Your 95% numbers are based on sales, not actual machines in market. Macs account for as much as 15% of the actual market. The reason is they last 3 times longer. And G4s have been out since 1999 all starting at 4 billion floating point calculations a second. PC users are getting upset that PCs are having massive license restrictions, when Macs are more open allowing you to install on many more machines the same CD. How much are you going to spend on licensing restrictions alone? Mac OS X server is UNLIMITED licenses. Microsoft licenses limit you to 25 licenses for 6 times the cost of Mac OS X server. And who is going to want to run Linux now, now that Mac OS X consists of the highest percentage of Unix users on the planet and is simpler and easier to use?
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Are Apple products too eXpensive?
- Thread starter elensil
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you can say that again
my early 90s performa 600 still works and the apple printer from a couple years later still makes beautiful color prints
i don't know of any pc from the early 90s that works without having had something done to them...i have never been inside the case of the performa 600 ...and only one battery change, by dealer, in nearly a decade
I am actually configuring a G3 (blue and white) 350MHz for a new user that starts on Monday. For many people, these systems are all they will need. They do the job, don't crash (unlike peecee's of the same vintage), and are easy to maintain.
Simply put, we love Mac's. That is from the standpoint of both end user AND tech.
Simply put, we love Mac's. That is from the standpoint of both end user AND tech.
OK, I think Apple has brainwashed you here. According to this article (at Macworld nonetheless) Apple's recent sales figures account for 3.48% of the US market. Less of the world market. Don't try to tell me that Apple has a 15% real-world market share - the Mac hasn't had a 15% market share since the mid-'80s. Even if your claim that "Macs last three times longer" is true (which I'm doubting), that would still only add up to about 10%. So what were you saying? 5% or 10%, my point about AltiVec not being worthwhile to develop for compared to x86 still stands.
4 billion peak single-precision floating point calculations per second with highly optimized nonstandard vectorized code. How hard is that to understand?
The topic is: "Are Macs too expensive?" If you're talking about the Xserve, then say so. I was under the impression that we were talking about desktops/laptops, faster x86 versions of which can be had for less than their Mac counterparts - the whole point of this thread. I see that you've sidestepped my earlier arguments - I take it as an indication that they must be pretty good.
Alex
If G4s are only single instruction precision, I ask you, why are the RC5 numbers so much higher on the G4? Those numbers came out from prior to the XServe being released. The Xserve only increases the speed because of the copper processors.
Again I find hard to believe they are only single instruction precision when this quote from Apple's developer page says:
"Motorola's AltiVec Technology, embodied in the G4 processor, expands the current PowerPC architecture through addition of a 128-bit vector execution unit that operates concurrently with existing integer and floating-point units. This provides for highly parallel operations, allowing for simultaneous execution of up to 16 operations in a single clock cycle. This new approach expands the processor's capabilities to concurrently address high-bandwidth data processing (such as streaming video) and the algorithmic intensive computations which today are handled off-chip by other devices, such as graphics, audio, and modem functions.The AltiVec instruction set allows operation on multiple bits within the 128-bit wide registers. This combination of new instructions, operation in parallel on multiple bits, and wider registers, provide speed enhancements of up to 30x on operations that are common in media processing."
That's 16 operations in a single clock cycle. Where is that single precision? And with dual processors it makes it that much more formidable. Again read this carefully:
http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/index.html
Vector calculations make sense. What good is high speed if the operations are so complex it takes 5 times longer to learn them?
How is parallelism single precision? You aren't making sense. Because that's what you are saying the G4 is doing. You can get as much precision as you like when the processor is running things in parallel.
