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The G4 and Apple's Second Coming
Anyone who's been anywhere near true computer geeks soon comes to realize that the driving ethic behind the Internet isn't pornography, technology or money-making. It's not even freedom.
It's the yen for cool stuff - designing it, programming it, acquiring it or trying it out.
This week, Apple unveiled its Mac G4 series, somewhat exaggeratedly described as the world's first supercomputer for the desktop, with TV spots that show a G4 being encircled by Army tanks while an announcer points out that this is the first personal computer so powerful that it's been declared a military weapon (translation: the federal government has declared certain technologies off-limits to specific foreign governments, including Iran and China, because of potential military applications).
Don't worry about the Pentium chip, adds the announcer. "It's harmless."
You could practically hear countless geeks and nerds inhale sharply and breathe heavily. Judging from Web chatter on tech sites from C-Net to Linux World to Slashdot, the G4 was an instant smash. Geeks are forever on the prowl for the coolest, fastest, most powerful new thing, and the G4, clearly, is it.
In America, corporations often become cultural or even political symbols that transcend the products they make. IBM, AT&T, Ford, Linux - all are icons as much as manufacturers, programs or communications giants.
With the possible exception of Bill Gates's Microsoft, no company embodies a particular corporate approach to the digital world more than Apple Computers; no individual personifies a corporate view more than Steve Jobs.
From the early days of the boom, Gates and Jobs have been the yin and yang of the computer world: Gates is intrinsically corporate, rapacious and big, ferociously competitive, monomaniacally focused, Jobs straight out of the alternative entrepeneurial wing that saw computing as a wondrously liberating tool.
His buddy Steve Wozniak grasped almost instantly that this philosophy was unlikely to withstand the looming capitalist assault on the computer industry and bailed out. Jobs was driven from Apple, but stayed in the game, before a desperately failing company asked him back.
In conventional financial terms, Gates was by miles the more successful, becoming the global poster boy for the Long Boom and the world's richest man.
Jobs, always more quixotic and, if such a thing is possible, even more egotistical than Gates, positioned Apple as the anti-IBM, and the anti-Microsoft, each, at different times, versions of the same thing. In so doing, he created a company that brought millions (including me) into networked computing. But in a corporate sense, he fell far behind and out of grace.
Now it seems the wheel has turned again. If there's an ideology at the heart of computing, it's to be forever on the lookout for the coolest, fastest, most powerful thing. The G4 clearly, is it.
At least for a while.
Apple has been enjoying a remarkable renaissance with the runaway success of the iMac, the G3 desktop and Powerbook series, and, more recently, the iBook. The G4, from early accounts, is an impressive accomplishment, an unprecedently powerful desktop machine that costs little more than the too-cutesy, candy-colored iMacs. Because it is new and powerful, it is cool. Because it is cool, they will come.
Although substantially more powerful than the G3s they will replace, the G4's price increments are the same: $1,599 for a Mac with a 400-megahertz processor; $2,499 for 450 MH available in September, and $3,499 for 500 MH, available in October.
The G4's microprocessor, co-developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola, uses a circuit called the velocity engine, (similar to the vector processors used in supercomputers), that allows it to process 128 bits of information per cycle, compared with 32 or 64 bits in most processors. It can, according to Jobs, tackle tasks, from encrypting Net messages to processing digital video, that are beyond most ordinary PC's.
Apple's engineers and designers have again radically changed public perceptions of computing, offering machines for non-computing professionals as well as loyal Mac-adherents that are colorful, portable, powerful, easy, and/or cheerful, depending on one's tastes.
Apple has always had the strange distinction of being uncool and cool simultaneously. To legions of professionals - writers, artists, designers - the Apple was a godsend, permitting creative work while eliminating the sometimes nightmarish process of struggling with computer mechanics. To geekdom's macho wing, Apples are for ignorant wimps who use graphic interfaces to avoid ever really coming to understand how computing works. For years, no self-respecting geek would be caught dead on a Mac.
Now the G4 signals the return of an Apple Age, or at least Round Two of the original Apple Age, though it's significance may be more metaphorical than real. The new Apple doesn't allow us to think differently so much as it enables us to compute more simply and powerfully, two very different ideas. For some years, Apple alone offered individuals an alternative to corporatism. Now that mantle belongs more to the open source and free software movements. (A telling example of the new, greedier Apple ideology is that the G4 was deliberately built so that owners of the new G3 can't upgrade to it - they have to buy a new one. Doesn't sound like very different thinking after all).
The irony of the Apple story, especially for people like me, is that these machines made it possible for us to use computers, but kept us perennially ignorant about how they really worked. In my own case, this was a mixed blessing. (For the past year, I've been struggling to learn and use Linux, in many ways the antithesis of the Apple experience. It's been rough, but I'm close. I have a working Linux computer and am getting lessons in how to use it. More on that later.)
