[bonkers]

Assuming that you have $3500 sitting in your pocket, are there any good reasons (regarding the technology) not to buy the new quad?

[Lateralus]

Not particularly. Especially if you want to keep it for a while.

The best time to buy a Power Mac, as far as longevity, is during changes to the I/O and expansion card bus. The Power Macintosh 75/85/9500 came out in 1995 and is still incredibly useful because it introduced PCI to the Mac, which ended up becoming the industry standard through now. The Power Mac G4 Sawtooth is still incredibly viable because it brought AGP to the Mac, and had native FireWire.

I think it's safe to assume that between the addition of PCIe, and four-cores, of course, this revision of Power Mac G5 is going to prove to be a very good investment for owners.

[OreoCookie]

I agree. It is similar to a Dual G5 of the first generation which still is a venerable machine. It is significantly faster than any other PowerMac to date and this means your machine is up to date longer (i. e. that the fictitious current low-end PowerMac is faster than the quad G5).

[P]

Originally Posted by bonkers

Assuming that you have $3500 sitting in your pocket, are there any good reasons (regarding the technology) not to buy the new quad?

The watercooling - I'm not at all certain how long that is going to keep working. Other than that it looks solid.

[macsfromnowon]

Well... will there be Quad'tels coming out next year?

[Lateralus]

The Power Macs aren't going Intel until 2007.

[awcopus]

If you have $3500 sitting in your pocket, take it out of your pocket and put it in a money market fund or some such thing so that it will earn interest while Apple ramps up production of this behemoth. Once it has been produced in sufficient quantity that you can order it for next day delivery, and assuming that the reviews of it are excellent (and don't reveal significant problems), then seriously evaluate the machine in terms of its performance advantages over the other new Macs using the apps that you need to use.

I am very interested in the Quad, but would like to learn more about how it will perform when Apple's new OS is optimized for the Intel processor-based Macs of the near future. Also, how much of the performance advantage of this machine is linked to the code optimization of Adobe/Macromedia/Apple. I imagine Apple will include specific optimizations for Final Cut Pro Suite apps, my main applications, so that's encouraging. Also, I need to generate for the total cost of ownership of this new machine because it's incompatible with my dual 2.5's 8GB of memory and my Sonnet Tempo PCI-X SATA 4+4 card and my ATTO SCSI card (which I need to create professional DVDs via DLT masters).

For a pro, there are plenty of reasons to sit tight, keep your money making money for you, and then buy the right machine once the air has cleared and the reality distortion field has worn off.

[awcopus]

Oh, and as far as water-cooling is concerned, I haven't had any problems with it. Applecare has me covered for another two years and I'll probably have upgraded my main editing machine at least once by then.

Honestly, the water cooling is probably either going to arrive broken (in which case Apple will replace it or your machine immediately), or arrive problem-free and stay that way.

***

Another thing just occured to me. My main displays are ADC-based using an ATI X800. The new Macs don't have a GPU available that supports ADC. So, that adds the cost of an adapter. A minor d'oh.

[bonkers]

thanks for the comments so far.

i'm crutching along with my comp right now - daily crashes & running slow like molasses. i've been waiting for a regime change like this, but i'm not interested in waiting for the MacTels.

[Leonard]

Originally Posted by awcopus

Another thing just occured to me. My main displays are ADC-based using an ATI X800. The new Macs don't have a GPU available that supports ADC. So, that adds the cost of an adapter. A minor d'oh.

I'm glad I never got a display with an ADC connnector, that's a real pain now that Apple has gone to DVI and dual-DVI.

[pliny]

I want to surf the web, write some email and maybe do some light editing on my digital pics. Will this system work??? Does it support Core Video???

Specifications


* 2.5GHz Quad-core PowerPC G5
* 16GB 533 DDR2 ECC SDRAM- 8x2GB
* 2x500GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm
* QUADRO FX 4500 512MB SDRAM
* Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)
* Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)
* Bluetooth Module + AirPort Extreme Card
* Apple USB Modem
* 16x SuperDrive DL (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
* Fibre Channel PCI Express Card (w/ SFP-SFP cable)
* Apple Keyboard & Mighty Mouse - U.S English
* Mac OS X - U.S. English
* Final Cut Express HD + Motion 2 preinstalled
* Accessory kit
* AppleCare Protection Plan for Power Mac (w/ or w/o Display)
$24,316.00

Or should I just wait for Rev B?

