The dual 1 GHz G4 is definitely going to be pretty fast, but not $2999 fast. Maybe I haven't used one, but I've played around on Quicksilvers and PCs with Athlon XPs/Pentium 4s, and I can tell you that the PCs are fast. I think we tend to underestimate Intel and AMD. A problem I see with the new towers are a few system bottlenecks. It's also a little annoying to see the GeForce 4 in an MX variant. Give us the goods, NV25. Apple won't go anywhere if they brag about high margins, having a low market share. PCs continue to get faster/cheaper at the same time, while Motorola has put as at a stagnant pace as far as technology is concerned. My feeling is that Intel has a lot of resources/utilities that help them create faster processors and fab them. AMD is primarily a chip maker as well. Motorola is not, and they don't make it their #1 concern. On paper, they know how to make some awesome chips architecturally, but can't fab the things worth a damn. When you're competing against 2 companies that are primarily concerned with making microprocessors vs. a company that ignores Apple and makes light of their cell phones and embedded products, you are at a huge disadvantage. I don't understand why it is so hard for Apple to contract another company to fab Motorola's designs for them, since they can't seem to. I'm sure that IBM would love to kill Intel.
I know that the Pentium 4 is not a great processor, but we downgrade it too much. With Northwood it's turning into a viable processor that will test AMD's offerings. The Athlon XP is a great processor. We chastise Intel, when Motorola was the one with no speed increase for 18 months.
Performance is always going to be the biggest measure of a computer. Applications for the computer will continue to need faster and faster hardware to reach it's peak. Without these things, games software graphics will all be bottlenecked from the system's hardware. How bout a render that takes 25 minutes? Wouldn't 3D animators much rather prefer 5? And don't we want to bring things into the mainstream market that once weren't possible? This all requires better, smarter, faster technology.
You can bet that OS X for x86 would have me building an Athlon XP 2000+ with DDR333 mobo, etc.
I think that most of the people here make good arguments. Apple makes some great stuff, but lack other basic sh!t. They especially need to get their acts together with the whole motorola thing. But all the ranting on these boards doesn't get anything done. If we want Apple to change, we have to be proactive.
I think we should band together, as ethusiasts, and buy a significant chunk of Apple stock (AAPL). Then, come the investor meetings, we flood them with suggestions. They can't possibly ignore us if we own a noticeable portion of the company. Money talks, company listens. Each person can buy as much as they like, but together we should have a big portion. When they actually hear the mass of suggestions/criticisms, from people who have a financial interest in the company, they will listen.
[QB]Same thing with OS X—they did a nice job of putting a pretty GUI on someone else's operating system...I can't say it's revolutionary. It was way overdue. Remember Copland?[QB]<hr></blockquote>
exactly, companies have been making unix easy to use for years, the market for an os with the power of unix and the beauty and ease of use of the mac is so saturated i really don't know what jobs was thinking, and all those apple engineers! what ego's on those guys, trying to take credit for os x- it was there all along!
Junkyard, you have made some good points. When racing against the competition, to the great unwashed masses the Mhz race is important. But this reminds me of an old saying: never argue with an idiot, because he will drag you down to his level then beat you with experience. The problem with the Mhz race is that Apple cannot win.
What Apple should do is let intel and amd have their little dash for the stars saying "we are the fastest", "no we are the fastest" and so on. Apple does not need to get involved. When people ask what processor it uses, they can answer: it uses the Apollo G4+/G5/Quad Vectras with double overhead cams.
Of course people will ask: but how fast does it go? Answer: Mac runs a 7455 running at 15Gflops (or whatever). People have no idea what Mhz mean and at the end of the day they could be told anything by Wintel sellers and they would believe it. What they want to hear is a big number so they think they are getting the best. Because they don't know what any of it means.
Macs are more than powerful enough for 90% of the professional markets. As I said, we run some pretty intensive data crunching, and the Macs we have are pretty suped up. But no-one is waiting around for 25mins for a render. If anyone is in a situation where they are doing those kinds of animation or 3D rendering, maybe they should start looking at a mainframe. Get those renders down to 2 secs. Are SGI units still around?
We get hotshot Wintel salesmen coming in every month trying to show us how rip roaring fast their new 2.657843Ghz PC is and why we should swap from Mac to Win, but you stack any Wintel machine against our Mac machines and, in a word, they can't cut the mustard, and Wintel salesman slinks off until next month.
