Apple Computer on Tuesday harvested a new crop of Power Macs outfitted with faster processors and lower prices on some configurations. The high-end system tops out with twin 1.42GHz PowerPC G4 processors. The new low-end Power Mac costs $1,499–a $200 reduction over the previous starter system–and packs a single 1GHz processor. But the megahertz boost and price cut is a trade-off. The previous entry-level Mac packed dual 867MHz processors.Meanwhile, the price of a midrange model has dropped from $2,499 to $1,999. Apple also cut the price of the 17-inch digital flat-panel display from $999 to $699 and introduced a new, 20-inch Cinema Display monitor for $1,299. Apple likewise dropped the price of its 23-inch Cinema Display from $3,499 to $1,999. Like the 23-inch model, the new Cinema Display has a wide-screen ratio of 16-10. Maximum resolution is 1680 pixels by 1050 pixels.
New Power Macs Faster, Cheaper
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Wow! Finally a reasonably priced Apple 17′ LCD Display. Very competative! Cool!
I would say that Macs are begining to come down to parody with PCs….do not just match up GHz, we all know that while CPU speed does matter, it is not that easy to compair CPUs of diffrent archs.
I think my next comnputer will be this….though by the time I get it, 2-3 years will have gone by and the Mac will be on a new chip.
Although, as Eugenia said, there is a bit of a trade off regarding the low-end Power Mac, it is good to see these new Macs and displays come out with pretty good (for Apple) price drops. They really needed to update to keep things moving until they can make a processor shift.
It’s kind of a shame they dropped the 15″ Studio Display. At 1024×768 it is just right for many people. At least the 17″ has a halfway reasonable price now.
it’s parity they’ve been hunting for…
If you think Apple moves slow you should see me. It was just last summer that I upgraded to a VIA C3 800 from my old P200. If I could afford a mac I’d be all over some of those machines. A G3/G4 would look great in comparison to this piece of crap I’m currently on.
For that extra $500, I would go for the $1999 model (+ some extra memory of course). Before, the choosing was easier, the best deal was the dual 867 for $1699 (which overall is faster than the new single 1 GHz).
But as for the dual 867, same goes for the single 1 GHz, I would change the GeForce2MX with the Radeon 9000 (Carmack suggested that a year ago…) and add more memory. But as prices are layed out *today*, I would go for the dual 1.25 GHz machine instead, for that extra $500.
“If I could afford a mac I’d be all over some of those machines.”
“If you can’t afford it…F—ing finance it!”
Judge Reinhold from “Ruthless People”
Does anyone know if the G4s are using the same motherboard for both their dual and single processor machines? It would be really sweet to pick up the single G4 now, and drop the extra cash to upgrade in a year or two!
What? how can they be using a duel CPU mobo in the single mobo system?
I think it is the same motherboard, just with an other CPU module on it.
The only problem:
I bet you don’t want to invest in a new G4 CPU module in a year or two 😉
Ralf.
The price points of the old dual 867 might not have been attractive to customers, also they probably wanted to get rid of some stock of 867mhz procs.
Also check the refurbished or whatever section of the site, it sells the old models at decent prices so you can still pickup a dual 867 probably.
Im really not seeing a difference in dell 3gighz setups as in apple dual 1.4gighz setups price wise anymore. This is good.
Thats a normal issue in the PowerMac world.
The mainboard architecture allows this.
The board has one single socket hooked to an CPU-daughterboard with two processors. Thats all the magic here.
Ralf.
These prices still look grossly outrageous to me, but I guess Apple can still charge a premium and the base customers will be happy with it. I still don’t see Apple being able to expand its market share unless it does something much more drastic.
Apple’s competition for dual processor systems isn’t Intel, it’s AMD. Strange that no one has benchmarked a dually apple against one of these AMD beasts. If anyone knows of such a link it would be an interesting read.
You might be suprised. I’m still running on my Athlon 500 I bought almost four years ago now (and will continue to use it along side a G4 system). If I had a mb capable of dual processors I’d quickly buy a second processor to upgrade the system
(I run BeOS on the 500 and it is plenty fast for everything I need, although painfully slow when i have to reboot to do some photoshop work)
look, just because you measure a computer’s worth by its GHz, does not make you right is saying an Apple is over priced. 1499 is a great price and it performs normal computer functions (outside window resizing, right Eugenia) perfectly well.
if i hadnt just bought a pc last year…
i usually like to skip a couple generations of machines
but i have to agree with eugenia… the dual processor model definitely looks worth the extra $$
who knows i might just have to break my own rules and get one
I feel your pain — for a long time I ran photoshop 5.5 on a celeron 366.
Fact is, though, that as long as you’re not dealing with filters on large print sized graphics, you’re fine. As a graphic designer I do work with large high res stuff but frankly, the only time I hit the CPU hard is running a blur or sharpen filter — I don’t use any others (I think most photoshop filters are irrelevant)
In my job I work with a number of other graphic designers, some on mac, some on PC. We all get along just fine doing *serious* graphic work, even on relatively outdated machines.
Also, of all the work we do, only one person I work with considers macs underpowered, and he’s a 3d & video guy. he prefers macs, and does all his modelling, animation, and high level video on his mac — he just sends to it a cheap pc to do final render. For note, the opengl on macs is pretty damn good and he has a better experience doing his modelling and animation on the “underpowered” macs than his pcs.
