This discussion is just a little nauseating for this site — 68kmla my ass. Thus, please excuse the following rant.
Wow, I missed this the first time through.
If that's your notion of what the 68kMLA is about, then you clearly haven't been around long enough, or you have just completely misunderstood everything you've seen since you got here. As ianj says, the 68kMLA isn't about actively pursuing the opportunity to be a luddite. There's really nothing noble or admirable in being a luddite or avoiding upgrades that are worthwhile, justicable or needed in the pursuit of some kind of higher calling.
When this site was new, we weren't "collecting" 68k Macs, nor were we actively attempting to be luddites. We were buying these things used because they were a budget-friendly way to get a reasonable amount of computing done in a then-reasonable amount of time, for a reasonable amount of money. The World Wide Web (and high multimedia integration therein) had not exploded at all the way it has in the decade since I joined up at the MLA, and to put it bluntly, no re-compiling was needed to make an 840av and an iMac or PowerMac G4 run the same version of Internet Explorer. (up until 5 came out, but web standards changed very slowly back then and IE4/5 had the same functionality for a long time.)
At present, I notice a few people trying to do the same thing with decade- (or nearly-decade-) old G4 and G5 systems, and it is kind of bothersome because a lot of stuff has changed since then. For example, not counting inflation, the cheapest Mac today costs half what it did in 2002, and is super easy to expand into something pretty incredibly powerful. Plus, it wasn't until the middle or late 2000s that we really started to see computers start to ship with an excess of computing capacity.
In 2002, even on my TiBook (which you'll learn later in this post cost my family $2800 when it was new) wasn't really so powerful and didn't have so much excess horsepower that I really felt like it was a machine purchased for its ability to last a long time based on the fact that it was too much computer for my needs today.
But, generally I'll give somebody using PowerPC as their home computer a pass, so long as they aren't talking about how much faster it is than an Intel system. I'll even let some instances of "it does what I need" if it's discovered that they're using contemporary apps.
I prefer to use professional-grade hardware when I can
A lot of people do, but I'll admit, I tire of that attitude. Go hang out with the SGI or Sun or DECPaq people if you want a platform where every model was a professional-grade computer. In the grand scheme of things, Macs haven't ever been very high end. There are high-end Macs, but Macs are not high-end computers.
If you go backward in time, "high end" computers are very very expensive. Today, I could afford to bring home a Mac Pro, but in 1990, somebody with my type of job would have had to save a long time to bring home a Mac IIfx.
A perfectly functional professional-grade computer tower ought to keep getting used as long as possible, like any $3000+ tool in a rightly-ordered world.
What do you use your machine for? Not every use case really requires that the tool be $3000.
Previously, I was in the process of entering the dangerous and sexy world of professional photography, but then changed to business/information systems school, and now I work in an IT environment at the university. I can tell you that the notion that a desktop machine should last forever is patently false in almost every applicable context. To put it bluntly, $3000 is not enough spent on a computer to justify trying to make it last far beyond its prime, which in microcomputers that fit on desks and can easily be carried by one person, is not a very long time.
In an institutional environment, even if a computer (let's say it's an early Pentium 4 based Dell Precision workstation) cost a lot and was a really useful productive tool when it was new, today at ten years old, it would cost more to support than it would to just buy a new Dell desktop like an OptiPlex 780 or 790 that could virtualize ten of the old P4 box. And you can't just presume that a computer will never need support, parts, or to have its software maintained. It's also unfair to suggest that the entire institution should avoid upgrading just so that a few old boxes can be maintained without it causing a major disruption in service to the "standard" computers. (1)
In an individual's home, they last a good while, but that's because an individual is going to have fewer things to support and is going to have to spend money and time supporting a piece of equipment
anyway so it matters less if that equipment is old.
In the context of professional tools (even an individuaol professional operating out of his or her own home), especially in the situation that you are using the computer directly as a tool that does your job and makes you your money, a willingness not only to invest more than $3000 for the computer itself, but to reinvest in that tool every few years should be of paramount of importance.
Let me put it this way: When you're a professional photographer, the faster you can view, process, and output your images and get them to the customer is all the faster you can get back out into the field to start taking more pictures and getting those pictures to their customers. Unless you're enough of a big-shot to have a dedicated editor, you'll want to have the fastest possible tool for that job. (And if your editor works for an hourly wage, I bet you'll want to equip him or her with as fast a computer as possible, to reduce the number of hours they'll be billing you, or to increase the amount of work they do in a standard day.)