Again I find hard to believe they are only single instruction precision when this quote from Apple's developer page says:
"Motorola's AltiVec Technology, embodied in the G4 processor, expands the current PowerPC architecture through addition of a 128-bit vector execution unit that operates concurrently with existing integer and floating-point units. This provides for highly parallel operations, allowing for simultaneous execution of up to 16 operations in a single clock cycle. This new approach expands the processor's capabilities to concurrently address high-bandwidth data processing (such as streaming video) and the algorithmic intensive computations which today are handled off-chip by other devices, such as graphics, audio, and modem functions.The AltiVec instruction set allows operation on multiple bits within the 128-bit wide registers. This combination of new instructions, operation in parallel on multiple bits, and wider registers, provide speed enhancements of up to 30x on operations that are common in media processing."
That's 16 operations in a single clock cycle. Where is that single precision? And with dual processors it makes it that much more formidable. Again read this carefully:
http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/index.html
Vector calculations make sense. What good is high speed if the operations are so complex it takes 5 times longer to learn them?
How is parallelism single precision? You aren't making sense. Because that's what you are saying the G4 is doing. You can get as much precision as you like when the processor is running things in parallel.
Yeah right... links please!
Maybe because Premiere is still a standard? You know what a standard is, right?
You mean, you just have to know where to look when you want to ignore the bare naked truth??
Dude, you still don't get it!!!
Double precision FP != Altivec code
And for the rest... I am not going to write my own applications, there are standard applications out there I want to use! Is it that so hard to get???
To optimize code for Altivec isn't that trivial and especially since it is incompatible with other processors it means just a lot of extra code/work for software houses.
And less heat doesn't mean greater potential speed. If you would accelerate the G4 to the clockspeed of the PIV on the given technology the processor core would melt!
Fine! That still doesn't solve the problem with my standard integer and FP operations in standard code. But I am too tired to go on about that subject. You don't want to get it... so be happy with your opinion.
Be nice!
groovebuster
they DO last longer...
I am writing this on my two-and-a-half-year old B+W G3 450... stuck a gig of cheep pc100 ram and an 80GB ATA drive (to replace the small 9GB scsi drive that it came with) and it is running 10.1.5 like a dream, for about $300 of upgrades. (I tried flashing a GF2MX PCI card for upgrading the video, but it didn't work out.)
on the other hand, I went from a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 to an Athlon 700 to a T-Bird 1GHz on the wintel side... just to keep up with 98->2000->xp. Now that the PC's dead tho (crashed HDD) I'm in NO HURRY to fix it...
these were all home-built machines, btw, so they had good, fast components... but the software brought it down!
If Jag is as good as people are saying, I'll be able to keep this thing for two more years!
I am writing this on my two-and-a-half-year old B+W G3 450... stuck a gig of cheep pc100 ram and an 80GB ATA drive (to replace the small 9GB scsi drive that it came with) and it is running 10.1.5 like a dream, for about $300 of upgrades. (I tried flashing a GF2MX PCI card for upgrading the video, but it didn't work out.)
on the other hand, I went from a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 to an Athlon 700 to a T-Bird 1GHz on the wintel side... just to keep up with 98->2000->xp. Now that the PC's dead tho (crashed HDD) I'm in NO HURRY to fix it...
these were all home-built machines, btw, so they had good, fast components... but the software brought it down!
If Jag is as good as people are saying, I'll be able to keep this thing for two more years!
Well, as much as I hate defending pcs, you're not comparing apples to apples here either. The smalldog G4 933 only has a 60gb hd (vs 80), and a gf4 dual = gf4mx (vs a gf4 4400, which has programmable pixel shaders, and about 150% the speed due to faster ddr ram). The L3 Cache is good, but the RDRAM runs at 800Mhz, faster than the G4's the L3 cache, and it doesn't limit the cpu like sdram does. Also, I'm comparing fully customized computers on apple and dell's websites to see pricing differences their respective companies. If you compared a fully preconfigured system with a barebones system that's been upgraded, it completely defeats the purpose of the experiment, which is to see how much apple charges over an average pc vendor. If I went along with your reasoning I could build a custom pc myself and get the exact same pc system for about $1800 by buying the components off of www.newegg.com. Sure, it's not fair, but neither was your comparison.