The fact is, the even in serious graphic work, these machines are more than powerful enough. The difference between a top level mac and pc for all but the most specific number-crunching work is maybe a few seconds here and there. The real selling point then is one’s experience on the machine; and at least where I work, we all agree the mac is king.
if with Jaguar you can play LAN games with PCs?
you can always resell on ebay for a little less then you paid for it.
Heh, I wish I waited you know, but the past 5 months of no stress computer based work has been sooooo nice. I still play 2 games on my PC though, should turn it into a server, so I dont have to save files to my 30gb hd.
LAN Games? YES!
Here in the office, we play Unreal Tournament all the time, a few use the 15′ LCD iMac and a few are running Win2K. In fact, we can even play UT in classic mode! Cool stuff.
Umm…I never mentioned GHz in my post, just commenting on the appeal of the new stuff. I build systems for myself and friends and I’d smack someone who would be stupid enough spend $1500 on a full x86 based system (with monitor), unless it was some very specialized dual processor system that needed a raid 5 setup or more than 1G of ram.
So restating, Apple is producing a product that their base customers will like. I’m still waiting for them to do something that I think will make them truly competitive in the market. I’m just not sure that is something Apple wants to do though.
some of the time. There still is on these desktops. But how else is Apple going to innovate and provide free and awesome apps (and continue to improve the ones that are still a little shaky like iCal)? I still don’t understand how apple is supposed to sell at the Dell price points, innovate, use quality hardware, etc. Will somebody explain that to me?
at least at the high end…
22″ – 24″ comparison
Samsung 241MP (16:10 aspect ratio) $4,400 (street price)
Samsung 240T (16:10 aspect ratio) $3,000 (street price)
KDS RAD-23 (4:3 aspect ratio) $2,900 (street price)
LG Electronics LM295 (4:3 aspect ratio) $3,000 (street price)
Sony SDM-P232 (16:10 aspect ratio) $2,600 (street price)
Viewsonic VP230MP (4:3 aspect ratio) $2,900 (street price)
Apple 23″ Cinema Display (16:10 aspect ratio) $1,999 MSRP
20″ comparison
NEC-Mitsubishi LCD2080UX (4:3 aspect ratio) $1,300 (street price)
Viewsonic VP201MB (4:3 aspect ratio) $1,500 (street price)
Sony SDM-X202 (4:3 aspect ratio) $1,700 (street price)
Apple 20″ Cinema Display (16:10 aspect ratio) $1,299 MSRP
don’t care about the OS but about whether the particular game is available on all desired platforms… so yes… there are a number of games you can play….
As Apple discussed on their relatively recent conference call, they are trading operating margin for market share. So far, the signs are good that the company will be able to make this shift.
Apple has built a software base that is beginning to become substantive. Adobe currently has a market cap of about one billion dollars more than Apple. If Apple continues to expand their software business, they will be in a very strong market position for expansion onto Intel/AMD hardware or to lower the cost of their hardware even further, making money on volume vs. margin.
On the software side —
Apple iWork — getting closer, need word/excel clones
Apple iLife – very close to ship, keeps getting better
Apple iStudio – need a Photoshop clone and a web tool
Overall, if Apple keeps getting more competitive on price, there will be more of an impetus for users to switch from Windows to Mac. The software business is almost a bonus adding a good reserve of strength and flexibility to the company. I’d expect Apple stock to do well this year.
Michael
I can still build an x86 architecture for significantly less than the low end imac. As I am a GNU/Linux fanatic (I do respect everyone’s choice of OS) I could not even take full advantage of the vector processing in the G4, and the opportunity to use OSX does not appeal to me personally.
On the other hand I felt as though Apple had been sucking every cent humanly possible from the mac faithful, despite the down economy. It is nice to finally see a price cut.
In regards to the price cuts on these machines, it seems like a move to keep their powermac sales alive. At previous prices, it would seem hard to justify paying 3k for a machine that would be significantly out of date with the release of the 970 later in the year. Maybe this will push some users to purchase a new system. Besides, in terms of percentages, a 170 mhz jump in processing speed in the high-end model is fairly large by apple’s standards (assuming you have a use for it). I might buy one of these to hold me over until the 970s come out at the end of the year.
If you think Apple moves slow you should see me. It was just last summer that I upgraded to a VIA C3 800 from my old P200
That’s not much of an upgrade. A Pentium 3 or an Athlon at 800MHz would have been a lot quicker than the VIA C3…
It maybe was a bit more expensive but with enough RAM they still would have been usuable today.
A bit off topic, but I am impressed. I need to share my findings.
When I was saying that OSX is slow on my review ( http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1611 ) a few months ago, people were saying that my Cube 450 MHz is outdated to contuct any reviews on. I told them that it is not, and now the XBench benchmarks (the most complete benchmark for OSX) confirms that!
My Cube 450 Mhz, 1 MB L3 cache @ 225 Mhz, 448 MB SDRAM 100 Mhz with a GeForce2MX 32 MB, is faster than the faster G3 iBook today at 800 Mhz.
JUST last night I was discussing the possibility of buying a 12″ ibook 800 Mhz, and both my husband and David (the owner of OSNews) were leaning mostly on the Powerbook purchase. But now I see that if I had actually going to buy that brand new ibook, it would still wouldn’t be faster than my current Cube (which I do find slow when running OSX – MacOS9 flies on it though).