Anyway, that's enough of my mindless ramblings. What are people's thoughts about this? (Don't flame me too much, I'm new to this)
[quote]Excuse me? Apple perfected the Pioneer Superdrive by adding incredible software to it. Apple is the only company that makes such capable software for free. The G4 makes encoding the DVD footage so much faster than can be done on any PC.<hr></blockquote>
Did you read my post? I said the software was great, but the hardware wasn't anything special.
[quote]You have it all wrong, its a combination of hardware and software that delivers a powerful experience and useful technology.<hr></blockquote>
This may have been a big deal four years ago, but after using Windows XP I can say it's a very viable alternative to the Mac OS...it's not perfect, but neither is OS X. I love the Mac OS, but OS X has not impressed me as much as you, clearly. I don't love Windows XP, but it's not as horrible as you make it out to be.
[quote]Firewire is really nice, indeed. Airport is a Lucent development that Apple took and you guessed it, made it useful. OS X is someone else's? Who's? Why cant you say its revolutionary? Because its specifications were already known? The present now will later be past. The first one now wil later be last, for the times they are a 'changin.<hr></blockquote>
When people realized that Copland would never make it, Apple started looking for some already made OSes that they could Mac-ify to replace the aging classic architecture. They were considering Sun, BeOS, NeXTStep, and *gasp* Windows NT. They decided on NeXT...and they turned it into a Mac OS and here we have it. It's a good OS, but by no means revolutionary. As I said before, it brought long overdue elements to the MacOS like protected memory, etc that were standard in other OSes. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. Same with Airport. The fact that Apple made someone else's technology usable is revolutionary?
[quote]Really? 150,000 iMac orders doesnt seem to be nailed to me.<hr></blockquote>
Oh it doesn't? What side are you on anyway?
[quote]A great last financial quarter. The iPod. The iBook. The Powerbook. What are you talking about? <hr></blockquote>
Let's see, Apple made 36M last quarter. The quarter before that they made 66M. Revenues and profit are the worst they've had since Q4 '00. Great quarter huh?
<strong>Is it just me or did you copy that right from an Apple ad? </strong><hr></blockquote>
i must have, god knows i can't think on my own. if you're not impressed by os x then you really don't need the power it offers over other operating systems, it sounds like you would be fine with windows xp, millions of people are
Many people here such as tigerwoods and junkyard dawg have it in a nutshell. However, it is such a shame that so many apple apologists are paving the way for apple complacency and inevitable demise.
Face it. The Power Mac line just doesn't deserve to have the Power moniker.
Its not about Mhz. We know that. But apple is supposdely after market share and the fact is that the Mhz=Myth argument cuts no ice in the windows world - you know the one that apple hopes to wrest market share from?
I have been guilty of being an aplogist too. I believed all the crap about how glorious the move from 68k to PPC would be. How it would usher in a new era where macs would be untouchable for performance.
I believed the second big proclomation that OS X would send us to new heights again (Photoshop?, Quark? macromedia?)
Now I no longer accept what apple puts out with blind faith. I care about apple and the mac and want to have it around for decades to come. The current G4 range does nothing to help secure that. The last PMac I bought was a G4 400 AGP. It will be the last until the G5 (unless they hamper that with crap ram and cut down nVidia cards).
At work we have 15 of them. Try telling my paymasters that we should replace them with more macs when all the main software (and more - MAX anyone?) is available for XP on PCS that to their way of thinking represents more bang for bucks.
We used to buy macs at work with no question becuase it was generally accepted that multimedia pros all use top end macs. Now no one believes that any more.
If my bosses opt for 15 PCs, that about 50,000 gbpounds lost for apple. extrapolate that across the globe and where will the future R&D budget come from to develop more insanely great macs?
I love macs (the new imac has finally won me over on its looks - I at first thought it was butt ugly) and always will. My students (people apple should be moving heaven and earth to court) who don't have them think they suck: slow, underpowered, old technology, overpriced - they're the next generation of computer buyers and would be mac fanatics. Where will apple turn to now? more importantly, who will apple turn to now?
My G4 400 is a fabulous machine (except for 3D rendering and video when its a dog) and I truly enjoy the experience of being sat at my mac. I just wish I felt there would be more macs to come.