AltiVec
For those saying AltiVec should become a thing of the past, may i just say that i agree with you 100%. there are very few apps left that sill use it. everyone is now worried about Carbonising for OSX. i'd much rather see them concentrate on getting a new chip with some serious speed increases. something that everyone could use. look at the eMac. it's the biggest scam in the world. over a thousand dollars for a 700mhz machine! what consumer who uses as eMac needs AltiVec? none. i don't think little Timmy is running Blast or or doing RGB to CMYK conversions in Photoshop. my point is that because AltiVec is so rarely used all we are left with is straight mhz, at which point i'd rather have a G3. it makes me sick to hear Apple make the outlandish claims of Pentium Crushing Power and Gigaflops. F*ck Gigaflops. no one cares about floating point calculations. all anyone wants is some speed. shame on them for ripping people off.
For those saying AltiVec should become a thing of the past, may i just say that i agree with you 100%. there are very few apps left that sill use it. everyone is now worried about Carbonising for OSX. i'd much rather see them concentrate on getting a new chip with some serious speed increases. something that everyone could use. look at the eMac. it's the biggest scam in the world. over a thousand dollars for a 700mhz machine! what consumer who uses as eMac needs AltiVec? none. i don't think little Timmy is running Blast or or doing RGB to CMYK conversions in Photoshop. my point is that because AltiVec is so rarely used all we are left with is straight mhz, at which point i'd rather have a G3. it makes me sick to hear Apple make the outlandish claims of Pentium Crushing Power and Gigaflops. F*ck Gigaflops. no one cares about floating point calculations. all anyone wants is some speed. shame on them for ripping people off.
We all know apple's systems are outdated. I here you guys talk about how apple's systems are made of the best components. What a bunch of crap. The hardware is old how can it be considered the best. Listen to yourselves before you say apples systems are made of the best components. If it so good where are the 128 meg ddr graphics cards,ddr ram,rdram,dvd+rw (the new standard),gforce to go portablegraphics cards,superfast processors, faster harddrives in portables I could go on and on. Apple's prices are much to high for their dated hardware and crash prone OS. Yes I said crash prone OS. I have been running 4 GC's (gas chromatographs)and 3 LC's(liquid chromatographs) with chemstation on win2k with 3 hp vectras for over a year without one single crash. My thinkpad with winxp pro has yet to crash but my powerbook has crashed numerous times in the past 8 months. Apple needs to step up and produce more up to date systems.
right on dude. i find it funny when people say how stable OSX is. i get a kernal panic almost everytime i turn off my machine. i get the spinning beachball of death atleast once a day. i constantly have to force quit apps because they've frozen. i use cmnd-option-ctrl-powerbutton atleast once a day. my 550 TiBook is the biggest piece of crap. yet it cost like $3000. and since there is very little use of AltiVec left in the world i'm squeaking along on a 550mhz computer, which is pathetic at this point in time. i don't doubt that OSX could be a great OS one day but they don't even have hardware that can handle it properly. and i use a dual 1gig and i'm not impressed by that either. 128mb RAM just to run the desktop? that's just retarded. people always say "OSX flies on the dual..." or whatever. yeah, the OS is fast but applications still run like crap! power users have nothing to gain from the G4 right now since everything is just barely Carbonised and buggy as hell. to hell with AltiVec and the G4 and Apple for ripping everyone off. the iBook is the only halfway-decent machine in the line. i'd trade all the throbbing vector icons in the world to have some speed again.
RC5 results are so much higher on the G4 because RC5 is heavily optimized for the matrix calculations that are AltiVec's bread and butter. RC5 works on AltiVec because it uses vectorized single-precision fp operations. It is not an accurate measure of real-world performance any more than SETI@home or the random Photoshop filter. (Which are among the only things the G4 performs well at these days.) It is, however, a reasonable measure of Photoshop, FCP, and SETI@home performance, if you want to look at it that way.
