[IFLY2HIGH]

So what do you think is still missing? I think apple has done a very nice job on the new design. We now have DDR Memory that people was putting up a big fuss about last time, even up to two gigs. We have a faster cpus, all in a dual configuration, I think that is awesome. Drive bays that can easily acept another cd-rom, or optical device. Now you can pop four hard drives into the system without the addition of an ATA card now, I personally like. Faster system bus. Looks like one less fan, but I see one now on the door, and a gigantic cpu heat sink. I would of opted for a fan on the back myself especially if you put four 7200 rpm hardrives on it.

Does 10.2 come preloaded yet though? I saw something about August 24th, but I feel it's been out long enough to come preloaded by now.

[tooki]

Right on the apple.com main page it says in bold "Preloaded with Mac OS X v10.2 Jaguar".

tooki

[climber]

I think the biggest complaint will be the half baked DDR. If the FSB is still not DDR like most are speculating.

The other compaint will be the relatively small increase in processor speed compared to the rest of the computer world.

[IFLY2HIGH]

Originally posted by tooki:
Right on the apple.com main page it says in bold "Preloaded with Mac OS X v10.2 Jaguar".

tooki

Opps, never read down that far before clicking the picture.

[jguidroz]

Well even though you can have 4 hard drives internally, two will be on ATA100 and the other two are on ATA66. That is just plain ridiculous right there. No update with USB 2.0 or the second generation of firewire.

The two 5.25 bays are cool and up to 2.0Gb of ram is great too.

This update keeps looking like a slight refresh to generate sales while a bigger and better update is on the way in the next few months, maybe around January(or at least, I think, a lot of people hope).

[misc]

I myself don't like the design of the case very much. I would also like more expansion options. More PCI slots, more optical drive slots.. but thats just me..

[milhous]

I'm betting that new features like Firewire2, FSB and what else will be held off until the G5 at MWSanFrancisco. This is where we'll trully seem some innovation. With shipping delays as long as two months for the high-end models, there can't possibly be another G4 revision by the end of this year. MWSanFrancisco is going to be a dynamite show, IMHO.

The new case design is abhorrent and it makes me want to love my Quicksilver even more. Although it is nice that they offer 2 5.25" bays.

[foamy]

Besides the 1.25's not shipping for an eternity, the button bar on the PM page is absolutely horrible.



Am I the only one that finds that buttonbar just terrible?

[jcarr]

I'm not too thrilled with the new case design, but it may grow on me.

Personally, I don't see the need for dual optical drives. Sure when combo drives were expensive, a DVD-ROM and CD-RW drive is a good solution, but now combos, and SuperDrives for that matter are not all that expensive. Furthermore, the second optical drive bay seems to have precluded the BTO Zip option. If I had my druthers, I'd rather have a Zip BTO option than a second optical drive.

Perhaps SONY will ship a 5.25" MiniDV tape drive. It would be nice to simply insert a MiniDV tape into my tower and copy clips to my drive array for editing.

[DESTRO]

i want to be able to get OSX server as an option. hey Xserve is great, but i cant afford that AND a rack to put the bastard in. the speed bump is about what i expected, not predicted mind you. a dual ADC graphics card is on my wish list, the list of things i want Nvidea to make. i think the ADC to DVI thing is a little ghetto, but hey. why cant we take the keyboard off the options, i have three of those damn things in my closet, in the distant future they will be uncovered by some archeologist, still in my closet. now that im done writing it seems my beef is more about the apple store. back on track, no firewire2. usb2 is crap as far as im concerned, it can wait. sure the FSB isnt DDR, but apple dosnt make the G4 chips now do they. more 5.25" bays, does anyone else have the need http://www.pcmods.com/details.asp?prodID=230 for "hot" swap-able HardDrives? mount right up front, in an all aluminum case. im sick of the current design. looks like i might be waiting even longer for a new tower, not that i REALLY NEED one this ones a little over 6 months.

[DaedalusDX]

Originally posted by misc:
I myself don't like the design of the case very much. I would also like more expansion options. More PCI slots, more optical drive slots.. but thats just me..

why on earth would anyone need more than 2 optical drives?

Heck... i find it hard to imagine the use for more than 1.

So with the new Powermacs you can burn a DVD while WATCHING a DVD.... or do a direct copy from one CD to another CD....

What more do you want to do? burn 2 cds at once while watching a DVD? do iDVD, a direct copy and play Quake at the same time?

c'mon... 2 is enough... heck, i wasn't complaining when there was just 1.

only question... what happens when you press the Eject key on the keyboard....

[DaedalusDX]

Originally posted by milhous:
I'm betting that new features like Firewire2, FSB and what else will be held off until the G5 at MWSanFrancisco. This is where we'll trully seem some innovation. With shipping delays as long as two months for the high-end models, there can't possibly be another G4 revision by the end of this year. MWSanFrancisco is going to be a dynamite show, IMHO.

