Gaaaa!!!! So much skepticism!!!!

Koelling

Koelling

I Think Different
This is getting out of hand. The amount of whining on this board is so incredibly stupid. In a place where I used to come to enjoy some good rumors/news I now get depressed every day because the people on this board are so negative.

The thread "New PowerMacs Released!" Should be a thread of people cheering that we finally get a new chip. Instead it's diverted into "Waa, too little too late". The "Switch campaign... real "actors"..." is polar opposite to the general consensus we had a couple months ago that Apple needed more advertising. Then there's the thread "Total Disaster? Here's why." which got me started on this whole rant. I mean really, if the machine was actually 500% faster, or 400% boost then we'd have people complaining about how obsolete their computer became so quickly. I have a 266 G3 iMac running perfectly fine under 10.1.5 and you bet your boots I'd see a 500% or more likely 1000% boost in power. Did you ever think that maybe I'd not share your opinion that 1.25 Ghz is too slow?

The real problem here is that you people are so self centered that you don't realize that when Apple does something that isn't exactly what you wanted to see, you expect everyone to agree. I didn't want to resort to personal attacks, but Pezagent, you really need to give it a rest. As far as I can tell, your so-called "harmless venting" is succeeding in turning other people into cynics. Thank god this forum doesn't have the attention of the whole world or else they would all be powering down their Macintosh computers and crying in a corner about how uncle Steve doesn't love them any more.

This may be flame bait but as far as I'm concerned, this forum is dead to me. I bid you all a very fond farewell.
 
Too true, reading the messages on here is becoming a chore rather than a diversion/relaxing break. (I can only feel sorry for moderators at the moment).

I aint going as far to say I can't be bothered anymore, but certain people are just out to p*** people off and tell you the opposite of what you state for the shear bloody-mindedness of it.
 
i could not agre with u more, i come here wanting to discus how cool it is that we now have all this new cool hardware (dual 1.2GHz, 167MHz DDR) and all i see is negative coments on how eveything sucks. :(
 
Regardless of how "cool" it is to not like these products, or how much people are whining, I believe that there are many people who have respectably expressed their opinion here.

In my mind, and the mind of a few other level-headed users of this forum, this revision is "too little, too late" and that is certainly a justified opinion.

Though mac users have "finally gotten a new chip", is it not accpetable for them to not be pleased with it? By Moore's law, the 1 Ghz towers that were released in January should have been replaced by something more on the scale of a 1.5 Ghz G4. Not to mention that it would take something more than simply matching Moore's law in order to close the performance gap with x86 manufacturers.

In addition, the DDR memory which has finally been employed in this system is seriously crippled, much in the way that the Xserve's is. There is 2.7 Gbps of memory throughput, but only 1.3 Gbps of CPU throughput.

I also remember hearing that the L3 cache was reduced, though I am not sure.

Apple's own benchmarks from the product page state that the machine performs 3.0 times better than a 500 Mhz G4, whereas it is also stated that the previous 1 Ghz tower performed 2.5 times better. This represents, for what will problably be for the year on the whole, a 20% increase in professional line computing power. Even then these statistics may have been embellished by Apple.

Now strictly speaking of performance, this machine can already be called "dissapointing" this is before even examining some more exotic feature requests, that some Mac users may have had.

Now, everyone can go ahead supporting Apple in its every marketing decision. You can be "loyal" to the company and talk about how "cool" this lacklustre hardware is. Or, you can recognize the obvious: this is a poor system that was put together in order to carry us to the next revision, which hopefully holds some more interesting developments.

Some people may be overly ready to call Apple "beleaguered" again, but most of here just wish to make a just and fair criticism of Apple rather than to be zealous and ignorant.

Koelling, best of luck in finding you new home, I always liked your avatar.;) And please, if you do find a suitable forum, would you mind paying a visit and posting a URL to it, in the many forums that I read, I ahve sene nothing but similar talk.
 
I'll have to definitely agree about the whining.... Two other people at work were considering getting PowerMacs. They were both blown away by todays announcement. One of them came over and said "OMG I was going to buy a 933Mhz tower and now I can get dual 1Ghz chips for the same price." She placed an order this morning. The other person said he'd have to go home and figure out the money before buying. He'll have a Mac within the month.

Dual GHz is nothing to sneeze at. Apple said that 10.2 would allow *all* applications to use the SMP. My guess is that this will be something similar to BeOS' pervasive multithreading (although probably not as good). Maybe it would be as simple as being able to allocate individual threads to individual processors depending on need.... If this is the case, apps like Mozilla will use both processors. I'm sure that apps tuned for dual processors will see an even bigger boost than normal, multithreaded apps.

In any case, most folks (not fastest and ultimate) are getting almost 100% more processing power.