Floating point precision, single or double, refers to the word length of a floating-point instruction. A single-precision fp word (on most processors including x86 and PPC) is 4 bytes (32 bits). Double-precision fp words are 8 bytes (64 bits). (Bits = digits)
Yes - up to 16 single-precision operations in a single clock cycle. The paragraph you quoted mentions nothing about floating point precision. As I said, the maximum word length AltiVec can handle is 32 bits.
128 / 32 = 4 (the maximum number of single-precision [32-bit] fp ops / sec)
128 / 16 = 8 (the maximum number of half-precision [16-bit] fp ops / sec)
128 / 8 = 16 (the maximum number of quarter-precision [8-bit] fp ops /sec, and the source of the marketing stat that you just fell for)
I would suggest YOU read it carefully. Stop swallowing the marketing hype and think for yourself.
Vector calculations do make sense, for some tasks. I suggest you get to work convincing developers why they should devote precious time and energy re-writing the necessary portions of their code to support a platform that comprises a miniscule portion of all markets outside the graphic design and audio production realms. Outside these niches, it would help Apple so much more if the PPC were simply able to run standard, platform-independent code even close to as fast as x86 (or any other CPU family) can.
No I'm not. You are confusing parallelism with precision. Parallelism refers to processing chunks of data concurrently, which AltiVec does do. AltiVec is, however, incapable of processing these chunks of data concurrently if they are double-precision (>32 bits long). Double-precision fp work (and non-vectorized single-precision fp work) is passed off to the G4's FPU, which sucks massively.
Nope. It doesn't matter if the vector processor is 128-bit or 1024-bit, if it only supports 32-bit words, it will only give you 32-bit precision. It's just that a 128-bit VPU will give you four chunks of 32-bit data per cycle. As you know, adding 1,000 (4 digits) 4 times will not give you a number that is 16 digits long. I HOPE you knew that, anyway.
Alex
Right now I am looking to buy a computer that would run PhotoShop, Quark, Flash, Dreamweaver, Premier, AfterEffects.
Are those applications AltiVec optimized? I am a student with small budget. How would eMac perform under such a task?
Are those applications AltiVec optimized? I am a student with small budget. How would eMac perform under such a task?
not anymore. or atleast, not like they used to be. use all of these apps in OS9. they will perform great. in OSX they are Carbonised pieces of crap. the eMac would do OK. After Effects and Premier are hungry though. i would get the eMac because the CRT is much better for graphics work.
too expensive?
It's funny, every time people talk about how expensive macs are, or that they are too expensive, the discussion always degrades to whether or not pcs are better. I would say that that has nothing to do with the other.
Macs are expensive, beyond the quality of the products, because Apple does a lot of R&D. Someone has too pay for it, and I am glad to contribute, because Apple helps drive the industry to new places.
As for whether macs or pc are better... You know it's always something? The big argument used to be that macs weren't worth it, because PC's had more software; or that macs weren't worth it, because they were too hard to modify, and now it's that they aren't fast enough. Well, all these arguments have/had merit, but it really doesn't matter. It's all smoke.
Most users (gamers, get a console, jeez) come nowhere close to using the speed they have. Are y'all trying to tell me that writing email and surfing the web is painful at a gigahertz? What, you write so well, that the sluggish MS Office is holding you back? Come on.
And for the professional, which I am one, yeah, computer speed is important, but it isn't the most important. I am far more concerned with how fast a project goes than how fast the computer goes, and if there is a delay, it is almost always due to inexperienced or disorganized users, rather than the computer itself.
In the rare case that a computer does case the delay, it is due to a crash or outright failure. In that case, I haven't loss a mac to major failure in 18 years, and crashes have always been rare. What more can you want?
To sum up, a faster machine isn't going to make you more talented, no matter how fast it is. I use macs because they are reliable, and they stay out of my way. For that, nothing is too expensive.
It's funny, every time people talk about how expensive macs are, or that they are too expensive, the discussion always degrades to whether or not pcs are better. I would say that that has nothing to do with the other.
