Don’t regret a thing….
This morning Apple updated the PowerMac line. My wife asked me if I regretted not waiting. My answer is “no”.
The low-end of the PowerMac line is always a “dumbed-down” version of its predecessor, and this newest line up is no exception. The dual 2 GHz G5 PowerMac, which is what I bought about a month ago, is now priced at $1999, the same price I paid for a refurbished model. But if you look at the specifications on the machines, you’ll notice that the new PowerMac is only upgradeable to 4 GB of RAM and it has only PCI slots. My PowerMac is upgradeable to 8GB of RAM and has PCI-X slots. Now, it’s true that I only plan on expanding my RAM to 4GB and I don’t have any PCI-X cards, yet. But I have the capability of using the new technology. Had I bought a new one, I wouldn’t have.
The newer PowerMac has a faster and double-layer capable DVD burner and a 128 MB Radeon 9600 XT video card. Well, as soon as I understand what dual-layer and dual format drives are natively supported by Tiger, I’ll be equipping my G5 PowerMac with one. My G5 came with a Radeon 9600 Pro video card with only 64MB of RAM, and the Radeon 9600 in the new machine is not available outside of Tiger. But I plan on bumping the video card up at some point anyway, probably to a Radeon 9800 Pro with 256MB of RAM, so I can run Motion and get real-time rendering. The bottom line is that both of those options are things I’m going to address on my current G5 on my own.
I can’t see how I would have done anything but lost out if I had waited and bought todays’ 2 GHz machine.
The low-end of the PowerMac line is always a “dumbed-down” version of its predecessor, and this newest line up is no exception. The dual 2 GHz G5 PowerMac, which is what I bought about a month ago, is now priced at $1999, the same price I paid for a refurbished model. But if you look at the specifications on the machines, you’ll notice that the new PowerMac is only upgradeable to 4 GB of RAM and it has only PCI slots. My PowerMac is upgradeable to 8GB of RAM and has PCI-X slots. Now, it’s true that I only plan on expanding my RAM to 4GB and I don’t have any PCI-X cards, yet. But I have the capability of using the new technology. Had I bought a new one, I wouldn’t have.
The newer PowerMac has a faster and double-layer capable DVD burner and a 128 MB Radeon 9600 XT video card. Well, as soon as I understand what dual-layer and dual format drives are natively supported by Tiger, I’ll be equipping my G5 PowerMac with one. My G5 came with a Radeon 9600 Pro video card with only 64MB of RAM, and the Radeon 9600 in the new machine is not available outside of Tiger. But I plan on bumping the video card up at some point anyway, probably to a Radeon 9800 Pro with 256MB of RAM, so I can run Motion and get real-time rendering. The bottom line is that both of those options are things I’m going to address on my current G5 on my own.
I can’t see how I would have done anything but lost out if I had waited and bought todays’ 2 GHz machine.
posted by Andy Foster at
2:19 AM
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