Architosh Staff ([email protected])

21 Aug 2002

 

Architosh pays new Power Macs a visit at Apple Store - Our Thoughts on the New Gear

We visited an Apple Store last night to take a look at the new Power Mac G4's with dual processors. They didn't have any 1.25GHz models inhouse, but there were new dual 1.0 GHz Power Macs hooked up to Cinema Displays.

First Impressions on the Case

Our impression of the new case design is that we like the old case design better, especially the front panel. We have a Quicksilver at hand and much prefer its stark front panel. It is simply more elegant.

Looking at the design, this model doesn't seem like Jonathan Ive's work at all. It seems hard to imagine Jonathan coming up with vent holes on the front like it is some jet fighter or race car. What we imagine is that Jobs mandated all new Power Mac cases to express 'power' and speed as much as possible. But judging Jonathan Ive's past work, such a literal attempt at expressing speed through a cheap metaphor seems unlikely.

We hope we are right on this. We hope Jonathan is busy working on the G5's case design, now that the Xserve is over. The new case screams B-team and we are not alone in that sentiment.

First Impressions on Jaguar's Speed

Obviously we couldn't conduct real tests at the Apple Store, so we what did was open up the CPU monitor utility and start experimenting with throwing various loads at the two processors. What we found was that we were unable to get both processors to be above 80 percent usage simultaneously. So it appeared that the bandwidth was holding us back from saturating the two processors together. Have a thought on this? Let us know.

We opened up a QuickTime movie, a Photoshop 7 file, web browser, and then streamed in two QuickTime movies plus a steamed Windows Media movie from C/net news. We had four videos going, one off the hard drive, three streamed, then ran some filters on the Photoshop file, while we surfed the rest of C/net news, all simultaneously.

The new dual Power Mac G4 1Ghz, handled everything with ease, with all four videos running smoothly (no dropping out or freezing). The Photoshop filters ran so fast we couldn't even take notice when they finished (we really needed a larger file) and the web browser page rendering was much quicker than on our 500MHz TiBook, running 10.1.5.

We were clearly impressed with the way these machines handle many applications simultaneously. They balanced the load across the processors beautifully. Overall, the feeling of the machine was much more robust and quicker than a 2.0 GHz Pentium 4 machine we have on hand in our Lexington studio.

Quartz Extreme Impressions

Quartz Extreme isn't as dramatic as one might imagine, but with Jaguar, the overall speed of the Finder is now as fast as Mac OS 9, if not faster. Menus fly open now, and dragging windows around the desktop is noticeably faster. We were especially impressed with QuickTime 6's ability to maintain video while dragging really fast and popping things in and out of the Dock.

Quartz Extreme on this machine was being powered by a new medium range GPU. The faster GPU's are BTO versions, one of which, the ATI RADEON 9700, isn't out yet. With the ATI 9700, the new Power Macs with Jaguar are going to scream.

Finder Differences

We need to play with these machines more. But one thing we noticed was that the desktop image changed (it was dynamic) while we worked. It faded different colors, slowly in and out. It was a nice affect, if not a little discomforting at first. This happened while we were working.

iChat was there of course, but iCal, something we are particularly interested in, will come later in the Fall.

Closing Thoughts

While we need to do real tests, based on our little visit, we wouldn't hesitate to recommend the new lot of Power Macs, especially if your current machine is more than two years old. The speed up is clearly there and Jaguar will continue to benefit you speed-wise, as new GPU's come out from ATI, Nvidia and others, later in the future. That's the unique benefit of Jaguar's OpenGL-based screen technology.

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