PowerMac G4
October 12, 2008May I introduce the latest addition to my computer family?
After waiting for months and months for a decent offer, I’ve bought a PowerMac with Dual G4 450Mhz processors, 1MB L2 cache each, 1GB of memory, 80GB HDD, and a dual layer DVD burner (oh, and a ZIP drive - automatically I dug up my old ZIP disks, who knows, when the world ends, and the US government flips the kill switch on all USB drives, MY 8 ZIP DRIVES WILL STILL WORK). It has a rather crummy Ati Rage 128 Pro whatever 16MB video card, so you can guess what’s next on my wish list.
The PowerMac G4 is from the days when Apple design was playful and a little bit crazy - contrary to the boring and clinical computers they put out today. Apple machines today are pretty, but also rather void of any emotion. The PowerMac G4, with the Cube and the iMac G4, represent the last truly astonishing hardware from Apple.
Let’s hope they can break their cycle of boringness coming Tuesday. I’m not keeping my hopes up, though.
I bought my parents a nice cheap single processor 500mhz Power Mac with 512mb of RAM, and was very pleasantly surprised at how exceedingly well it performs under Tiger, especially the speed of Safari (this was right after the nice fast 3.1 came out, much faster than Firefox on a machine like this). The only problem, is, of course, that ATi Rage, which doesn’t support Quartz Extreme, so screen drawing is sluggish. With a nice cheap Radeon 7500 or GeForce 2mx, however, that problem could be fixed.
But I don’t think I’d put the Power Mac G4 in quitethe same league as the stunning Cube or iMac G4.
Comment by nonesuch — October 12, 2008 @ 5:14 pm
power mac is the best computer in the world
Comment by Parantar — October 13, 2008 @ 1:03 am
You’re 100% right Thom about Apple’s design having declined.
There’s nothing funky about it anymore.
Comment by yelamdenu — October 13, 2008 @ 8:49 pm