The Dynamic Duo

FOR SALE: iMac, 17” screen, 1Ghz processor superdrive model (the highest-end standard [non-custom] model imac that apple sells). Add to this 768Mb worth of RAM upgrades to the maximum allowable 1Gb of RAM along with English versions of Adobe Photoshop 7, Adobe Illustrator 10, and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. The machine is in mint condition with all of the original packing materials (aside from a foam wrapper that was surrounding the screen and got torn while opening) and software and manuals. It is covered by the AppleCare protection plan. This is truly a beautiful machine, and I will sorely miss the swivel screen, it is amazing. contact me at mac AT t4ac DOT com with questions and offers, read on to find out why I am selling it. Rest assured it is not because of any complaint about the machine. (which has made a mac believer out of me)

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I haven’t been this techcited for years. (Techcited: a combination of Technology and excited. Stupid? Yes I know that’s kind of my trademark.) I was just commenting to the UltraGirl about a week ago that I didn’t really have a very extensive list of computer hardware that I wanted anymore. Sure there are some things that would be cool to have. I wouldn’t mind having a scanner, and if you wanted to give me an old PC to mess around trying to turn into a media PC for the living room I wouldn’t turn it down, and I would really like to be able to capture video from my HI8 camera to enable me to edit it on the computer; but there was very little out there that I felt like I really need. I say was because yesterday Steve Jobs gave his keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Two things that he introduced there have gotten me really excited: the new G5 machines, and Mac OS X.3 (Panther). The G5 will be released in August, and I must have one, but I’m REALLY excited about Panther!

It sounds silly for me to be more excited about the least expensive of the two products, but there are a couple of reasons for it. First, while the hardware is very cool and it is necessary, you don’t feel like you are directly interacting with it like you do with an OS. Secondly, while I have yet to see anything about Panther that I didn’t like, I have at least one issue with the G5 that I’ll get into below. We’ll see when I start writing about it whether I have anymore gripes that I’m not conscious of yet. (Yes, your suspicions were right. I write in a stream of consciousness fashion and very rarely go back and edit, as the snake post reveals. [yes I reread it, and know that it is pretty bad] <- double parenthetic clarification, beat that if you can! [hint: you can’t])

The G5

Anyway, back to writing about the G5.

• Dual 2Ghz 64-bit processors!
• 1 Ghz frontside bus!
• High-speed AGP 8X Pro graphics bus!
• etc!

In other words, what is there to not be excited about? This is the fastest PC in the world, and they have already announced that there will be a dual-3 Ghz model out within 12 months. If you aren’t blown away watch the segment of the keynote address where they pit the dual 2Ghz machine against a Dell dual 3.06 Ghz machine. It blew the Dell machine out of the water, and usually ran more than twice as fast. To be fair, the Dell processors were 32-bit processors, but there are no 64-bit chips available to the consumer. Oh yeah, the Mac is a lot cheaper than the Dell machine too.

The G5 has 9 fans to keep it cool, but is purportedly twice as quiet as the G4 (35dbA at during normal operations at room temperature) and is capable of running dual displays off the shelf.

Now that I have discussed a bit about how the G5 is put together and mentioned the G4, I guess it is time for me to address the gripe that I have with the G5: it isn’t sexy enough. The G4 has those smooth creamy curves and looks deliciously approachable.

The G5 on the other hand, while looking better than any box I’ve ever seen Windows come in, looks a lot more imposing and a lot less luxurious. The grill on the front reminds me of those steel grills you sometimes see around vending machines at rest stops in the United States to keep the machines from being vandalized. I’m sure the design will grow on me, and perhaps it looks a little better in person than when pictured on a computer screen, but I’m pretty sure I like the G4 design a lot better. Let me clarify one more time though, the G5 design is still a good one.

Panther

The easiest way to describe what has me so excited about Panther is just to say that all the things I hated about Jaguar are not just fixed in Panther, but turned into works of art.

The biggest complaint I have with Jaguar, or at least the most naggingly irritating one, is the way it integrates with my Windows network. You see I still primarily work on a Windows machine, and my laptop also runs Windows. My server is a linux machine, but thus far I haven’t accessed it very much from the Mac. Every time I reboot the mac I have to reconnect to my Windows network. This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I have to enter a user id and password for every shared folder that I want access to. I regularly access about four shared folders on the network, so every time I boot up I need to log in (to the same machine) four times. As you can imagine, this gets old really quickly. Panther’s new finder seems that it will eliminate these problems, and that alone would make me a happy man but they’ve also made the finder interface a lot more intuitive and useful, and have added super quick searching too.

A feature that Windows XP has that Jaguar doesn’t is fast user switching. In Windows XP if I am working on something on my computer, but UltraGirl wants to check her e-mail real quick, she can log in to her account without logging me out, and without making me close all the programs that I am using. In Jaguar to switch users you need to log out of one user’s account before the other user can log in. With Panther’s fast user switching I can do it on the fly like in Windows XP, but with style. If you watch the keynote you’ll see a demo of it in action, and it’s pretty.

There is a lot more, but the final thing i want to talk about is Exposé. My other huge gripe about Jaguar has been that I hate dragging a bunch of windows to the side to get to the window that I want. I really missed the Alt-tab functionality of the Windows environment, and no, Command-tab is not the same – it toggles through applications rather than windows. I won’t miss Alt-tab anymore because Apple has come up with a gorgeous solution to the problem of being able to quickly access the window you want. Exposé, allows you to quickly and easily take visual stock of the windows that you have open, and select the one that you want. With Exposé you can see all open windows, all open windows in a single app, or clear all the windows out of the way to see the desktop, which was another gripe of mine about the Mac, although Alt-command-h took care of that for the most part.

So for those of you who were interested in the i-mac, but read on because you wanted to know why I’m giving it up. It’s not the i-mac at all. The i-mac is a beautiful machine, and with the RAM upgrades I made it’s a beautiful and smooth-running machine. the only complaint I had about the i-mac was that it was sometimes a little sluggish when I tried to open 50 files in Photoshop while editing a huge website in Dreamweaver. Unless you frequently do things like this, I highly recommend this machine to you. My hope is that I will be able to recoup my initial investment in the imac (the 768 Mb of RAM and extra software should up the value a lot I would think). I will then put in an order for the new G5 which should handle my harsh design commands like they’re nothing, using the imac money as my down-payment. I don’t really like to buy on credit much, but this machine will be worth it. I think that this investment will finally make a full switcher out of me. I will have to delay the buying-a-car idea for a while though.

So go ahead, contact me at mac AT t4ac DOT com and tell me that you want to buy my imac. I’ll tell you what, just to sweeten the deal a little, I’ll also agree to love you for a full year when you purchase (note: This additional benefit is purely optional) Once again, that is mac AT t4ac DOT com

Oh yeah, the G5 will be out in August, and Panther is scheduled for “later this year.”