Don’t Buy A Quad G5
Back in the pre-Intel days I must confess there would have been some drool hitting the keyboard as I write this right now. Quad G5s?! Holy moly! It sounds to good be true. You mean not only do I get one blazing fast Intel-snail-crushing G5 chip, but I get it by the factor of 4?
Oh, except for the Intel-snail-crushing part. Which is why Steve Jobs was absent when the announcement was made. All this was was a speed bump for a dead chip. Yes, folks, a chip that is dead, as in end-of-the-line. Cancelled. Irrelevant.
What was most curious to watch was the Apple hype-marketing machine turned off. Sure you can see a hint of it on the copy describing the new G5s. But the comparisons we have seen in the past have gone.
The G5 no longer matters to Apple. And that is why, unless I had some very pressing high-end video project over the next six to twelve months I wouldn’t even consider buying the new G5. It is simply a waste of money. And something that in short order, I’d want to replace with not only a new chip, but also a new architecture (and hopefully, given my thoughts of the G5 design) a new form factor.
It will be interesting to see how sales of this new G5 are. I do suspect that Apple knows they will be mediocre at best. This, along with the powerbook update was just an update; something to keep the current line-up alive while the real deal gets worked on inside Cupertino.
I, for one, can’t wait to see what that real deal is. Whatever it is, I can guarantee you one thing, Steve will present it himself, and he’ll have a few Keynote slides about how it kicks the Quad G5’s butt.
What do you think? Would you consider buying a new G5?
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I buy Macs for their stability, less bugs, better productivity, and quite simply, because I like them. I always have. The quad G5 is a killer machine, who cares if it’s a bit faster or slower than comparable PC’s. I never was too fond of the speed comparison between DOS computers and Macs to begin with. The speed is necessary because time is money and I can’t wait for hours to render video. So here’s my suggestion: Buy, buy, buy. Why? Because it’s a good computer and Steve is a nice guy. Mark
I’m still hesitating about buying a Quad. Since I want to use Motion, I’m really not sure than an iMac can handle the job. I also need some power to make sure that I can use many tracks in GarageBand. So I guess I’m gonna buy it but that 20 inch 2.1 Ghz iMac is really tempting.
gate, for what it’s worth… Garageband works just fine on an iMac G5 and you can typically handle as many tracks as you’d like, especially after a fresh restart of the syste (for some reason it’s a little less responsive after the Mac has been on for days on end).
As for Motion, that too works fine under most of the same circumstances. I do a lot of work with Motion and take my work home with me quite often to an iMac 2.0GHz 17” (1GB RAM). The realtime preview isn’t as nifty as I’d like but keeping the library files that you’re working with on a seperate firewire harddrive helps substantially. As long as you keep the video filters under about 3 at a time and aren’t super-overzealous with the particular generator it works like a charm.
I’m guessing based on specs that Aperture is going to be the first OS X application that is really more or less crippled on anything less than a PowerMac, but I haven’t seen it first hand - I’m just going based off the minimum requirements as compared to other softwares minimums. Motion’s minimum requirements, for instance, are very light (and a bit unrealisitic in the real world) compared to Aperture.
dickrichards2000, thanks. I think I should go to a store and ask for a demo of Motion. I really want to use Motion with many layers of graphics and video and I don’t want to regret my purchase.
‘Cripple it with OS X!!?!?!!??!
What the heck are you talking about?’
Yes, the statement is correct! It is a well know fact that YDL (Yellow Dog Linux) running on a G5 runs 2 to 3 times faster than OS X on the same machine. Apparently YDL running on G5 is equivalent to 4+ GHz Intel processor: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-ydlg5.html
Beya
29. ....(assuming of course that the Apple rep I’ve talked with about the quad G5 is even half as knowledgeable as he comes off).
This is the problem I am having. I use my G5 for music production, and the Dual 2.5 G5 just doesn’t live up to all the hype that Apple tried to sell us when demonstrating the G5 running 1 million and 1 tracks while the Intel machine could only manage 6! They shot themselves in the foot doing that, as far as i’m concerned, and any thought of me purchasing the Quad G5 is tempered with the memory that I have only had my dual 2.5 for just over 6 months and am having to move on to a bigger machine becuase it just can’t cope..and when I mean cope, I mean trying to run many plugins without the use of an accelerator card, which the Opteron systems are managing to do with no problem!!
Compared to a dual dual core Opeteron system, the G5 2.5 doesn’t even get out of bed!! So i’ll wait and see what the results are in terms of performance before I spend my cash.. If it doesn’t live up to the hype, was there any hype for the release of this machine!?!, then a dual dual core opteron system it is!!
Beya
I sure hope this mac is faster the the Dual G5 we have right now. We cripple that G5 which is suppose to be one of the fastest ever. We would really use the quad G5. Everyone is so excited about 16 bit imaging which really has no difference in our photos that it now takes over 1 gig per image were it use to be less than 300 megs for the same image as an 8 bit image. So hopefully this will be the answer we have been looking for.
I’m loving my Quad so far - it really cooks!
I have a Quad which I bought as my first mac as a long time professional who has used windows XP for years (and 98 and 95 before that) in the knowledge of the availability of Intel imacs…Although I do miss my two favourite apps - Omnipage Pro 15 and DNS Professional 8 - I am very happy with the move to mac. I formatted my desktop and notebook 5 times in the last 12 months alone. Windows as a system is fundamentally flawed by the fact that so many hardware providers supply drivers as third party apps - which innevitably interfere with each other - making the system inherently stable. Yes the virus/spyware issue is more marked also prevalent - but that’s what happens when 12 year old hackers can afford computers - which they can with windows. Unfortunately if the future apple OS supports windows - it cannot help but face the same problems. I make no commment as to whether the PC side will corrupt the Mac side of such a system - but I would definitely speak from experience when I say that the XP side will, of itself be so unstable as to make any Mac OS instability issues frankly irrelevant. This is not to mention that Vista does not even exist as a real, stable entity commercially available - and won’t on current projections until early 2007 at the earliest. Having felt the pain that only Bill Gates can provide with new windows operating system versions many times over - I am very very grateful NOT to be facing that nightmare.
Further - given that actual applications will not be available for Vista natively at release - how will programmers justify the writing of code for Vista, XP and PPC/intel Mac?
Yes the new intel macs can do XP - but this round of intel macs will likley need to have major hardware upgrades to run Vista when it eventually comes along. So I guess what I’m saying is that as a professional I am very glad to have an obsolete - utterly stable - tried and tested system which has no trace of Bill Gates anywhere near it. Personally I think you’d have to be crazy to dump a wad of cash on rev A anything - let alone add misery to that by installing windows. I guess you have to learn the hard way. I suggest partition magic for you windows users getting ready to format your hard drive for the first time…...my 2c