The "photographer" example is compounded by the fact that photographers tend to pick up new cameras once every few years, to catch up with the advances in imaging technology or to advance the types of services they'll be able to provide. (You can't shoot sports on a Hasselblad, and if you're doing art landscape or fashion photography, your quick-shot Nikon or Canon may not capture enough image data to produce a very large print.)
A good example of this is when I replaced my 6mp cam with a 12mp cam, back when I was still on the photography track. Even though I was already using Core2 computers for my photo workflow, I noticed a slowdown as my computer's storage subsystems spent more time shuffling the same number of photos (now bigger) from place to place, and I noticed a reduction in the overall number of photos I could view or process at once, and I noticed an increase in the time it took to convert a certain number of camera raw files to DNG files, using Adobe's tools.
Of course, it was still fast enough that I didn't consider replacing the iMac right away, but enough that I became pretty well aware of the impact that computer performance would have on my life as a professional photographer. If I was a working photographer making money, there would be no reason for me not to buy a new computer every few years to compensate for new camera bodies, increases in volume of work, and to take advantage of advances in microprocessor technology that make my job go faster.
Compare this to the tools of a carpenter. One hammer, unless you need specialized ones, will probably last forever. Likewise, a car can last a long time, because the nature of its work doesn't change. You can't really buy a faster hammer.
Now, I understand that not every job people do on a computer is really going to see such clear benefits from upgrades, as photography does. If you're writing, then you can probably write just as well on a Mac Plus (I'll allow for 4mb of ram and a hard disk) as you can on a Mac Pro. My understanding (this bit is specifically for beachycove) is that you mainly work with text. Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless there's really specific graphic layout or conversions involved (LaTeX or PDF creation, or you're doing graphic layout for a publication) then why is a "professional" computer even needed? Microsoft Word runs just as well on my mini as it would on a Mac Pro.
Is it just an aesthetic preference, sort of how I happen to prefer that my minitowers be OptiPlexes, or is there a legitimate reason why text processing even requires a G5? If you're not going on the Internet and your e-mail and file transfer services/protocols work fine with what's available on a G3 or G4, and you literally ONLY use your computer for work purposes, then why ever upgrade at all, and why bother with a high end computer? (I explain later why I would, and why an institution would, but as an individual professional, or as a home user, this interests me.)
That having been said, I've bought/owned new "professional" computers for use at home before, and on a few of them, I've spent quite a bit. My TiBook was $2800 when it was new, my current ThinkPad was $2200 after deep discounts when I bought it, and my server was $1200, plus $1000 in upgrades, plus probably $500 in storage supplements after that, and I'm planning either my next $1000 storage/backup server, or more upgrades to the main virtualization server. (Meaning that when I'm done with it, well over $3000 in new parts will have gone into this one computer, which at this point is just about 16 months old.)
I bought those high end computers for a reason, and if the pattern shows you anything, I'm probably not going to stop. Buying a high end computer isn't like buying a high end car where you can do it once in the '90s and then just stop forever -- unless you've managed to seal its tasks, and your own tastes and preferences, in time. The point of a "high end" (but still desktop) computer is that you need as much grunt or flexibility or whatever right now.
Buying a computer for its functionality six or more years in the future always has been and always will be an incredibly misguided thing to do. What I've seen time and time again is "I bought this system that was about six times more than I needed when I bought it, and cost twelve times what I should have paid, I am now using it way over its capacity because I spent all my money a few years ago when I bought this system, thinking I would never outgrow it." Either that person is once-bitten twice shy and thinks they will always out-grow every computer very quickly, or believes that the computer is responsible for a few more years of service to them, even though they have clearly outgrown it, and outgrown its expansion/upgrade options.
The need to replace machines regularly is especially true for somebody who manages to use all of the functionality or capacity of their brand new high end computer right away. My server has a lot of scalability built in, but at the end of the day, I actually know exactly where its capacity ceiling is (
two of these, (2)), and I know how much it will cost me to get to that ceiling, and I know how much it'll cost me to get to a new machine, and I know what parts I can bring forward to a new machine.
If I weren't already running my server at capacity (2) and I was sure I wasn't going to be able to use the capacity of the computer I bought as my server, I probably would just have bought something way smaller. There is very little sense in buying a computer because you think it'll be useful for something you're going to be doing in a certain number of months or years, or you think you can predict the rate at which your need for computing capacity will expand.