[jamil5454]

That is really a great price for a quad machine. To build a comparable PC like that, two Dual-Core Opterons at 2.4Ghz would set you back over $2,400 alone. Then you'd need the motherboard, hard drive, optical drive, etc...

[Bwa]

Why not? Well, what add-on video cards can be installed in the PCI Express slots? How much are they? These new Macs have 4x and 8x slots...what Mac cards are out there? Presumably nothing.

I use >2 monitors. More video cards is a requirement.

Edit: Looks like Apple is selling a $200 Nvidia 6600 upgrade which appears that it will work in any PCIe slot. This is the only card at store.apple.com I could find for PCIe.

[Cadaver]

Originally Posted by pliny

I want to surf the web, write some email and maybe do some light editing on my digital pics. Will this system work??? Does it support Core Video???

Specifications


* 2.5GHz Quad-core PowerPC G5
* 16GB 533 DDR2 ECC SDRAM- 8x2GB
* 2x500GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm
* QUADRO FX 4500 512MB SDRAM
* Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)
* Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)
* Bluetooth Module + AirPort Extreme Card
* Apple USB Modem
* 16x SuperDrive DL (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
* Fibre Channel PCI Express Card (w/ SFP-SFP cable)
* Apple Keyboard & Mighty Mouse - U.S English
* Mac OS X - U.S. English
* Final Cut Express HD + Motion 2 preinstalled
* Accessory kit
* AppleCare Protection Plan for Power Mac (w/ or w/o Display)
$24,316.00

Or should I just wait for Rev B?

For web surfing and email, you could probably save yourself some money and just go with 16GB of non-ECC RAM.

[jamil5454]

Originally Posted by Cadaver

For web surfing and email, you could probably save yourself some money and just go with 16GB of non-ECC RAM.

You forgot the additional Quadro FX 4500 to support 2 more 30" displays. Screen real-estate is vital when checking email.

[jcadam]

Man, some of you guys are on a fast upgrade cycle. If you're like me, a normal middle-class individual who buys Powermacs for home use for power user/prosumer type stuff, a 4-year upgrade cycle is more realistic. My DP2GHz I purchased about a year ago will last at least until the mactels arrive.

Oh, and these machines are perfectly fine. Why is SJ going to intel again?

[Lateralus]

Originally Posted by jcadam

Why is SJ going to intel again?

The general concensus is that the Intel switch is happening because of the following two reasons;

1) With Freescale/Motorola out of the picture as a serious provider of PowerPCs for Macs, Apple felt boxed in as far as notebooks and small form factor machines go since neither of these types of machines have really been a concern of IBM's when designing processors. IBM's bread and butter is mainframes and servers, which only benefits Apple on the Power Mac front. But with notebooks now outselling desktops, notebooks have become a larger focus for Apple than ever.

2) Steve threw a fit because IBM isn't super-motivated to crank out the custom-tailored 'best processors in the world' that Apple wants. Reason being that as large of a company as Apple is, they still only account for around 5% of IBM's total microprocessor sales. However, development of processors for Apple accounts for a significantly larger percentage of IBM's total R&D for microprocessors (I've heard more than 20%).

I'm opposed to the switch. IBM, on the whole, has had better offerings than Intel across the board on the desktop/server front for years and the PowerPC ISA is far and away a better architecture than x86 is. And with the foundation of OS X being as 'portable' as it is, there's no reason why Apple couldn't continue using IBM's PowerPCs for Xserves and Power Macs and reserve the Intel switch for the only lines that actually need it; the portables.

In fact, I'm hoping they will do so.

[Todd Madson]

I just got my 2.5 G5 dual in June. So I'm good for five or six years.

[hmurchison2001]

The new "Quadra" is damn sexy. I'd hope on it in a NY minute if I had the cash. This is such a good thing for the future. The Mactels will likely have the option for a quad yet we'll have 4MB of L2 cache per die and dissipate only 65 watts versus the 100+ that the DC 2.5 prolly puts out. Yes lucy...things are improving rapido.

