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Apple Reverses G4 downgrade
puck13 writes "According to MacInTouch "Apple has reversed the cancellation of existing Power Mac G4 orders, according to impeccable sources, and is calling back customers to explain. The Apple Store will honor existing orders for the previous configurations at the previous prices. People who ordered the G4/500 model that cannot be produced due to Motorola's production issues, will be offered a choice of the original G4/450 configuration at the original price or a discount on their G4/500 configuration, as if it had been ordered custom-built with a 450-MHz processor selected. " Check out yesterday's story for more information.
Apple's reversal only applies to folks who have already placed orders. (And I suspect that their lawyers may have had more to do with it than the public outcry.)
If you decide that you want a G4 today, you'll still be getting 50 MHz less than you would have gotten yesterday for the same price.
Maybe this was Apple's plan... They raise prices and try to screw their customers, then they announce that they're not to screw their customers after all, and everyone on Slashdot ignores the ridiculous price hikes and praises them for "doing the Right Thing."
MSK
Apple sent me the cancellation email yesterday, and I wasn't very upset at all. I had the sense that rising RAM prices and the earthquake in Taiwan would make my purchase of the G4/450 a steal for me, and a loss for Apple. So I didn't feel bad, just figured I could re-order as soon as the original configuration returns. Which it will soon!
............ 065-1744 450MHz G4 w/1MB L2 cache ............... 065-1608 256MB SDRAM/1 DIMM ........... 065-1956 20GB Ultra ATA drive ........... 065-1902 DVD ROM drive w/DVD Video .... 065-1911 Zip drive ..... 065-1821 56K internal modem w/FAXstf ...... 065-1820 RAGE 128 GL card/16MB SDRAM ......... 065-1696 Ultra SCSI PCI card w/adapter ............. 065-1995 USB Keyboard ........ 065-1732 ACCESSORY KIT .......... 065-1984 MAC OS ... 065-1899 No AirPort Card
HOWEVER: Today I received the following email...
Dear Apple Customer,
The following products have been shipped and are expected to be delivered on 10/16/1999.
_________________________
Z01B POWERMAC G4 1 2,848.00
With the following configuration:
PROCESSOR
MEMORY
HARD DRIVE
CD/DVD ROM
REMOVABLE STORAGE
HIGH SPEED MODEM
GRAPHIC SUPPORT
HIGH SPEED NETWORKING: 065-1623 10/100 BASE T Ethernet
SCSI SUPPORT
KEYBOARD
ACCESSORY KIT
OS LANGUAGE
COMMUNICATION CARD
_________________________
Looks as if Apple is doing the right thing, at least for those of us who ordered the G4 on the day it was announced! As for all the whiners out there, isn't screaming about it just the "adult" version of bawling yer poor little eyes out?
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
-- thinkyhead software and media
I've always maintained that the Stock Market has little if any relation to what happens in Real Life.
:P
ie. company fires a lot of people to save money, but the stock goes up because the company is now profitable on the books
Apple has been profitable,Macs are selling well (so well, in fact, that Apple can't meet demand, as usual!) they look like they will still be profitable next quarter/next year, so they're a good investment, regardless of how you FEEL about the company.
The thing that pisses me off the most about the computer media is that they still think that Windez is the only possible market, and that Apple is going to go away RealSoonNow. How can you say that about a company whose products are back-ordered to kingdom come because of outrageuous demand?
Thank goodness I was waiting 'til February to buy a G4. By that time, they might actually have some in stock!
PPoE
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Are there actually any powerful OpenGL cards in consumer space that isn't targetted for games? Because those would be the ones that should be 'ported' to the Mac, right?
I guess Permedia?
Gamers are a different issue altogether, and my feeling on that is that the gamer niche is small enough that going with ATI is actually not a bad call. By going with ATI's Rage Fury chipset Apple get's a DVD ready solution with excellent video quality and decent TNT level OpenGL performance. This, I believe, is more than enough for 90% of users out there, and the other 10% would buy V3 boards or something.
How about the iBook vs any WinTel notebook? I think Apple has the price/performance curve beat right there. Comparing an iMac C2 with a PC requires a system with DVD, Firewire, and movie editing software, which will add an additional $300 to the price outright. I don't see that there is a disadvantage in buying Mac, as far as price performance goes. Considering the following:
ATI Rage Fury = $60
64MB Ram = $180
17" monitor = $350
10GB HD = $120
Speakers + Sound Card = $120
FireWire card = $200
Ethernet = $35
Modem = $75
Win9x = $60
Movie Software = $140
price = $1340
Price drops if you go for a lower quality monitor, smaller 15" monitor, of course, but the Apple iMac C2 is still pretty competative; nothing compared to a scratch built bargain basement, but many don't have the skills or resources to build one of those!