The new case design is abhorrent and it makes me want to love my Quicksilver even more. Although it is nice that they offer 2 5.25" bays.

I hope you're right, but i think it may be too wishful a thought for january.

I have a Quicksilver... i don't think the new one is all that bad. I'd say the Quicksilver and the new G4 is about the same on the ugly scale, but hey i stuff it under my desk.

[mac freak]

Perhaps the keyboard they ship with has an eject key split in 2?

[DNA man]

I am glad to see a speed bump, the new case is not up to the usual standard but my real questions are...

Why not a 2Mb cache across the line?

Why not a superdrive across the line? These are 'pro' Macs!

[::maroma::]

Originally posted by foamy:
Besides the 1.25's not shipping for an eternity, the button bar on the PM page is absolutely horrible.



Am I the only one that finds that buttonbar just terrible?

I agree..that's the first thing that hit me when I went to that page. Those drop shadows are not good. I hope someone fixes that.

As for my complaints...I have no money and won't until next year, so I don't really care what these are like. I for one like the case design, it's refreshing. I also agree that this is a minor update to the G4 family, and we should be seeing major revision or even G5's by MWSF.

[CubeWannaB]

Originally posted by foamy:
Besides the 1.25's not shipping for an eternity, the button bar on the PM page is absolutely horrible.



Am I the only one that finds that buttonbar just terrible?

Very ugly. But so is the new case. I think the new case is puketastic. Notice that it lacks a sexy name? I'll give it one: IckSilver.

This is the first time that I can remember an Apple machine getting more ugly than the last version. Sure, the iMac and new iMac were weird, but it was obvious that someone with a sense of design has slaved over making the thing consistent in a particular style. This design looks like someone tacked a piece of metal in front of the old case. Why? Why is there metal on an all plastic case? Dear god that's ugly.

[DaedalusDX]

Originally posted by DNA man:
I am glad to see a speed bump, the new case is not up to the usual standard but my real questions are...

Why not a 2Mb cache across the line?

Why not a superdrive across the line? These are 'pro' Macs!

explain why its not up to the usual standard? Just in LOOKS you mean? Its certainly a whole lot better designed from a airflow perspective and in functionality.

why not 2mb? cutting corners i guess. i guess they figured when they were selling the single processor 933, it came with 2MB of L3 cache...

Now that they're doubling up, the midrange model is 2x 1ghz with 1 MB on each processor for a total of 2 MB.

the top end still has 2MB per processor for 4MB total, same as the previous top end...

the low end dual 867 now has 1 MB per processor, which is a significant improvement from NO L3 cache for the single 800 last revision.

Why not superdrive? i don't know. Again, probably cutting corners.... cutting corners, and trying to juice their customers... Apple's probably going to have some trouble selling that when they have an eMac with a superdrive at $1499, but i think the dual procs and ddr ram will sell the Powermacs still.

[kupan787]

Originally posted by mac freak:
Perhaps the keyboard they ship with has an eject key split in 2?

How did the eject key work if you had a CD in and a zip disk in on the old systems? Which got ejected first? Maybe you have to hold down option or control to deal with the second drive?

Ben

[bseely]

I think the new macs head in the right direction, but still are missing some serious performance enhancement possibilities:

Dual processors on two buses - why bother with two processors if they're sharing the FSB like in the new Power Mac's? That will hobble performance quite a bit...

167mhz FSB - why not true DDR? I mean P4's will soon be shipping with 533mhz buses or faster....

Why not all ATA100 or ATA133?!? What a waste...

-blake

[DaedalusDX]

Originally posted by bseely:
I think the new macs head in the right direction, but still are missing some serious performance enhancement possibilities:

Dual processors on two buses - why bother with two processors if they're sharing the FSB like in the new Power Mac's? That will hobble performance quite a bit...

167mhz FSB - why not true DDR? I mean P4's will soon be shipping with 533mhz buses or faster....

Why not all ATA100 or ATA133?!? What a waste...

-blake

Apple's current implementation of dual processors works fine... it doesn't hobble performance as much as you'd think, and generally, it gets to about 50-80% better performance out of the DP systems.

the question of lack of a double pumped FSB stems from a limitation of the 7455 procesor. Motorola simply didn't build the processor to sit on a DDR bus, so the xserve "hack" was needed just to get DDR on a powerpc architechure.

why not ATA 100 or 133... cutting corners... blah... typical.

Still, ATA 100 is very respectable, and its generally accepted that 133 doesn't give a significant boost over 100

[echoes]

Originally posted by jcarr:
Personally, I don't see the need for dual optical drives.

They're actually very useful. They allow you to do things like CD to CD copies and if your doing a HDD to CD burn you can use the second optical drive for whatever -- watching a DVD, playing a game, loading up some software.