Laptops....when Yonah comes out Q1 of '06 we'll be DC for the Powerbooks as well. How sexy is that? Very. Life is good

[dru]

Originally Posted by jcadam

Why is SJ going to intel again?

Because he's not perfect.

He might still be bent at IBM over their refusing to pay an outrageous fee to license 2.0 of the NeXT OS when it took them so long to port 1.0 that 2.0 was ready when they finished! Or maybe he hates Scully and holds a never-ending burr for being kicked out of Apple. The AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) partnership was a Scully thing. He's exorcised pretty much everything from that era: Newton, Taligent's technology, Copland's technology, QuickDraw GX, QuickDraw 3D, Worldscript, pop-up folders, view-as-buttons, spatial-finder, themes, OpenDoc, the list goes on ...

The move to Intel is foolhardy as have been some of the decisions with Mac OS X.

NO ONE has ever survived existing on x86 next to Microsoft. Not Sun, IBM, Be, NeXT... Mac OS X on Intel better be so well tuned it's on maglev rails! I have no idea how they'll be able to avoid the mindless perpetual upgrade cycle.

It's Apple's fault that PowerPC never reached critical mass. Without a vibrant clone industry, there is no way PowerPC would be worth the investment on the low end that Apple represents compared to IBM's investment in the Power2. There's nothing in the PowerPC architecture that means Apple has to abandon it.

[Eug Wanker]

If you don't need it then don't bother. I'd rather put the money toward a better GPU and a copy of Aperture. Too bad the 7800 GT is not yet available however.

I'd probably get the dual 2.3 with 7800 GT if I were in the market for a new Power Mac, although a quad 2.5 with 7800 GT sounds rather sexy too. The quad would be good for video encoding too.

[jamil5454]

I need a real job.

[goMac]

Steve Jobs isn't stupid. He's got a plan. I'd guess he's going to unleash OS X for PC's and damage Microsoft's monopoly. He's been out for blood recently.

[outaru]

Originally Posted by goMac

Steve Jobs isn't stupid. He's got a plan. I'd guess he's going to unleash OS X for PC's and damage Microsoft's monopoly. He's been out for blood recently.

agree... but i think there are some disadvantage in doing that..

[outaru]

Originally Posted by Todd Madson

I just got my 2.5 G5 dual in June. So I'm good for five or six years.

Juat got my Dual 2.7 dated Oct. 01, 2005.... im on bleeding edge fo less than a month... i should have trusted my instinct, i knew dual core is coming... geeshhh....

i got this link from digg.com https://abs.apple.com/transition/ , wonder if i can trade-in my machine...

[crooner]

Originally Posted by outaru

Juat got my Dual 2.7 dated Oct. 01, 2005.... im on bleeding edge fo less than a month... i should have trusted my instinct, i knew dual core is coming... geeshhh....

i got this link from digg.com https://abs.apple.com/transition/ , wonder if i can trade-in my machine...

Hey, man, unless you're doing some *serious* workstation class video, three-d rendering or high end medical research, your 2.7 is gonna carry you all the way through to the rev B Macintels.
You have a great Mac (that Apple is still selling, BTW) that will kick *ss for years to come.

[Big Mac]

I'm glad to see a few more people realize the move to Intel is foolhardy. Too bad our opinions aren't of any consequence to Apple. . .

[KeyLimePi]

I'm also seriously considering a new Quad PM. My Quicksilver is getting kinda long in the tooth, and my strategy was to either:

1) Buy an iMac to tide me over until '07 when the Mactels come out, or

2) Buy a pimped out PM and hang on to it.


The iMac is significantly cheaper, available today, and the Frontrow/remote thing is shiney enough to excite me for a while. Plus it's not so great that I won't feel guilty if I dump it for a Mactel in 16 months.

Of course, if I get a Quad PM I know it will still be a workhorse for at least 5 years, I won't be desperate to buy the first Mactel offerings (and all new native software), and I can feel kinda smug knowing that I own perhaps the last great PPC Mac.

Still not sure what do.

[Voch]

I remember when the term "Quadra" referred to the new 68040 processor. Or am I mistaken?

EDIT: Of course, I remember the original SuperDrive. Damn kids! Get off my lawn!

