| Tiger
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Date: 2/5/2005
| I've been reading up on Apple's new version of OS X 'Tiger' and it's pretty much heading directly where I wanted linux to go. With a full OpenGL implementation of the GUI for maximum hardware acceleration. Powerful OS level API's for graphics, sound and data. Visually beautiful UI - Aqua. Support for lots of multimedia add-ons via firewire and usb2. Top level authoring capabilities.
And linux has X windows. Wow I'm so overwhelmed. ;)
To me it doesn't seem like it's a matter of 'if' I'll jump on the Mac bandwagon but rather 'when'. I doubt that a Mac Mini will really give Tiger room to stretch it's legs. According to some it wants a ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce FX to run Quartz 2D Extreme, a feature which I think I'd appreciate. So from my limited research into which Mac would suit me (a free one hehehe) it seems the iMac G5 17" @ 1.8 Ghz + 512mb RAM would be a minimum hardware platform for decent performance in Tiger (right?). A mere A$ 2,520 at my local Apple retailer. Which is quite a bit more than a dual Opteron upgrade for the existing machine. *sigh* But I think the Mac has a really rosy future with a disproportionately high level of mindshare in the geek community.
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| Comments:
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Simon
03/05/2005 7:48pm
| I run a Mac Mini and find it absolutely fine for everything, including development. It might not be so hot for the latest games, but that is what a game console is for. I also use a 867Mhz powerbook (laptop), 512Mb RAM, ATO 9000 gfx chip, and it is great for development as well - it used to be my main machine until recently. I have never had a problem with quartz being slow. The important thing is to get lots of memory - I got 1GB since the mini only has one ram slot. The mini also silent, which makes a huge relief after jet-engine sounding PCs. I have had the fan come on about once, when doing heavy audio work. The only sound I normally hear is the hard drive working!
I switched to a Mac at home about 4 years ago, and have never regretted it. I much prefer the Mac, and Mac apps, to Windows. The development tools/environment (XCode and Cocoa) are especially good.
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Bardo
03/05/2005 10:40pm
| There has been talked before about this MiniMac ('the computer won't sound like a wind tunnel', I read somewhere). If I find a Scribe-equivalent for the Mac (or it should be Scribe itself :-), I'll probably switch. If not foregood, then at least for long.
Alas, I don't know anything about developing, so I cannot be a judge there.
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fret
03/05/2005 11:36pm
| Hey they upgraded the iMac line today... so I guess my ideal would now be a 17" 2.0ghz /w 512mb for A$2,299. Hmmm I love price drops.
As appealling as the Mac Mini is, with it's tiny form factor and low noise, I think I'd be buying a LCD and peripherals anyway so that I can run it as a 2nd box. Which would bring the price up to about 2K, which is awefully close to the 2299 for the iMac, which of course has a G5 and a graphics card capable of running Tiger's core image. So for me at least I think I'll keep waiting till I can afford the iMac. |
tozz
06/05/2005 12:40pm
| quote from anandtech.
"Further indication of Tiger's hurried release is the fact that Quartz 2D Extreme, the complete handling of UI rendering and compositing by the GPU, is not enabled in the release version of OS X Tiger. As such, users of Quartz 2D Extreme supported GPUs gain no performance benefits in Tiger as the CPU is still left to handle all UI rendering and the GPU handles all compositing after the CPU renders the interfaces to textures in AGP memory."
So you have a fancy gui not using your gpu for rendering, so don't get all exited about the gui, it's still not working :) |
fret
06/05/2005 1:02pm
| tozz: But it's not like I can go and upgrade the video hardware in an iMac when they _do_ get it working. They'll switch it on in 10.4.1 and I'd like to have hardware that'll be ready. |
tozz
06/05/2005 3:07pm
| of course you can upgrade your video hardware, just switch the card? :) |
fret
06/05/2005 9:32pm
| The iMac's video hardware is hardwired into the motherboard, it's not upgradable. |
tozz
12/05/2005 9:50am
| My bad, I thought apple had grown up on that part since they offer PCI-Express slots, insane that you can't change videocard in this age. |
fret
12/05/2005 10:40am
| The iMac is essentially a laptop in a nice case. So it's to be expected that you can't change the video card... you can't change it in a laptop either.
As for a G5 desktop Mac of course you can change the video card, it's just an AGP card and you rip it out and put the new one in. |
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