The G4 is the crowning achievement to date of the Jobs-engineered Apple comeback, because he's not only created a machine the wusses will love; he's pounded the macho geeks at their own game and exposed behemoths like IBM and Microsoft for the clunky and unimaginative entities that they are.
For all that, apart from the fact that Jobs has calmed down considerably and sports a graying beard, this second Apple Age is sadly different from the first one. Mac made its national debut (remember the famous anti-IBM ad?) during the 80s. The computer was presented as an anti-Orwellian device, a revolutionary affirmation of individual creative spirit versus corporate domination.
The Macintosh, Jobs was saying, wasn't about technology, but creativity. It wasn't about big business, but about individual aspiration. Accurate or not, lots of people fell for the line, and the Apple brought part of an entire wary generation into computing. Even the most severely technically-impaired were able to approach computing and participate.
The new Apple Age is more consumer-oriented and profit-driven, and far less honest and idealistic. You have to wonder: Is the G4 really necessary? Do people actually need a desktop that's classified as a military weapon? Or portable computers that resemble translucent toilet seats? Will this generation of Apple computers, like the first, keep affluent computer users happy, more powerful and even more ignorant?
The good news is that the resurgence of Apple is a rebuke to the way big corporations do - or don't - think. No board of directors or mega-company with squadrons of vice-presidents would have come up with the G4, or with anything like the iMac.
Apple's comeback invokes the long-ago days when companies reflected the stubborn, idiosyncratic visions of individuals, instead of the tepid, amorphous conglomerates that dominate new and old media.
If Apple may no longer lay claim to its anti-Orwellian ideological roots - always personified more by Wozniak than Jobs anyway -- it has made computing fun and accessible again, and has provided consumers with more real choices and alternatives.
For that alone, the second coming deserves to be hailed.
Job's revitalization of Apple is finally coming to fruition. With the G4, they have a chipset which Intel, etc. will not be able to compete with performance wise for the next 2 years, at least--and if the PPC consortium has their act together, maybe never again. Their is a lot of expense in pushing technology, and that is part of the premium price that you pay for an Apple product. What many will not realize it the enormous amount of energy that Apple put in behind the scenes--the Altivec/Velocity Engine idea came from an experiment at Motorola and Apple engineers realized its potential (IBM fought tooth and nail against the idea and had to be shown the potential). Intel hasn't done much at all in the innovation department--the PIII is basically a PII with a couple of problems fixed, and an extremely limited vector unit. In addition to the cpu innovation, Apple has led the PPC consortium into what Apple calls the universal motherboard architecture. This makes things cheaper to manufacture, as you can use the same basic technology to make multiple somputer products. This architecture change is why the G4 is not going to be readily available from Apple to upgrade your old G3 machine--there is a hardware revolution going on. This will ultimately bring the price of PPC's down to be even more competetive with PC's--and they are competetive with **well built** PC's now. Nobody has ever gotten rich trying to compete with the bottom of the market, and much of the griping about the price of Apples in the past, and in this article, is based on resentment that nobody in the PPC consortium is bottom fishing the market. Simultaneously with all this hardware inovation, Apple has done a lot of software innovation. This is just over the horizon, with OSX. Imagine, a year from now having a computer which will let you operate mindlessly in an updated version of the Apple gui, or since the Apple OS will run as an application , let you drop the Apple OS application and drop back into (Free)BSD and fire up X windows, with the window manager of your choice. Not happy yet, you can bootp and fire up LinuxPPC. Any geek who doesn't understand the implications of this is brain dead.
How do you get that. The first age of Apple is clearly the Apple ][ Era. They were at the forefront of the new, blossoming, personal computer market, before IBM and its clones hit the market like a ton of bricks. I'd say the second age was the Macintosh age, with their Anti-Orwellian, personal empowerment bent. Their third age kinda started in two steps, first with the Macintosh II, then with the G3, as they moved from a completely closed, monolithic design to a more open (compared to the early Macs), expandible, modern design, their ads started to focus more on the professional designer, rather than the rebel artist that was the early Mac target. The G4 system, far from revolutionary, looks like it's a power and performance boost for their third age systems, but nothing as earth shattering as the beginning of a new era.
If there is a new era forming at Apple, it's the iMacs and it's relatives that are making it. It's a return to the completely closed, unexpandable, monolithic design, but with a more network-centric approach than before. I'd still be reluctant to call that a new age either.
However you count it, you can't say that Apple is just starting their Second Age now, that is very short sighted.
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Open mind, insert foot.