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Due to the increase of file handles in OS 9, you can have 4 times as many fonts in your Fonts folder...
if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
I can't believe how many people are willing to fly off the handle without understanding what they're talking about.
Major points:
When the G4 first came out, the 400mhz version was the only one available. But it was not much more than a G3 in G4's clothing. This "low-end" G4 had a G4 CPU, and a G4 casing, but the motherboard was basically a G3. This motherboad is codenamed "Yikes." The "real" G4s use a motherboard called "Sawtooth." With this motherboard, you get:
The old G4/400 has none of this. So although the G4/400 started out life as a Yikes based machine (a revamped G3), Apple just graduated it to a Sawtooth machine overnight, with significant enhancements. As such, the price increase is actually justified, particuarly when taking into account the RAM issue.
So whoever preorded a G4/400 prior to all this is probably going to get much more than they originally bargained for -- at no additional cost.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
They're already at price/performance parity, more or less. The G4 is roughly triple the speed of a P3, and this is using Intel's own benchmarks, mind you. We're not talking Bytemarks here, boys and girls, we're talking benchmarks no one dares discredit.
Oh lord. Another one falls for the Apple FUD.
No, we're not talking Bytemarks here; this one, if you can believe it, is even worse. You see, at least Bytemarks is a benchmark. It's about 10 years old and has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the performance of a modern CPU, but at least when they came up with it, someone was trying to get an idea of how fast a chip would run.
These 6 tests are not benchmarks, in any normal sense of the word. Benchmarks measure how long it takes for a computer to perform a real-world task. These tests (Apple's got 'em posted here; scroll to the bottom) measure the speed of individual ops.
That's right: the G4 performs 6 specific operations an average of 3 times faster than a P3. We're talking things with names like "1024 dim. DotProd" and "256 Pt. Complex FFT". The G4 can take a dot product 3.68 times faster than a P3. Oh wait--not even that; a dot product in a specific dimension. Whoopdee. A 128-bit unit can do operations on very large numbers faster than a 32-bit one. Wow. This is like posting the fact that a 64-bit CPU can add two 64-bit numbers faster than a 32-bit one. Who would have thought.
And yes, these benchmarks were "published on Intel's own website." Of course they were. In the technical specs on the SSE core. Deep in the technical specs on the SSE core. Where information that is completely useless to anyone not planning on optimizing a compiler belongs.
Essentially, this benchmark is as misleading as quoting MFLOPS (oh yeah: Apple stooped to that one too...). Except that usually when you quote MFLOPS you at least generally need to average over the entire set of floating point ops. Not here folks. They picked out their favorite 6.
Oh wait--here's another difference: when you quote MFLOPS, you actually need to, uh, benchmark the thing. These numbers are all theoretical--just compare the number of clock cycles it takes to do an operation, and multiply by MHz. Now, it turns out they'd probably be even more in the G4's favor in practice--if I remember correctly, the AltiVec unit has a much better designed pipeline than the P3's SSE unit. But still, these numbers are absolutely, completely, worthless.
I don't have the URL offhand, but I've seen the Intel page they copied these tests from, and there were literally hundreds for them to choose from.
The point is, you can always find an operation that is carried out in less clock cycles on one particular archicture as compared to another. Always. Now it turns out that, in this case, the AltiVec apparently really is vastly superior for the sorts of things it does when compared to Intel's SSE or AMD's 3DNow. (Of course, it also takes up half the chip. Any guesses as to why they can't fab any 500's??)
However, the fact is that except for very specific applications (SETI@home in particular, and some signal processing stuff, IIRC), it doesn't make all too much of a difference. A 700 MHz Athlon will smoke a G4 450 or 500 or whatever on your basic integer stuff, and a 600 MHz P3'll be right up there with it. For the stuff that can be done with AltiVec, the G4'll certainly come out ahead, but for general floating point work, again, they're about equal. It goes without saying that, at this point, nothing crunches graphics like a year-old PC with an NVIDIA GeForce in it (except maybe something from sgi)--which, of course, is about the only thing the average user needs good float performance for anyways.