The ibooks score between 45 and 53 points on xbench while my Cube scores between 52 and 56 (depends).
On the rest of the benchmarks found in the XBench pages, the eMac 700 Mhz is on par or just a bit faster than my Cube (you see, the eMac doesn’t have the cache) while the new eMacs are about just 15-20% faster than my Cube.
So yes, still today, that Cube with the 1 MB of cache is better than any of the G3 machines being sold by Apple currently.
If you are thinking of buying a Mac, get a G4. Save yourself the trouble, the G4s have more “life” in them anyway (when talking about future support from OSX and Apple and optimizations).
XBench web site: http://xbench.com/
$1499 is still overpriced. We’re bascially paying Apple for the limitations of the Motorolla processor. Compare comprable prices for dual AMD systems. Apple caters to the “Beverly Hills” crowd of computer users. It’s pretty, it’s expensive, and it makes a statement about it’s owner. I’m looking forward to the day when Apple strikes a deal with another company that makes CPUs. Hopefully this will drive down the costs of MACs as decent systems won’t be forced to be dual processor ones.
I just benchmarked mine again: 51.52 is the average (I submitted my results to the xbench site)
Still, faster than most ibooks.
http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc2=6713
well, WC3 is on the mac, I was just concerned becasue my friend likes to have LAN paties and my PC died (fan fell off the proc because the lugs cracked when it was moved)…I have a power mac and was consideing takeing it over to play on…
only thing is that in xmidi’s example, it is a client/server modle, not a peer to peer type modle as you have in a small network…might as well try though….I have a PC laptop that I can try it as a proof of concept.
“I’m looking forward to the day when Apple strikes a deal with another company that makes CPUs.”
that’s the day apple loses its only inherent advantage – it’s control of the hardware, software, os and apps and online service.
this allows for: (1) more reliable, fewer glitches, easier to use and (2) innovations more rapid than possible on the PC side for everything that requires hardware and software(e.g., airport, iMovie + firewire)
of course many PC users like yourself are in denial of this. you can’t admit it because you like the PC and hate that mac has something you can’t have
Thanks for your benchmarking comments, i won’t be buying an ibook now, i’ll wait until they move over to G4 1ghz at least before i will buy one.
umm…I think he was refering to having some one else develop a PPC chip for them.
They can keep whatever control they want on their hardware, but with cheaper and faster processors. That doesn’t mean you would be able to install OS X on commodity PC hardware, Apple will find a way to prevent that, even if they move their production line to AMD let’s say.
Just a note that I don’t think changing processor architectures would affect the prices at all; you’d simply get faster chips for the money. I seriously doubt Motorolla is charging that much for G4 chips.
Macs cost more because Apple, unlike, say, Dell, has to pay software engineers to create and maintain an operating system, software engineers for products such as iLife, hardware engineers to design motherboards and whatnot, and industrial engineers to create such excellent designs.
Because they’re a minority platform, they have to provide “extra incentive” to buy a Mac instead of a PC. This is why they develop the software they do, and why they strive for the beautiful designs that they do. But doing so costs a lot of money, and that’s reflected in the cost. There’s simply no way Apple can compete pricewise with a company that is basically a volume assembler, such as Dell. So get over it; they’ve chosen their path and their intended market.
I agree. Apple is likely to (perhaps be forced to) make a processor change at some point. I think it’s unlikely that they’ll sell Mac OSX or iApps that will run on non-Apple brand hardware. It’s just too big of an advantage to have the control, and to supplement their software revenues with hardware revenues. Apple will require some kind of ROM to boot OSX if they ever release it for Intel. But even then, I think it could be a big boost for the consumer if Apple had access to chips that were on par with Intel for price/performance. I think people will always be willing to pay a little more for an Apple computer, just like people will pay for a Dell or an HP rather than [insert crappy white box brand here]. But it’s disheartening to pay more and feel like you’re getting less power than you really deserve, even if we all know that most people don’t even need computers as fast as they currently have.
i think the sweet spot is a bit lower than $1499 for those desktops (maybe $1299) but the lower price is a start in the right direction.
thought hayabusa meant something else
while at lunch today, I stopped by the local apple store to drool over the new 12″ powerbook. I just bought a 12″ ibook a couple of weeks ago. While in the store, I downloaded xbench 1.0 and ran it on the 12″ powerbook (being sure to close all the applications) with 256 mb ram. I then went to a 12″ ibook (with 128mb ram) and did the same thing.
powerbook = 50.95
ibook = 53.95
it seems that they hobbled the powerbook by not leveraging any L3 cache.
If you only have the brass to spring for an entry level G4, go for the dual 867 and pack it with ram. If you’re really cheap, you can find factory refurbished, under warrantee, models for less than $1600.
When it comes to day to day tasks such as email and surfing the web I really don’t notice that much difference between my ibook 600 (no QE) and my G4 tower (w QE).
If you plan to be pshopping and/or vidding, ’tis better to have 2 processors and 2 altivec units doing the chewing.
Or, best yet, start a little fund with ingdirect.com, socking away $100 a month and by the time you’ve got enough to buy 2/3ds of that PowerMac, Apple and IBM should have the new 64 bit chips out.