I think the G4's 128-bit registers are a serious breakthrough, and that Apple in the corporate sense is not to be underestimated (they still keeping inventory lowest in the industry?), but Katz still talked a lot of nonsense. To be expected.
The interesting thing is this: given an article that is _so_ much of a troll, and makes it _so_ difficult for any selfrespecting geek to agree, it's expected that the anti-Apple folks are out in force with burning torches, aggravated beyond tolerance. That said, there are still slashdot geeks willing to stick up for Apple despite Katz's shenanigans! That says a lot.
ObSlashdotCred: regarding Altivec vs. MMX: two words for you- context switches. >:)
Right now the higher-ups at Be are clearly indulging their hatred of Apple rather than making clear technology decisions. They claim that BeOS can't run on a G3 or G4 because Apple sabotaged it, tied the hardware up to lock users in to MacOS. This is a claim similar to that of the barber, back in the days of desegregation, who said that he wouldn't serve black customers because he didn't know how to cut black people's hair.
... does anyone know if Be has gotten to the starting line on IA-64 yet?)
If Linux runs on a G3 or G4, why shouldn't BeOS be able to? Linux has no secrets, no NDAs with Apple that let it get around lock-in. There is no lock-in. Be's hierarchs are whining about Apple at BeOS's users' expense, while hoping beyond hope that x86 will pull ahead of the G4 in performance and save their asses before Be's user base all turn to Linux on IBM PPC boards, or (worse yet, from Be's perspective) to MacOS X.
(Speaking of BeOS and Linux
The "AIM" group broke up last year. Apple has put themselves in the position of relying on Motorola, but the reverse isn't true; Motorola's original intent for AltiVec was embedded systems. From a business standpoint rather than a geek standpoint, Intel isn't competing against the PowerPC at all; chip customers are motherboard manufacturers, and the only way PPC and Pentium could be competing for the same space is to be compatible with one another. Motorola has no competition in their space, and Intel's competition is AMD. (Anyone who thinks the "Intel Inside" campaign was targeted against Apple, call me--I have a 64-bit TRS-80 to sell you. It'll be the next big thing.)
In anti-defense of Intel, our Anonymous friend is not exactly correct that the Pentium III is a tweaked Pentium II--it's even older than that. Both of them are using the P6 core from the Pentium Pro, which was the last major upgrade to the 8086 CPU family. Everything else has been either pushing the speed level or integrating separate units onto the CPU.
However, given that Intel hasn't released any specs for the P7 processor other than noting it's going to be using a .13-micron manufacturing process, it's premature to say that Intel won't be able to "compete performance-wise" with the G4 chip "for the next two years, at least." P7 is due in about a year (Q3 2000), and given AMD's Athlon processor, it's a good bet that Intel will be motivated to keep to that timetable. Let's wait for the P7 specs to be leaked before we slag it, hmm?
(To those not keeping score, by the way, the P7 is not Merced. The IA64 line is a separate dark horse from Intel, and I think Merced's successor, McKinley, is going to be one to watch.)
I think you're forgetting the "glue logic" that keeps BeOS from being cleanly ported.
...which is one reason that Linux has taken longer to gain a foothold on Mac hardware (and the open-source mechanism allows distribution to other free OS's but BeOS finds it needs to do it in a "clean room" environment to retain their copyrights- rightly or wrongly).
When there are closed sections of the box, it's more difficult to take advantage of...
Seriously, consider that IBM's release of specs for PowerPC-based motherboards (which includes the artwork...) will make G4 technology (with documented glue logic) more available for Linux-o-philes. Heck, my main system at home is 4+ years old - it's an AMD 5x86-133; I haven't upgraded it since I didn't consider a Pentium as an upgrade path- I wanted an Alpha or a PowerPC (and I had expected cheap CHRP MBs to become available as "commodity parts").
Apple (apparently) did not want to allow for cloning since it'd reduce their H/W profit margins to (effectively) zero- which Steve Jobs wanted to retain. Against BeOS (much less Linux or FreeBSD) the MacOS would show it's senility on open hardware- so there needed to be a software margin too.
Now all I want is to get some PPC CHRP motherboards cheap...
-soup
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
this is what i heard from a friend who tried:
OS 8.X get into some VERY funky issues with G4 boards
OS 9 is fine (that's what the G4's ship with, AFAIK)...
with the new ROM, you can boot into a G4 with OS 9.X, but not with OS 8.X
simple, not malicious, and from apple's point of view, no one should be playing with either OS 9 or G4 upgrades, as they are not out! (and all the manufacturers are on NDA)...
If that's the case, then why is a relatively small-time company like Phase 5 expecting to ship G4-based processor boards for Amigas on October 15? If Phase 5 can get specs and chips in quantity for such a small/niche product, then any serious computer manufacturer can. (This is not intended as a put-down against Phase 5. :-)
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Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If you're right (and I hope you are), then Apple is going to looked pretty bad when 3rd-party non-Mac-clone G4 computers start coming out (and that isn't very far away).