[Maflynn]

Originally Posted by dru

Because he's not perfect.

He might still be bent at IBM over their refusing to pay an outrageous fee to license 2.0 of the NeXT OS when it took them so long to port 1.0 that 2.0 was ready when they finished! Or maybe he hates Scully and holds a never-ending burr for being kicked out of Apple. The AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola) partnership was a Scully thing. He's exorcised pretty much everything from that era: Newton, Taligent's technology, Copland's technology, QuickDraw GX, QuickDraw 3D, Worldscript, pop-up folders, view-as-buttons, spatial-finder, themes, OpenDoc, the list goes on ...

I really think that's a stretch, if Jobs did have IBM issues he would never had gone to IBM for the G5 in the first place. While i don't agree with the decision, it was a business choice and not an emotional one. For what ever reason (lack of low power cpus, lack of 3ghz cpus, little R&D, not IBM's focus) Apple was frustrated by IBM and felt they'd be better off with intel.

Time will only tell if this is a wise decision.

Mike

[jamil5454]

Apple has a huge opportunity in the move Intel. If they play their cards right, they'll start taking more and more of the market from Microsoft. Since Windows and OS X will both be running on similar hardware, most developers shouldn't have to do much more than porting the code to a different IDE. Hopefully this means a larger software base, and especially more games brought to OS X (did that make sense?).

Also, if the Wine project matures (or heck maybe Apple should take over that), you can suddenly run your necessary windows apps on your Mac. The only thing left is games. And all the PC hardware available.

[hmurchison2001]

Originally Posted by Big Mac

I'm glad to see a few more people realize the move to Intel is foolhardy. Too bad our opinions aren't of any consequence to Apple. . .

Few and dwindling. We lose nothing by moving over to Intel and yet gain capable fabs...power efficient processors and a dedicated laptop chipset.

The move to Intel was smart for so many reasons I can't see how someone would have an issue with it. My allegience is to the Mac OS...not the hardware.

[Lateralus]

Originally Posted by hmurchison2001

Few and dwindling. We lose nothing by moving over to Intel and yet gain capable fabs...power efficient processors and a dedicated laptop chipset.

The move to Intel was smart for so many reasons I can't see how someone would have an issue with it. My allegience is to the Mac OS...not the hardware.

No... The number of people who oppose the Intel switch is indeed on the rise around the net. Immediately after the announcement, everybody seemed to be in rather good spirits about it. But people are digging into the deficiencies of x86 and realizing Intel's usual approach to design, and the second guessing has begun.

Why was the move to Intel smart? I'll agree that it was a good move for portables, as low power consumption has become a focus of Intel. But you'd be hard pressed to come up with any reasons to support the switch on the desktop and server front.

More over, the fact that there is no clearly attractive PowerPC route to go down for portable chips is a temporary sympton, it has nothing to do with any flaw or draw back to PowerPC. It's simply a matter of IBM not wanting to custom tailor low-power chips for Apple's portable line without some R&D help from Apple. Which, in reality, Apple should be willing to provide given the cost of developing the things.

The only people I've run into who don't have an opposition to the Intel switch are those who don't know the differences between the two architectures.

[P]

The desktops are only switching because its feasible to split the Mac market by running it on two hardware platforms, and Apple really needed a new portable processor. IBM likely offered to build one if Apple paid the design charges. Apple most likely did the math and decided to bail.

The black helicopter crowd can note the ABI issue and start thinking abotu whether Jobs planned this from the day he came back to Apple. With an Intel architechture and Mac OS X, the reverse takeover is all but complete.

Personally I think the reason the PowerPC never realised its potential was that the compilers for it never were good enough. IBM had a good one from AIX, and MrC had potential even if it never got out of beta, but even Codewarrior was only ever decent and gcc wasn't even that, for most of its usage on the Mac. PPC might beat x86, but icc beats almost everything thrown at it.

[Eug Wanker]

My impression from surfing around the net is that people are generally positive about the switch, even for the desktops (although the G5s are fine). ie. Some people have said for their small apps it really was just a few days of porting, if that. As for the large apps, many are saying that it's gonna be a heluvalot easier to transition to Intel in general than it was transitioning from OS 9 to OS X.

