G3s are slow, get rid of them
I just recently bought a 700mhz ibook for traveling. I thought that if I maxed out the ram I would be happy until they released a G4 model. I would go with a Ti, but it?s just not quite small enough to call it portable.(I?m a Sony Picturebook owner) The day I bought it the store didn?t have the 512mb upgrade so I had to wait a couple of day?s. With 128mb it was literally unusable, very slow and unresponsive so I turned it off and waited for the 512mb. When I installed the 512mb for a total of 640mb, things defiantly got a lot better. Yet, now that I?ve been playing with it more, I still find it to be poky. My biggest complaint is the 2D video rendering, horrible to be kind. That damn beach ball turns all the time, especially when I?m uploading something using itools. Applications start fast enough, just not as fast as my 600 mhz emulating Intel technology Transmeta processor. I think the ibook does what it was attended for, just not as fast as I would like it. In fact all of Apple products have been that way for about 5 years now. Does what it was attended for, just not very fast. So I wish Apple would move us into the 2002?s, discontinue the G3 and double the speed of the G4. I returned the ibook over the weekend and bought a IBM Thinkpad X23 with a 866mhz processor. Fast little machine, the second I click on any icon the application starts in under 2 seconds. Surfing is twice as fast, and resizing folders is instant. I?ve been a Mac owner for 14 years now but I?m slowly moving over to the intel world, for now it?s just the portables. If after MWNY and nothing comes out worth talking about, my Powermac will be next. A dual 2,400mhz with 2 gigs of memory from Intel for the same money as a dual 1,000mhz with 512mb from Apple is starting to look mighty tempting.
Comments
Now, I just stepped down from a fast G4 with 768 MB of memory running OS 9, so if I haven't noticed a significant speed decrease, I rather doubt it's that bad.
Some people on these boards (Relic, Macasaurus, especially FellowshipChurchiBook, and others I don't remember offhand) seem either to have obtained duds or have bad attitudes. In the absence of direct data, I can't tell which. My guess would be that some iBooks are accidentally stuck at the power-saving speed, through either a hardware or a software glitch.
Not just being sarcastic too: Those are the weak points of Mac, allways have been. If you look one step beyond, to Photoshop performance for example, you'll find that the iBook 700 is very competitive indeed.
2D in the finder should improve with 10.2. Right now it's a whole lot of non-hardware accelerated, carbon molasses. (to show that Carbon could be used for something important, Apple used it in one of it's own key items: Aqua. Me no like.)
Since you already returned it, there is really no point in arguing; you already made your choice and I think you're right. Just use what makes you happiest!
I spend my time in apps, working with high-density content. Text is a word every five bytes, whereas in video editing (which I don't do) a word may be a megabyte or more. Image editing may take dozens of hours of thought and work for a single 500 kb image. A second's delay in going from one page to another just doesn't disturb me, nor does less than thirty starting an app.
The way I look at it, no computer commercially available is more than five times as fast as my computer. Most are less than two. And none can get my work done faster than a Mac. I could stop with the hardware I have right here right now and never upgrade it again (well, up it to 640 MB) and still manage my work for my entire life. I can edit images at 2400 DPI easily. I can scan, print, type, compile, browse the internet, archive old work, and communicate with the world. Of course, since new things will come, I will buy them then. Still, I use my computer intensely, and strangely, the more intensely I use it for work the less powerful relative to the market I find I need it to be.
Macs are made for and by people like me. We're the core. Many of us still use very old Macs, even Classics, alone or with modern Mac, to get the job done. It matters very little to us how our computer stacks up against the ones of next year, or if Intel is half a year or even a year ahead. Buying the PC only gets you a matter of months ahead, if at all, and then you have something that isn't a Mac.
Turn traitor and I turn hostile. Casualty.
[ 07-08-2002: Message edited by: BrianMacOS ]</p>
I think all of us that have used a G3 were struck by how slow the original OS X beta was. It didn't make me want to switch for speed at all, I stayed in 9 most of the time. It has increased in speed as we have moved along. Each update seemed to bring out a little more speed in the OS X interface.
I now own a Dual Ghz G4, speed in the interface(which seems to be the biggest complaint) I don't have an issue
They all probably have valid complaints . We all judge computers differently, based on what we use them for. I used my Macs for many things...digital camera/photoshop,ipod/music,games,email,internet, and just about any other thing i can. I find many of these things easy to do on my mac. I get my speed when it turns on and is easy to use and easy to set up. In the 3 or 4 years i had my B&W G3, I never had one hardware problem.
