Farewell to G4, Apple Options

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Farewell to G4

[boze]

Today wonderful G5 is here and G4 is discretely waving goodbye...

some grammar mistakes here.

I'm sorry but the tongue-in-cheek 'fond farewell' angle _totally misses me. The G4 hasn't been a modern system on a modern mobo with up-to-date hw in about two years. Until this summer- no wait, i mean this _fall (my bad, summer was when you could _order a G5s but they didn't ship until maybe three months after that, right?) a G4 tower was the best the Apple store had to offer.

While some folks may have fond memories of spending an extra two or more years in OS9 after OSX came out and watching the Apple/Motorola relationship hold back their desktops while wintel machines raced to speeds of 3ghz, I thought it was lame. The G5 was long-awaited but imo that's because the G4 outstayed it's welcome by over a year while Apple lurched away from Moto to the new IBM chip. What I'm saying is the long run the G4 had was something the Mac community _suffered not enjoyed (in the sense that the community as a whole is waiting out the G4- I'm not saying each of us is feeling discomfort or anything like that). Nowhere is rustiness of the G4 as evident as in the Mac notebook line which still offers only G4s and benefits not at all from the dual processor technology that helped the G4 towers stay afloat. Who here _doesn't know somebody who's literally waiting for a G5 powerbook?

Being a Mac person has sweetness and sourness to it like anything else, but the 4+years of the G4 tower and the Moto G4 chips was something Apple was _forced to do by sourcing all it's chips from a company that had too much invested in embedded technology (tiny weak chips that go in watches and toasters and microwaves and machinery) to develop the kind of hot inefficient chip that would have suited desktop and notebook computers. The result was a period of several years where the entire Mac community was forced to champion arguments about 'elegance' and 'user experience' because frankly they were getting their asses kicked in measurable terms like performance.

I'm sure everyone here has either heard the argument or made the argument that goes like this: "I'm faster on a Mac even if it's not the absolute fastest piece of hardware out there, and what's most important is that I'm productive and comfortable." And while this is completely true, it's not the kind of distinction you're looking to make when your computer's performance specs are competitive. To wit, Apple's slogan for the G5 campaign: "The World's Fastest, Most Powerful Personal Computer."

This post has been edited by boze: Wed 3 Dec 2003, 17:54