Macs are expensive, beyond the quality of the products, because Apple does a lot of R&D. Someone has too pay for it, and I am glad to contribute, because Apple helps drive the industry to new places.
As for whether macs or pc are better... You know it's always something? The big argument used to be that macs weren't worth it, because PC's had more software; or that macs weren't worth it, because they were too hard to modify, and now it's that they aren't fast enough. Well, all these arguments have/had merit, but it really doesn't matter. It's all smoke.
Most users (gamers, get a console, jeez) come nowhere close to using the speed they have. Are y'all trying to tell me that writing email and surfing the web is painful at a gigahertz? What, you write so well, that the sluggish MS Office is holding you back? Come on.
And for the professional, which I am one, yeah, computer speed is important, but it isn't the most important. I am far more concerned with how fast a project goes than how fast the computer goes, and if there is a delay, it is almost always due to inexperienced or disorganized users, rather than the computer itself.
In the rare case that a computer does case the delay, it is due to a crash or outright failure. In that case, I haven't loss a mac to major failure in 18 years, and crashes have always been rare. What more can you want?
To sum up, a faster machine isn't going to make you more talented, no matter how fast it is. I use macs because they are reliable, and they stay out of my way. For that, nothing is too expensive.
Tjwett, I hear you, and I sympathize with everything you've said, but as a fellow 550MHz TiBook user I'm going to step over to the other side and defend my TiBook.
Yeah, it's slow. OK, it's damn slow. I knew this would be the case when I bought it. 10.1.5 is not as unstable for me as it is for you, but it does have its problems - SBOD (spinning beachball of death) every week or so and generally miserable performance being the big two. However, as I said, I knew it was pretty slow before I bought it. I could have got a GHz+ laptop instead, with all the same features for less money. I'm still not bothered though, because I wanted a computer that:
- Didn't suck for desktop use like Linux
- Had as little to do with Microsoft as possible
And that pretty much narrowed it down to the Mac.
I think, if things don't improve, Apple is going to have to de-emphasize the performance angle. They need to stop calling their computers supercomputers, because everybody knows that's a load of crap. They need to stop saying that the G4 smokes the P4, because that's about as close to a lie as you can get without quite stepping over the line. What they need to do (or one thing they could do) is emphasize the pleasantness of the "Mac experience" - the always-working plug & play, the ease, the simplicity, the smoothness, etc. I think the kernel panics etc. you're experiencing are not normal, and I hope those get fixed for you ASAP. At the very worst, enjoy the high resale value of your TiBook.
Alex
Yeah, it's slow. OK, it's damn slow. I knew this would be the case when I bought it. 10.1.5 is not as unstable for me as it is for you, but it does have its problems - SBOD (spinning beachball of death) every week or so and generally miserable performance being the big two. However, as I said, I knew it was pretty slow before I bought it. I could have got a GHz+ laptop instead, with all the same features for less money. I'm still not bothered though, because I wanted a computer that:
- Didn't suck for desktop use like Linux
- Had as little to do with Microsoft as possible
And that pretty much narrowed it down to the Mac.
I think, if things don't improve, Apple is going to have to de-emphasize the performance angle. They need to stop calling their computers supercomputers, because everybody knows that's a load of crap. They need to stop saying that the G4 smokes the P4, because that's about as close to a lie as you can get without quite stepping over the line. What they need to do (or one thing they could do) is emphasize the pleasantness of the "Mac experience" - the always-working plug & play, the ease, the simplicity, the smoothness, etc. I think the kernel panics etc. you're experiencing are not normal, and I hope those get fixed for you ASAP. At the very worst, enjoy the high resale value of your TiBook.
Alex
I have a Ti800 and think it was worth every penny. I used to have a Dell Desktop as my primary office machine, and a Dell Lattitude as my home/portable work machine. The TiBook has handily replaced not only both of those machines, but also about half of a unix box. I still have a headless linux box in my office to run some custom stuff that was developed in house that won't yet run on my Mac. I love doing an ssh -X server to do xwindow port forwarding, so I can run an app on my linux box and have its windows appear on my dual-headed Mac.
