jeffbistrong said:
Doesn't apple like maintain a policy that is sort of not competative . . .look at the prices of their G5 Computers and, all the other computers . .you even see it with the IPOD. A 15 GB ipod is 300, a dell like 20 gb jukebox is like $250 or something like that
Yes, they're the most anti-competitive compuer company out there, which is why they use their massive cash to force competitors out of busine... No, that 's Microsoft. Okay, so they're the ones who sink their consumer electronics budget into artificially lowering the cost of... No, that's Sony and HP. Hmmm.... Okay, maybe Apple's the one that leverages a misleadingly specced low-end machine in order to sell their high end... No, that's Dell. Hmmm.
I guess Apple's the one that does pretty much all their own R&D, belongs to a large number of industry-leading technology groups, uses an architecture with legs, and provides some off the most simultaneously appealing and powerful hardware in the world. Yeah, that's them, the ones that lead the commodity supercomputer market, who continue to push the edge of technologies that others might ignore if not for them.
jayscheuerle said:
Geez... Okay, "decent" isn't the right word. LCD, okay?
Depending on what you're doing, a CRT could very well be better for the task than an LCD. Flat panels can't equal the CRT in refresh rate yet, and that means that they're better for video and, as much as I hate to use it, games.
How do you differentiate between a vocal minority and a large group? I can't say I tally up the names, but over the 3 years I've been a member of this site there's been calls for a "headless iMac" ( a misnomer, because the eMac is the only low-end machine made by Apple these days) by many people. LowEndMac.com also rallies for this every so often.
Not a G5. A G4. And why would you consider that "cheap"? In this thread alone, there are examples of the G4 continuing to be a strong perfomer.
The Pegasos II thing is interesting, bit irrelevant to wanting a Mac.
Well, it's a bit irresponsible to be making sweeping claims about what people would and wouldn't want if you can't show how you know. I see people chime in regularly that they'd buy one, but the same people who said they'd buy a mac when something better than the last crop of G4s are the ones who are still complaining now. It's a game... People play it all the time, and it goes with cars just as much as with computers. "Oh, that's so crappy. I wouldn't buy one unless they did this," you'll hear someone say, when they wouldn't buy one unless it was the same cost as their Chevy, no matter what it cost the company to produce it.
The G4 is still a reasonably decent processor, but the big problem is cost. That's why the Pegasos board is relevant. If you look at the costs involved, even moving to a commodity motherboard that uses the cheapest available parts yields some pretty high expense, and it highlights just how much Apple might have been getting us a
better rate on the chip than some think.
What's this insistence on a low-end box being a low-end experience? It would still run the same OS as the G5s. You could still put a load of RAM in it. You'd still have firewire and usb ports for peripherals. Put the box out of site and you'd be hard pressed to differentiate between the "experiences". Price is often quoted by PC users as why they can't switch. When you only have $700 to spend and you want a new system, somebody telling you that a $1300 system is a great deal feature for feature is just missing the point.
Believe me, I understand everything that you're saying, but I don't necessarily think that you're going to be able to get it. The distinct possibility exists that the eMac is the highest we can push the current G4 without some major revisions from FreeScale. Now, it you're talking about selling a non-expandable, small formfactor computer like an eMac with the monitor chopped off (i.e. a "pizza box" G4), then I might see that as a remotely interesting endeavor. If nothing else, it would allow more sales to schools that have monitors to begin with.
JFreak said:
me too. put in a G5 while lowering prices at the same time, and i'm in! i really fancy that 20" version, but will not buy G4 desktop no matter what. the G4 is acceptable in laptops, however, but for desktops it really needs to be replaced with the current generation. i wouldn't mind if they needed to cut the clock frequency to - say - 1.2GHz if that's what they need to put it into the small case, but all in all they must to put in the G5 if they care about the market share at all.
Are you aware of how illogical this is?
You want the G5, which has an entirely new motherboard, system interface, and other components, to be released cheaper than technology that Apple has had for years. On top of that, you think it would be better to have a lower-clocked processor, when a higher-clocked single (the 1.6ghz G5) is barely competitive with the highest G4 at the moment (1.5ghz 7447a). What needs to be done is a reeducation of consumers to honestly see the upsides and downsides of every chip. There are circumstances where, for raw performance, you're better off buying a PC. I don't deny that, and until something major happens at IBM, that's going to be true.
This is an interesting time to be a mac user, but people need to realize that the PowerPC is not a cheap platform.
dongmin said:
None of those articles mention the kind of money we're talking about for a Xeon/Itanium system vs. a G5 system. Isn't the 2nd place supercomputer considerably more expensive than the Big Mac?
Bingo.
If there were cheaper than the VT cluster, that would have been mentioned, especially since they spend so much time on Vandrajahar. So what if you can take number two? Apple took number three at a tiny fraction of any of the top five's cost. That was the biggest deal, even though getting a mac on the list was important, too.
ts1973 said:
There's no way OpenGL can compete with Direct X, and the latter is incompatible with the Mac, so the conclusion must be that - in the games section - Macs will always be slower (unless we adapt to the same standards as PC's).
Wrong on several pointts. OpenGL could compete with DirectX, until Microsoft leveraged their position to get DX optimizations made on graphics cards, and yet this hasn't ever been challnged in court because there's no commercial OS that people play a lot of games on. The standards are pretty comparable in performance when one doesn't have, say, hooks directly into the OS and the hardware, unlike OpenG, which is portable and flexible.
Also, don't be fooled... Even if the mac platform were to go to something like x86, there's no way in hell that Microsoft would let Apple get away with porting DirectX, nor would they do it themselves. It's a major Windows advantage, and they won't give that up.
Chip NoVaMac said:
One thing that I missed in the discussion so far is that in OSX 10.5 or OSX 11, is that it will probably require a G5 processor. Given that the I Mac's are the mid end of the line and needing an update, the moving towards the G5 makes sense.
The G4's succesor is going to be 64-bit. The e600 chip is dual-core and has on-die memory control, which largely makes up for the fact that it's only a 400mhz bus. It also puts out a relatively svelte 30w for two cores on a single chip, and possesses double-precision SIMD (AltiVec) units. In other words... This is a serious chip, and it's pin-compatible with the current G4s.
With the 975 quite possible being dual-core and even higher FSB, I think it would make sense to differentiate the line to the cooler e600/e700 line for consumers and the 975/980/990 line for pros.
Dont Hurt Me said:
The current form factor isnt that bad just give it some Juice! stick in a 2.0 G5 and a 9700 or better card with Tiger and il be happy
is this asking so much? drill a million more holes in the base and give it space for another fan. 17" or 20" both are nice. come on Apple! Emac makes imac look like such a bad deal. it is crying out for a better Cpu and video card. No reason to keep holding down imac with such poor hardware in todays age of high performance Cpu's & Video cards. give the G4 the Boot!
and its poor fx5200.
The current form factor wouldn't passively displace the added heat, no matter how many holes you add. Okay, that's a lie... If you made it a completely open case (i.e. just one big hole) then it might work, but adding fans means adding noise, and that's just not what the iMac is about.
As usual, though, we can count on DHM for his "gimme, gimme" posts, rather than an analysis of the issues of the iMac. GPUs and CPUs take extra heat. Where's it going to go? You like to say the same things over and over, DHM, but you never answer these questions.