I think people will always be willing to pay a little more for an Apple computer, just like people will pay for a Dell or an HP rather than [insert crappy white box brand here].
/me is inserting Dell, HP, Gateway, Compaq….
Will these big companies EVER learn how to set up a PC that works out of the box? I want a mac…they come complete with enough software to do anything. Windows computers come with enough junk on them to slow them down. These big PC makers will never learn how to optimize a computer and bundle high quality free software with the computers. There is no innovation being done by any PC manufactures, just marketting gimmicks. And everything DOES take longer to make it into PCs than Macs.
that’s the day apple loses its only inherent advantage – it’s control of the hardware, software, os and apps and online service.
>>>>>>>
I love how Mac users think this is a *good* thing. It’s bad when MS tries it, it’s bad when Apple tries it. I’ve always thought it’s an inherently stupid idea for an OS manufacturer to compete with it’s app developers.
more reliable, fewer glitches, easier to use and
>>>>
You think an x86 is inherently less reliable than a Mac? I have a POS Tandy 486 that has been working great for 13 years now. My five year old PII-300 still works great. If Apple used x86, they’d still deliver an integrated solution. They’d most likely use high quality motherboards from Asus or Intel. Those things just plain won’t die. As for being easy to use, there is nothing that prevents Apple from ditching the x86 BIOS mess and using OpenFirmware, which would put hardware detection on a par with Apple machines.
(2) innovations more rapid than possible on the PC side for everything that requires hardware and software(e.g., airport, iMovie + firewire)
>>>>>>>>>>>
Nothing would stop Apple from doing that with an x86-based architecture. Airport is just 802.11b (AE is 802.11g). Sony was shipping machines with Firewire support right after Apple did. Heck, my Dell has a Firewire port. Any hardware you can throw in a G4, you could throw in a custom designed x86 machine.
of course many PC users like yourself are in denial of this. you can’t admit it because you like the PC and hate that mac has something you can’t have
>>>>>>
The day I get a Mac is the day I give up my two favorite things about computers: power and flexibility.
Yes, the new 12″ 867 Mhz Powerbook is considerably slower than its own predecessor!
I am really angry about this. All the Xbench benchmarks do show that the new Powerbook is _notoriously_ equal or worse than the faster iBook today and even slower than my G4 Cube 450 Mhz.
Sure, it doesn’t have that 1 MB of L3 cache, but it should have been performing better than what it does atm!
Check here the previous 867 Mhz Powerbook model, which has an ATi Radeon 9000 (instead of the slower GeForce4MX-420 model) and 1 MB L3 cache (here http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc2=6405 and here http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc2=6259 ). They average between 77 and 80.41 marks, which is really fast! And the new Powerbook barely gets above 50 points. There is no excuse to be selling such a slow model. >:(
FWiW: Just ran xbench on my titanium powerbook:
73.81
Powerbooks are plenty fast enough for development and heavy duty office work. Yes, I love my mac, as well as the Macs I have at home.
Yes, your numbers are normal for the Mhz.
I don’t understand why the freaking 12″ new Powerbook is so slow. It *should* be scoring between 65 and 70.
Last night, I wanted to buy it. Right now, I am not so sure. >:(
I’m not at all impressed with this release.
1) The processors are still starved for bandwidth. At 1.42 GHz, the G4s can chew through some 25+ GB/sec of data per second (ideally). The FSB only runs at 1.3 GB/sec, and that’s shared by two processors! I have a feeling that once the benchmarks come in, these new machines won’t be very much faster at all. This is the big reason why the G4 architecture is holding Apple back. Memory bandwidth has been a major bottleneck in PCs for about a decade now. Recently, x86 machines have made huge jumps in memory bandwidth, to the point that the new chipsets coming out this fall from Intel and AMD offer 6-7 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. For multimedia work, this is a huge leap.
2) It’s still expensive. A dual 1.4G/512MB Mac with Radeon 9700 and 17″ LCD is $600 more than a 3G/512MB Dell with Radeon 9700 and 17″ LCD. And the Apple machine’s speakers and audio card aren’t nearly as nice as those on the Dell.
PS> Offering DDR333 on the high-end machines vs DDR266 on low-end machines is a damn ugly marketing gimick. The G4’s can’t even use the full 2.1GB/sec of DDR266, much less the 2.7GB/sec of DDR333.
Don’t know either. I agree with someone (and you) who posted some time ago on the decision by apple to make the small powerbook also low end wrt speed; I think that’s a mistake. I would love to have a small hot-rod for a powerbook for travel.
Eugenia, here’s a little Cube talk. After doing that Powerlogix dual 800 MHz upgrade on my friend’s Cube I told you about (I have to get them to run Xbench on that), I got a 450 MHz Cube, maxed out the RAM (1.5 GB), was able to get the hard-to-get Raedon 7500 graphics card and installed the single 1 GHz Powerlogix upgrade. My Xbench score is 94.13! And, it is a huge difference from the 450 MHz. I see that the Powerlogix 800 MHz for the Cube has gone down to about $385. I bet it would score in the high 70’s or perhaps even into the 80’s on Xbench.