The one vocal group who are anti-Intel though are those who have built their lives around Altivec, and Altivec alone. Suddenly their apps and programming skills are gonna be useless, because there is no fallback. Fortunately, this is a very small group it seems.

[voo]

Originally Posted by crooner

You have a great Mac (that Apple is still selling, BTW) that will kick *ss for years to come.

I don't see it listed no more... Dual 2Ghz, Dual 2.3Ghz and Quad 2.5 is listed.
Maybe its because people would see the higher number and think the 2.7 was faster over the Quad 2.5 if it was listed?

[Lateralus]

http://www.apple.com/powermac/pcix.html

[exactopposite]

Originally Posted by jcadam

Oh, and these machines are perfectly fine. Why is SJ going to intel again?

becasue intel has the best mobile chip around, the pentium m. intel will have no problem making enough chips to keep up with whatever apple needs. intel makes more then just processors. there are also chipsets, wireless cards, flsh memory, and on and on that apple will be able to use from intel. apple computers with intel processors will directlly compare to wintel machines. there will no longer be a reason to try to explain to somebody why they should by a 2.0 ghz imac rather than a machine wit a 3.6 ghz pentium. to people who aren't really into computers that last one makes a big difference. for x86, i much prefer AMD processors, but intel offers a lot of things that amd just doesn't offer. without the intel switch the g4 will be in the mac laptops for the forseeable future, and i think (or at least hope) we can all agree that a replacement for hte g4 is long overdue. even a dual core g4 would be too little too late since intel is going to be coming wiht the dual core pentium m. intel has other technologies (like a replacement for bios....i can't remember the name) that are not being implemented in the wintel world that apple can take advantage of also.

personally i never thought the switch would happen, but in my opinion it makes business sense to do it. i think a lot of people are opposed to it without looking at the big picture because for years now apple has been touting their superiority over intel machines. i think in order for apple to reach a tipping point where they can gain a larger share of the market, they need to use hardware that the avg comptuer user can recognize. intel is the biggest name in processors and i think more people will buy after the intel switch.

i really hope later we will look back at the intel switch as the move that brought apple computers to the masses.

just my thoughts on this

[himself]

I'm seriously looking to splurge and pick up that Quad G5... I can see my productivity skyrocketing with that much power... mwahahaha!

The whole transition to Intel is a mixed bag to me. Intel seems really eager to work with Apple, and I assume that eagerness will translate into great products, but as Lateralus has been saying, the PPC is the future. I've had this feeling that this lull in PPC production was a hump that was to be overcome soon, if folks would just stick it out.

I've also speculated, with the sales volume of [non-iPod] machines increasing, as well as Apple's steady market share growth, it would be a no-brainer for a company like IBM to sacrifice a little bit now for possibly more rewarding gains in the future, since Apple's growth generally means growth for their suppliers as well. I guess Intel noticed this, and lobbied harder for Apple to jump ship... after all, wouldn't Apple be an even smaller fish in the larger Intel pond, compared to being with Intel? Whatever happens, I seriously hope that Apple can maintain some PPC offerings after the transition is complete.

[exactopposite]

Originally Posted by jcadam

Oh, and these machines are perfectly fine. Why is SJ going to intel again?

becasue intel has the best mobile chip around, the pentium m. intel will have no problem making enough chips to keep up with whatever apple needs. intel makes more then just processors. there are also chipsets, wireless cards, flsh memory, and on and on that apple will be able to use from intel. apple computers with intel processors will directlly compare to wintel machines. there will no longer be a reason to try to explain to somebody why they should by a 2.0 ghz imac rather than a machine wit a 3.6 ghz pentium. to people who aren't really into computers that last one makes a big difference. for x86, i much prefer AMD processors, but intel offers a lot of things that amd just doesn't offer. without the intel switch the g4 will be in the mac laptops for the forseeable future, and i think (or at least hope) we can all agree that a replacement for hte g4 is long overdue. even a dual core g4 would be too little too late since intel is going to be coming wiht the dual core pentium m. intel has other technologies (like a replacement for bios....i can't remember the name) that are not being implemented in the wintel world that apple can take advantage of also.

