Apple Sets Oct. 24th Release For Mac OS X 10.3 696
dricci writes "Yahoo! has posted a press release from Apple, regarding the release date of the next major Mac OS X update, 10.3 ('Panther'). The update will be available 8:00 p.m. on October 24th at Apple Retail Stores and Authorized Resellers for $129.00 US (Family Pack for up to 5 users will be $199). Pretty much the same pricing structure they had for Jaguar. It looks like 'old world' Beige G3 support has been discontinued -- the update requires a Mac with built in USB."
Shame Wallstreet isn't supported Bcause this is it (Score:4, Informative)
That said, 10.3 is the release of Panther you have been waiting for. Dramatic increases in speed and launch times - and I just have an older prelease from WWDC.
Re:Shame Wallstreet isn't supported Bcause this is (Score:2)
You probably like record players, too (Score:4, Interesting)
Please. This is just my-record-player-is-better-than-your-CD-player BS. I had a Lombard, and it was a piece of shit. In your hands it looked, felt, and sounded like a plastic toy. The CD drive door broke. The rubber feet fell off within a month. The case scratched -incredibly- easily and the letters on the keyboard wore off within 2 years. One screen clutch broke, the hard drive died inside of 3 years, the battery within 3 went to half-capacity, and Apple stopped selling new Lombard batteries shortly thereafter. The screen was horrible- in any kind of sunlight, for example, all you saw was green plastic w/ a hint of something in the way of a screen. Half the keyboard doesn't work anymore, the screen has a white line down one side- and to top it all off, the video cable to the screen is toasted; the display went from occasionally flipping out to requiring 2 minutes of adjusting the screen angle, to just not working period.
I now have a revision-1 17" powerbook. It's awesome. Fit+finish is excellent, and everything in the design screams attention-to-detail. The case appears to be very durable(I do have a few small scratches on the bottom however). The screen is terrific in strong light, even direct sunlight hitting it. Gigabit ethernet is fast as hell, airport reception is fantastic, better than my Orinocco Gold card, which was widely considered the standard. In almost every way, my 17" PB kicks the living shit out of your Wallstreet, including battery life...the one exception being weight(so get a 12 or 15"). So do yourself an enormous favor and start using a computer built this decade.
My problem is that Apple broke Bluetooth in a MAJOR way with 10.2.8, and with Panther right around the corner, it looks like it'll never get fixed. That's practically illegal- "we broke it, so just buy the update." Um, no- and as a result, I think I'll be downloading Panther, not buying it.
Re:You probably like record players, too (Score:3, Interesting)
Illegal? (Score:4, Interesting)
err....really? Works fine here on a 12" Powerbook/Nokia 3650 combination. In fact, with the iCal/iSync updates out today my machine just become a lot more useful as it now sync calendars with any Series 60 device (which includes the 3650).
That's practically illegal- "we broke it, so just buy the update."
Or go back to pre-10.2.8 for free. Assuming it's broken of course, as stated above I haven't seen any evidence for that. Happy to be proved wrong if you can point me anywhere.
Now, if you're looking for something that really is illegal...
Cheers,
Ian
Funny - I'm experiencing something similar. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Shame Wallstreet isn't supported Bcause this is (Score:2)
Re:This is what? (Score:3, Interesting)
"After all, why would they call the oh es Mac oh es ten ten point three if the ex really meant ten?"
Yeah, mac os ten ten point three. Aren't they cute?
no 'cheap' upgrade for purchases prior to Oct 8. (Score:2)
Re:no 'cheap' upgrade for purchases prior to Oct 8 (Score:2, Insightful)
However, I can see there will be a lot of new 12", 15" and 17" 'Alu' Powerbook owners that will feel they have been shafted having bought the new revised machines at the start of October...
Sucks if you just bought a new powerbook (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sucks if you just bought a new powerbook (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus, it was widely known that Panther would come, and probable that there would be no cheap updates for folks who bought Jaguar prior to the release announcement (because it was like that with the last updates, too).
