64 with Nvidia GFX. It's big, it's fast, I have to turn it on with my car key, the GUI is adequate, and it runs lightwave almost fast enough. (Just need it to be about 10-100 times faster, like always). It's got four fans, and it is noisy. I wouldn't dream of getting rid of either.

Depends if they are idiots or not

[SuperKendall]

Surely once Apple moves away from the PPC architecture, the developers will not continue developing software for the platform, will they?

Well I don't know, if you were writing software would you prefer to sell to 10 million people or one million? That's the kind of question you are asking.

Furthermore the dev tool (XCode) makes it super-easy to build universal binaries - it's not like you have to ship an Intel version and a PPC version. They are all bundled as one "App". That's the handy thing abou tmaking applications really directories in hiding. So if you have something that works now you just need to make sure it can also work on Intel and then you can ship universal binaries in perpituity.

It's the new Intel macs where the situation will look a little sketchy the first year or so. The current PPC macs are going to see universal binaries for something like 99% of apps for several years just for marketshare reasons alone. I do think that after a short time some games may be Intel only, but since when have you bought a Mac because of game support? :-)

Re:Clearing existing component inventory?

[Jozer99]

G5 to x86 converstion will begin in the middle of 2006, and end in 2008. Somehow I doubt Apple keeps a three year supply of processors on hand. The Powermac series will be one of the last to go x86. One of the main reasons for the switch was because Apple was frustrated with a lack of a G5 for notebooks. The G4 processor is now quite outdated. First the notebooks will go x86, then the budget desktops; Mac Mini and iMac, and lastly the Powermac and XServe. The computers that already have G5s are not in desparate need of a new processor, unlike the lower end stuff and portable equiptment.