Because somebody is going to mention it, it's worthwhile for me to suggest that there are types of computers that don't need or merit regular replacement. If I buy a computer (It doesn't matter what class of machine it is) and it just keeps doing its job and legitimately, the performance needs don't ever outstrip that machine's capability, there's nothing so much more efficient as to justify replacing the machine for efficiency purposes, and it continues running updated and secure software, then it wouldn't be on my replacement list. Something like a
dectop (barring hard disk failure) running a small web site is a good example.
Outside of my retro computers or hobby machines, I replace computers for one of the following reasons:
- There is a useful performance increase in buying a newer machine (such as in the photography example)
- I have reached the capacity of my current machine (such as with my virtualization server)
- because there are security benefits to a new machine (such as with a PowerPC Mac, on which it's important that I was running Mac OS X, and I was using for production work where the app is available as a UniversalBinary)
- because there are reliability or energy efficiency benefits to a newer machine
- the cost of replacement parts for that machine have reached an unreasonable level (IDE hard disks for laptops? Just three new disks later and you really should have just bought a new machine with one of those AMD fusion processors that uses newer, cheaper, faster SATA disks.)
I can honestly say that i think the only time I would expect a computer I bought new to last a long time (like, I bought a machine starting with the expectation that I'd use it for more than three or four years) is if I were to spend the money on something like an
HP Integrity or an
IBM POWER system -- a computer that cost me more than $5000 up front which I was going to be using/maintaining over the course of several years mainly just for the fact that it's cool or different, not because I can utilize that amount of horsepower. It's way out of my regular purchasing habits anyway. (But, oh man, can you imagine how awesome OpenVMS must be on that HP RX2800i2?)
As long as we're talking about big systems, that's maybe another avenue to explore for just a brief moment. Some organizations buy computers (true professional computers, not just business-class desktops/laptops or desktop workstations) that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not into the millions. Most of those same organizations have standard three, four, or five-year desktop replacement cycles, but I happen to be on board with the notion that it's totally reasonable to expect your million dollar research supercomputer to stay operational a little bit longer than that. Plus, in the '90s and earlier '00s, UNIX servers cost a lot more than the commodity servers that can these-days replace them. I know that at my institution, a bunch of the web servers that have been taken out of service in the past year or so were a decade or so old. The new servers might not last that long, but it'll be because the workload outgrew the machine. (We're switching away from discrete, physical machines, one for each task, to virtualized servers running on commodity hardware for most tasks. When a task outgrows a machine, we can just increase its resources, or add another server in order to give it more room.)
Modern technology makes a huge difference in the datacenter, too. One of our old UNIX servers (whose job, by the way, was mainly hosting static HTML files) was a purple, SPARC box with two or four processors that probably drew 400 or 500w. It was replaced with a new server that draws 200W, has eight or sixteen cores, and does the work of a whole rack of those old machines.
I'd take such a G5 tower over an early MacBook any day, essentially because the former will outlive the latter, has dollups more class, and in that sense and more kicks early MacBook butt. Speed is frankly over-rated; so is wasting one's youth on Flash and online video. I prefer interesting engineering and design quality.
The G5 as a product was horrible. Yes, it was based vaguely on a family of supercomputer-class chips, but it was cut down in all the wrong ways to make it affordable for a desktop computer, it held half the number of disks and optical drives as its predecessor, it had fewer expansion slots than its predecessor, and its successor shares in the interesting and successful visual design while actually producing a computer that's truly (or as truly as Apple will ever get) desktop-workstation class. (You can get a Quadro graphics card for it, but you have to know what you're doing to even bother with that -- the card alone is like $2000 and it has pretty poor drivers for most every day Mac tasks, but it's what you'll want when doing sustained 3d rendering or a bunch of AfterEffects work.)
Add to that, comparing the G5 to a MacBook/Pro is kind of unfair because it's fairly well established that Apple hasn't really sold a professional or business-class laptop for a very long time. The present MB/Ps are good, but give me a hollar when they've got flexible expansion bays and a docking connector. (Thunderbolt could remove this need even on PC laptops though, I'm staying tuned for that.) The G5 tried very hard to be a competitor to systems like the Sun Blade 2000 and the Silicon Graphics Fuel/Octane2/Tezro, Compaq DS15/DS25/ES47 and the HP C8000. It might even be faster than those systems, and if you think of it in terms of just those systems, sure, because most of them had limited options and only two disk bays. But we all compare it to the PowerMac G4 and dual socket netburst xeon systems.