BTW I never thought apple would fold during the so called dark days - now I'm not so sure.
The PowerMac line if it were a PC would be a "midrange" machine at best priced in the 1100- 2000 range. certainly not a Professional machine priced like a workstation.
Face it, Apple may not be able to be the leader in processor performance but they haven't shown the desire to make up for it through lower pricing and/or enhanced all around features/performance.
Comments
What I was referring to when I said 'I bet it is optomized for Mac OS X' was the GeForce 4. Not Quake 3 Beta. Just needed to clear that up.
BTW, I stand corrected on the Apollo. I was pleasantly surprised to see that MacCentral article this morning.
I know that the Pentium 4 is not a great processor, but we downgrade it too much. With Northwood it's turning into a viable processor that will test AMD's offerings. The Athlon XP is a great processor. We chastise Intel, when Motorola was the one with no speed increase for 18 months.
Performance is always going to be the biggest measure of a computer. Applications for the computer will continue to need faster and faster hardware to reach it's peak. Without these things, games software graphics will all be bottlenecked from the system's hardware. How bout a render that takes 25 minutes? Wouldn't 3D animators much rather prefer 5? And don't we want to bring things into the mainstream market that once weren't possible? This all requires better, smarter, faster technology.
You can bet that OS X for x86 would have me building an Athlon XP 2000+ with DDR333 mobo, etc.
[ 01-29-2002: Message edited by: TigerWoods99 ]</p>
I think we should band together, as ethusiasts, and buy a significant chunk of Apple stock (AAPL). Then, come the investor meetings, we flood them with suggestions. They can't possibly ignore us if we own a noticeable portion of the company. Money talks, company listens. Each person can buy as much as they like, but together we should have a big portion. When they actually hear the mass of suggestions/criticisms, from people who have a financial interest in the company, they will listen.
[QB]Same thing with OS X—they did a nice job of putting a pretty GUI on someone else's operating system...I can't say it's revolutionary. It was way overdue. Remember Copland?[QB]<hr></blockquote>
exactly, companies have been making unix easy to use for years, the market for an os with the power of unix and the beauty and ease of use of the mac is so saturated i really don't know what jobs was thinking, and all those apple engineers! what ego's on those guys, trying to take credit for os x- it was there all along!
please
What Apple should do is let intel and amd have their little dash for the stars saying "we are the fastest", "no we are the fastest" and so on. Apple does not need to get involved. When people ask what processor it uses, they can answer: it uses the Apollo G4+/G5/Quad Vectras with double overhead cams.
Of course people will ask: but how fast does it go? Answer: Mac runs a 7455 running at 15Gflops (or whatever). People have no idea what Mhz mean and at the end of the day they could be told anything by Wintel sellers and they would believe it. What they want to hear is a big number so they think they are getting the best. Because they don't know what any of it means.
Macs are more than powerful enough for 90% of the professional markets. As I said, we run some pretty intensive data crunching, and the Macs we have are pretty suped up. But no-one is waiting around for 25mins for a render. If anyone is in a situation where they are doing those kinds of animation or 3D rendering, maybe they should start looking at a mainframe. Get those renders down to 2 secs. Are SGI units still around?
We get hotshot Wintel salesmen coming in every month trying to show us how rip roaring fast their new 2.657843Ghz PC is and why we should swap from Mac to Win, but you stack any Wintel machine against our Mac machines and, in a word, they can't cut the mustard, and Wintel salesman slinks off until next month.
Anyway, that's enough of my mindless ramblings. What are people's thoughts about this? (Don't flame me too much, I'm new to this)
Cheers,
MarkL
Uh oh...
[quote]Excuse me? Apple perfected the Pioneer Superdrive by adding incredible software to it. Apple is the only company that makes such capable software for free. The G4 makes encoding the DVD footage so much faster than can be done on any PC.<hr></blockquote>
Did you read my post? I said the software was great, but the hardware wasn't anything special.
[quote]You have it all wrong, its a combination of hardware and software that delivers a powerful experience and useful technology.<hr></blockquote>
This may have been a big deal four years ago, but after using Windows XP I can say it's a very viable alternative to the Mac OS...it's not perfect, but neither is OS X. I love the Mac OS, but OS X has not impressed me as much as you, clearly. I don't love Windows XP, but it's not as horrible as you make it out to be.
