| Monday, January 28, 2002 |
09:50 - Okay, that's more like it.
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
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Welp, there we have it: dual 1GHz PowerMacs.
Nothing to sneeze at, either-- sure, it's a fairly modest speed-bump, but gone are the days when all three models in a range separated by 150MHz would each jump by 50MHz. The tradition lately is to take the previous top-of-the-heap and make it the new bottom. That's sort of what's happened here-- 800 is now the bottom, then 933, then dual 1GHz. And the CPU is hardly the only upgraded thing-- it now has an L3 cache with 2MB of DDR RAM, which is a nice not-on-Intel thing. However, these CPUs don't appear to be the "Apollo" 7460s; they're the same 745x series that are in the previous machines, just speed-bumped and with an L3 cache added.
One nice thing is the GeForce4 MX graphics, which (again) are available on the Mac first (though not by much). They did this a year ago with the PowerMacs announced at Macworld San Francisco, which were the first to be announced with a GeForce3; but as with most models announced at a keynote address, they didn't ship for several weeks, and the GeForce3 ended up being available on Wintel PCs first after all. This time, presumably, you can go down and buy one of the new machines Today.
I'm not going to buy one myself-- I'm not in the market for a new desktop machine; my current G4/450 is two years old, and it still has some legs left in it, even running OS X. I'm waiting for the G5 desktops, which might see daylight in July-- or maybe September, or next January, or possibly it won't happen until Motorola's PPC properties get bought by Apple and contracted to IBM for manufacturing, and considering Motorola's current straits, that might not be too far-fetched an idea.
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