Raynier, I pretty much agree with you about the current Apple situation. But, I think they’re stuck there right now – there isn’t much they can do until they make some kind of processor change. Personally, I’ve never had any problem with Microsoft bundling software with Windows. I do believe they abused their monopoly in other ways, but bundling software in itself has never been a concern of mine.
I do think this is going to be a great year for OS X though.
>Don’t know either
the benchmarks here also confirm the slowness of the 12″ pbook: http://www.barefeats.com/pb17.html (however, these numbers are from beta 3, which can’t be compared with the 1.0 vesrion of XBench)
>by apple to make the small powerbook also low end wrt speed;
I don’t think that this is the case. There is something _very fishy_ happening here: Either the new Powerbook has a technical flaw that makes it so much slower, OR the XBench software doesn’t measure it correctly (this is more likely).
It just doesn’t make sense AT ALL, to have the 12″ Powerbook, with considerably faster RAM than the 15″ Powerbook and extremely faster RAM than the iBook, and yet, the new Pbook to score worse than the iBook and WAY worse than the 867 Mhz Powerbook (which indeed has faster gfx card and 1 MB L3 cache).
I would expect the new 12″ 867 Powerbook to score between 65 and 70 or even 75. That “50” points that a lot of XBench benchmarks show, is just unrealistic. There is no way in hell that this machine can be slower than my Cube or even the iBook!! As I said there are 3 reasons that this might happening:
1. XBench has a flaw in its calculations in regards to the new 12″ powerbook.
2. Apple has screwed up somewhere in their hardware implementation… somewhere..
3. The new Powerbook might be running a new driver or something (for example, for the new BlueTooth thingie) that has a negative impact when running XBench.
The first reason seems to be the culprit though when thinking more about it. Again: there is no way in hell the new Powerbook 12″ to be slower than my Cube.
Update: The XBench developer just emailed me and he pointed me to this page:
http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc2=4726
So, indeed the new Powerbook 12″ is where I expected it: between 65 and 70.
>Eugenia, here’s a little Cube talk.
I really don’t want to upgrade anything in it anymore. Doesn’t worth the (crazy) money. I have already upgraded the graphics card from the ATi Rage Pro 128 to GeForce2MX and that was a donation!
If I am going to upgrade, I will do it the way it really worths it financially with all its additional benefits: getting a refurbished dual 867 Mhz or the new dual 1 GHz PowerMac.
If I am going to upgrade, I will do it the way it really worths it financially with all its additional benefits: getting a refurbished dual 867 Mhz or the new dual 1 GHz PowerMac.
Definitely a good choice… though the cube is so cool.
Yes, my line of throught is that while the cube is really sexy, is an old computer. It only has AGP 2x, it only has SDRAM 100 mhz and is extremely difficult to find a graphics card that actually fit in it.
Also, trying to upgrade through PowerLogix, and then upgrade the gfx card (if you find one) and its RAM, it will be really costly. It would definately be more than $1000 and it would still not be as fast as the cheaper PowerMac today.
While if I get the dual 867 or the dual 1 GHz, yes, I would pay just a bit more than the Cube upgrade, but I would have AGP 4x, much faster RAM, much faster hard drive, expansion slots, CD-RW/DVD or Superdrive, more USB and Firewire ports, better audio and jacks, and I won’t have the current headaches of trying to turn on the Cube and it only turning on only when it feels like it too.
In my mind, there is no value trying to upgrade the Cube.
It will be overall “cheaper” to get a dual PowerMac and I am not necessarily talking about money here.
I was doing some MPEG-2 -> MPEG-4 video encoding last night on my Dual G4/867, and I was getting a pretty amazing 28 FPS. This was dramatically faster than what I remember getting on a PC, so I tested it on my brother’s P4/2.4GHz. Sure enough, I was only able to get around 20 FPS.
Back on topic…I’m curious how a Dual/1.42G would fair against a 3.06GHz P4+HT, or, perhaps more appropriatly, dual Xeons. Video encoding really is one of those tasks that needs as much CPU as possible, and it’s also one of the few which has been heavily optimized on lots of different platforms.
Eugenia, yes, a dual processor Power Mac would definitely be a better value. The Cube upgrade – it does make it very usable – for the time being – but it is more of an exercise of trying to make a really cool computer something you can still use – more of a hobby type thing than anything else.
Thank God for those Barefeats 12″ PB scores – I ordered one the day after it was announced and was thinking of cancelling my order. I really do wish Apple hadn’t skimped on the cache though.
Assuming that xbench runs it’s tests properly, the only item that could explain the results I saw, would be energy saver options. It is possible that the powerbook used reduced processor performance while plugged in and the ibook used full processor performance while plugged in.
Double checking the ibook, since I have one, I got a 52.60, but I didn’t shut down any apps (multi terms, ichat, safari, address, itunes, sherlock, ical, excel, stickies,X11 and a bunch of X apps, etc….). Plus this machine hasn’t been rebooted in 13 days and has been in and out-of numerous wired and wireless networks. Basically, what I’m saying is that the machine was not primed for a benchmark run and still came in pretty close to the machine in the store.
