On the point of giving up ...

i hear ya man, its very disapointing.
I've been a mac addict for the past year now, and used to hate apple and thought they were pointless. once i figured out how usefull they were if yoou wanted to do anything creative with a computer, you can't look anywhere else then a mac. So i go on and convince 5 of my friends to get Macs instead of PC. I convince them to go out and buy their iBooks, Powerbooks, and Imacs. Now ive been waiting for the new Powermacs even since G5 talks way back at MWSF 2002. Now how does apple surprise us by giving us the old 7455 chip thats in the old dual 1 GHZ. Besides the expandibility options on the new Powermacs, they have failed at giving apple users what they wanted. I know we can't get everything (new superdrives, gigawire, USB2, bluetooth or whatever else you guys wanted) but at least I thought that we would get some working DDR. Now I don't know if its worth waiting for the 1.25GHz duals or just another 9 months for the macs to be upgraded.

Mac OS X makes up for hardware partly

I've been using Apple machines since 1993 and, for the most part, have been pleased. I got in there just as the PowerPC processor was starting to be used. The operating system, version 7.1, was dismal.

The hardware started to become better but the O.S. was in the way. Two years later, I got my PowerComputing PowerCenter. It was faster and better but I knew that the hardware was being held back by the O.S. Then, I tried BeOS and had proof...wow!

Now, it's the opposite. We have an O.S. that's ready to bust loose but the hardware is holding it back.

I'm sure that Apple is working on it. They're trying to find some way to get what they need to be competitive. They also have to be looking at a way to do it smoothly as they did with the 680x0->PowerPC transition.

I have hopes, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re: On the point of giving up ...

Originally posted by stoaty35
I have been a total mac fascist for over ten years now, working with macs where preferable, owning god knows how many of them and spending huge amounts of cash on Apple hardware.
I work in an industry where macs and pcs happily combine.

I love OS X, Jaguar is cool, Apple are cool....

I have had a decent amount of cash sitting around for almost a year now, just waiting for Apple to start doing something about their falling behind on the hardware front, ready to jump in and spend the cash. I cant believe we have had yet another incremental improvement.

Talk all you like about dual processors (folks ... 2* 1.2 Ghz on these machines does not equal 2.4 Ghz Pentium, now matter how many times you say it), but Apple has taken its eye off the hardware side of things for way too long.

It's getting soooo predictable. Take a look at the Apple web site, the usual (highly skewed) photoshop tests, shattering the gigahertz myth. Who is convinced by these any more ?

Apple have to do something, and fast. I'm sitting here writing this on my 2200 Athlon XP, which - running a second rate OS, I admit - cost peanuts compared to the current powermac range and in real world usage is infinitely faster.

Meanwhile sitting in a repair shop somewhere is my TiBook 667, £2500 worth, on its second hard drive and receiving its second CD drive in 4 months, with its chipped away paint, keyboard scratched screen and virtually useless airport reception.

With this sort of power gap, price gap and even - not something that happened in the past - low build quality, even a total MacHead like myself will say "enough is enough" and spend the money elsewhere.

Do something quick, Apple.

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I too have a similar life story... so to speak..

Ive always been really a mac dude.. but ive really been let down recently...

I have a good friend that ahas been in the industry for about 15 years. He started working for Xerox, back in the day and wokred with people that developed the mouse at Parc.

He later worked for IBM and became very involved with Apple in terms of mostly software.

He has been to numerous meetings at apple in cupoertino and he tells me that apple is NOT doing well... He says that they are renting off a big portion of their land and are becoming alarmingly smaller...

I tell you that he is a real genious, and he knows the industry well.. He is personally a PC guy but he has always adminred apple in many ways, but is vbery disapointed with apple and he really thinks that apple is going downhill -- majorly...

He is VERY impressed with jaguar and is very impressed with all of apples software, but he tells me if apple doesnt get their act together on the hardware side, theyre gonna loose a lot of customers and a lot of money...

He says the biggest problem now with apple is getting their ideas out at the right time... Apple started out in the begginning with, by far, the best ideas in the industry, but was too early and people didnt recognize their efforts, and in the mean time people like msoft stole their ideas... he mentions the newton as one of a better example -- at the time there wasnt a compeitor in the pda field, and the newton is still very powerful at 230 mhz today... but they anounced it at the wrong time, and now everyone ,akes popular pdas...

I find myself walking over to my pc a lot more just to do simple html work nowadays cause i know my pc is gonna do it faster than my mac.. its kind of depressing.. i mean, i know im doing it on my 400 mhz rev a pb, but the sad fact is is that i cant afford to buy something that is obsolete the day i buy it, rather than buying a pc thats cheaper that wont be obsolete for quite some time...

i think the most amazing thing apple could do is come out with a desktop that could have the same pricing.. but was clearly faster than a pc...

i mean, look at apple... nowadays, their not doing AS GOOD AS msoft, their doing better, much better, in terms of software... but they really need to make hardware thats goal isnot to be as good as pc hardware, it should be better. i mean, it would be just fine and good if they were as good as pc hardware. i guess i could live with that for a while, but the hardware isnt as good. it should be better. we pay money to be better.