I guess it's what people want. I want the reliabilty i get from my mac, and speed at which" I "use my computer for me. If any of them feel they need to bitch....let them. I don't have their issues, and I'm thankful <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
[quote]Windows XP is really buggy, the operating system might never go down, but the applications can?t stay up for more then 10 minutes.<hr></blockquote>How is Windows XP buggy? What kind of system? What applications? I don't seem to have any problems keeping my apps up. In fact, I can't recall the last time something crashed.
Now, the iBook is cool, and I would like nothing better than to have a PowerMac sitting on my desk, but am I going to pay upwards of $3'000 just so OS X might not be too sluggish? I think not. Apple needs to seriously revamp their hardware and lower prices if they ever want to achieve any sort of respectable market share.
I think part of the problem is your HDs. The iBook is using those lame 4200 rpm ATI HDs, and OS X is constantly swapping data to and from the HD. I bet if you upgraded your HDs to 5400 rpm ATAs then you would notice a substantial improvement in OS X performance.
The other nice thing is that since you have the 700 Mhz iBook, it will support Quartz Xtreme, so with Jaguar you will get a nice boost in system performance.
But I'd target the HD before blaming the G3. I agree that the iBook's should have G4s, but the G3 is not so bad as you are making it out, certainly not a 700 MHz G3 on a 100 MHz bus. B&W 450 Mhz G3 owners are running OS X without any problems, and the main difference between those towers and your iBooks is the HD speed.
Not sure what a faster HD would run you, but they can't cost all that much...maybe $150 or so??
As far as the hard drive, it's extremely difficult to replace. It'll void your warranty, and Apple Certified Technicians aren't allowed to do it (because even if they do it, it'll still void the warranty). I saw a website that had the full procedures for replacing the optical drive on an old colored iBook. It was very involved and you had to pretty much take the entire thing apart and reassemble it. Replacing the hard drive in that computer is more difficult than replacing the optical drive. And replacing either one is more difficult in the new white ones than in the old colored ones. That should put things in perspective. You could do it, but it would only be recommended if the only other option you had was to sell it (because of the slow speed).
Other thing: Macs are just different. People who want raw speed either buy a top of the line PowerMac or a PC. When you look at it, many PCs aren't quite as cheap as they seem. Sure, the base price is low, but many come with old OSes, a crappy monitor or no monitor, no high-speed peripheral connection, crappy speakers or no speakers, etc. So you add in $200 for a new OS (I saw one that came with Win98, really!), $200 for a monitor (if it didn't come with one), $30 for a USB2 or FireWire PCI card, $50 for some okay speakers, $50 for an internal CD-RW to replace the CD-ROM, $50 to add a DVD-ROM and you've turned a $300 PC into an almost $900 PC. And it still uses "shared graphics memory," a slow Celeron processor, and may need a bit more RAM. Okay, add another $150 for a decent graphics card and $100 for 512 MB more RAM. Now it's $1150. Still cheaper than a Mac, but not as cheap as it seemed originally.
Macs sell themselves. Many like to look at Apple the same way they look at BMW or Mercedes. If BMW didn't advertise, they'd still sell their cars well, because they sell themselves.
I don't know why Mac users are perfectly happy using older machines like 466 MHz iBooks and 350 MHz G3s and even PowerMac 7500s and Quadras and Classics. But I know I'm happy using my 233 MHz PowerBook G3, and I'm happy using a Quadra 950 (33 MHz) and a Performa 630 (33 MHz) and even an SE (8 MHz!). I'm actually more satisfied with the Performa than with any of the other computers I have. My PowerBook doesn't have USB or FireWire and the hard drive is too small. The Quadra has a malfunctioning hard drive. The SE doesn't have a working hard drive either, so I have to boot from a floppy. The thing is, I don't need USB or FireWire on the other computers, but I do need it on the PowerBook. I don't need 10 GB of storage on any of the other computers, but I do need it on the PowerBook. You always want a computer that suits your needs. Mine doesn't, so I'll get a new one soon. Your iBook didn't, so you replaced it. That doesn't make it a bad computer. It just means that for what you do, it wasn't enough. For others, it may be fine. I'll put up with an extra few second delay when I open applications in order to use a Mac.
[ 07-10-2002: Message edited by: Luca Rescigno ]</p>
You also have to remember the iBook and iMac were introduced for consumers looking to do every day computer tasks such as surfing the internet and doing word processing plus your iPhoto and iTunes, not major 30 layer graphics or complex video editing. Overall the iBook is still going to be able to do that but maybe not as the speed you can with a little better Mac. But for my little 5 layer graphics and minor video editing the iBook once again gets the job done. I mainly use my system to run Dreamweaver MX, Office X, browse the net, and it more than handles them with speed, so I guess the iBook just works for me. I also use Adobe Photoshop 7 under VPC Win2000pro to do my graphics for my site and it works.