Re:Sucks if you just bought a new powerbook (Score:3, Interesting)
Three years ago I switched completely to Linux. I wanted a unix machine that was well integrated because I was tired to trying to get Red Hat to do simple stuff (example: native MP3 support was discontinued because of license issues, DVD playback). RH is great - I've bought
Countdown clock (Score:5, Informative)
Flash aside, this is one important update for Mac users and shows how much code optimization can get you in terms of performance. This release runs impressively fast on current hardware, but more importantly for the installed user base, it gives new life to older machines with good performance on machines going back several years.
Re:Countdown clock (Score:5, Informative)
Actually it appears to be a javascript type thing. I have flash disabled in mozilla (due to stupid flash ads) and I can still see it.
Re:Countdown clock (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely! I'm not the biggest fan of XBench, but these numbers [hardmac.com] do paint a very impressive picture.
Regardless, don't forget the cool stuff Apple's adding - Expose is cool, I got a chance to play with a pre-release version of Panther and it's one of those things that you'll begin to wonder how the hell you ever lived without it. The other thing that I'm looking forward to is the on-the-fly, user-friend 128-bit AES encryption. Your computer goes walkies? Least the pricks don't get all your stuff.
-- james
Re:Countdown clock (Score:3, Informative)
Yay, no more encryption by hand. I'm also looking forward to the secure delete function. I'd rather have all those proof of concept and rough design programs and documents destroyed if someone swipes my laptop in an airport.
A little too anxious counter? (Score:2)
Re:Countdown clock (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Countdown clock (Score:5, Informative)
You have do understand that most Mac application rely on the system's libraries to do many task: GUI are dones using Quartz, media handling is typically done using Quicktime, DSP like calculations using vecLib and so on. Now you can debate if those libraries are part of the OS or not, the fact is, Panther will probably bring improvements to those libraries.
Re:Countdown clock (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been done. Witness the perennial Linux v. GNU/Linux debates.
Re:Countdown clock (Score:4, Informative)
For example, in Panther, the Type 1 rasterizer had a lot of time spent on it, to the point where rasterization alone saw a huge improvement in performance (10.3's rasterization is almost twice as fast as 10.2).
Of course that doesn't mean text draws *twice* as fast as there are many other factors involved in getting text on the screen. But it does mean that text draws faster in 10.3 than 10.2.
Another example. Cocoa. Cocoa's invalidation model was really piss-poor. Often waaay more of a window would get repainted than was truly necessary. 10.3 greatly improves so any Cocoa-based app with many views will be much faster and more responsive.
Another example. Carbon and and its controls. Rather than have all the controls rasterized in QD which in turn had low-level transformations to CG, eveything is now done directly with CG primitives. For example, the animating progress bar in 10.3 uses 1/10th the cycles as compared to 10.2.
i could go on for hours. I have to wonder if the original poster is actually a developer or not? Clearly OS X is a young OS and the are literally thousands of opportunities for optimization. Apple obviously worked on a lot of them for 10.3
Bryan Pietrzak
Re:Countdown clock (Score:2, Informative)
Everything else is also *seems* faster, but I don't have objective numbers to back it up.
I don't expect a revolutionary faster OS, I do expect a much more responsive system.
Re:Countdown clock (Score:5, Insightful)
Run an OS 10.0.4 box along side of a 10.1.0 box or a 10.0.4 along side a 10.2.0 box and then do a file copy or a browse to a network server and fart around with the machine at the sametime.
Or fire up IE and browse
The OS does get *that* much faster.
Re:Countdown clock (Score:4, Interesting)
Under the covers they've done a lot of work to make prebinding work better, for one thing, and gcc3.3 provides vast improvements in powerpc code over gcc3.1 (even apple's modified version).
Re:Countdown clock (Score:3, Informative)
I've been running the panther seeds for months and it's noticably faster. Believe it or not. =)
Re:Countdown clock (Score:5, Informative)
Aside from that, there are huge chunks of code above the OS that Apple also tuned -- Mail.app, Safari, iTunes, iMovie, etc. So when Safari runs 3x faster than before (subjective number), I can't really tell without a lot of work whether it's the Safari application layer, the HTML engine ("in the OS"), the text layout engine, the display drivers, etc. But I can tell you that after using 10.3, I wouldn't voluntarily run 10.2 again.