personally i never thought the switch would happen, but in my opinion it makes business sense to do it. i think a lot of people are opposed to it without looking at the big picture because for years now apple has been touting their superiority over intel machines. i think in order for apple to reach a tipping point where they can gain a larger share of the market, they need to use hardware that the avg comptuer user can recognize. intel is the biggest name in processors and i think more people will buy after the intel switch.

i really hope later we will look back at the intel switch as the move that brought apple computers to the masses.

just my thoughts on this

[Don Pickett]

There is an extremely good reason to buy new G5s now: it will get you a machine which will stay useful through the first generation of the Intel Powermac transition. After all of the bugs have been worked out of the first generation machines, you can buy a second generation one.

A lot of graphics, pre-press and video places will be loading up on the new G5s for this very reason. We're getting a bunch of new ones in here over the next several months.

[jcadam]

Originally Posted by exactopposite

becasue intel has the best mobile chip around, the pentium m. intel will have no problem making enough chips to keep up with whatever apple needs. intel makes more then just processors. there are also chipsets, wireless cards, flsh memory, and on and on that apple will be able to use from intel. apple computers with intel processors will directlly compare to wintel machines. there will no longer be a reason to try to explain to somebody why they should by a 2.0 ghz imac rather than a machine wit a 3.6 ghz pentium. to people who aren't really into computers that last one makes a big difference. for x86, i much prefer AMD processors, but intel offers a lot of things that amd just doesn't offer. without the intel switch the g4 will be in the mac laptops for the forseeable future, and i think (or at least hope) we can all agree that a replacement for hte g4 is long overdue. even a dual core g4 would be too little too late since intel is going to be coming wiht the dual core pentium m. intel has other technologies (like a replacement for bios....i can't remember the name) that are not being implemented in the wintel world that apple can take advantage of also.

personally i never thought the switch would happen, but in my opinion it makes business sense to do it. i think a lot of people are opposed to it without looking at the big picture because for years now apple has been touting their superiority over intel machines. i think in order for apple to reach a tipping point where they can gain a larger share of the market, they need to use hardware that the avg comptuer user can recognize. intel is the biggest name in processors and i think more people will buy after the intel switch.

i really hope later we will look back at the intel switch as the move that brought apple computers to the masses.

just my thoughts on this

The switch is just plain asinine. We are switching from a modern ISA to one that is ANCIENT. I roll my eyes when I think of all the R&D dollars that were spent on finding workarounds for all of x86's flaws that could have been spent making real advances in microprocessor technology.

Oh, and third party developers will now have LESS incentive to port their Win32 apps to OS X. Such apps could run reasonably well under a VM running windows (much as Classic runs under OS X - don't think some third party developer won't create such a product, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft does). Fewer OS X native apps == stagnation and death.

Hey, at least the world is standardizing on one microprocessor ISA, too bad we seemed to make the absolute worst choice possible (wouldn't be the first time, Beta was superior to VHS, after all). I'm not calling intel engineers stupid, they have done amazing things eeking performance out of x86 (polishing the turd). It's just that x86 was one of the first attempts at a microprocessor architecture, and it shows (sort of like the difference between a Model T and a Ford Mustang).

[exactopposite]

Originally Posted by jcadam

The switch is just plain asinine. We are switching from a modern ISA to one that is ANCIENT. I roll my eyes when I think of all the R&D dollars that were spent on finding workarounds for all of x86's flaws that could have been spent making real advances in microprocessor technology.

Oh, and third party developers will now have LESS incentive to port their Win32 apps to OS X. Such apps could run reasonably well under a VM running windows (much as Classic runs under OS X - don't think some third party developer won't create such a product, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft does). Fewer OS X native apps == stagnation and death.

Hey, at least the world is standardizing on one microprocessor ISA, too bad we seemed to make the absolute worst choice possible (wouldn't be the first time, Beta was superior to VHS, after all). I'm not calling intel engineers stupid, they have done amazing things eeking performance out of x86 (polishing the turd). It's just that x86 was one of the first attempts at a microprocessor architecture, and it shows (sort of like the difference between a Model T and a Ford Mustang).

i'm really not trying to argue the merits of processor technology(or anything esle actually). i was simply pointing out some of the logic that i think is behind the switch. i think the the goal wiht this move is to increase apple's market share in the personal computer segment. all the technological advances are moot if people aren't buying them.

my comments were solelly about the business aspect of the descision. there are many variables in making a descision like this including the ones that both of us mentioned. i just hope in the long run it turns out to be the right move.

