When I saw this comemrical late night during Conan i was pissed. I even came back here after promising myself to get away from Mac rumors. Well this tears it. Let's see what i should say. I few things have me angry:
Some people "know" too much. "The GF4MX is a crap card." You could argue the GF4Ti is better, or that the Radeon9000 gives you more for the price, but you should be more specific. It's better than the GF2MX you get otherwise, how's that for an argument?? For people who don't have as much time as me they should know a little something about architectures of GPUs, nVidia has 3 out right now: GeForce2, GeForce3, and GeForce4 (sorry i forget the nv20 and whatnot codes). The GF2 and 4 come in a few flavours, but the MX is the bottom, and Titanium is the top (Pro and what not is inbetween). The GF4MX is a GF2MX with better ram and clock speed, but it's still a GF2. The GF4Ti (seen in Apple's PowerMac 1st of course) is a new system, it kicks ass (but I still want a Radeon9700 on Jaguar with drivers, that will rule).
"Final Cut Pro" is not pro. Bull, some people are working in really high end positions, and they need to get back to work. But I had an argument about this before and the guy schooled me but still I argue- FCP3 isn't prosumer, some might be able to swallow a $1000 piece of software, but most can't. FCP is also the most used software solution, not some crap from Avid, or the all too popular Premiere. FinalCut Pro is the staple in web, TV, trailers, and is even used for some movies. HD: good point, avid is probably ahead here, but not like Apple is sitting there, they have HD capture cards that work (well) with FCP3, they have computers to handle it, and they built the 23" HD Cinema for HD Editing. Why? Not for cinema, but for TV which is going HD obviously. Eventually FCP will be used for everything, but it's not a prosumer app, nor is it considered one. Is the company editing a $500,000 Cocoa-Cola commercial still considered prosumer? I doubt that somehow.
One of my theories which i'm sure will come true sooner or later- iWeb. An Apple branded web browser, based on a OS X native core, and which would rely entirely on Cocoa and Quartz. Apple can't go on with a 3rd party shipping web browser. MS's is even in the OS code for crying out loud. It'll happen eventually. And it will rule. Why? Because I can't think of anything to add to a web browser, but Apple can. It will definately combine the beauty of OmniWeb, speed of Chimera, and compatability of IE5 (which is oddly the most compatable browser on OSX). I mean for an OS so embedded in the 'net, how can apple not have a web browser. And let's not bring up OpenDoc for those of us who rememeber webDog. Ahh the good old days.
Performace. What is performace mean to you? For me performance is speed where it counts. This means scrolling, OpenGL, PhotoShop, and Quicktime (which runs compressing and Final Cut). A PC can open PhotoShop faster than even a Dual 1.25Ghz Mac, but once you're running it? All bets are off, the PC is gonna die. And if that wasn't enough, obviously with Quartz Extreme (whcih works great on any iMac with the GEFORCE2/4!) and Jaguar the system feels much more responsive (even though my copy is still on the way).
The mac advantage. Why do I put up with a "slower" system? Well in the time i save with all the genious parts of MacOS X such as path names in the window bar, the dock, quicktime integration, drag and drop, and so on and so on I think I'd probably get more done in a day than any PC user with a dual 3GHz OC'ed Xenon. Oh and I have dual displays, that helps me get things faster. I have IE's window on the right, and the report I am supposed to be writing of the left. And It's too bad you can't measure troubbleshooting time. Mac takes 70 seconds to reboot? Then the mac has a 70 second troubbleshooting time 99.99% of the time. PC has a 20 second boot time? Well I bet it's even faster in safe mode, which is good, becase when i go to your house and you've been in safe mode for a week and you can't even USE DirectX and Quake3 i will be there to laugh in your face while you're reformatting.
As for 3D performance I know something has to be up with that. I heard it was classic, i think either that or software rendering. Thank god the mac comes with working OpenGL drivers, i bet they would have botched that up too. But it's impossible because I think my G4 500 when it was new, running the Quake 3 Demo in OS9 (back in '99 guys) on the stock AGP2x Rage128 16MB SDR RAM card probably got around 30fps. Now I have a pimpin' R200 GPU but i digress, the iMac should be able to get about 100fps i think, GF4MX packs a huge whallop for those simple games (no TC&L required, 12MB texture max, simple AI, low polygon count, and so on).
What I guess i'm saying is that speed isn't everything, and even if it is, you make up for it in many more places than a PC gains on the iMac. There are so many reasons to go to a mac NOW, not the other way around. And our laptop LCDs look like GetaWay's desktop ones. So if you have an iMac 14" you're pretty much looking at one of these CowDung4s or whatever they're called.