From the marketing wizards at Apple:
“Direct PCI bus
In another example of superior architecture, the Power Mac G4 optimizes PCI performance by connecting the PCI bus directly to the system controller. In a typical PC architecture, PCI devices connect to the I/O controller through a bridge, a bottleneck in the data path where all connected PCI devices are slowed down to avoid overloading the system controller. Going through this bridge constrains PCI throughput to 133Mbps (the bus speed on Pentium 4 systems), even with otherwise fast PCI devices. This slowdown of data to and from PCI devices results in greater overall system latency. The Power Mac G4, on the other hand, features a direct 266-MBps bus to the PCI slots to guarantee high throughput and low congestion ? in effect, lowering latency. The Power Mac G4 also supports write combining, which allows write instructions to be grouped into one large instruction, further increasing data throughput. “
(from the website)
Anybody have a comment on that?
im running OSX.2.3 on a G3 250 powerbook w/ 320mb ram and dont find it slow at all for an ‘ancient machine’ its as fast if not faster than OS9 that was on it before.
but, this is the only machine, other than an 800mhz iBook, I’ve run OSX on.
-kevin
> G3 250 powerbook w/ 320mb ram
> [OSX] is as fast if not faster than OS9 that was on it before.
Please.
>Anybody have a comment on that?
Yes, a good architecture indeed. Same as PIII’s, 3 years ago.
PC chipsets are so fast that they don’t need to put PCI on the north bridge any longer, freeing some precious pins for dual-channel memory and specialized buses (AGP, giga-ethernet). It’s so 1994 – 430FX “Triton”.
Surely all (if not a few) of you dont go around running computationally intensive tasks on your laptops … thats what desktop machines with dual processors & gigs of RAM are meant for! With laptops, the issues really are portability and battery life, not power. If you didnt go around benchmarking these things, you probably wouldnt even notice how fast/slow the thing is running. So why keep complaining about how the 12″ model scores 10 points less than what you expected in some obscure benchmark?
Because:
1. It will cost me $2000 (with the RAM I want to add to it). I want as much more value I can get for the money. And compared to a $2000 PC laptop, it is certainly underpowered, so I do care how much less or more it performs than a 867 Mhz machine.
2. I already have a Cube and I find OSX crawling on it when resizing and scrolling. If I am to buy a $2000 product in order to “upgrade” from my Cube, and at the end I find out that it is actually slower than my 450 Mhz Cube, then I won’t be happy about it, would I? I would be freaking angry. And I bet you haven’t met angry, mediteranean-tempered, women.
Stop being an apologist for Apple. This is a product that costs money. Therefore, it will get evaluated before we decide if we will buy it or not. This is why we have commenting sections on web sites. People are coming together and they discuss what performs well and what not, for any kind of hardware. Apple’s hardware is no exception. They are not God-sent goods. They are man made. Therefore, they will get evaluated as any other product.
Oh. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Just to throw in $.02 here. From the discussion over at macslash (certainly not a hostile crowd when it comes to apple) the 12″ powerbook is a lot more like the iBook than the 15″ powerbook. Its really not the same machine in most respects in terms of motherboard, bus…. The reviews in terms of price / performance have been pretty negative. My guess is go with the 15″/17″ powerbook or save the money and get the iBook.
G3 250 powerbook w/ 320mb ram [OSX] is as fast if not faster than OS9 that was on it before.
Sorry, but I don’t belive that. I’ve used G3 500 MHz iBooks and they are slow, even when running OS9. I’m not sure if it has 128mb of ram or 256, but either way it’s slow. And having OSX on that would be… insane.
My point was about portability & battery life: I’m pretty sure you can find a pentium 4m that can kick some serious ass in terms of raw performance. But in all likelihood, it will be a 8+lbs gorilla with an audible fan that you will not enjoy carrying around, and once unplugged, will give barely 2.5hrs battery life under normal use. I should know, coz I own one of these. My next laptop will be a Ti-powerbook … and there’s nothing YOU can do about it!
My point was about portability & battery life
What good does battery life and portablity do if you can’t do anything on the computer?
You may be missing the point… In my opinion, OSX is the best unix client on the market and as such, is my platform of choice. That being said, I’m very interested in maximizing my hardware purchases on the platform. Now, if the new powerbook did not show an appreciable performance (and function) difference between the $500 cheaper ibook, why would I buy it. People need this type of information to make informed decisions.
> What good does battery life and portablity do if you can’t do anything on the computer?
Good point. Here’s another one though: what good does all that power do when you end up throwing in the recovery CD on the recommendation of so-called ‘technical support people’ after every 4/5 months simply because the thing has been crashing too often? How productive are you when that happens?
Can I use the new 20″ Cinema w/ my PC using a ADV-DVI convertor?
That would be nice.
I’m sorry to be redundant here, but has everyone just been ignoring the XBench page that was posted ( http://ladd.dyndns.org/xbench/merge.xhtml?doc2=4726 )?
Yes, I already linked there. This is the page submitted today, and the XBench author has emailed me about it.
Why don’t you tell him that he has to fix his site.
He’s mischaracterizing some models in the wrong categories (a 500MHz Alum. PowerBook? Don’t think so…) and his categories are too general (by his categorization the 12″ and 17″ are in the same class, but the 15″ isn’t? Whaah?)
If you want to tout this as the be-all-end-all in Mac benchmarking, you should at least be a bit more critical about the mess that he is reporting now… Maybe not AS critical as you are of Apple, but you know–obviously, he has confused you too.
According to the benches the 12″ is the fourth fastest machine they build!!