Apple's recent minitower machines really are quite nice (except for the exterior part of the case), but they are also overpriced. Part of this is due to greed (Apple has no competitors) and part of it is due to the development cost of MacOS. PPC machines that don't MacOS licensing or compatability are going to be price competitive with x86 PeeCees, but faster.
So if you want a G4, just wait a little while. Apple's machines are going to be a joke compared to the Real Thing. On the other hand, a lot of people do buy Macs because of MacOS, so I doubt Apple is really in serious danger.
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Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ah, but look at what the consequences are: Apple is mass-marketing PPC-based machines to consumers in addition to geeks. This is giving the PPC enough economy of scale to avoid becoming another Alpha (fast, but expensive).
Next year when you buy a brand X G4 machine to replace the old stone-knives-and-bearskins x86, remember: Apple (inadvertantly) made it possible.
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Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I almost couldn't bring myself to read the posts when I saw an article by *Katz* about *Macs*! But then I started to think about it, and it is kind of an interesting little experiment: Are Katz-despisers and Mac-haters mutually exclusive? What proportion of /. readers bash both of them? Will Katz annoy the Mac-lovers, even?
:-)
Regardless, no matter what Katz actually says, you had to know there would be some heated discussions here!
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
How come everyone assumes that Macs are toys. You can customise you system just as much as you can with Win9*. Win9x is a toy too, just not a fun one. I use my win95 disk for a coaster, I'm not sure what I'd do with an I-Mac, maybe an aquarium.
--Shoeboy.
What is wrong with Photoshop benchmarks? Apple unveiled the G4 at Seybold, a desktop publishing, web, and media convention... Photoshop breeding grounds if ever I saw it. As the web grows, so too does the Photoshop niche, btw.
Regardless, I actually did see the Apple G4s at Seybold, hooked up to gorgeous 22" Cinema Displays playing Q3.
Full resolution, highest detail, flawless framerate. Not that I can claim the G4 is faster, but if I do Photoshop for a living and play Q3 on the side, *nothing* can beat a G4. Likewise anything that does raw number crunching I suspect nothing beats a G4(for now)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I dunno, they don't seem to occupy that radically different markets...
Apple *is* planning to replace MacOS on the Mac, with OS X, which rests atop a (hopefully) stable underpinning of BSD with a MacOS/NeXT hybrid UI. Likewise the G4 seems to be pretty powerful, so I don't see why Apple wouldn't try to market it as a deskstop workstation...
iMacs for the consumer desktop, and G4s for the professional desktop, no? Including researchers, scientists, desktop publications, animation, visualization, etc. Why wouldn't Apple want this market? It's not as if Apple can't compete...
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
You forgot some other stuff.
You get:
64MB ram
20 GB HD
Zip internal
Rage 128 Pro w Digital output(not Rage 128)
DVD drive
plus
2 Airport wireless networking antennas
the ability to use 1.5GB memory(up from 1.0GB)
Three times the memory throughput(so Apple claims)
133MHz AGP 2x
An additional Firewire port(how many PCs have a firewire port anyhow?)
MacOS 9
As well as the price for speed boost from 400 to 450 MHz
I may have forgotten a few items as well.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Which might be why you and PC magazines love to use it. Along with MS Office benchmarks and operations that did heavy floating point calculations but light on the integers.
Quake was ported by Westlake Interactive, not id. While they are good programers, they went for compatibility before performance, so the Mac version lags.
A Quake benchmark is just as biased as a bytemark benchmark. That and the game is four years old! At least use a newer application like Photoshop or Quake 3.
John Katz seems to have missed the extreme irony of his first paragraph: that while the new G4 Macs were released with the usual Apple hype and with Jobs' reality distortion magic, Apple remains a "creative" company.
Where Apple had technical brilliance in the 80s and early 90s, it now possesses amazing marketing skills--it is, in fact, one of the best corporate marketers right now. The iMac's success stems from Apple's ability to seek out a large consumer base (non-techie, aesthetically sensitive persons) and make a computer that aimed right for that mark. However, open up an iMac and one finds little, if any, technical innovations. The iMac, technology-wise, is no different than the $1000 celeron-based offerings of Dell and Gateway--but it was Apple's marketing and attention to design and aesthetics that gave them a winner (although not with the orange ones).
True geeks, technophiles, and the digirati will acknowledge that the G4 is an impressive CPU. But these people will also point out that Apple has coupled their G4 with the same uninspiring graphics chipset from ATI, as well as with the aging MacOS (we are, of course, promised Apple's next OS real soon now). And let's not forget the Apple strategy that has remained unchanged throughout its history: the Apple price premium. Why, most geeks would ask, would I pay 10-20% more for a machine simply because it has translucent plastic and the Apple logo?
