asv108's Journal: Forgive me Lord for I have Sinned

After more than a decade of hating the Apple culture and company, (I liked Apple in the 80's), I made quite a rash move the other day. I decided to buy a Powermac.

This was really hard for me to do, so let me explain my rational. First off, I really don't care for Apple as a corporation. In many senses, Apple is more restrictive and monopolistic (in nature not market share) than Microsoft. The company doesn't bug me nearly as much as the "Apple fans," who are generally quite a clueless bunch. Apple fans make comments like "The G5 is the fastest computer in the world," "OSX is the most advanced OS ever." "Safari is the best browser ever," and my favorite "Apple embraces Open Source.."

Even though I hate the fans, the company, and the culture, the Apple products are actually very innovative. In the 90's Apple was near death in terms of products and finances, but it seems that the company is now putting out particularly innovative software products with better hardware. The Powermac G5 is nearly as fast as the latest Xeon workstations, like the dual 2.8 I have at work. Its certainly not the fastest and oh yes, the dual powermac is a workstation. I love how the Apple crowd likes to act like that box is a personal computer thus making Apple's marketing kool aid true.

There were a few events that manifested in to a perfect storm, which led to me purchasing an nice shiny dual G-5. First off, I now work in an office with a sweet workstation. I may only work 10 hours a week at home, generally sshing in to my work machine. At home I had 2 machines, a ~3 ghz athlon with all the latest bells and whistles and a 1.6 athlon with 750 GB of storage for my file server. I never use the windows machine, except when using photoshop and other design tools.

In past year, Apple has released a few products that made me want to purchase a Mac.

• The G5
• Isight
• Garageband

Along with some older products that I've always wanted to use on a mac

• Final Cut Pro
• Photoshop
• Soundtrack

The real software clincher for me was Fink, which Apple should gives those guys a big donation if they haven't already. I don't think a lot of the Unix/Linux people would considering running osx without fink.

So I decided to get a refurbished dual ghz Powermac which with edu pricing, it didn't break the bank but is still more expensive that my dual xeon at work, but I that machine is homebuilt. I think my dual xeon would run ~$5000 from dell. I'm looking forward to running the various media apps, hooking up my midi controller, and attempting to install gentoo on the G5 :)

BTW, if you need any PC parts, free shipping to /.ers. I stuck the 3ghz athlon and the ddr 400 from the windows box in to my file server :)

It's ok

[blueforce]

I don't blame you. I had a dual Athlon system on a Tyan mobo. Several years ago when I built it, it was the first dual Athlon set-up available. About a month ago the Tyan board and a piece of the Crucial Ram died so I was forced to replace parts, which would require basically building a whole new machine, or just buy a pre-built machine from a vendor.

I seriously considered a new mac. I thought about it and researched for about two weeks. I was really torn between a new G5 and just buying all new parts

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It's ok

[salimma]

OS X's GUI does perform a lot more enhancements than XP's though; use WindowBlinds and WindowFX and performance deteriorates [slashdot.org], to the point that subjectively Macs seem faster. *Very* subjectively as I sold my *books months ago.

That being said, since those GUI frills could not be turned off, it does make using an OS X a pain, sometimes. If one's working with Unix tools, nothing that could not be solved by running a full-screen X server though.

Cheapest workstation deal...

[salimma]

... is to buy one off eBay. I know this for a fact because I was a seller once. Was about to leave the country (UK) after graduation, ended up selling a nice dual-Athlon MP 1600+ (2x1.4 GHz) for just over 350, this in spring 2003.

Before Apple puts the G5 in their eMac/iMac line I don't see how they could call their G5 systems 'personal computers', frankly. Nor economical. I'm tending towards Opteron for workstations and whichever CPU is made available with 64-bit capability and Pentium-M-level power consum