Thanks for the comment on the “good architecture”. I got that in an email today from a friend who insists that the new Macs are faster than my recently purchased P4 2.83 with PC3200 RAM. He was gloating in that email about how Apple has finally upgraded the architecture to address my concerns.
We used to argue incessantly over beers, with him telling me an 800mhz G4 was much faster than my PC and how Apple in general had a better “price/performance” ratio then the Linux servers I deploy in school districts.
But I digress. Thanks again, I wish one of the aplogists would address my question.
I have an ibook 800mhz with a mere 128mb of ram. I had planned on maxing out the ram, but to be honest I find it unneeded.
I am in linux (debian) about %95 of the time and all I do is code, listen to oggs, email, a little web browsing. I get by on this easily. At all times I have xmms, 6 vim sessions, galeon, sylpheed open. I have never had any problems.
I was even impressed with performance under OSX. It is impressively fast. I don’t really notice any speed problems until 5-6 apps are open. And mind you this is with 128 megs of ram!
I bought the ibook because I got it for about a grand with student discount. I really didn’t have any more money to spend on a laptop and just needed something to code on. It’s working great for me so far.
I owned a tibook 667mhz model about a year ago and ended up selling it. They are simply too fragile; I could feel the case flex way too much when I picked it up. The idea of running around town with it in my backpack from class to class was unheard of–I have no problem doing this with my ibook. Much more durable.
This is finally the most important thing about this new machines. For the first time apple doesn’t increase their prices 20% more in Europe (which still happens on other configurations).
You may also add 16% taxes in Europe to the apple store prices so till now macs have been 36% more expensive although 1dolar is less than 1Euro today 🙁
I’m not ignoring the link, merely stating what I executed today. The two obviously don’t reconcile. Too be honest, the xbench site is correct, my wife may wind up with an ibook… she really needs it, she just doesn’t know it yet 🙂
meant to say “IF” the xbench site is correct…
//Yes, my line of throught is that while the cube is really sexy, is an old computer. It only has AGP 2x, it only has SDRAM 100 mhz and is extremely difficult to find a graphics card that actually fit in it.
Also, trying to upgrade through PowerLogix, and then upgrade the gfx card (if you find one) and its RAM, it will be really costly. It would definately be more than $1000 and it would still not be as fast as the cheaper PowerMac today//
With all due respect, eugenia, you shoulda known that when you bought the cube you were screwed right away, as far as upgrades go.
It’s still cool looking, tho.
Xbench is a beta application. I have no idea if that might favor or disfavor particular systems. But, I don’t think, one way or the other, it should be the end-all of benchmarks because it is still in a development stage.
I don’t like that the 12″ PB doesn’t have that cache. But, I have found, given the context of the Apple processor problem, that RAM makes a huge difference. I would like to see the 12″ PB’s Xbench with the 640 MB max RAM.
> With all due respect, eugenia, you shoulda known that when you bought the cube you were screwed right away, as far as upgrades go
With all due respect Mr, you know jack about me or my Cube. I never bought the Cube. It was given to me. Hah.
>Xbench is a beta application.
XBench 1.0 was released today. I think you made your benchmarks with version 1.0b7 which produces different results than 1.0.
Wow, I missed that! Thanks!!
yes in my original post I was not saying apple should use out of the box X-86 processors. I was stating that motorolla processors have hit the wall in the fact that you need dual processors to come close to what single processor x86 systems can achieve.
Let an established CPU vendor make the new PPC processor to Apple’s specifications. IBM has been mentioned a lot, but someone here mentioned AMD. AMD has proven they can deliver a high performace cpu at a fraction fo the price of comprable cpus from their competitor. Hypothetically if AMD could design a single PPC cpu that performed at or above the level of current dual processor motorolla cpus we would see a reduction in price as we’d now only have to pay for one cpu as opposed to two.
I own both an iMAC and an AMD x86 system. And I agree with the sentiment that apple should keep rigid control over thier hardware in order to provide an OS that is polished and functional, as opposed to an OS that has to support every brand of joe cheapass hardware under the sun.
I won’t mind shelling out /a little/ more for an apple provided it has superior hardware. I don’t see that as the case now as apple has to resort to using dual processors just to stay competitive in the current market.
Jay, which hard drive do you have in your Cube?
I made a small research and saw that _all_ the western digital drives suck on the Cube. No matter which model. It has to be a problem with Mac compatibility…
I just put my Cube 500/CDRW through it’s paces and it came up with a 62.51 on XBench 1.0 final release. While this certainly doesn’t compare to the latest greatest Power Macs, I was quite pleased to see how well it’s still keeping up when compared to most of the recent line-up.
Anyone of you ever listened to the noise of a dual 1.25 GHz box … an airplane during take off!!
Did anybody of you notice the frontal holes in the housing? They are used to FORCEDLY convey fresh air directly to the heatsink.
Where is the legendary Apple quietness gone? (Do you remember the old advertisement?)
IMO these are almost overclocked machines
Submit your results then! That would be the fastest Cube 500 in the results there!
Also, what hard drive are you using *exactly*? model name please.
Excellent for you guys in Europe, however the price of the entry level powermac system in Australia is still very inflated. Someone check my arithmetic but
$US1499 / .5893 = $AUS2544 NOT $AUS3099 as quoted.