Rendered text (Score:3, Informative)
Let's see, that would put us back in '73. Not many PCs then. The Apple II (released 26 years ago) was capable of generating text on its hi-res graphics display (if blitting a pre-stored bitmap directly to the screen can really be called "rendering"), but was painfully slow. The operating system relied upon hardware character generation, and did not even
MacOS X 10.3 really is that much faster (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Countdown clock (Score:3, Informative)
http://simplest-shop.com/Macintosh--1-229660-so f tw are.html
Let's see
X.1 Sept 28, 2001
X.2 Aug 23, 2002
That puts 11 months between those two releases
And assuming the earliest release of X.3 in sept, that would be 13 months from the last release. And 16 months in december.
By contrast:
Windows 2000 , Feb 17 2000
Windows ME released Sept 14 2000
That would be 7 months
Windows XP Oct 25 2001
That would be 13 months
And lets compare prices:
Mac OS X $130 always
Yes, but... (Score:2, Funny)
Worth it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hooray!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Jeff
Re:Microsoft can do it... (Score:2)
Old World Support (Score:5, Funny)
That's OK - the six guys to whom that would actually apply are still waiting for their copies of 10.2 to boot up.
Re:Old World Support (Score:2, Informative)
Don't laugh (Score:2)
Actually, there's 10... (Score:3, Funny)
...and you just found them all!
Re:Old World Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, man! Fight the power! I want to run the latest and greatest OS on my six year old computer! Even though I bought into the proprietary platform, knowing full well that Apple goes through hardware generations and OSes every 3-5 years! For the past 15+ years!
No more Apple screwing us over! I want OS 10.4 to support my Mac SE! I put 4 megs of RAM and an ethernet card in that thing... it cost me a bundle in 1989! I want some return on that investment! Damn Apple for screwing the user!
And now...! (Score:5, Funny)
More info on the Dev Tools too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More info on the Dev Tools too (Score:4, Informative)
Darn, and I was just getting used to the C Shell too.=) Oh well then...
What's the big deal about bash being the default? As it is now, tcsh is the default, but you can easily switch to bash (which is included). I'm sure it'll be the same with Panther. A real quick way to switch your shell (chsh doesn't work on OS X):
Apple isn't making it impossible for you to use the C shell, they just decided it's not the right thing to use as the default shell. Whether or not that's a good move depends, of course, on your personal preferences. But most likely tcsh will just be one little command away after you install Panther.
Re:More info on the Dev Tools too (Score:5, Informative)
iSync adds some support for more phones (Score:2, Informative)
Panther (Score:5, Interesting)
Expose is so amazing, expect Microsoft to "borrow" it in their next OS release.
Re:Panther (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, they might try. It'll probably be a pale imitation, just like with everything else that Microsoft has copied of Apple's.
Regardless, there's a precedent that Apple has set, that MS hasn't been able to follow (and, IMO, won't ever be able to): that is, with every new OS release, your computer gets faster.
-- james
Re:Panther (Score:5, Insightful)
This is usually a sign of good software engineering: make it right first, then make it fast. It's difficult to make bad software faster since it is a challenge to get it work acceptably and changes have too many consequences.
That said, MS probably doesn't care about older machines. Most people don't upgrade their MS operating systems, they buy new ones bundled with new machines. This allows the MS engineers to focus on features that will help MS in its business plans. So, when you get your new machine, with a few exceptions it feels pretty much the same speed as the old one, but has lots of spiffy new features. The folks still using 90MHz Pentiums are not the people who spend much money on IT, and therefore they can do without or suffer horrible performance. It doesn't make for a product one admires on a technical level, but it's hard to fault the business strategy.
Apple's approach makes sense too though, considering their niche position. People buy the latest Macs because they must have them, and roll down their old Macs to other folks. Improving the experience of folks with the hand-me-downs probably helps create the next generation of converts who will shell out money every year to year and a half out of pure technological lust.
Re:Panther (Score:2)
XP is already fast enough. On a 500mhz notebook, I almost never experience the same kind of "lag" that my Mac (and Linux) using friends do. I'm not talking about speed per say, but XP just feels snappy compared to GNOME or Mac OS. Hopefully 10.3 will resolve this.