[mac freak]

Well, I know that when I press the "eject" key on my DP450, it simultanesouly ejects anything in the built-in DVD drive AND my external USB burner. If it works this way for these new PM's, it's really quite a terrible implementation.

I still think they should just split the key in two, or put EJECT BUTTONS on the PM case itself.

[misc]

Originally posted by DaedalusDX:


why on earth would anyone need more than 2 optical drives?

only question... what happens when you press the Eject key on the keyboard....

I'm a hacker, I would probably put fans, speakers, volume control, or anything else I could fit in there. But, as I said.. thats just me.... I'm guessing the eject key does the same thing it does for my imac with a external cd-rw, it will eject all the disks not in use.

[osiris]

To heck with the EJECT key, bring back the keyboard POWER key!

[hmurchison2001]

IS the MPX bus is still limited. We're only getting DDR speeds to the system controller.

ATA 66/100 BAH. There's not an ATA-Drive out there that can saturate even 66MBps ATA. So it's a nonissue. Stick with what works until Serial ATA drives are readily available.

Duallies at the entry level are nice. I think I prefer better multitasking rather than absolute speed.

Sound I/O thanks Apple. About time you killed that USB audio nonsense.

Two optical drives. Would be cool but Apple's burners are 16x. Bleh..I'll pass. Looks like these new boxes might take some 3rd party bezels. I'd rather have a 2.3GB optical drive below the DVD-R.

OSX is going to rock on these machines. I wish I was in the market but I have another 6 months to wait.

[nebben123]

Apple needs to do something about the processor speeds. This is getting ridiculous. On the Power Mac page on Apple's site, they brag that the new DUAL 867MHZ model is twice as fast as the original SINGLE 500MHZ. What?!? It should be a lot faster than that! I mean, we're talking about combined 1.74GHZ, vs 500MHZ, not even including the faster memory bus etc. It should be 3 or 4x as fast, not just 2x. WHAT A JOKE APPLE!

I'm a Mac user and supporter for over 10 years now, and it's starting to feel like the joke is on me. Apple please make me a Mac that will blow me away, I haven't upgraded in 4 years to a new Mac because they just don't seem worth it. Where is USB 2? Where is Firewire 2? Where are the ports on the front of the Mac? COME ON!


Ben

[SMacTech]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:

ATA 66/100 BAH. There's not an ATA-Drive out there that can saturate even 66MBps ATA. So it's a nonissue. Stick with what works until Serial ATA drives are readily available.

Duallies at the entry level are nice. I think I prefer better multitasking rather than absolute speed.

OSX is going to rock on these machines. I wish I was in the market but I have another 6 months to wait.

So true about the ATA spec not at 133. Check out Tom's hardware for latest on serial ATA. Same performance a parallel, but it is still early.
I am going to get a dual gigger. I don't think a 25% increase in speed is too much to ask from MOT

[DaedalusDX]

Originally posted by nebben123:
Apple needs to do something about the processor speeds. This is getting ridiculous. On the Power Mac page on Apple's site, they brag that the new DUAL 867MHZ model is twice as fast as the original SINGLE 500MHZ. What?!? It should be a lot faster than that! I mean, we're talking about combined 1.74GHZ, vs 500MHZ, not even including the faster memory bus etc. It should be 3 or 4x as fast, not just 2x. WHAT A JOKE APPLE!

I'm a Mac user and supporter for over 10 years now, and it's starting to feel like the joke is on me. Apple please make me a Mac that will blow me away, I haven't upgraded in 4 years to a new Mac because they just don't seem worth it. Where is USB 2? Where is Firewire 2? Where are the ports on the front of the Mac? COME ON!


Ben

mhz myth still holds ALOT of water. The new breed of PowerPC G4s have longer pipelines than the original G4 500, so there. That's why the performance isn't 1:1 with the processor speed. They're just trying to make fools who see nothing but the processor speed happy.

And remember that doubling up a processor does not make it EFFECTIVELY 1.7 GHZ. the processor isn't the only aspect that determines performance. Doubling a chip up doesn't mean 100% faster... it might mean between 50% and 80% faster than just 1 chip because there are also factors like bus speed, amount of multithreading, and memory performance to consider.


Give me a break... you people will never be happy. First of all, Firewire2... 1394b, the controller chips haven't even started going into fabrication... the spec is long done though...

AND HONESTLY... what the h*ll are you going to do with a 1394b port on your Powermac at this point?!?!? bragging rights? at this time, THAT'S ALL IT WOULD DO. No one has a 1394b product out there yet...

The new powermacs are FAST. are you trying to dispute that from what you read on a web site and the numbers you see?

