Kjølen Posted June 14, 2004 Share Posted June 14, 2004 ... in an attempt to start a conversation that CANNOT fail, I'm telling you my plans. I'm getting a PowerMac G5 as soon as I can scrap the money... and after OS X 10.4 Tiger is released, probably after they preivew it in then end of June, beginning of July Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple Store: PowerMac G5 Those are the choices, and the fun part is, if you hit "Select" it brings you to a place where you can Customize everything. You can customize your G5 to come with an iPod. Hehe, that's awesome. Here's what I am planning on getting: • Dual 1.8GHz PowerPC G5 • 256MB DDR400 SDRAM (PC3200) - 2x128 • 250GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm • ATI Radeon 9800 XT w/256MB DDR SDRAM • AirPort Extreme Card • Combo (CD-RW/DVD-ROM) • Apple Keyboard & Apple Mouse - U.S. English • Mac OS X - U.S. English Subtotal is $2,519.00, but if I buy it through my sister's university, I can get a $200 discount, and my dad is buying the Wireless card ($100), so I'd say it would cost me $2,219 roughly, or about 1,221 british pounds. (About 3,200 Australian dollars for the few of you out there) As for the low RAM, I'm going to buy the 2 pack of 512MB DDR RAM from BestBuy, because it's cheaper seperately, so I'll have about 1.2 Gigs of RAM. It can have a SuperDrive (DVD burner) but I don't need one so.... Play around a bit with the stuff and give me your opinions, with REASONABLE facts backing them up, don't just say "Macs suck", please Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nute Gunray Posted June 14, 2004 Share Posted June 14, 2004 If I paid $2300 for that, I'd expect it to come with go-go dancers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kuuki Posted June 15, 2004 Share Posted June 15, 2004 you better make sure that 512 is usable in a MAC and is the same speed as the ram you already got Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edlib Posted June 15, 2004 Share Posted June 15, 2004 I just got a day of training on OS X (I don't know which "cat" version...) because the place where I work is going to switch over all the Macs by the end of the summer. It seems cool,.. but practically all the "great, new" features the teacher was touting with the new OS were all things that Windows has been doing for almost a decade. Sure is pretty, though. And it beats the snot outa the old Mac OS. Now if only the hardware was cheaper I'd have one... (other that my work one I mean...) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kjølen Posted June 15, 2004 Author Share Posted June 15, 2004 Originally posted by Scar Da Kookee you better make sure that 512 is usable in a MAC and is the same speed as the ram you already got it was DDR400, PC3200 ram, just like the kind used in the G5s, and I'm petty sure there is no RAM for Macs. It's all the same as long as you have the right kind. And Gunray, did I forget to mention the go-go dancers? Oops. Of course, three Go-go dancers in the back, and one underneith the USB port in the front, for easy entertainment. I could have selected Japanese massage agents too, but that would be like 1000 bucks more, considering you get 6. Edlib -- There is 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panthar, and soon-to-be-out 10.4 Tiger. I expect a 10.5 Lion to be out sometime next year. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kuuki Posted June 15, 2004 Share Posted June 15, 2004 just as far as i know from getting paid to take mechines apart, Mac sdram was incompatible with IBM clone's (to be more 'PC' about it...) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edlib Posted June 15, 2004 Share Posted June 15, 2004 Mac and PC hardware have been slowly inching closer and closer together over the last couple of years. Open a modern Mac and about the only thing inside that isn't exactly what you would find inside a modern PC is the processor. That's really about the only thing seperating them now. Which is why it's so difficult to understand why Macs cost so much more for what you get. There have been rumors that Apple is going to drop the Power PC chip eventually and use AMD chips, becoming even more standardized with the rest of the world. Since OS X is essentally UNIX under the skin it will run on *86-compatable hardware with little to no porting. (I believe a version of OS X for non-Apple hardware has been confirmed to already exist.) They can then farm out design and construction of thier hardware to almost anybody, bringing the hardware costs way down. Apple will essentally become a software\ accessory (as in iPods) vendor at that point,.. pretty much what Microsoft is today. A few analysts have predicted that is exactly what Steve Jobs has in mind. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr Edison 007 Posted June 15, 2004 Share Posted June 15, 2004 Good for you, I'm considering buying a MAC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kjølen Posted June 15, 2004 Author Share Posted June 15, 2004 Originally posted by edlib There have been rumors that Apple is going to drop the Power PC chip eventually and use AMD chips, becoming even more standardized with the rest of the world. Since OS X is essentally UNIX under the skin it will run on *86-compatable hardware with little to no porting. (I believe a version of OS X for non-Apple hardware has been confirmed to already exist.) They can then farm out design and construction of thier hardware to almost anybody, bringing the hardware costs way down. Apple will essentally become a software\ accessory (as in iPods) vendor at that point,.. pretty much what Microsoft is today. A few analysts have predicted that is exactly what Steve Jobs has in mind. If you are a Mac Addict magazine reader, you might disagree. Apple is a hardware company that makes software to sel it's hardware. So if you can run Mac OS X on some crappy customized PC, no one would need Apple hardware. I understand what you mean by changing, but it would hurt Apple more than it would help them, I would think. Apple can still make software and keep their quality hardware too. I don't want to see anything but Motorola chips in Macs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edlib Posted June 16, 2004 Share Posted June 16, 2004 Originally posted by Kjølen ... no one would need Apple hardware. Exactly. In the last couple of years Apple has made more money selling iPods and songs over iTunes. Selling hardware to the kind of specialty market that Apple has cornered is kind of a dead end. It takes a massive jump in performance to get people to upgrade every couple of years, and that just hasn't been happening with the Power PC platform. Most of the people I know with last generation G4s aren't rushing to upgrade to expensive G5s... the old computers are still viable. However... change your OS platform every couple of years,.. force it into being the new standard so that all the cool, new, must-have programs will only run on it and not the older OS,.. and you have a cash-cow! Especially when you are the one writing and releasing those programs. (Sound like anybody we know?) The rumors about AMD were probably to get Motorola and IBM off thier duffs and get faster chips to market quicker than they ever have in the past. But, with AMD starting to soak up the 64-bit high performance market, and getting faster chips out the door almost every quarter, it must look tempting. Here is an article that got me thinking about all this: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20040520.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kjølen Posted June 16, 2004 Author Share Posted June 16, 2004 Motorola chips are plenty fast. Many people think that the lower clock speed means slower chips. edlib, I can tell you are smarter than that from this conversation. Architecture of the chip is also very important. It makes a 1.4 Ghz G4 equal to a 2 Ghz or up Pentium4. I don't know the conversion, but I know clockspeed isn't very important unless you need it for minimum specs for gaes and such. The new G5s have Dual 2.5Ghz chips. that's TWO 2.5Ghz chips. one of those is powerful epnough, but two means serios multi-tasking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ray Jones Posted June 16, 2004 Share Posted June 16, 2004 the first time i installed a mac from zero, we played some starwars racing game and put the first records after only 20(!!) minutes. that's pretty fast but easy because "every" mac has the same hardware. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edlib Posted June 16, 2004 Share Posted June 16, 2004 Originally posted by Kjølen Motorola chips are plenty fast. Many people think that the lower clock speed means slower chips. Yeah,.. but the biggest problem is that it takes them years to get a new one to market. Despite any technical advantages the machines have, that's still death at the checkout line. There will always be a few folks who religiously upgrade every time a new model comes out, but it's something I'm starting to see a lot less of. The G5 is almost as fast (even faster on a few apps) as some of the other popular chips out there right now, but historically it usually doesn't take long for Apple to fall behind again, with Intel and AMD releasing new chips with increased clock speeds every couple of months, but with only one or 2 small incremental increases for the Power PC every year. It usually takes Apple a brand-new platform (G4 to G5) to see a real performance leap. I'm not saying Apple is bad. They've just painted themselves into a corner in the marketplace. Thier products have a serious "nitch-appeal" problem, and compared to the competition, thier products are seriously overpriced. The other probem I see in Macs right now is that it will probably take a new must-have "killer-app" that will only run on the newest versions of the platform to get everybody to upgrade again any time soon. Right now the 2 Mac-centric killer-apps I know (Pro-Tools and Final Cut) seem to still run pretty good on the old hardware,.. at least well enough for most folks needs. There are newer versions to take advantage of the new processors, but the