Those bitching about the 5K PowerMac: who buys the "ultimate" anyway? The way apple prices RAM you'd have to be mentally deficient to willingly buy 2GB of RAM from apple. Everyone knows this, so please stop whining for the sake of whining... :rolleyes:

To those whining that their 1 year old macs are not obsolete: No, you 1 year old Mac is not obsolete. There is a reason why apple is comparing these machines to the original 500Mhz G4. You are not the target audience for these machines. Most people can't afford to dish about a few thousand dollars every year. To people running the original G4 and G3s, these machines are a *substantial* increase in performance.

one more thing: this machine has other features that although not as marketable will make a real difference in performance.

The DDR in the L3 cache is the biggest one (IMO). This is huge and will translate into *real* performance gains. In addition to this, having a dirrect connection between the ATA100 drives and the CPU will do more for performance than having ATA150 drives. Most drives don't saturate a ATA66 bus. What good will it do to have a bus that is underutilized by a greater factor than the ATA100 or ATA166 bus?

I totally agree that Moto *sucks shriveled balls*, but I think apple is remaining competitive by doubling up on the CPUs, enhancing their software so that *all* apps use both procesors and most importantly, getting rid of the *real* performance bottlenecks (even if these things are not as marketable).

I also agree that this is only a stopgag measure until they can get performance gains that are easier to market, but on their own right, these machines are pretty competivite.
 
I would just like to say that I think no one is maliciously trying to rain on anyone's parade here. There's whining to be sure, but there's also valid criticism. I've always been a big Mac proponent, having owned a Plus, LC475, PowerBook Duo 230, and now a 400 MHz TiBook.

The criticism of "too little, too late" is mostly aimed at the mid and high-end models. They are simply too pricey, in my opinion, for machines with technology that should have come out 7 months ago.

The $1700 low-end model, however, is a great deal and is the only gem in the refreshed line-up. It provides a huge boost over the model it's replacing and a complete dual-processing system with a modern subsystem can be had for about $2100.

However, the mid-range model is very iffy at its price point and the high-end model is dead in the water at $3300. Again, the machines would be hot - if Apple chopped 20-30% off the price.

As such, I think we'll see a reverse of what's been happening in terms of sales patterns. For example, the best seller in the iMac line has always been the tricked out, high-end model.

In contrast, I think the best-selling pro desktop model will be the $1700 low-end model - the only really competitively priced system in the lot.

I'm actually in the camp that thinks Jaguar is worth the $129. I also think the Switch campaign is highly effective, the consumer strategy is rock solid, and there is plenty to cheer about in the eMac, iMac, iBook, and TiBook lines. The iPod, too, which is still by far the best digital music player out there.

Don't get me wrong - these would be great machines - but not at the current price points (with the exception of the $1700 model).

I suppose time will tell on whether they sell or not, but I think for the most part, pro users expected a better value offering than what Apple is providing, considering how overdue all these enhancements are.
 
Koelling - I couldn't agree more. I've been sick of it for some time now. It's flat out annoying. The whole Mac community is getting on my nerves.

Unless you have money in hand to purchase a machine today, you don't deserve the right to "po-po" what you can't afford.

Admin
 
First let me say that I generally agree about the "whining". It seems to me that there are a lot of people far too concerned about the current Apple MHz issue. I'm concerned about getting work done. And I get work done just fine on a 600MHz G3 iBook!

That said...

Originally posted by Javintosh
To those whining that their 1 year old macs are not obsolete: No, you 1 year old Mac is not obsolete. There is a reason why apple is comparing these machines to the original 500Mhz G4. You are not the target audience for these machines. Most people can't afford to dish about a few thousand dollars every year. To people running the original G4 and G3s, these machines are a *substantial* increase in performance.
Click to expand...

This is a very interesting and non-obvious observation. How many people are buying a new machine every year? In fact the really funny thing is that if Apple had just obsoleted (completely) the set of PowerMacs sold in the past 3-6 months, there would be a whole other crowd whining about THAT!

Apple seems to be more astute in their product planning than many give them credit for (this observation indicates that).

Finally, let me say this...Apple is NOT selling CPUs (per se). Apple is NOT selling operating systems (per se). No, Apple is selling systems that help people get their work done. Do these machines have to be fast? Yes, some of them do. Do they have to be the fastest in the world? Probably not.

The bottom line question (and this is for ANYONE complaining about Apple's current or rumored products) is this:

Are YOU getting done the work YOU need to get done with the machine YOU have right now?

If not...is it because of the MHz of your machine, or something else (watching Apple's product developments too closely perhaps ;))?
 