Perhaps this is why John Howard wants to bomb iRAQ, get the free trade agreement happening…
At that price, one can get a reasonable 2.0Ghz notebook from Dell…
If Apple’s CEO was the leader of a religious group, then he would be glad to rely on the donations of a small number of faithful members. But, to my knowledge, Apple is not a cult : it’s a business.
It’s outrageous to have to cough up $1,499 for a 1 GHz Power Mac, as several people before me have already said. For that amount of money, I can get a decent 2 GHz PC from a reputable company.
What is even worse is the fact that beside a few specific tasks (heavy graphics, video, …), there is no compelling reason to use a G3 or a G4 instead of a PC.
Sun and SGI are other computer manufacturers who act the same way as Apple : they rely on their technical excellence and are proud of the fact that they are loved by the few customers they have. In real life, more and more companies are opting for solutions that are cheap but get the job done.
Having a market share of less than 10 % after more than 15 years of existence is a shame for a company that is reportedly as talented as Apple. It’s nothing to write home about.
Eugenia, if you do end up getting the 12″ TiBook, would you mind writing a review on it?
-Masao
Can I use the new 20″ Cinema w/ my PC using a ADC-DVI converter?
I would buy the 20″ today if that is the case.
Do any video cards supports the widescreen resolution of a PC w/ XP or Linux?
Sounds to me like the L3 cache is not enabled. I think Apple has this turned off to save energy. Try this:
1. Go to System Preferences > Energy Saver.
2. Click on “Show Details”.
3. Select settings for “Power Adapter” from the the select menu.
4. Click on the “Options” tab.
5. Make sure the “Processor Performace” select menu has “Highest” selected.
Hope that helps.
B*tch and moan about the price all you want, but Macs will never be as cheap as Wintel/Linux boxes. NEVER. They might finally catch up as far as speed is concerned (IBM 970) but they will never cheaper. Apple has to pay for development cost related to their software that other Wintel/Linux companies don’t.
I bet Dell wouldn’t be as cheap as they are if they had to develop their own OS.
Sounds to me like the L3 cache is not enabled. I think Apple has this turned off to save energy. Try this:
According to the Apple website the 12inch powerbook
doesn’t come with a L3 cache…
(they only mention it on the 15 and 17 inch versions)
“I bet Dell wouldn’t be as cheap as they are if they had to develop their own OS.”
Dell and the other Wintel manufacturers subcontract the development of their OS to Microsoft, it still costs money, that money is still included in the price of a new PC.
The reason that Macs are more expensive than PCs of equivalent quality (and usually higher performance) is market share. The development costs for hardware and software are divided up amongst a far smaller number of customers, but those customers have shown that they are willing to pay a high enough price to cover it.
If you’d smack anyone who bought a $1500 PC system then of course you’d smack anyone who bought a $1500 Apple system. Oh the folly of comparing home-built to manufactured. I mean, how is Apple supposed to compete with “Brian in his basement”? Exactly what market are they supposed to be competitive in?
Eugenia, my Cube has a 80 GB 7200 WD Caviar Special Edition hard drive. It’s quiet as a mouse, which sort of surprised me. I just did a new Cube test with Xbench 1.0 and my Cube result is now 95.74.
The disk test are interesting: 101.90.
However, breaking them down by sequential and random, they fluctuate (the uncached read and write tests) between the mid 90’s all the way up to 109.82.
I did my own comparison of the new Apple LCD pricing to what’s currently on the market, using Pricewatch pricing. And realizing LCD prices in the PC world are in a freefall.
First, I must congratulate Apple for bringing reasonable pricing back to their LCD screens. The fact that the prices are not 2X or 3X the price of a PC LCD monitor is a giant accomplishment.
The pixels/$ ratio (1357 p/$) on the 20″ 16×10 is of roughly comparable value compared to the raft of 16×12 monitors available which have p/$ ranging from 1262 (to 1511:
Samsung 210t 16×12 = 1262 p/$
Apple 20″ 17×11 = 1357 p/$
Philips 200p3g = 1449 p/$
Viewsonic VX2000 = 1512 p/$
However, the Apple 23″ 19×12 display comes in at 1229 p/$. This compares quite favorably to the Sony SDM-P232w/b 23″ 19×12 at 960 and the Samsung 240T 19×12 at 856. That Apple is leading any segment of LCD monitor in terms of value is amazing.
If the rumors at http://www.macwhispers.com are true and Apple does come out with a high density LCD at half the price that these monitors currently command in the PC world, that will be a giant step forward for desktop computing.
Let us only hope that Apple can do some work on their CPU pricing and performance similar to what they’ve done with their LCD monitors.
–ms
//With all due respect Mr, you know jack about me or my Cube. I never bought the Cube. It was given to me. Hah//
You didn’t buy it? Okay … so .. then … you’re the last one that should complain about it.
If somebody gives me a brand new car with a mid-sized engine, but says “you can’t upgrade the engine” … I’m not gonna complain.
But that’s me. Maybe you like to be curmudgeonly. Whatever.
When the PowerMacs went to DDR they still were not utilizing the DDR. They seem to be limited on bandwidth and hence hindered the performace. With new bus speeds does this mean they also put a new memory controller in? Also I see they finallly went to 133IDE. Now all they lack is the 8X AGP