I have seen expose in action, but, quite frankly, it doesn't impress me all that much. There are already emulations of Expose for Windows, but quite frankly I find the taskbar to be just as ef
Don't Forget the Educational Discount... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Don't Forget the Educational Discount... (Score:2)
--Richard
Re:Don't Forget the Educational Discount... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How do you prove you qualify? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious about that too. My brother is a teacher, and I'm curious what he would have to do to take advantage of the discount. Possibly, nothing.
It used to be that companies would offer steep discounts on software for educational customers, but you would have to verify your credentials in order to get that discount (e.g. buy from a campus bookstore, and have to present your student ID at purchase time, etc).
Now though, at least some companies seem to be a bit more lax about this. For example, I regularly see the student edition of Microsoft Office XP advertised in the local newspaper & area stores for around $100 to $150, while the full version -- which I almost never see advertised -- can be more than double that. The student version only has part of the suite, but it's the part that most Office users would want anyway -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. My fiancee bought a copy of this edition when she got her computer a year ago, and the clerk at the register didn't do anything at all to verify if she's actually a student. I assume that most of the people buying this edition of Office aren't actually students, but the fact that it apparently sells much better than the full edition has encouraged Microsoft to avoid slaying this particular golden goose.
Maybe the same is going on with Apple. As far as I can tell, they don't do much or anything to enforce the restrictions on the educational discount program. Maybe they see it as a small leak that allows for a bit higher sales than they would have gotten had such a program not been available; that is to say, if they started enforcing the "are you really a student or educator" rule more closely, they might lose too many sales to be worthwhile.
*shrug* In any case, I'm going to have to talk to my brother, and find out if he's interested in buying an operating system that won't run on any computer in his house... :-)
Rumor sites right (Score:4, Interesting)
Panther is GM [macrumors.com]
October 24th Release for Panther [macrumors.com]
Oct 8th official announcement [macrumors.com]
S+H Upgrade price for G5 owners [macrumors.com]
Panther / jaguar compared (Score:5, Informative)
Using Code Warrior to build 730 megs worth of sources (no, really), the complete build cycle (after a total cleanup of objects) took 9 minutes on Panther, and 13 minutes in Jaguar.
And that's with a tool that's not multi-threaded. Kudos Apple.
(Oh, and BTW, this same source code set takes roughly 45 minutes on a dual G4 450!!)
Re:Panther / jaguar compared (Score:5, Informative)
Yes: the OS is fundamentally 32-bits, but the kernel and key parts (math libs etc) are 64-bits under a G5, making it faster. This design decision allows running 32-bit apps seamlessly alongside 64-bit apps.
Ie, does it allow applications to address more than 32 bits (4GB) of RAM? What's sizeof(void *)?
Heres the rundown, from an Apple response in SCITECH:
Hi all,
There seems to be a bit of confusion on this topic. The short answer is
The PowerPC G5 processor is fully 64-bit Mac OS X supports many, but not all, services using 64-bit integers.
Currently, sizeof(void *) == 4
I realize that some people take a rigid position that 64-bit computing = 64-bit OS = sizeof(void *) == 8. Which may be understandable given their problem space, but reality - especially when dealing with mass-market personal computers, not speciality workstations - is a bit more complicated, and different people benefit from Mac OS X's level of 64-bit support in different ways.
A more official explanation is below. Please let me know if there's any confusion about this.
Sincerely,
Ernest Prabhakar
Product Manager, UNIX & Open Source
Apple
Mac OS X Jaguar (10.2.7 and later) features a redesigned kernel and updated system software math libraries specifically for the 64-bit PowerPC G5 processor. The updated kernel delivers the most substantial benefits of 64-bit computing by breaking through the 4GB physical memory barrier enabling the kernel to use all the RAM that can be added to the new Power Mac G5 (currently 8GB).
The key functions of the system math and vector libraries have been hand tuned to make maximum advantage of new and faster math functions that the 64-bit G5 is capable of. This is a great because unmodified applications that use the system math functions will get an automatic speed up when run on the G5. For example, the square root function is implemented as a software algorithm when run on a G3 or G4 but on a G5 when a square root calculation is requested the math library uses the super-fast hardware instruction that the G5 has.