I am behind Apple, but if i feel there are things that could have been done better, than i will and shall voice my opinion. Hopefully Apple will see our requests and take action to make Apple the best it can be, which might help the market share of the company. What this site did was not acceptable, considering we have opinions on what would make the better product, considering we are the ones spending the money for them. Every industry, everything has criticism, what people do about it is the key. There is no way for everyone to be happy with everything, but if the words of a few can bring change, no matter how little, it is worth while. If Mac is the Mercedes of the computer world, why is it too much to ask for the best? Mercedes dominates when it comes to quality, although they have competition with other quality brands. The Mac has to have the best components, the fastest processors, and options for us to make our systems more suitable for our needs. So until i see all that, I think it is hard to compare Mercedes to Apple when it comes to being good and innovative across the board.

My machine will be 3 in January, and i have yet to see a system that is so much powerful that I NEED to have it. I will buy a Ti, but I am still good for about a year for a desktop machine.

CCUILLA is right, my Mac gets the job done and i am happy with it, because it makes money for me.
 
This is really quite amusing.

I've never seen a forum actually close down due to being perturbed about some people complaining.

Furthermore, some people should realize that when one person complains, there may or may not be such a legitimate problem...

When *many* people stand up and complain, they usually have somewhat of a point. The .mac controversy proves this, as do the new powermacs perhaps. [although I havnt looked over their specs personally]

People have to learn that the phrase "your opinion does not make you the center of the universe" cuts both ways. If you are happy with any given subject/announcement/rumour etc, then fine. If someone else expresses dissapointment, then no mature adult should be chastising said person because of that.

I am not in the market for a 3000 dollar apple machine, and I am hoping that Jaguar is all that many claim it will be. But its fairly obvious to me, despite my neutrality on the whole subject; that apple's hardware is no longer cutting edge in many respects.

You have to have a certain level of neutrality and/or objectiveness to come out and say that.

I also notice a lot of people trying to change the other person's mind or "prove them wrong" or "prove how little they know" in certain threads just because of a dissagreement. Some of you have also yet to learn just how futile it is to change someone elses mind.
 
If this forum had any credibility before yesterday, it all went out the window with that little stunt of 'protest.' I guess I feel most sorry for those people who have been suckered into purchasing email addresses thru this site: better not complain or you might find your email service 'interrupted' out of spite.

Really, a classless move.

Obviously, there are many people here who aren't too thrilled with the new product line. I guess that makes all of us wrong and the admin right. We should all be good little Apple lemmings and fall in line.

Screw that noise.

I've been a loyal, zealous, vocal Mac supporter for 12 years or so, and I feel that I have earned the right to voice my displeasure, just as I would voice my joy, when Apple initiates new hardware or software.

Tell me admin, how useful having a SuperDrive and a ComboDrive in the top of the line PowerMac is. Tell me how often you can envision using both at the same time. $5000 for that thing? Are you kidding me???

Having railed on asosx and about ready to tear pezagent a new one (talk about trolls!), I think I, along with a lot of others around here who have made their allegiance to Apple quite clear, have 'earned' the right to complain where we see fit.

If you disagree, say why. Don't just take your ball and run home crying.
 
Tell me admin, how useful having a SuperDrive and a ComboDrive in the top of the line PowerMac is. Tell me how often you can envision using both at the same time.
Click to expand...

This would let you duplicate a disk without having to copy one disk to your hard disk first, or it could let you play a game, etc. while you are burning a disk in the background, and you can keep two discs mounted at the same time which lets you do all sorts of other multitasking things (import a CD to iTunes while you watch a DVD), and saves you some disk swapping.

$5000 for that thing? Are you kidding me???
Click to expand...

You can get a ComboDrive+SuperDrive G4 starting at $2,149. I think what you have to realize about the PowerMac revision is that we saw only moderate enhancements on the high end, but an enormous leap forward on the bottom end, which is where the vast majority of the users are buying; I know a lot of people who always buy the current low-end pro desktop (including me), and maybe one or two that would buy the next one up, and no one above that.

The fact is, there are no new killer apps that require more processor speed; my G4 466 is just as responsive with Jaguar, Photoshop 7, and InDesign 2 as it was the day I bought it with OS 9.0, Photoshop 6, and Quark. I slapped a 32MB RADEON in it for $40 so it runs all the new games just fine, and 384MB RAM in it so it runs OS X, and I have little reason to upgrade anything else besides the storage. Gaming and Photoshop used to be the big reasons to upgrade, and now that we are seeing amazing graphics cards that take almost all the work off the CPU, and with AltiVec letting any G4 get good PS performance, I suspect many others are holding back longer than they ususally would as well. I'm leaning a lot more towards buying one of the rediculously large displays than getting a new tower right now; I think becoming an industry-leader in large, quality flat-panels was a great move, since screen real-estate is something creative professionals do always need to upgrade ;).

What Apple really needs to do to kick-start their pro hardware is team up with innovative software companies to produce software that will give me a reason to upgrade. Getting platform parity on Maya was a great start (especially when we were hearing all these rumors of Mac Maya being dropped completely), and they have been acquiring other professional-level software companies left and right.
 