[waffffffle]

I'm all for the 2 optical drives. I've never been a power mac person in the past, but after spending a lot of this summer working in Photoshop I now am in need of some serious speed. I'm thinking I'll get the new low end machine and put a really fast CD-ROM drive in the second optical bay for fast CD ripping and CD copying. I right now have a Performa 6400 with 2 optical drives (a burner in the top bay) and I use it all the time to copy CDs. That's pretty much the only purpose it serves because to copy CDs on my iBook is a pain since it requires making an image first.

I just think they should have put those bays on the top of the machine like before, and then the speaker on the bottom. It looks wierd to have everything in those places.

[neilw]

I can't help wondering what, if any, non-server applications will benefit from the Xserve-like memory architecture. Can anyone come up with any?

I could sort of see the benefit in the Xserve, but in a personal system it seems to offer so little, other than being able to brag about having DDR.

I imagine that the FSB boost from 133 to 167 will help a little, though.

[rambo47]

So, I've been wondering how much faster true DDR RAM would be vs. the "hacked" approach we now have. If we has a true 333 MHz system bus, about how much faster would the PowerMac run something like Final Cut Pro or Photoshop? Anybody care to speculate as to what percentage faster?

[osiris]

Originally posted by rambo47:
So, I've been wondering how much faster true DDR RAM would be vs. the "hacked" approach we now have. If we has a true 333 MHz system bus, about how much faster would the PowerMac run something like Final Cut Pro or Photoshop? Anybody care to speculate as to what percentage faster?

Bare Feats posted this test with Xserve (MP & SP) vs the old Dual G4. In most cases, the Dual G4 beat out the DDR'd Xserve. Maybe today's releases will be a hair faster, but not much more I suspect.

Bare Feats Comparison

[nana4]

Originally posted by hmurchison2001:
ATA 66/100 BAH. There's not an ATA-Drive out there that can saturate even 66MBps ATA. So it's a nonissue. Stick with what works until Serial ATA drives are readily available.

There is an issue because ATA100 doesn't support drives larger than 128GB (137). Unless the controller firmware has been rewritten to provide LBA48 support. Given that the Apple site claims 480GB max storage (4*120GB) they have not done this. So that means that the new towers CANNOT access the full capacity of the bigger IDE drives coming to market (i.e. the 160GB MAxtor and 200GB WD).

[Apple Pro Underwear]

USB2? Just get a firewire device.

Firewire2? Firewire 1 is still kickass, not like there are any firewire 2 products.

Superdrive across the line? Some people have no use for a dvd drive recorder. i rarely even use my 40x cdrw, if you included a superdrive i would never use it.

****News Flash****

Apple will never have Mhz speeds comparable to the wintel world. They do an admirable job as is. If you want them to match intel, eye for eye...it's never gonna happen.

They can perhaps solve this problem in the next processor but thats few years off. In the meantime, chill out and realize:

G4 x 2 + Altivec = Niceness

[VRL]

Nothing wrong with it.

[Jim Paradise]

Remember that the bus speed was 133 still on the xServer and that there are other benifits that are more server-oriented from that architecture. The new PowerMacs have a faster bus... might not a be a hell of a lot faster, but at least it's something...

[davechen]

Originally posted by neilw:
[B]I can't help wondering what, if any, non-server applications will benefit from the Xserve-like memory architecture. Can anyone come up with any?

Actually I think this memory architecture could have a noticable affect on lots of things. Quartz Extreme offloads the window compositing to the graphics card, which talks directly to the system controller. So both the CPU's and the graphics card can access memory without saturating its connection. Similarly DMA I/O won't get in the way of the CPU and vice versa.

Sure, a pure CPU/memory task won't get as much bandwidth as you'd like, but for graphics or I/O apps it might work out well.

[legacyb4]

You will have a Mac on OS X that, by all accounts, kicks butt on current hardware with 10.2 and should do even better on these new machines...

Do you *need* USB 2.0? Get a USB 2.0 PCI card then...you will have four slots to play with which should be plenty given the current hardware configuration.

Ports on the front? What in God's name for? The last thing I want is a computer with wires spewing out the front...

Cheers.

Originally posted by nebben123:
Apple needs to do something about the processor speeds. This is getting ridiculous. On the Power Mac page on Apple's site, they brag that the new DUAL 867MHZ model is twice as fast as the original SINGLE 500MHZ. What?!? It should be a lot faster than that! I mean, we're talking about combined 1.74GHZ, vs 500MHZ, not even including the faster memory bus etc. It should be 3 or 4x as fast, not just 2x. WHAT A JOKE APPLE!

I'm a Mac user and supporter for over 10 years now, and it's starting to feel like the joke is on me. Apple please make me a Mac that will blow me away, I haven't upgraded in 4 years to a new Mac because they just don't seem worth it. Where is USB 2? Where is Firewire 2? Where are the ports on the front of the Mac? COME ON!


Ben