This approach brings the maximum benefit of 64-bit processing to the desktop personal computer market and does so with full native-speed compatibility with existing 32-bit applications. Because the PowerPC instruction set was designed initially with 64-bit instructions in mind, this transition is a smooth and simple one for our developers and customers.
Apple has also supplied a new compiler, GCC version 3.3 which generates optimal code for the new G5 machine model. Importantly, this compiler produces code that executes efficiently on G5, G4 and G3 systems so a single Mac OS X application runs on each of our support processor architectures. This allows developers to build and qualify a single version of their applications for the 32-bit and 64-bit Mac systems.
Mac OS X Panther takes the same approach to the G5 as Jaguar but will be able to optimized additional math functions based on feedback from the developer community.
References
Optimizing for the Power Mac G5
):
Technical Note TN2086: Tuning for the G5: A Practical Guide
Technical Note TN2087: PowerPC G5 Performance Primer
Technical Note TN2090: Driver Tuning on Panther or G5 (Of interest only if you have written a device driver)
Power Mac G5 Performance White Paper (PDF)
http://www.apple.com/powermac/pdf/PowerMacG 5_Perf_ WP_071503.pdf
Default Sizes
sizeof (char) == 1
sizeof (short) == 2
sizeof (int) == 4
sizeof (long) == 4
sizeof (long long) == 8
sizeof (void *) == 4
sizeof (void (*)(void)) == 4
sizeof (float) == 4
sizeof (double) == 8
sizeof (long double) == 8* [may change in the future]
sizeof (size_t) == 4
sizeof (off_t) == 8
G5-Related Flags for GCC
-mcpu=970
This allows the compiler to use instructions only available on the G5 (also known as
XCode alone looks worth the upgrade (Score:5, Informative)
The rendezvous enabled distributed building and predictive compiling look to be winners.
Re:XCode alone looks worth the upgrade (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look at the Apple solution called Expose [apple.com]. They use F9 to cascade all windows (like opera), another key to grey out all windows of other apps than the one you are using. Press F10 and all photoshop apps are highlighted while all other apps fade into grey. In linux Gimp could benefit from such a feature.
First complaint... (Score:2)
Shame on you Apple...
is it so hard to use the CLI FTP client? (Score:2, Insightful)
No G5 (Score:5, Funny)
Thank god I didn't get a G5.
Re:No G5 (Score:2)
Bet you're having a Homer moment right now.
Re:No G5 (Score:2)
Damn! (Score:2)
Proven GCC 3.3? (Score:2)
Enough with the "point" release (Score:5, Insightful)
I will stipulate that Apple went ahead and violated a convention in computing for the sake of marketing; but people criticizing the $129 price in the context of the upgrade being a "point" release are way off the mark.
Panther is OS XII -- but I guess Apple wants to stick with the mindshare that the big "X" has created.
I stuck with 10.1 until only last month. Know what? When I finally installed Jaguar on my machine, I was kicking myself for waiting so long.
These are major upgrades.
Re:Enough with the "point" release (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Enough with the "point" release (Score:3, Insightful)
The X in OS X is a word play. It has a double meaning. It means 10 in Roman numerals, thus signifying the next big release after OS 9, and a revolutionary release. It is also an X as in uniX and advertises that OS X is a uniX operating system. There's more to the name than just changing to a Roman numeral numbering scheme.
OS X is the name of the operating system. The number afterward is the version.
Could they have gone with OS X 1.0? Yeah, and I think that would have bee
Upgrade price (Score:3, Funny)
8P
Powerbook users screwed (Score:3, Interesting)
It wouldn't burn so bad if they hadn't made a specific exception for machines that were shipping back in August. That's like a slap in the face.
I wonder who to complain to (clearly complaining to
Re:Powerbook users screwed (Score:4, Interesting)
No bother anyway though, cause my laptop will fit under the family pack that I have to buy for my older machines anyway, it's just the point of it all. They should say - anyone with a computer that SHIPPED with 10.2.7 should get a free (or $20) 10.3 upgrade.
X11 (Score:3, Interesting)
Tribute? (Score:3, Funny)
OS X Panther [apple.com]
Malcolm X [imdb.com]
Black Panther Party [tripod.com]
Steve Jobs secret marketing meeting (Score:5, Funny)
Steve: "Well, we'll just give all the G5 people the free upgrade, the powerbooks are shit out of luck."