Lets see why the Ti book is worth the price:
Only laptop with built in gigabit ethernet (for that matter only laptop with
any kind of gig E)
Beautiful Screen
DVD player that actually works (all my pc friends have problems with playing dvds on their laptops)
Great battery life
Light as hell
DVI-VGA-SVideo-Composite video out
Worth every penny
One: You have done something to f*ck up your computer... When was the last time you ran ANY kind of utility on it??? Even a simple fsck -y???
Two: if you spent $3k for the 550MHz system, you either got it jacked up with something, or the store saw you coming and knew they had a sucker on the way.
I never had a kernel panic on my 500MHz TiBook, unless I placed in the incorrect memory. Makes me wonder where you got the memory that is installed in either of your systems...
OS X rips you a new ******* from my 800MHz TiBook, twit...
The G4 processor is NOT 'buggy as hell' unless you actually do something to f*ck with it. Have you bothered to check the memory requirements for windblows?? 128MB is the bare bones minimum for either win2k or winheXPee. Right from m$'s web site... "128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
* 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space*" OS X can run on less memory, but it performs better with more, just like windblows does.
BTW, judging by your writing style, you didn't do very well in the English classes, did you now...
Re: too expensive?
i hope those days are not over. FireWire, the death of the floppy, DVDR, etc. i hope they have something up their sleeve. it all just feels really old to me right now. i really try not to compare the Mac to the PC. i just think we should have components that are current. i agree with everything you said though.
i hope those days are not over. FireWire, the death of the floppy, DVDR, etc. i hope they have something up their sleeve. it all just feels really old to me right now. i really try not to compare the Mac to the PC. i just think we should have components that are current. i agree with everything you said though.
Okay,Originally posted by AlphaTech
One: You have done something to f*ck up your computer... When was the last time you ran ANY kind of utility on it??? Even a simple fsck -y???
Two: if you spent $3k for the 550MHz system, you either got it jacked up with something, or the store saw you coming and knew they had a sucker on the way.
I never had a kernel panic on my 500MHz TiBook, unless I placed in the incorrect memory. Makes me wonder where you got the memory that is installed in either of your systems...
OS X rips you a new ******* from my 800MHz TiBook, twit...
Have you bothered to check the memory requirements for windblows?? 128MB is the bare bones minimum for either win2k or winheXPee. Right from m$'s web site... "128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
* 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space*" OS X can run on less memory, but it performs better with more, just like windblows does.
BTW, judging by your writing style, you didn't do very well in the English classes, did you now...
1. I run Disk Warrior regularly.
2. I bought my machine new when it was first released and after tax and a few peripherals the price was in the neighborhood of 3k. i'm not going to split hairs here.
3. I use Viking RAM, it's good.
4. I'm no twit. And I NEVER said the G4 processor was buggy. I said that alot of the new Carbonised software that is being released for OSX is buggy. It is. And these Carbonised apps do not take advantage of AltiVec at all, or in the same capacity as they used to, which hurts the performance.
5. I never looked at the requirements for Windows and I don't really care since I didn't spend any money on a Windows machine.
BTW, I don't repond to lame insults. I have no problem getting into discussions, even arguments, about Macs and related topics but I don't waste my time with flamewars about ridiculous things such as my "writing style". I type fast. Forgive me for not running a spellcheck before I post.
So then why don't you write developers to optimize their code for Altivec? It obviously presents a great method of speeding things up.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/ccarch/2002/07/12/steinberg.htm
Stories like this keep pouring in on how Altivec is indeed faster. Apple isn't going to feed the bottom of the vine as long as graphic artists demand higher speeds. It is up to developers who want to get more speed out of Macs to use Altivec. Only if we demand them to do it, will we see faster speed out of those lower end programs you feel Apple is ignoring in terms of speed.