Apple has always had the brightest ideas in the industry i dont want to have to switch now.

i dont know. id agree the previous powermac revision was a complete joke, but this one is very nice. it brings quite a bit of technology to us that pcs dont have. and yes there are things pcs have that it doesnt yet, but id say we have the better end of the deal (expect for the cpu itself). apple isnt letting anyone down, moto let apple down. its easy to get unrealistic expectations reading these rumor sites. people asking for a g5 just dont understand the situation and are being unrealistic. asking for more than .25 ghz updates however is a realistic request in my book. the cpu is lagging. the rest of the tech is right there with the x86 world or beyond. and the cpu is in motos hands. moto hit a wall at 500 and is only very recently making up for it. all these rumors of a desktop power4 look promising in that moto will be out of the picture. sure it may be 18 months down the road or longer, but at least we know that moto cpu is going the way of the dodo.

sitting there on a athlon 2200 i can understand why the powermacs look pretty poor. but osx does make up for what we are lacking as far as speed goes IMO. raw speed is important, but productivity is more important and mac os gives you that productivity big time. so you wait 2 more seconds on a photoshop filter or action, but you make up that time because of the general efficiency of the os. so you wait an extra hour renderinga video clip, you make it up since you have better tools. so the x86 machine is cheaper to purchase, but the mac costs much less to own.

yes, it would be nice to have the best of the best in every category. yes the cpu is hurting. but look at the advantages. dont make that switch until you do.

'sigh'

It is a shame when we, the mac men and women, are reduced to giving PCs some sort of credit. I owned a IIGS for a bit, then an LC630.

My next upgrade had to be a PC due to fiscal restrictions. And there in lies the problem. Apple is bad value for money in the copmuting world. Apple is trying to make themselves seem like they can do it all, and do it fast.

Problem they arent fast, or cheap. Yay they look good, that is a massive 5 million people turned, now how about the other 499,995,000,000 people who own a personal computer.

Lower price, multi-Ghz processors in dual configs and we would see the good ol' days again. But motorola couldn't care less. IBM knows this and is working to kick them out of the partnership. If it happens them macs may become a platform again rather than an environment. The difference being that a platform is a standard environment to ork in, an environment itself is an outside thing for the niche market, like BeOS.

Oh well, at least my computer reseller is still in buisness to provide me with after sales support.

Don't blame Apple. Blame Motorolla!!! Motorolla is holding Apple back from being the best and the fastest. Hopefully IBM can speed things up.

oops

I didnt mean to blame apple. i dont like motorola at all:

they dont make chips that can go fast
there fones are hopelessly hard to use
and they dont care about apple (main reason)

I do like IBM a bit:

they make fast chips
they dont like motorola (thats good enough on it own)
and they do care about apple; they realise if apple sells alot of computers with power4 chips in them then they make money

sorry for making it look like i am blaming apple. i know it isnt their fault. I only wish that they would dump mtorola faster, doesnt matter i got me a G4 867 MDD and i like it, alot.

Damn, I am tired of the whining! Look, the speed of a computer is determined by more than GHZ. The new G4's are really friggin fast. Played around with one of the 1.25's yet? Sure they may sound like a harley, but they run like one too.

As for your PowerBook. Damn dude, take care of your ****! I have had my PowerBook going on three months. No scratches, gets cleaned everyday. No paint coming off. Baby your PowerBook

The reason everyone complains here is because they upgrade after every revision. I hear people trading in their Dual 867's for Dual GHz PowerMacs and they bitch about not noticing a major speed increase. I have a 400 MHz G3 PowerBook!!! Can you imagine how excited I would be if I had an 800 MHz G4 PowerBook? That's where you would notice a major speed increase.

IIGS's run fast

like i said i owned a IIGS once. My old primary school loved it, the best mechine in the games section. I went there recently and played Conan. No HDD just 5 1/2" floppys and a 156 color monitor with a 16 color game.

These machines run like greased lightning, as do all macs for one reason - my mac has 2x 867 in it, the s/w was made to run at a good speed on a G4 700 in an emac with PC100 SDR-SDRAM.
And i have played with a dual 1.25Ghz, if only i had AU$10,000 then i would get me one.

All i need is for my council to stop charging me land rates, and for GST to go away and i will get one. Oh well, when i go to upgrade it will be a mac, i dont care, I hate, with a "hammer in box" vengence, all PCs.

They lost me my major assignments on more than one occasion, they are worth 50%!!!!!