Lackey: "What if the angry powerbook owners storm the building, and take it?"
Steve: "How much damage can they do? Those powerbooks wouldn't even dent my skull. Now, if the G5 owners got pissed, wielding their G5s like clubs, then I might shit my pants. Those things are big. Let's keep them happy."
Lackey: "Good thinking, master. I will alert your minions."
Steve (to self): "Yes... Angry G5 owners...damn....Shit my pants..."
Free ($20) Qualifying Update (Score:5, Informative)
The $20 covers shipping and handling of the retail box.
Re:rediculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:rediculous (Score:5, Informative)
Re:rediculous (Score:2)
Most definitely not true if you compare the boot up and shutdown times.
Windows 2000 = syruuuuup...
Re:rediculous (Score:2)
Re:rediculous (Score:2)
Yep. Upgrade.
It's Mac OS X 3.0 (Score:3, Insightful)
For technical reasons, Apple chose to go with a more conservative numbering scheme. The problem seems to be that buyers put way too much emphasis on the version number. For example, 10.2 brought Quartz Extreme, which was a massive leap for the graphics engine. This isn't something you'd typically find in a point release. These are major new features that require serious engineering.
Mac OS X 1
Re:rediculous...it's spelled ridiculous & U R (Score:5, Informative)
10.2.1
10.2.3
10.2.4
10.2.6
10.2.8
Were all free, not to mention all the app and security fixes. Most of those updates weren't REQUIRED like the "free Windows updates" AND each time you updated you had to validate your Windows system under XP.
This is the release of X that everyone should want. faster, more stable on every machine I've tested it on.
Re:rediculous...it's spelled ridiculous & U R (Score:2)
Re:rediculous...it's spelled ridiculous & U R (Score:2)
Um, no they're not. They are more like Windows 95 to 98, or 2000 to XP.
Have you actually used those releases? I know the dot versioning is confusing, but you should think of them like OS X v1, OS X v2, etc.
The additions in functionality between versions of OS X are too great to be considered "service packs". Since "big bad evil MS" rarely includes appreciable new functionality in their service packs, it's more like mega-hotfixing on the MS side.
Re:rediculous...it's spelled ridiculous & U R (Score:5, Informative)
No. This analogy is false. Apple's version numbering is 10.X where X is the new release number based on the baseline Mac OS 10 architecture. 10.X.Y releases are service packs.
This is no different from Microsoft's release engineering versioning. Windows 2000 was based on NT and was versioned 5.0 and Windows XP based on windows 2000 is version 5.1. Just open a cmd window and look at the verison of XP it should say 5.1.0.xxxx.
Linux does the same thing with 2.X where X is even numbers for stable new releases and 2.X.Y is the number for fixes and minor updates.
There is a difference between marketing and release engineering verisoning.
Re:rediculous...it's spelled ridiculous & U R (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:rediculous (Score:3, Insightful)
And, if we use the MS argument against Linux, unless your time and bandwidth is worthless, you do pay or every incremental upgrade.
Re:got it! (Score:3)
Maybe I was hoping for too much for a
Just my $0.02
Re:That's too bad (Score:4, Funny)
Re:MacOS 10.3 (Score:5, Insightful)
Two fallacies in one post - way to go.
Fallacy one. How many different word processing/spreadsheet/paint packages do you use ? how many does anyone need? There's a slection of the best from free to costly available on the Mac. Some of the best aren't available on Windows...
Fallacy two. OSX (and Linux and Unix) aren't just more secure because not so many people hack them - they're more secure because they're built that way. They don't by default execute attachments when you read email, they don't leave ports open all over the place etc etc. OSX has fewer security problems because its built that way and Windoh!s isn't. Edward
No you dont. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Looks like the Apple 'lies' (marketing) continu (Score:2)
6 year old Macs are no longer supported under OS X. Big deal.
I was hoping to get one more release out of it though. Ah well, time to shop for a G4.
Re:Looks like the Apple 'lies' (marketing) continu (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry to hear that... the PPC 603 in the 6400 **sucked** compared to the 604 in most of their other desktops.