In the end, the G4 is just a decent chip with a neat vector processor that's proving hard to fab. Is it damn fast? Yes. Is your new G4 450 going to touch the Coppermine P3 733 that's shipping by the time yours actually ships? Nope. Is it "two or three years ahead of its time" like Stevie says? No way.
-Dave
P.S. And yes, you can sell them to China as well. As much as I want to like Apple these days (a simplified vertically integrated product line is a very good idea in many cases; OS X just might be incredible; and geez--did you check out the new iMac subwoofer??), the fact that every single word out of their marketing department/CEO's lips is a baldfaced lie...gives me pause.
(besides FIRST POST! that is :) )
Honestly, I'm glad to see Apple listening to its customers. I doubted they could really be stupid enough to pull a stunt like that, and I'm pleased to see I was right.
Let's just hope they keep this idea of listening to the customer going in the future.
Try checking out Macintouch, they need 24 to 48 hours to finalize everything, you'll get an email. Ric Ford verified it with Apple, it is happening.
The phone peon probably hasn't even heard of the reversal yet, Steve Job's may have a Reality Distortion Field but he's never been known to have telepathy. Communication takes time.
Apple actually did the Right Thing for once - be still my beating heart!
For all their neat hardware and unique software and "cool" consumer appeal, Apple has a long and distinguished history of doing things that really piss off customers (the 1988 price hike, the cancellation of Performa free tech support, the PowerPC upgrade fiascos, etc.) yet they miraculously retain goodwill despite that. It's fine if Apple wants to change the base configs in order to ship product (they actually added RAM to a couple of them in this action), but cancelling existing orders was pure foolishness. It's good they saw the error of their ways. Were I Jobs, I'd have changed the speeds on the base models, filled all the existing orders except the G4-500's, and then asked the customers for those if they wanted to wait or if they wanted a 450 with more RAM instead. That's the only fair thing to do. I'm glad Apple finally seems to have gotten it for once.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
After I read the Macintouch article I called Apple to see if they were really going to uncancel my order (placed early last month.) They weren't sure, but said I might be one of the "lucky ones" whose orders had already been sent into production.
Doesn't sound like much of a reversal to me, if everybody who ordered after mid-September is still sh!t out of luck.
There's nothing like massive consumer & media backlash to make someone change their mind, huh?
But the fact that they seriously thought that they could get away with it really bothered me. "Oh hey, we're Apple so you know that G4 400 that we said was going to cost you $1600? Well now that's gonna be a 350. But you can still get the 400 for $2,500 if you want." Total insanity. At least they got wise. I guess they banked on the fact that the Macintosh faithful are probably some of the most loyal consumers out there and thought that they could ream them just a little bit more.
I can't believe I'm saying this but - Way to go angry Mac users!
Pete
Pete
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
I'm very suprised at Apple's actions today. Most people whould be able to tell you (meaning a corporation) that raising prices while lowering quality would piss a customer base off. I know that according to economics, raising price can raise profits even though it lowers the number of customers you have. However, in the PC market, the number of customers also affects the quality of the product (by enticing companies to write progams for it.) It also affects the customer satisfaction, which is incredibly important these days. Overall, pissing off so many people at once is a really bad idea.
I am impressed that Apple has reversed their decision, but Apple is beginning to act more and more like a mindless, heedless corporation than the benevolent underdog of a company Apple used to be.
-B
This is the proper way to do business.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
until:
1. Ship Mac OS X already!
2. Unbundle ATI video
3. Ship Pro models with Pro keyboard and Pro mouse instead of crappy iMac kbd&mouse.
4. Reach MHz/price-parity with Intel.
5. Fix QT 4.0 and Sherlock UI.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Looks like this is legit. Apparently S. Jobs' email has been flooded with hate mail (heh), and he has been replying to customers saying that it will be 'set right' tomorrow.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
Steve has a unique management style, and although some dislike him personally, it is obviously effective. Check out the two year stock chart
In other news: IBM is now also making G4 chips (*with* AltiVec) which should help to get the G4s out the door faster. If I was a gambling man (i.e. if I had any money) I would be putting all I could into AAPL. If the current backlog of orders is any indication, the next quarter could be the most profitable yet... and investors will reap the rewards. (Along with the Mac faithful who are rewarded with that Good Feeling(TM) ;-)
Great work Steve... just dont let it go to your head.