By the way a 4Ghz P4 is going to kick a dual 1.5Ghz G4. I wish apple would get on with dumping motorola and picking up IBM.

Please ....

when i first got my TiBook i thought it was the cat's pajamas. after a few month's of using it i was ready to let it go. i was very let down by it's performance. plus the optical drive had failed twice, the logic board died and i was ridden with kernal panics and crashes all the time. and once the paint started to fall all off i decided enough was enough. but i didn't give up on Apple, just on the PowerBook. i think the PowerBook, while damn sexy and stylish, is built to a much lower standard than other Apple products i was used to. it felt flimsy and i was always worried about it. i think the iBook is an awesome machine though and a great buy. personally, i've decided to stay away from portables for a while. sorry about your bad experience. with computers i always follow one rule; sell it while it's still worth something.

64-bit

Dont give up yet.. if you need a faster Box now.. get a 2.8P4... then come running back to Apple when they pump out the next big thing. I agree that the minor speed bumps and the Dual CPUs are just teasers to keep the Mac faithfull ... faithfull. Apple allways has something up its sleeve and allways delivers the goods in the end. They are and will continue to be the most innovatice computer CO. in the world. There is talk about Apple brining the 64-bit chip to the Pro/consumer market.. that would be a first. Currently only Enterpise markets get to reap the bennifits.. emagin having something faster than an UltraSparkIII in an iBook! The G4 has much potental but Motarola just is not puting the time and money into R&D. I have a 867G4... Ill be happy for a while... long enuph to wait out the slow ramp up from Apple... I'm not buying untill the next revolutionary stage stealer, like the Origional iMac, hits the apple store.

Originally posted by Backtothemac
Damn, I am tired of the whining! Look, the speed of a computer is determined by more than GHZ. The new G4's are really friggin fast. Played around with one of the 1.25's yet? Sure they may sound like a harley, but they run like one too.

Click to expand...

Run like a Harley? You mean they're slow and cumbersome compared to less expensive Japanese crotch rockets?

Originally posted by alex_ant

Run like a Harley? You mean they're slow and cumbersome compared to less expensive Japanese crotch rockets? [/B]

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Maybe, but they are more reliable, better looking, and damn sure get the girls

One word: uptime

My OS X systems go for weeks/months of real use without the need for a restart that's not imposed by a software installation of some sort.

I have rarely seen a Windows system that is actively used perform like that.

Originally posted by Rower_CPU
One word: uptime

My OS X systems go for weeks/months of real use without the need for a restart that's not imposed by a software installation of some sort.

I have rarely seen a Windows system that is actively used perform like that.

Click to expand...

OS X can be used for real work. Solaris, Linux, Other UNIX blends are the only OS's that I have seen get that kind of work done. I do have a few boxes at work running Win Advanced server but .. I dont mess with them much. the Mac OS can play with the big boys now!

Originally posted by Pismo
Don't blame Apple. Blame Motorolla!!! Motorolla is holding Apple back from being the best and the fastest. Hopefully IBM can speed things up.

Click to expand...

yes, DO blame Apple. They, alone, are responsible for the dire straits they're in right now. It was their choice to kill off the clones, effectively cutting off any and all competition in the Mac platform marketplace. Competition alone is what drives innovation. It's what makes Intel, Sun and AMD keep cranking out faster and faster chips. If there was some competition in the Mac arena, we would have faster chips.

Apple made their own bed, now we're all sleeping in it.

Add me to the list....

APPLE Top of the Line PB:

40 Gig HD/ 4800 RPM ATA 100?
800MHz G4
133MHz FSB
133MHz RAM
ATI 7500 32MB DDR

Price $3200

PC LAPTOP

60 GIG 5400 RPM ATA 133
1.8 GHz+ P4
533MHz FSB
2700DDR RAM
ATI 9000 / Nvidia 4600 64MB DDR

$2500 - $3000



something is wrong with this picture!

Originally posted by e-coli


yes, DO blame Apple. They, alone, are responsible for the dire straits they're in right now. It was their choice to kill off the clones, effectively cutting off any and all competition in the Mac platform marketplace. Competition alone is what drives innovation. It's what makes Intel, Sun and AMD keep cranking out faster and faster chips. If there was some competition in the Mac arena, we would have faster chips.

Apple made their own bed, now we're all sleeping in it.

Click to expand...

You can't really compete with yourself can you? I agree that Apple/moto/IBM may need to be spurred on at the minute in terms of CPU speed; but since Apple made the core components of the clones and sold them to manufacturers that could box/package them cheaper, all that was ultimately happening was a re-cased design at a cheaper price - meaning genuine Apple hardware sales dropped quite a bit when the clones were in production - rearrange "to spite cutting face nose" with added words to form a well-known phrase.