Apple's business is not to cater to the needs of diehard geeks, but to cater to the unwashed masses for whom simplicity and aesthetics are more important than one's framerate in Quake.
I think John Katz has it backwards: In years past, "macho" geeks touted their Macs as superior to any Wintel offering, because, in fact, they were. However now, these geeks, and especially the more frugal amongst them shun the Mac not only on technical grounds, but financial ones. And John Katz shows his adherence to the religion of Apple by stating the same old 80s Apple rhetoric of shaking up the rest of the computer industry. The emergence of Apple in the 80s no doubt changed the industry forever, but now, in the 90s, with Jobs' greying beard, Apple is just another entrenched veteran in the most competitive industry around, and has, apparently successfully used its storied past to both sell decent machines at a premium and keep its faithful believing in the myth that is the Apple Computer Company.
For the most I have to agree with you...personally I never cared much for Jobs and I did not think that his return to Apple was going to do much for the Company. They have managed to answer to customer's needs and even though they got an influx of cash from M$ a couple of years back they don't seem to be "Slaves to Redmond".
But the real question is: "Is Apple's success due to Job's return or to finally listening to consumers or does the answer fall somewhere inbetween ?"
Maybe not everybody agrees with Apple's stategies, or simply the way Jobs does his job. But one must admit it works.
.02
Apple was almost dead a couple of years ago, and now it's back on top. I say "bravo". They have managed to answer customer's needs, and we have to remember they are *not* M$ slaves all the way. Most users don't need and don't want to put their hands in the system, and Apple knows that.
Just my
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
"pounded ... IBM and Microsoft... at their own game" (sorry for the paraphrasing) but didn't you say a couple sentances before, that IBM Motorola and Apple were working on this project together? :)
So, is Apple just "pounding themselves"?
yeah yeah ok -1 me allready!!!
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Let's face it: Apple is cool because it has CULTURE.
...we'll do what Jobs envisioned: change the world.
Bzzz... Sorry, Apple has about as much culture as an average California corporation. What you mean is that Apple has a good MARKETING DEPARTMENT and spends money to hire good ad agencies. That's a little bit different, I believe.
Apple makes a cutlural statement, a leap into the imaginations of its users.
Again, you are judging a company by its advertising. Not a very good way to go about it. If you want to talk about making leaps into imagination, find out which ad agency made the ads that you liked -- they are making these leaps.
From everything I've seen, Jobs is an evil bastard, even more so than Gates
Hear, hear!
But he's a bastard in the right way. He really beleives that by giving people 'insanely great' technology, he can change the world.
I wouldn't state so confidently my opinions about Job's beliefs. In any case, you are probably thinking of the time long past, time when the computers were only starting to appear and things like Macs were really new and exciting. Now (and for many years already) Apple is just another corporation out to make a buck and Jobs is a CEO with a flair for public relations. I doubt very much that he is thinking a lot about changing the world with Apple technology. Besides, what technology is that? I haven't seen anything radical (except for colors, that is) come out of Apple for a looooong time.
Err... thank you very much, but I don't think I like the idea of changing the world according to Job's ideals (I am pretty sure they include a lobotomy for all non-Apple users like me, among other unpleasant things). And since you are so enthusiastic about changing the world, can you please be a bit more exact about how you will change it and what Apple has to do with it?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Sorry, but I read the article (don't) so I figured I should comment on it.....
after I take a quick nap.zzzzzzzzz
O.K., so is JK impressed by this amazing machine (WOW, look at those benchmarks! um.) or by another good commercial? I mean to totally buy into the hype like this is poor journalism, it's even poor consumerism. The same limits being placed on the G4 are placed on the Dreamcast, why, because we haven't adjusted our belief in what makes up a supercomputer. Or maybe they all are supercomputers now. Wouldn't that have been more groundbreaking? Not, ooh, a new color and number, but, ooh, anybody can have a supercomputer on their desk (and play solitaire, yippee!)
Sorry anytime you just add a number to a product precludes it from being amazing in my book, or anything other than a blip on the big screen.
non-story, non-article, non-event.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz
+&x
The G4 chip has Altivec, the PPC platform's SIMD extensions. These are 128-bit (vs. the P3's 64-bit) vector math additions that have their own dedicated parallel units on the CPU (vs. MMX's need to turn off the FPU and use its registers). They are well supported in PPC C compilers (unlike MMX and SSE, which require nasty direct use of x86 assembler -- ). They will be extensively supported in the main OS for the machine and many of its applications (unlike MMX and SSE which are really only supported in a limited fashion in DirectX and a few games). In other words, this is one of the reasons Mac OS X will smoke the competition. Oh, and the better SMP support than the P3's hardcoded 4-way (which require serious hardware hacks to get around for the new 8-way machines) and the new, improved FPU don't hurt either.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Most users don't need and don't want to put their hands in the system, and Apple knows that.