increase in performance isn't yet large enough to justify the expense of upgrading everything (and with Pro-Tools, that means a lot of really expensive software and hardware. A 2-year old Pro-Tools system running on a G4 is still a lot more powerful than most of us really need, and still sounds really good.) The other big problem I see is that functionality and stability of the 2 major OSes are getting closer and closer. Once upon a time you couldn't do ANY music, video, and graphics editing/ rendering on a Windows-based machine,.. and even when you could, the stability problem kept most pros away. Now since that is much less of a problem I'm seeing more and more people starting to add PCs to thier studios, and a few formerly die-hard Mac-fanactics I know have switched over completely. Of course, people have been predicting the end of Apple for decades now,.. pretty much since IBM came out with the first PC, and they've always managed to hang in there and come back when things looked bleakest. But I'll tell you this: I'll probably never buy a Macintosh for my personal use unless the prices come way down. However, if Apple released a version of OS X today that I could install on my PC so that I could dual-boot to it and run Mac software without ever messing with "Virtual PC" crap, it would be installed by tomorrow. I know a lot of people who feel the same way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kjølen Posted June 16, 2004 Author Share Posted June 16, 2004 It might be true that Apple only releases new stuff every few years, but really, they've been upgrading clockspeed every so often. In January they only had 1.6Ghz to 2Ghz, and now the have 1.8 to 2.5. Both of which are Dual, and not just the 2Ghz. I read an article that Apple expects to have their G5s at 3Ghz, and SOON. Now Pentium4 seeemed to release a 100Mhz faster chip every other week it seemed. Once they got to 3Ghz, there was all this talk about 3.2 and 3.5, but you hardly ever saw it. Now it's been almost a year sinse they've come out with greater clockspeeds. And Pentium4 has been around, unchanged for awhile now. Unless Intel is slowed down to work on some Superchip, like a 64-bit 3.5Ghz Pentium5 or something, I would think that Intel has slowed down quite a bit too. The entire Computer industries seem to have slowed drastically. Now about OS X. True, Windows XP is becoming more stable, maybe notso as much as 2000, but I still can't STAND its ability to crash a perfectly working program. Explorer might just crash for no reason and need to get reloaded. Mac OS X has NOT been getting less at all. It seems to be staying the same throughout all of OS X: Almost Perfectly Stable. My cousin had a G4 for years and only once or twice did he get a kernal panic, the Mac equivalent of a blue screen, and he hasn't had a single crash or system problem in his G5 sinse he got it in January. I think that is nice. Now I undertand what you say, edlib, Apple is holding its head up high, and has the right to do so with their accomplishments, but I can sense something is going to go down in the future. I personally, would like to get a good piece of Apple hardware before then. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zoom Rabbit Posted June 17, 2004 Share Posted June 17, 2004 Originally posted by Kjølen Edlib -- There is 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panthar, and soon-to-be-out 10.4 Tiger. I expect a 10.5 Lion to be out sometime next year. Let me get this straight...Apple is manufacturing AI robotic jungle beasts? I am truly alarmed. ... And staying indoors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ray Jones Posted June 17, 2004 Share Posted June 17, 2004 so you did go outside? now i stay inside. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ikhnaton Posted June 20, 2004 Share Posted June 20, 2004 Macs suck. go ahead and spend more money on something that doesn't run half as many programs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kuuki Posted June 20, 2004 Share Posted June 20, 2004 or spend none on a different OS that you might be lucky to run the other half plus meny meny other things Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kjølen Posted June 20, 2004 Author Share Posted June 20, 2004 Originally posted by Ikhnaton Macs suck. go ahead and spend more money on something that doesn't run half as many programs. Macs have already proven the quality vs quantity thingy. Besides, WHAT on Windows do I need to run on OS X? Sure it would be nice if DC++ was made Java or something, for Mac OS X, but otherwise, there are programs on OS X that aren't found on Windows that I want. Final Cut programs, Airburst Carbon, other small programs that just do cool things. And for games, there is Unreal Tournament 2004, there is Halo, Halo 2 when it comes out, and Airburst Carbon like I said before, which is an oddly addictive game. Anyways, I'll still have my 2.66Ghz Pentium4, 60GB hard drive, 768MB DDR RAM shared with 64MB Radeon 9000, DVD/CD-RW Combo, 15" SXGA+, laptop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.