I think becoming an industry-leader in large, quality flat-panels was a great move
Click to expand...

People give apple too much credit. When they resell somebody's screen or airport card they are awesome but when they put slow processors in their machine it's motorola's fault.

On a different topic, I agree that shutting down the site was an immature move. I wonder what admin is like in real life? I suspect I wouldn't want to know him.

Vanguard
 
Here's how I see the current situation:

What Apple has done *right*:

1) OS X. Huge. Probably will draw more 'switchers' than any other single factor. It's easy to use, yet powerful for the geek crowd. I haven't heard this much buzz about an OS since Microsoft released Windows 98 in the year 1999 (or was it Windows 95 that came out in 1997?) And that wasn't a good buzz.

2) iMac. People love it. Apple wins hands down in design. External design anyway. Their product line, in visual terms, is actually stunning.

3) iPod. Again, everybody wants one. I don't have one myself, but if I needed an mp3 player you can bet I'd covet Apple's.

4) TiBook. This I do have, and to loosely quote Charlton Heston, you couldn't pry it "from my dead, cold hands." Everybody who sees me using this in the bookstore, or when I am gigging with it at concerts (using just the TiBook and a USB keyboard), asks tons of questions about it.

5) iApps. I really love the apps that I do use (I don't use them all). AddressBook needs some serious work though.

6) Acquisitions. Personally, the fact that Apple bought Emagic is huge, but I also love the inroads they are making with regard to filmmaking and artistic endeavors in general.


Things Apple is doing *wrong*:

1) Processor speed. At some point, Apple is going to start to lose loyal customers if they cannot successfully start to close the mhz gap. You can blather on ad infinitum, but at some point, the argument that "x mhz on the Mac is as fast as 2x the mhz speed on a PC" is going to run aground. Most of us already know that's not true, but it doesn't even matter when the gap is now approaching 2.5x and beyond, and the price of the 2.5x (Intel/AMD) machines is quite a bit lower.

2) Pricing. The high-end machines are just too expensive. The top of the line tower and TiBook in particular, are in my opinion, not competitive. I think the lower and even mid-level machines are priced fairly competitively, but could probably come down a bit more.

3) Features. I always feel like my graphics card, my cache, my RAM, are inferior considering what I'm paying for a brand-new machine. Even the burners are, from what I hear, of low quality, at least in terms of speed. I'm not really a tech guy so maybe somebody else with more knowledge can comment on the differences between an out-of-the box Wintel machine and an out-of-the-box Mac in terms of those things.

4) .Mac. We've already had a slam-fest about this so I won't say any more.

5) The "switch" campaign. I like the ads, but the people they chose really put a bad taste in my mouth. They all seem to be tech writers or something. Why not show a filmmaker in real time actually using FinalCutPro? Or a music maker creating a dance track? Nothing (well, almost nothing) quickens my pulse more than seeing people using Macs to accomplish real goals.
 
Now we're whinning about people whinning. Endless cycle. Yeah so what. Let them whine, they'll still buy macs if their loyal users. I will never go back
 
I'm sure most everyone here is old enough to recall the Atari Commodore wars of our youth. Then when Atari was out it was Amiga versus Apple. Put the same people in a room and you'd have a near riot. It feels like those old days again. And not that they were all that bad either.
Atari and Commodore got a severe bashing from their own users when they didn't like the direction either company was going. And both companies made severe blunders big enough to make any loyal user angry. Why should Apple be any different?
It's the devotion and loyalty to a particular brand that makes people say and do very strange things.
Informed and uninformed comments, if it's positive or negative, let it be heard. If you do not agree with the negative that's your right, but censorship isn't the answer. Challenge the negative comments for clarification and do the same for the positive.
As long as everyone understands a persons right to their own opinion, whetever direction it takes this place is going to be better off in the long run. And remember we are the only hold outs to an industry which doesn't have any viable alternative to the Wintel juggernaut. Lets not make the situation worse by turning away Mac users from what few resources they have on the web.
 
I couldn't agree more with Koelling, it's like being around a bunch of 1st graders in here. They don't get their way or don't like what they hear/see so they cry about it constantly, thinking they're experts in the area...my question, if they're experts then why aren't they working for Apple? Could it be because they don't have as much knowledge as they tend to think or lead-on to have.

It's great to have opinions, but this area is full of negative ones from people who IMHO are ignorant to the topic. If all you want is a break-neck speed computer, build yourself one. Overclock and use a cooling system, etc.,etc., etc. Why you'd need all that speed is a mystery. Maybe when you actually use you computers for something more than tinkering in programs or the internet you'll understand the beauty of stability and endurance the Macs provide over the slightly faster but unstable Wintels.
 
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