That's the kind of thing I like to hear... too many people say the iMac is crap (for the wrong reasons). And always , and without exception, their first reason is that it doesn't have a floppy drive. Usually second is that it doesn't have a lot of upgrade options. I have a floppy drive, and I've used it maybe twice in the time I've used it. Far too many people (usually geeks) forget that "normal" people have to use computers too. People who would rather spend time with other things besides their computers (hell, some people are actually afraid of the things!). Simplicity is what will get more people using computers. As well as Linux runs, someone who doesn't know what to do will be content with using Windows (even through the crashes) or MacOS (they don't care if it's preemptive and memory protected).
But, say what you want about Apple (btw, it's the G3 that was "sabotaged" to not accept the G4, not the other way around)... that they are greedier and more coporate, etc... but then, Jobs isn't a 20-year-old hippie from Berkeley anymore. You can't deny that they haven't tried to bring computers to the more computer ignorant, though. And damn it, I think they did a good job.
The Happy Blues Man
The Happy Blues Man
I accept on blind faith that Cincinatti exists.
I found a few minor errors in JK's latest piece..don't know how significant they are but here goes. >>The G4's microprocessor, co-developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola, uses a circuit called the velocity engine... Then Katz goes on to say: >>...he's pounded the macho geeks at their own game and exposed behemoths like IBM and Microsoft for the clunky and unimaginative entities that they are. In light of IBM having a major part in producing the G4 processor, I doubt Apple's infusion of the new G4 chip 'exposes' IBM as a clunky and unimaginative entity. If anything it shows that Apple and IBM are on the same page, agreeing that Altivec was a good idea and investing in it. Katz, you should re-edit your stories occasionally. My two pesos.
I applaud Apple simply because I appreciate healthy diversity within the market. No single operating system is appropriate for all users. Today we have several healthy choices: NT, Linux, Solaris, PalmOS, and, yes, MacOS. Likewise, not single chip manufacturer should dominate the scene. Today we have Intel, AMD, and Motorola. You may not like Apple's products, but the company has helped maintain a competative and creative environment over the last decade.
Where does Apple go from here? Personally, I'm attracted by the possibility of a multiprocessor G4 running a Unix core with a slick window-based environment - Mac OS X. This vision may not work for everyone, but damnit, it works for me.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
But I wonder about a company that, with version 1.0 of the G3 firmware, allowed a G3 to be upgraded to a G4, but then disabled this option in version 1.1 of the firmware.
If I understand the Wired article correctly - it appears that Apple intentionally crippled its G3 firmware to prevent users from upgrading a G3 to a G4 with a CPU swap, presumably in order to "encourage" folks to buy a whole G4 box rather than just the chip upgrade.
At least with Intel, I may need a new motherboard for CPU swaps... but at least I can keep the video card, sound card, and, umm... plain white case :)
Can any Mac folks out there explain what's up with the G3/G4 firmware issue?
Feh. And generally I like Katz's posts. This one was really lacking, though.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
I have used macs for almost as long as I can remember. I remember many people claiming that Apple is dead for so many years and their claims were not without reason. Now Apple seems to have turned themselves around. They have started to inovate again and come out with some cool products.
There are still some things about Apple that they need ot fix. The need to stop the idea of not letting people upgrade their computers. I would be more hesitant about buying a G4 if I knew that there was a good posibility that I would not be able to upgrade the thing. I know that upgrades usually transform into less of a profit, but it is something that the industry is used to haveing. Don't take it away now.
Second, I think that Apple should allow the clones to start up again, although they may not have a choice. I know that the clones did dig a little into Apple's profits, but they also force Apple to inovate and keep prices down. The clone makers were able to create better computers at a lower price, which force Apple to try to do the same. The results was better computers on both sides.
Whether you like Apple's computers or not, you should be glad that the company is comming back. They help create competition, however little, for the rest of the PC industry. Without competition, there is no incentive to create better products or keep the prices low. There are still some things Apple needs to fix, but they are at least on the right track.
You see? It's like I've always said. You can get more with a kind word and a 2x4 than you can with just a kind word.
...putting aside the issue of which CPU (Pentium III or G4) is better at general purpose tasks (anything non-Photoshop, or non-signal procesing-related), true geeks recognize that even in "supercomputer" vector processing, the numbers don't quite add up to a significant win for the G4.
