On the PowerMac G5…

If you’re into computers at all, you probably know that Apple’s PowerMac G5 has begun shipping. I haven’t seen one, yet. I’ll get around to that next time I have some reason to wander across town to the Galleria, which probably won’t be anytime soon. Most pundits say that some stores around the country will have the machines by mid-week. You might want to look for them. You can tell them apart by the big Apple with a bite out of it on their side and a case that looks like aluminum swiss-cheese!

Last week, I found an article at SoundTrack Lounge that compared Photshop performance between a single-processor 933 Mhz G4 PowerMac and one of the pre-production dual-processor G5’s (2 Ghz). (You can see the article at: http://www.soundtracklounge.com/article.php?story=20030812073633362). Frankly, I didn’t feel the numbers were all that impressive. Admittedly, the operating system may not have been as tuned to the G5 as the OS shipping with them is; and Adobe released Photoshop optimizations for the G5 yesterday, so the full story does remain to be seen. But Apple has raised everyone’s expectations awfully high with marketing hype that the G5 is the world’s fastest personal computer. If the machine can’t produce to the point of making believers out of the folks, then the G5 will be a big bust, one that Apple will find hard to recover from.

As for me, I can’t see a G5 in my future anytime, soon. If I do decide to go there, it will be because I have all my current machines paid off, can trade in one of my PowerMacs on the G5, and can get a decent price on it all.

Frankly, I’m happy not to be a first adopter of the G5 or the upcoming release of Apple’s new version of OS X, Panther, OS 10.3.