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by jcadam

The switch is just plain asinine. We are switching from a modern ISA to one that is ANCIENT. I roll my eyes when I think of all the R&D dollars that were spent on finding workarounds for all of x86's flaws that could have been spent making real advances in microprocessor technology.

Oh, and third party developers will now have LESS incentive to port their Win32 apps to OS X. Such apps could run reasonably well under a VM running windows (much as Classic runs under OS X - don't think some third party developer won't create such a product, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft does). Fewer OS X native apps == stagnation and death.

Hey, at least the world is standardizing on one microprocessor ISA, too bad we seemed to make the absolute worst choice possible (wouldn't be the first time, Beta was superior to VHS, after all). I'm not calling intel engineers stupid, they have done amazing things eeking performance out of x86 (polishing the turd). It's just that x86 was one of the first attempts at a microprocessor architecture, and it shows (sort of like the difference between a Model T and a Ford Mustang).

Regardless of your rant, the fact is that x86 has had the technology lead in personal computer chips for quite some time now. Sure, the G5 is great, but we all know it hasn't made for a great laptop part. Basically what we've had is speed parity in desktops and lagging performance in laptops.

The predictions of doom are at best hysterics, because they have absolutely no basis in fact whatsoever.

[bonkers]

Hey guys, I don't know if I should say anything, but since I'm the thread owner...

Can we take the argument over the pros & cons of using Intel chips to another thread? It is interesting, but not relevant to my original question me thinks.

Cheers.

[bentoon]

really
I could almost afford to do this. I'm even weighing the payment plan , but I want the edu discount (assuming an adjunct faculty will fly with them) and I don't think I can have both.
The Ram though pushes the price to 5-6,000 and that's a bit steep. If you load a lesser Machine with a lot of Ram it's going to be 4-5,000, so it makes the 5or 6 look like more of an option.
That much for a machine for 2 years, well....
Hope will the intel OSX run on this dual dual?
Do I need this...? No , but I am looking at doing a lot of HD video and it certainly looks like the best investment in terms of the other lesser G5's

[bleee]

I'm quite torn between buying a PowerMac with a G5 or wait for the Intel PowerMacs, reasong being is becuase I don't want to blow $3400 and have to worry that Apple will not optimize/stop supporting the PPC based mac even though it wiill still be their biggest user base for a while after Intel PowerMacs come out. My Palm OS Treo smart phone is already in this boat since Palm decided to move to windows mobile and palm os was recently bought out by another company. From a business point of view is it viable to optimize for G5's after Intel's PowerMacs have been released? as opposed to just throw something out that "works" on G5 and is optimized for Intel? Its the same situation for Mac games sure they work on Macs but they don't run anywhere as smoothly or receive as much attention as their PC coutner parts.

[jamil5454]

Originally Posted by bentoon

really
I could almost afford to do this. I'm even weighing the payment plan , but I want the edu discount (assuming an adjunct faculty will fly with them) and I don't think I can have both.
The Ram though pushes the price to 5-6,000 and that's a bit steep. If you load a lesser Machine with a lot of Ram it's going to be 4-5,000, so it makes the 5or 6 look like more of an option.
That much for a machine for 2 years, well....
Hope will the intel OSX run on this dual dual?
Do I need this...? No , but I am looking at doing a lot of HD video and it certainly looks like the best investment in terms of the other lesser G5's

First of all, don't buy your RAM from Apple. Order the machine stock, then add RAM later. You can easily get another 2 gigs for under $200.

Second, OS X for Intel won't run on a PPC, because it's not Intel. Unless someone comes out with a way to emulate it, but then it will be dog slow, and just wouldn't work very well.

[bonkers]

bleee - it seems like you have listed the first real possible drawback --> os x & apps not being optimized for PPC quad g5's in 2-4 years. i guess you have to hope for the best...

[jamil5454]

I'm sure Rosetta would translate Intel->PPC fast enough on a quad machine to not matter.