Let's take the 128-bit vector processing operations. Say, best case, you wanted to issue and execute one of those every clock cycle, at 500 MHz, that would require 128/8*500= 8,000 MByte/sec memory bandwidth. The Apple available today has 20x less!
Only 400 MB/sec (half that of today's PII/PIIIs). And next month they'll ship a better 800 MB/sec motherboard, matching today's PCs. Even if execution rates are one every two clocks, or one only uses 64-bit wide data, the 10x gap between chip horsepower and memory bandwidth remains the crucial performance-limiting bottleneck for vector processing operations.
If both PCs and Macs have equivalent memory bandwidths, and memory bandwidths are the single largest constraint on vector processing operations, how does the wider 128-bit circuitry in G4 yield a worthwhile advantage?
(Answer: a few tweaked benchmarks aside, it doesn't.)
Yours for a more educated, critical-thinking populace,
LP
> Fancy label, fancy price tag but nothing special
> compared to the £20 clones
I assume your £20 clones have gigaflop performance?
Of course they don't.
Check your specs before making a fool of yourself.
Harry
Computers == freedom
A well used line.
Reassuring for all the freakled 16 year old anti-socilites, sitting in their darkned bedrooms. Busily preparing themselves for the day technology rules and they become the rulers.
Computing is the next step in human evolution . True ? I believe so, but can human evolution be controlled by a handful of charasmatic, singleminded, power-hungry, egotistical evangilists ? Aren't we as a species as a culture as a civilisation greater then this ? When one company controls 90% market share for a product essential to the operation of the single most important tool for out advancement, can we truly believe ourselves to be free ?
The G4 is a new processor. A new way of imprinting etchings on a piece of silicon. There are greater forces at play here.
It's still difficult to upgrade and loaded with proprietary hardware.
Difficult to upgrade? What have you been smoking? With the possible exception of a total motherboard replacement, the G4 (and its B&W G3 ancestry) is quite possibly the easiest-to-upgrade machine I've ever seen in every aspect.
As for "loaded with proprietary hardware" I'd watch what you're saying. Pretty much every single thing on that motherboard is now an open standard: Ultra-ATA for hard drives, PCI and AGP for cards, standard PC100 memory (or is it PC133 now?), USB and Firewire for peripherals, 10/100 Ethernet for networking, OpenFirmware for booting (yes, OpenFirmware is itself an open standard; check FirmWorks if you don't believe me), and so on. I should, by the way, note that the G4 AGP no longer has a proprietary Mac ROM on the motherboard anymore (the PCI graphics still do, as they use the legacy Yosemite motherboard rather than Sawtooth, but even the ROM's on these no longer contain any OS-level code). Proprietary hardware? Perhaps one or two things still, but don't even think of calling it "loaded" anymore.
The power user demands a machine that he/she can not only be proud of when it first comes out, but can remain potent for years to come (through upgrades to both operating system and hardware).
True, very true. I don't think you'll argue that the G4 isn't a machine to be proud of when first purchased. Now, look to the studies. It's been shown that Macs have a much longer useful life than any other desktop computer (indeed, usually double or triple that of the average PC in a given establishment); I have a seven-year-old machine at home which now has a G3 processor, a good amount of RAM, great storage space, and so on and so forth. Not only that, but it is still running all the latest software out there. In other words, Macs can and do remain potent for years to come, years longer than even most PC's, through upgrades of software and hardware, just as you said.
The G4 is aiming for the geek market, but just doesn't have the features that would make it attractive for more than a few months.
And what, pray tell, are those "features"? I don't see any glaring lack, except possibly that I'd like a couple more PCI slots and there are ways around even that problem.
By attempting to appeal to higher-end users but not changing its hardware strategy to one of modularity and maximum control, Apple will find that it has sown the seeds of bitter resentment.
Not changing its hardware strategy to one of modularity and maximum control? Perhaps we're on different wavelengths. The G4, as I see it, appears to be just about as "modular" as any PC I've ever seen (sure, there's the mobo issue, but that's the only problem I've seen and considering the way Mac upgrades tend to run this problem is actually quite minor). As for "maximum control" I don't see any real trouble in this area here either. Looks to me like I can dictate more or less exactly what does and doesn't go into my machine.
You did a good job of describing what the average power-user wants. Trouble is, the Mac fits your description perfectly. That's rather countrtproductive to your argument, which is thereby reduced to the level of "Macs suck because they're Macs" (since you have no arguments to support your claim). Perhaps you should actually look into these machines, rather than refer to 10-year-old FUD which hasn't been true for quite some time now.
good read, but it's a little bit on the side of repeating what the 'buzz' in the real world has been for a while - the iMac and Steve got on the cover of time, now with the iBook and the G4 full spreads in other glossies are appearing - that's not the kind of stuff you see when a new pentium is introduced... why? because, IMHO, apple has always build COMPUTERS, not COMPUTER PATRS - they could design the ibook from the beginning to have a low-power chip, a built-in handle, and an antenna - why? because they designed the whole thing and had to rely on no one else for critical components (they still relied on the engineers and manufacturers, obviously)... the mainstream consumer wintel world is stuck with, well. windows, and intel... kinda limiting, huh? (go powerpc, go linux...)