Reality has a liberal bias
ok.. so apple makes a kind of bad decision that annoys some of its customers. by 24 hours later, it has realized its mistake, listented to its customers, and done something rather nice to everyone who had ordered a 450 model. (in the process giving up quite a bit of money..)
/. posting about some mistake apple made, and then suddenly they're experts..
after apple makes the mistake, slashdot is flooded with people flaming apple. Apple is arrogant, apple is screwing its customers, apple is nonresponsive, apple is self-destructive and stupid. Almost none of these people posting were affected in any way by the order cancellations. The people posting who _were_ affected were just kind of calmly shrugged it off.
so now that apple has actually _listened to its customers_.. what happens? do the slashdot posters come back and appologize for being too hasty to flame? well, no. instead what we get is.. more apple bashing. people say "well it's a good thing apple is doing this", and then immediately go right on with the flaming. Mostly saying the exact same thing they were after yesterday's article. What is this? How many other companies would _do_ this? If compaq cancelled a bunch of orders and said "i'm sorry, we can't fufill these, you'll have to reorder".. would _they_ have listened to any customer complaints? (Compaq being a hypothetical example.. i've never dealt with them)
Oh, and btw i think i can say with almost absoloute certainty that apple did _not_ make the decision to give discounts to the people who had originally ordered 500s based on anything related in any way to slashdot. And the downgrade wasn't covered by any other "media" sources except macintouch/macnn. Apple based what they did on customer feedback..
meanwhile, other people in the current thread are complaining that apple effectively raised the prices for people who are going to buy new G4s after that. um, so? are you going to be buying a G4? if not why are you complaining? shouldn't apple have the right to charge what they like, especially if (because of rising DRAM prices) it is costing them more to make the product then it was awhile back? it's amazing the people who don't care about or pay attention to apple _at all_.. except when there's a
there are times when slashdot is full of interesting people with great technical knowledge and a willingness to share it, and informed insights on the thing being spoken on. These times almost never occur if apple's involved in some way. oh well. i'm done ranting now.
-mcc-baka
(this message sent from LinuxPPC r5)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I haven't read through the whole discussion here, so please excuse me if this is has already been said. I just feel the point needs to be made!
When Apple decided to charge the 500MHz price for the 450MHz system, they also threw in 128MB of RAM--for free--to compensate. At current prices, that just about makes up the original cost difference between the 500MHz and 450MHz model.
From MacNN:
Let me say that I'm not condoning Apple's handling of this matter. They should have contacted the affected customers via, first, email, and then if no response within 48 hours, telephone, asking them if they wanted to "trade" 50MHz for 128MB of RAM added to their system. As it is now, Apple can't deliver the 500MHz chips; if they'd asked their customers if they would be willing to trade MHz for MB, I'm positive that the reaction on Slashdot would have been damned near positive!
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
I'm also glad to see Apple listened, but as to your comment "I doubted they could really be stupid enough to pull a stunt like that..." Some of us have been here before.
:-). But I'm sensing a trend here of testing customers and pulling back only if it looks like the water's too cold.
Around April of this year (I think? Maybe earlier...) Apple issued a bug fix/maintenance release of their AppleShareIP small office file/web/mail/print server suite (version 6.2). These maintenance releases had always been free, until this one which they wanted $499 for.
Needless to say, a lot of us Apple admins bitched very loudly. Within a week, they had done a similar reversal and the update became free for all of us that had 6.0 or 6.1. A much more equitable solution.
I'm glad Apple did the right thing with the G4 processor squeeze and I remain that most rare of slashdotters, a relatively content Apple user
-A.
What did the walrus say to the penguin? "No soap, radio."
Agreed. It's not like they did something good -- they simply changed their mind about doing something bad.
I dunno. When was the last time you saw a revolutionary software product anywhere? Actually, I think part of the Mac's appeal to a lot of people is that they don't have to worry about rebooting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H having to use some "revolutionary software product" de jour.
Oh, but what's with the weird examples? I don't know what Premiere is, but I don't see how Photoshop or Excel could be viewed as innovative. (?) They had reputations as pretty good products, but was either of them something new?
Er, wait a minute... what poor selection? It might not have as many open source projects going for it as some of the Unixy systems, but it has plenty of "mainstream" products, and that type of selection seems to be acceptable to the 'Doze users.
BTW, I'm skeptical that this seguey into the topic of Mac desirability actually has anything to do with the recent price scandal... but I guess everyone (even Mac users) have to let off a little AppleSteam now and then. That company sure makes a lot of ... interesting ... decisions.
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