I suppose none of that necessarily affects your choice ot use one, but believing that you're making that choice based on the technical merits of the system is dangerous, because it has relatively few of them. Compared to a relatively modern MacBook (let's say 2009 or later) about the only merits it has are that it can accomodate two desktop hard disks and that it has the capability to consume a lot more electricity. (Technically it has a few other merits that come from being a desktop, but it is slow enough compared to any Penryn Core2 that it is probably not worth pulling one out to use if you already happen to have said Penryn Core2 MacBook/Pro.)
there also comes a point at which the recognition should dawn that Lemming-like behaviours are endemic in the world of computer consumption and marketing, and that they are best resisted
Oh, you. "lemmings" (your phrasing) and "misguided" (my phrasing) are really on different levels, and even though this isn't the lounge, "keep it civil" applies. It's a fairly big accusation to suggest that any of us who engages in owning a computer less than a decade old (which is basically what you're doing) is a lemming. Your doing so by a showing a YouTube video that will use most of the available resources on the very computer we're talking about makes it even better.
find someone else who can use it if you can't
Legit question -- if somebody can't find a use for a G5, what is really the likelihood that somebody who "needs it" (I'm going to take this as that they don't have any computer at all but could hypothetically use one somehow) would want a PowerMac G5 anyway? It runs an oudated, insecure version of Mac OS, and there's only one (and a half if you count Safari 5, is the latest version available on 10.5/PPC?) modern browser, and it's slower than a netbook-style machine they could get for $350 which would include a display and a basic office suite. Plus, the PowerMac G5s take boatloads of electricity, and many of them require adapters to use a monitor most people will have. You're basically giving your friend a money sink, especially if they have such a heavy "need" for a G5 (I'm presuming things about your friends here) because they don't have a computer at all, and therefore no Internet connection.
What is your friend with no Internet going to do with a G5? Are you also giving them a printer? I presume you have a compatible monitor (or monitor and the proper adapters) and keyboard/mouse to give them.
Selling it would be a good choice though. There are people on the Internet who can appreciate it for what it is: a cheap, compromised version of what we want to think of as a product of a bygone time -- RISC workstations. I do somewhat sympathise with folks who like the G5 and can understand it in context like that. Heck, I even appreciate the G5 when it's understood in that way. In terms of the whole market in the time it was new, it's a really interesting experiment of a machine, but there's a reason Apple switched to Intel's processors.
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(1) This is a really extreme tangent so I'm putting it down here -- institutional computer buying, as I have observed it, falls into one of two categories. The first is upgrades, these machines are bought with the purpose of directly replacing something else. Buying a new set of machines in a cascading or tiered upgrade pattern is fine too. When the university buys the next PC that will sit on my desk, it will be an OptiPlex that replaces the 790 I'm using today, and the 790 I'm using today will replace the 745 I have for secondary tasks, and that 745 will be taken to the surplus store.
The other category is capacity expansions. The university has a veritable boat-load of computers today, our main student computer lab has 80 seats in the main room, and a pair of 30-seat training classrooms. In the late 1980s or early 1990s when that building was converted from "Auxiliary Study Library" to a student computing facility, eighty Mac SEs or IIcis and IBM PS/2 stations (or even terminals to whatever VAX or IBM mini/mainframe existed at the time) would have been prohibitively expensive.
So, that lab, even though it's such a huge room, probably started with 30 or 40 computers, and sometimes new computer purchases went toward replacing the oldest machines, and sometimes new computer purchases went toward just putting in more machines so as to serve a greater number of concurrent students.
But, institutional computer buying habits aren't really what is being discussed here, and they're also fairly complicated anyway.
(2) I have a Dell PowerEdge T610. It's a dual socket server with support for up to like 192 gigs of ram, and it holds eight internal hard disks. Right now I'm running enough VMs that I'm almost at the limit of my current sixteen gigs of ram. I need to double that amount of memory, and I think when I do I'll start running into the limits of my current processor, which is an E5620 -- 2.4GHz quad core, HT, 12mb cache.
The next upgrade I want to make is the storage controller -- I currently have a Dell PERC6/i in it, which is kind of slow (apparently) and only supports up to 2TB disks. I have a way to go before I purchase any number of >2TB internal disks, but I am fairly close to making some decisions about the way the machine's internal storage is arranged, and the way I perform backups. In addition to increasing/rearranging the machine's internal data stores, I may be acquiring some sort of tape backup, or another server or NAS just for backups. Anyway, all of that is basically in the effort of saying that after the ram and processor, storage is the next big capacity thing I'd like to deal with on that box. Almost more because I find dealing with those issues interesting than it's an actual problem now or in the near future.