The Beige G3s were the last Apple machines that I would have considered buying. Since they are no longer supported I guess I won't be buying Apple
Huh?? Were you fond of the 66 MHz bus and onboard 10 MB/sec SCSI? Or was it the EIDE that you liked?
The Blue&White G3 had just as much expansion as the Beige G3 (3 PCI & 1 66 MHz PCI for gfx versus 3 PCI & 1 "personality slot" in the beige). One less drive bay, though, but the machine came with onboard USB and Firewire. Even had a legacy ADB port to help you transition over and keep your favorite keys/mouse. The stock Rage128 blew the beige's graphics out of the water with about 8x the fillrate.
The G4s were even better. And... there are gobs of aftermarket CPU upgrades for the B&W G3, just as there are for the beige.
I would agree that Apple is lacking a good entry-level desktop machine right now ($3K for a monster dual that can support 8-16 GB RAM is a good price, as are most of the PowerBooks... but there is no ideal $1K single processor desktop [the single proc G5s are really expensive in terms of bang for the buck]).
Re:Looks like the Apple 'lies' (marketing) continu (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? If you have $1K to spend you can get:
- 1GHz PowerPC G4
- 128MB SDRAM
- 60GB Ultra ATA drive
- DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo drive
- Keyboard/Mouse
- VGA out
- S-Video Out
- Firewire
- USB
- Audio In/Out
- 10/100 Ethernet
- 56K modem
- Mac OS X
- Speakers
- 17" monitor
- and a bunch of useful software
That's a pretty good entry-level system [apple.com]. It's not the fastest thing you can buy, but it's plenty of machine for most people. If you need more of a machine than that, besides some RAM, you're not in the market for an entry-level machine.Re:Liberate your software. (Score:5, Funny)
>>has a "revolutionary" new upgrade for my
>>Macintosh every year. I don't think that this
>>is worth $129.00.
Well I've put a team of monkeys to work on trying to figure out how to ensure you don't lose your $129 dollars, and will still allow Steve Jobs to market his product in a way that he sees fit.
After 3.4 seconds, the monkeys typed the following:
DON'T BUY IT
Re:Why is USB required? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple started shipping ALL of their computers with USB around the same time. Those are the oldest computers that Apple is supporting Panther on. Thus it is easiest to say that they require the Apples with USB built-in, instead of naming all of the oldest computers that they support.
So it's not USB that is required - but the "spec" of the Apple computers that come with USB built in that is required.
Make any sense?
Re:Why is USB required? (Score:3, Informative)
I suspect it's because Panther drops support for certain older Apple motherboards, namely the ones from just before Apple added USB as a standard feature.
Re:Why is USB required? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hey, that's my birthday! (Score:5, Insightful)
Another nice thing: No product activation.
Re:Sounds like a letdown? (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless, 10.2.8, as mentioned earlier, is free. And there are some significant things that make this worth the upgrade.
A lot of things have been sped up/optimized. PDF viewing, file searches, graphics in general.
The file system is fully journaled.
File Vault provides full 128-bit encryption of user files - with no or little speed degradation. A very handy feature for people with laptops that might possibly get stolen.
All the Samba stuff works much better.
iChat AV. I video call my relatives on the west coast and this is a billion times better than the phone; I don't care if people think it's cheesy or not.
X11 is a lot tighter than in previous versions.
etc.., etc.., etc..
As far as the G5 goes, what other PC, PC mind you, can you have 8-gigs of ram on or that comes stock wither SATA drives?! None yet. Apple is doing it right. They're introducing things that work well and will then provide incremental upgrades that bring in tested features, such as 64-bit. I think a lot of people are just too used to the Windoze way of release crap asap and then fix. Charging along the way as well.
Re:Sounds like a letdown? (Score:3, Informative)
Hit Google, search for "sata xeon workstation" for 6,330 hits. The first few links I visisted were PCs with SATA and capable of more than 8 gigs of RAM for less than the price of a G5. Most Xeon chipsets, and many Pentium IV chipsets allow 36-bit addressing, if you didn't know. (The 32-bit barrier was a non-issue as early as 2000.)
If the results degrade as you go on down the G