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Blazing Review of the New iMac
boxturtleme writes "Despite the sometimes lackluster reviews of the new Intel iMac over the past several weeks, what with speed tests and hardware bugs, the New York Times sure seemed to like it. And beyond the blazing review, the Times seems fully confident that someone will soon have Windows and OS X dual booting."
I dunno how good his predictions have been, and for a tech-writer, his knowledge level about tech stuff sometimes seems depressingly low (while above average for the general populace, it's certainly way below that of the typical slashdot denizen).
:-). He seems genuinely willing to explore his mistakes and learn from them -- all in print.
David Pogue does have one big saving grace though: when he's wrong/muddled about something, he seems to have no problem admitting it his next column (after being informed of the problem by 23,347 email messages from slashdot readers
I think this sets a great example, and is indeed even educational for the average reader. It's certainly a refreshing change from typical tech-journal pundits (who will never admit error or change their position, despite being off in bizarro-land about 75% of the time).
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Repeat after me : the iMac is not a Pro machine. The iMac is a consumer machine.
It's entirely likely that Apple never wanted to use the same chip in the iMac and the PowerMac at the same time, and were just forced into that situation by the dual pressures of increasing performance in the Intel world and no new developments in from IBM and Freescale.
While eventually the iMac might be 64-bit again some day, it'll be well after the Pro-level tower machines are 64-bit.
And uh, really... are you working on code that requires or uses 64-bit somehow? I'd be shocked... and if you are, don't buy the new iMac. Buy the current PowerMac. Seriously.
Yea, I agree, the iMac going back to 32-bits is a step back. So is the optimized floating-point performance ( not that I've seen a benchmark, I'm just guessing ).
But almost all users are more interested in knowing : does it do what I need it to do ? In almost every case, the answer for the new Intel-based iMac will be "hell yea!". For others, it'll be "um, I'm waiting for a Photoshop upgrade" ( though, how hard should a Gimp port be? ), but very few of us will be saying "I MUST have 64-bit!", even if we are waiting for BLAS to port.
Well, on /. mis-use phrases that have specific meanings, no matter how erudite they sound.
I owned an IBM PC-AT. It replaced my IBM-XT (mine was the 498th manufactured). The "T" stood for "Advanced Technology", which to IBM meant a '286 CPU, to everyone else it meant a '286 and a copy of the IBM bus & daughterboard layout. However the cloners wanted to stop referring to IBM when selling their IBM knock-offs (or in Compaq's case their ahead-of-IBM designs) and so the euphemism "Industry Standard Architecture" or ISA was adopted and later formalized.
Oh, and when I was manager at the Computer Museum I had a (then) nifty cutting-edge ISA box on my desk to play with, heady stuff back then!
However none of those phrases are in current use to describe PC or Mac designs.
The ISA bus was superseded by IBM's attempted lock-in "MicroChannel" or MCA (man that made my life miserable with it's wonky drivers), 'the industry' responded with "Extended-ISA" or EISA. "VESA Local Bus" or VLB had a short run for video cards (fond memories of making boxes with those for architects in South America) then Intel sorted the whole mess out with their "Peripheral Component Interconnect" or PCI bus which the PC market standardized on, mostly 'cause Intel became the dominant motherboard supplier and those that didn't use their boards used their reference designs & chipsets or copied 'em with 3rd party implementations.
Apple used, it seemed, as many bus designs as they had models (and for a while that was a ridiculous number!) However the early Macs are best known for using "NuBus" then later "NuBus90". However by the mid-90's Apple had started their long march towards using commodity components and was heading all PCI, albeit with their own chipsets and firmware.
However nobody calls anyone's architecture "IBM PC-AT" or "ISA" unless they actually mean those obsolete standards. Nor does anyone use the names of the various 'official standards' that IEEE and others have formalized around the ones the industry came up with at-need and internally. Instead most folks, and this is as true inside Apple as it is in Dell, simply refer to "PC architecture" or, if doing a PowerPoint/KeyNote presentation "PC Platform" (ooooh!). And yes, although Macs have been and are "Personal Computers" everyone calls x86 consumer boxes "PCs" and Macintoshes "Macs".
Back to the state of Mac design, Apple has always had to spend a lot of money & time re-inventing the wheel with their motherboard designs. They did use pretty much the same layout as everyone else, PCI, North Bridge, South Bridge, later AGP & PCI Express etc. and of course the support circuitry was nearly always out-of-the-catalog (little "Woz-magic" there.) But with their limited budget, smaller and shorter production runs, and competing internal priorities Apple has never been a leader in terms of motherboards.
Adopting USB was a huge improvement (and it was easy for them, heck they even used their old drivers with a shim), and FireWire/1394/iLink coulda been dominant 'til Int
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.