[quote]Firewire is really nice, indeed. Airport is a Lucent development that Apple took and you guessed it, made it useful. OS X is someone else's? Who's? Why cant you say its revolutionary? Because its specifications were already known? The present now will later be past. The first one now wil later be last, for the times they are a 'changin.<hr></blockquote>
When people realized that Copland would never make it, Apple started looking for some already made OSes that they could Mac-ify to replace the aging classic architecture. They were considering Sun, BeOS, NeXTStep, and *gasp* Windows NT. They decided on NeXT...and they turned it into a Mac OS and here we have it. It's a good OS, but by no means revolutionary. As I said before, it brought long overdue elements to the MacOS like protected memory, etc that were standard in other OSes. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. Same with Airport. The fact that Apple made someone else's technology usable is revolutionary?
[quote]Really? 150,000 iMac orders doesnt seem to be nailed to me.<hr></blockquote>
Oh it doesn't? What side are you on anyway?
[quote]A great last financial quarter. The iPod. The iBook. The Powerbook. What are you talking about? <hr></blockquote>
Let's see, Apple made 36M last quarter. The quarter before that they made 66M. Revenues and profit are the worst they've had since Q4 '00. Great quarter huh?
[quote]http://www.apple.com/
Have a nice day. <hr></blockquote>
Let's see, what's the cheapest computer I can get that has some internal expansion? Let's see...$1500? No...$1600. Very competitive.
[quote]the power of unix and the beauty and ease of use of the mac<hr></blockquote>
Is it just me or did you copy that right from an Apple ad?
<strong>
Maybe if Apple had competitive hardware, we wouldn't complain.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Hey, if you don't mind, I'm gonna make that my new sig. Good points, all around.
-mithral
<strong>Is it just me or did you copy that right from an Apple ad?
i must have, god knows i can't think on my own. if you're not impressed by os x then you really don't need the power it offers over other operating systems, it sounds like you would be fine with windows xp, millions of people are
... i bought my first mac because it had superior hardware, i'll buy my second because it has superior software
Why is it that...... this was posted in Future Hardware <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />
[ 01-29-2002: Message edited by: janitor ]</p>
Face it. The Power Mac line just doesn't deserve to have the Power moniker.
Its not about Mhz. We know that. But apple is supposdely after market share and the fact is that the Mhz=Myth argument cuts no ice in the windows world - you know the one that apple hopes to wrest market share from?
I have been guilty of being an aplogist too. I believed all the crap about how glorious the move from 68k to PPC would be. How it would usher in a new era where macs would be untouchable for performance.
I believed the second big proclomation that OS X would send us to new heights again (Photoshop?, Quark? macromedia?)
Now I no longer accept what apple puts out with blind faith. I care about apple and the mac and want to have it around for decades to come. The current G4 range does nothing to help secure that. The last PMac I bought was a G4 400 AGP. It will be the last until the G5 (unless they hamper that with crap ram and cut down nVidia cards).
At work we have 15 of them. Try telling my paymasters that we should replace them with more macs when all the main software (and more - MAX anyone?) is available for XP on PCS that to their way of thinking represents more bang for bucks.
We used to buy macs at work with no question becuase it was generally accepted that multimedia pros all use top end macs. Now no one believes that any more.
If my bosses opt for 15 PCs, that about 50,000 gbpounds lost for apple. extrapolate that across the globe and where will the future R&D budget come from to develop more insanely great macs?
I love macs (the new imac has finally won me over on its looks - I at first thought it was butt ugly) and always will. My students (people apple should be moving heaven and earth to court) who don't have them think they suck: slow, underpowered, old technology, overpriced - they're the next generation of computer buyers and would be mac fanatics. Where will apple turn to now? more importantly, who will apple turn to now?
My G4 400 is a fabulous machine (except for 3D rendering and video when its a dog) and I truly enjoy the experience of being sat at my mac. I just wish I felt there would be more macs to come.
BTW I never thought apple would fold during the so called dark days - now I'm not so sure.
Face it, Apple may not be able to be the leader in processor performance but they haven't shown the desire to make up for it through lower pricing and/or enhanced all around features/performance.
Click through to continue discussion.