And anyway who needs all that double speed precision except those who already have Altivec on the Mac? Obviously your demand for speed on the Mac is like asking for a mouse to fly like an airplane. Where the mouse is your lowly little word processor, and you want it to do what? Spell check 15 billion words a second? What are you going to use the double precision speed for on the low end when Altivec isn't being used?
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/ccarch/2002/07/12/steinberg.htm
Stories like this keep pouring in on how Altivec is indeed faster. Apple isn't going to feed the bottom of the vine as long as graphic artists demand higher speeds. It is up to developers who want to get more speed out of Macs to use Altivec. Only if we demand them to do it, will we see faster speed out of those lower end programs you feel Apple is ignoring in terms of speed.
And anyway who needs all that double speed precision except those who already have Altivec on the Mac? Obviously your demand for speed on the Mac is like asking for a mouse to fly like an airplane. Where the mouse is your lowly little word processor, and you want it to do what? Spell check 15 billion words a second? What are you going to use the double precision speed for on the low end when Altivec isn't being used?
elensil
Wait until after new Towers are released, buy yourself an education only lower end G4 Tower (about $1200), CTO or upgrade with cheaper parts from www.pricewatch.com, and get yourself some better software (unless you're not 'buying' the software). Final Cut Pro is way better than Premier (uses OS X and AltiVec) and you can get it for $300 Educational. Plus if you buy a new PM Tower from the Apple Store Education, you can get Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign (screw Quark. There's no way I would buy that product. Actually, you couldn't give it to me), Acrobat, GoLive, and LiveMotion in a bundle for like $400. If you have to have Macromedia Studio, go to http://www.academicsuperstore.com/ and buy it for $200, and get most of the other stuff for less than $400.
That's what I'm doing.
Let me know if you want some more advice.
Wait until after new Towers are released, buy yourself an education only lower end G4 Tower (about $1200), CTO or upgrade with cheaper parts from www.pricewatch.com, and get yourself some better software (unless you're not 'buying' the software
). Final Cut Pro is way better than Premier (uses OS X and AltiVec) and you can get it for $300 Educational. Plus if you buy a new PM Tower from the Apple Store Education, you can get Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign (screw Quark. There's no way I would buy that product. Actually, you couldn't give it to me), Acrobat, GoLive, and LiveMotion in a bundle for like $400. If you have to have Macromedia Studio, go to http://www.academicsuperstore.com/ and buy it for $200, and get most of the other stuff for less than $400.That's what I'm doing.
Let me know if you want some more advice.
right. so why isn't the eMac a G3? if the apps that are it's intended users don't use AltiVec why make it a G4? because it sounds better and they can charge more money. they boast the power of the G4 as the major selling point of the eMac but they don't tell anyone that they actually don't need it and won't use it. that's why it's a ripoff.
Okay, I'll quote myself a third time:
Yes - AltiVec can be very fast at tasks which lend themselves to it well, like audio/video/graphics editing. It doesn't handle anything else.
Graphic artists, by the way, at least the ones who aren't blind and don't vow to never leave Apple, are in an unfortunate position - they're wondering whether or not they should stick with the Mac since PCs are now so fast that they can spend roughly the same amount of $$$ on one as on a dual G4 and get superior performance. A dual G4, even at AltiVec-optimized tasks, will get its butt kicked by, for example, a highly-clocked dual Athlon. (Which can be had for less.)
That's a very good point - now you face the challenge of making every potential buyer of a low-end Mac agree with you. Right now, it's "You can spend $X on a PC, or you can spend $X+$500 on a Mac that's slower." You'll probably bring up the intangibles of the Mac, like their ease of use, their trouble-free nature, their seamless hardware & software interoperability, etc. - and I agree. But the challenge is making consumers understand that. Low-end Macs are definitely not faster than PCs - they're much slower - and they cost more. If consumers look at it from a speed angle, they'd be insane to buy the Mac. So the challenge is getting them to look at it from a different angle. This has proven difficult - which is the whole reason I'm saying Apple needs to get in gear and start catching up to PC-land.
Alex