/. fans will be able to run the coolest hardware with the coolest OS (be it WHATEVER flavor of unix or linux you want, that's not what this post is about)
:>
anyway, how do we REALLY see the resurgence? the sales! people LOVE the iMac, and perhaps more importantly, EVERYONE recognizes it, and EVERYONE knows who built it... i have one on my desk in the office here at Rutgers, in a residence hall, and it never ceases to get compliments
so, why the sudden spurt of belief in apple now that the G4 is out? probably because it signals all the technological merit that the PowerPC really represents... When Tom's Hardware is comparing 10% different rendering times between an Athlon and Dual Celeron, here comes a piece of APPLE hardware that whups them both - exotic, fresh, and it has a cool case - who wouldnt want one on their desk?
and one issue not mentioned: soon, the G4 will run a full BSD unix - so even Unix heads and
also, one issue: individual creativity? it took more than a few people to design the 7400 (G4 chip), and a LARGE crew to do the system - you can't hack together a complex beast like that in the same way Steve and Steve did the Apple 1... and AFAIK, Apple has a board, with plenty of hot-shots from much less flexible computer firms sitting on it... so what is apple's resurgence due to, in my opinion? they got back to their original goals: produce powerful, affordable, easy to use computers that REDEFINE how we can use them... With their last few products, they have done excellently, and the world has taken notice... may they continue to do so for a long time, as JonKatz says, i want the cool toys
Apple deserves credit for acting on what has been so obvious for so long, and that is computers are intimidating. Apple has borrowed from other industries (cars, consumer electronics) and carefully crafted a warm and fuzzy way to sell computers. That does not make them technically superior, just more easily marketable.
Let's face it: Apple is cool because it has CULTURE. Microsoft has no culture. Not even corporate culture. It exists solely as a money making machine. Apple makes a cutlural statement, a leap into the imaginations of its users.
From everything I've seen, Jobs is an evil bastard, even more so than Gates. But he's a bastard in the right way. He really beleives that by giving people 'insanely great' technology, he can change the world. Of course it is a world and culture that HE envisions, but at least it is something more than more and more money.
The best thing that could happen is when OSX really gets going that geeks will be attracted to it (Anyone ever used a NeXT machine? Weren't they just THE COOLEST?). Then, between a real OS like OSX, a movement like Linux and OpenSource, and real technology like the G4 instead of X86, we'll do what Jobs envisioned: change the world.
So the new Apple Renaissance is simply a revival of culture in Apple, a thing they have missed since Jobs the Conqueror left (dang he can do a great keynote, can't he?)
Of course, it won't be in Jobs' image, but the geeks....
I think the point that most authors miss about Apple is that they make computing fun, not cool or hip. When the G4 came out, countless geeks didn't say, "Ooo, I want an Apple," they said, "Ooo, I want a G4, cause I try and put Linux or something that will really take advantage of it on it." Geeks think the chip is cool, not the machine. Where Apple's success now lies (and it's evident by their marketing campaign and their product line) is in the fun of using a computer. Compare Apple's commercials to that of Microsoft or Sun. Apple uses music from the Beatles and touts ease-of-use and the funny little quirks of their machines. MS and Sun tout business applications and corporate development and how to use the computer for balancing the bank statement of a cow farm in Idaho or Wyoming or something. Which is more fun? Who are the majority of computer buyers (not Slashdotters)? And companies are noticing. They're copying the case designs, but really, that's only half of it. Apple has this image that their marketers, Katz almost points out, has created. G4s and tanks is serious stuff, but Apple says, "Hey, look, we're fun. We got a supercomputer here, but it ain't military, it's fun." And when consumers (not hard-core users) start up their new fun Apple, they find what really is a rather fun GUI to use, especially now that it's more stable.
Many people would say that having a bunch of consumers start using an Apple would be a bad thing, that they're not seeing how computing really is, but aren't they? I mean, they're hopping on the 'Net where invariably, they're going to learn about computing and general and the philosophies (open-source, closed-source, ie. alternatives) associated there-in and they'll be doing it in a comfortable environment that screams this isn't a work machine, this is a play machine, so have fun. Apple's always been good at that (I remember when my father got his first Mac in 1984), but now they have that image and the success only follows naturally.