Originally posted by phillymjs
My love affair with Macs began 11 years ago when I got my first one, an LC. I've had a few others over the years, and since 1996 I've been running a 7600 as my primary machine at home. I've added in a couple G3 upgrades as faster chips were released, and USB, and IDE, and a better video card, but the last couple years I've really been nursing it along, holding out as long as I could for a new Mac that would have equal longevity.
My intent was to buy the killer G5 (with goodies like FireWire 2, USB 2, BlueTooth, etc built in) that everyone expected to be released at MWNY2002. I've been working like a slave this year to rack up a nice bonus to blow on a whole new setup. So what happens? They don't release it at MacWorld, and then after addtional waiting announce lackluster G4 machines, without any of the aforementioned goodies. To add insult to injury, they've trotted out the "all dual processors" business again because Motorola is too inept to keep up in the CPU race with Intel/AMD, and Apple had to do something to save face (which we had seen once before a couple years back). At least now we have Jaguar which can take full advantage of dualies, but still... The improvements over the previous generation Power Macs are really not there. The adoption of newer standards like USB 2, faster FireWire, and BlueTooth hasn't come to pass, and I don't want to lay out big bucks on a machine and then have to buy a PCI card or USB dongle to add stuff that should've been there in the first place.
The terrible timing comes in because for the last 10 years I've made a career out of supporting Macs, and my clients are starting to get antsy about upgrading to OS X. I've maintained that the best way for them to go about it is to stick with OS 9.x until all their must-have apps are X-native or at least carbonized, so they won't have to deal with the kludge that is Classic. This was also supposed to buy me time to acquire a new Mac that would replace that 7600 and run OS X as Apple intended-- and time to learn by immersion all the stuff that I'd need to know to effectively support OS X at client sites. So now I'm in a jam because I need to buy a new whiz-bang machine, but what Apple's offering isn't whiz-bang enough. I know that if I bite the bullet and buy one of the dual G4s, the machine I wanted will be announced in January. And if I keep holding out, my ability to serve my clients will suffer.
I've got an iBook 500 that runs Jaguar pretty well, but I need that 'immersion' factor... I need the machine I sit in front of from 6pm until bedtime to run OS X, and not by using some hack like XPostFacto. One of my clients chose to ignore my 'wait as long as you can' advice, made me roll out 10.1.x, and they've paid the price in lost productivity. To make matters worse, they are still using older versions of apps that have carbonized/native versions, and those older versions don't always play nice in Classic. They're seeing all kinds of problems, looking to me to fix them, and all I can do most times is shrug and start combing Google or The Missing Manual in search of an answer, because I'm not up to speed yet. If I absolutely have to, I'll try to find a used Quicksilver or slightly older G4 on eBay to tide me over, but that is not an optimum solution.
So come on, Apple-- get on the damned stick and put out a machine worthy of the money I'm dying to give you for it. Tell Motorola to kiss off, and find a company who can provide good, competitive CPUs in a timely manner-- and do it fast, because those inept morons are costing you mindshare with the MHz/GHz-obsessed majority, and even starting to erode staunch Apple loyalists. My career is riding on you, Apple. I don't want to be an MCSE and spend my life repairing virus damage and fixing 0wn3d IIS boxes. Please, please save me from that! 🙂
~MJS
