hmmmm......
...... some posters seem to take it personally that the magic number "3" hasn't been featured stamped on aluminium boxes lately.
so?
g5 powerbook's are going to be a while.... fine and dandy. my g3/333 still scans pix via the coolscan, attaches them to e-mails and sends them to the world with a minimum of fuss (os9 too...). my new digi camera removes the scanning step (and processing too thank god). oh yeah, it's five years old and has served me well since new. granted warcraft three is a bit of an ask, but possible with a large swag of ram.
sure, i have lusted after a g4 for a while, but haven't been able to justify it, the machine i had still did what it needed to do.
now, i need a bit more, so am pleased the revision has finally been announced. a pair of number two's (not the 1.8's as i have previously stated somehwere on these forums) will soon enter my publishing life. replacing a pair of seriously flakey celeron 500's. i expect the new machines to last between five and ten years. i don't see myself needing more grunt to do the job (in all honesty, a pair of eMacs would 'do' the job). if i expand the biz, i get machines for the new staff. prolly an e-mac will do everything i would need them to do. if all is rosie on the fiscal front, i buy a top-of-the-line-at-the-time g6 (praps?) and they get the g5. either way, it'll be in service to my company.
which is why i buy apple. i buy them once. take care of them and they last me for five years (and counting). i can already see a place for the g3 powerbook (and an original iBook for that matter) that with OS-X installed should serve one of my reps quite well. apple is a BUSINESS CHOICE, pure and simple. i don't see myself as spending extra to buy a mac, rather i save bucketfuls of cash by not having to constantly call the tech-support witchdocters (at uber$ an hour). i am a photojournalist/graphic designer/newpaper publisher. not a techno boffin. i want an OS that i can figure out myself, ergo i do not want you know what. games - sure, i play games. warIII & UT for preference. i can play them on my lappy. ok, yuh its a bit jerky & ya, i have to turn the res settings to "low", but games 'aint why i bought it.
i don't care that the number three hasn't been reached yet. sure as eggs are eggs, it will. if you can wait for it, by all means wait. i have waited the whole g4 era to upgrade my mac. i have waited for the revision before upgrading my legacy win'98 system. i see enough computing grunt on offer, packaged with the friendliest os on the market. a package for which my primary software has been tailored (adobe CS). at a price i can justify. i'll get the 2's, regardless of their lack of a you beaut' cooling system (someone will figure out a way to build an aftermarket one.....) and oooh a whole .5 gig slower (and AUD$1000 more expensive). i have always found the 'one down from the top' model to be the bargain of any powermac line-up and don't see the need to pay $2000- more (i gotta buy two of theses things.....
) for bragging rights.
on the subject of the cooling system - it had to happen sooner or later. the amount of heat generated by modern chips is frightening. the Shuttle-X pc's use heat-pipes. why this sort of thing isn't more widespread is a bit of a surprise, but what the hey the current fan forced method has worked until now. but how much longer? the g4's generated more heat than the g3's, what will the g6/7/8.....'s do? sure, the g6 is prolly 3 or more years away, but it'll be a hot little sucker when it gets here. a p4 generates a huge whack of heat. heat-pipes and liquid-cooling solutions are the obvious way to control this sort of energy when it all becomes too much for air-cooled radiator heat sinks. perhaps this is what will be needed in powerbook g5's. theres a nice little engineering problem to set yourself steve jobs......how do we build a small, efficient, revolutionary liquid cooling system so we can fit a hot revolutionary chip into a little tiny case to keep people who don't max out the grunt of their g4 lappy's happy?
the whole number three vitriol espoused by some posters, who at times sound like they are going to commit suicide because there hasn't been a 3 gig Dual Processor G5 Powermac announced yet is garbage and needless. the whole RISC vs CISC debate is over. raw processor speed is not the only factor in system speed. i'd rather have two 2 gig G5 gruntmasters under the hood than anything short of a four or eight processor sparc-box, which i am in no position to contemplate.
there are a couple of disappointments i have from the revision - 256mb ram in the 1.8's?? - that is pretty lame. 4gb max memory in the 1.8's? - that too is pretty lame. the geoforce graphics card as standard in the 2's?? you beaut' cooling system only in the 2.5's? should at least be a BTO option on the others. i wouldn't mind seeing the faster frontside bus in the 2's either. however, i will forgive apple & steve, as i have forgiven them before. if they release a 30" monitor, i will forgive them to the tune of two of them. i will forgive them as i layout some more cash for a better graphics card and more ram (no more minimun resolution gaming experience for ME!
) because, power is nothing without control. os-x, the apple chipset/mainboard and ibm's little furnace give me the control i want to get my business running better. 3 ghz - wait if you must, i have waited and want these M$ celerons gone. and while you are waiting, please reduce the whingeing. it ain't going to make it come any sooner. what would you have preffered. apple to release an overclocked 2.5 at WWDC, stamping a '3' on it then having "deliver hassles" later on? the g5 iMac won't get here for at least another 6 months either. if we have a g5 powerbook by the time the g6 is announced, fine. it'll still smoke anything else on the market.
