The denial tango

[chipotle]

The question is who's really in denial over the PowerMac G5s announced today--Macintosh zealots who hope the machines will significantly improve the Mac market share, or PC zealots racing to poke holes in Apple's claims of the machines being the fastest personal computers.

So. No, I don't think Macs will stop losing market share. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they hold steady. (If the total size of the computer market holds steady, I think the Macintosh segment will grow, but that seems unlikely. People tend to forget that if your company's unit sales are growing at a slower rate than the market you're in is growing, you're "losing market share" yet still increasing your customer base.)

As for hole-poking, are the G5s the fastest personal computers? You got me. I'm sure the demos I saw today were stacked in favor of the G5, but they were no less impressive--watching Cubase on the Dell dual Xeon 3.06GHz machine stutter when it was doing realtime multitrack softsynth playback of a piece of the "Matrix" score when the dual 2GHz G5 machine went through it smoothly without hitting more than about 40% CPU utilization definitely says something.

A rhetorical question to rabid anti-Mac folks: Does my owning a Mac negatively affect your virility? Are you afraid using a one-button mouse for a measurable length of time will turn you into an art designer? From watching some forums (particularly those on the frequently overfrothed OSNews), the idea that Macs might actually become competitive in price and speed has sent the MACS ARE EVIL crowd into a blood frenzy.

The thing is, to some degree they're right. PowerMacs have always been designed as if they were computing with high-end workstations, even when the performance wasn't there to match. The PowerMac may be competitive with a Dell Precision Workstation, but it's not going to be too competitive with a Dell Dimension.*

But so what? It's a damn cool computer. I'm finding myself increasingly (if arguably irrationally) jazzed about the idea of doing Mac software development. I'm realizing that, for a long, long time now, I've missed having computers, in and of themselves, be fun.

And to me, that's worth a few extra bucks.

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*Since the P4-based Dimension can't be dual processor, I priced out a system roughly comparable with the "midline" G5. The Mac is a 1.8GHz G5 with 512M PC3200 SDRAM, a 160GB Serial ATA HD, Radeon 9800 Pro video, and DVD-R/CD-RW drive for $2720; the Dell is a 2.8GHz P4 with 512M PC3200 SDRAM, 200GB Ultra ATA HD, Radeon 9800 Pro video, DVD-R/CD-RW drive, Gigabit ethernet card (an option you can't not have on the Mac), XP Professional and Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition to roughly match Apple's "iLife," for $2448.

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I responded a bit to the compiler questions on OSNews. While I'm not sure it's still true for the G5, GCC wasn't the best compiler to use on the G4, CodeWarrior was, and if you want to compare the most widely-used compilers for a somewhat more real-world comparison you'd probably be comparing GCC on the Mac versus Visual C on the PC. But, Apple's always been "selective" about benchmarks; there were several times over the past few years I wanted to beat Steve Jobs with a copy of Photoshop. "We get it, Steve. Fast vector, Steve. Slow everything else, Steve."

I've used FreeBSD off and on with the PC sporadically for a few years and really like it. (The BSDish-ness of OS X is what tilted me toward buying a PowerBook to replace my Mac OS 9 iBook a couple years ago; OS 9 reminded of me of everything I'd liked about Mac OS 7 in 1991--and also showed how little the original Mac OS had come since 1991.) At NetPoodles we were developing on FreeBSD, which probably made me one of a very few people using a free Unix at work and Windows 2000 at home. I'm still considering upgrading my increasingly-outdated PC, with its Celeron 433 and the Matrox Mystique I'll charitably call "venerable"; while I'm not too much of a gamer, it'd be nice to be able to at least theoretically run my company's product.