Month: March 2004

Things that make you a bad candidate to be the government’s manufacturing ‘czar’: having outsourced a massive number of manufacturing jobs overseas. Mind you, this does appear to be in line with what this Administration thinks is ‘good for this country’.

Like Law & Order, but wish there were *more* episodes out there? Visit the L&O plot generator page!

BusinessWeek: Microsoft DID push Baystar to invest in SCO. But now it claims that it didn’t actually fund that investment. Of course last week they were saying they had nothing to do with it. It pays to be skeptical of SCO And Microsoft!

SCO shares soon to be worth less than rolls of Charmin’. …at which point the certificates can be put to an appropriately similar use.

Tennessee man bludgeoned to death with an iPod. It’s the new weapon of mass destruction!

US Senate: Sergeant-at-arms now investigating a Senate leak of a report on the investigation of a Senate leak. If you think about this one for too long your head will spin, then explode.

Create your own Bush/Cheney 04 poster! Come on people, be creative…

Want to optimize your nutrition? Eat bugs! I’m pretty sure roaches are Atkins-friendly.

Now that I have managed in putting together my AMD64 system I actually have concrete costing figures to evaluate whether or not this represents a good deal, compared with Apple’s current desktop offerings.

To be quite honest, things really don’t look good for Apple. Not only did my home-built box, dubbed “Postal” (yeah, after the game), cost less than Apple’s cheapest G5 model, but it’s considerably better-featured, even in those areas which are traditionally Apple’s strongest.

The Tale of the Tape

All in all, the AMD64 system cost me slightly under $1700, including XP Pro. A quick trip to Apple’s online store shows the cheapest G5 desktop offering at a whopping $1800.

If the two systems were similarly equipped that would be one thing. However that is clearly not the case. Here is how the systems differ, where comparisons may be made.

The rest falls outside tangibly-comparable criteria. I’m willing to concede that OS X probably has the edge over XP (32-bit) at this point, but that can’t be expressed in numbers; let’s say that my experiences with OS X, which have only been with fairly old hardware such as a 500Mhz G4 processor, have not left me waxing poetic about its performance, but I imagine that given a very fast processor it must be something quite neat.

The video card comparison was also a little difficult. Not having experienced or benchmarked the 5200 Ultra, I can’t comment on its performance, but the Radeon 9800 is *the* chipset of the hour, and the integrated TV tuner, as well as the software that came with the retail AIW, caused me to give it the nod. I’m having a tough time finding a comparison between the two chipsets, which frankly aren’t even in the same class anyway. That’s why Apple offers the 9800 Pro for a whopping $350 extra — more than I paid for the retail All-in-wonder (wow).

That being said, there is an overwhelming advantage on all fronts except the *standard* OS, all in favor of my own AMD64 system. The RAM comparison is particularly shocking, since the G5 comes up short in both quantity AND quality (speed). Even the Superdrive, once the crowning jewel of Apple’s lineup, is now outdone by a fairly generic $110 NEC drive.

64-bit OS availability

Once again Apple is “pwn3d” in this area. 64-bit versions of both Windows (XP in preview, and 2003 Server) and Linux (SuSE and RedHat, including Fedora) are available right now. For the G5 only Linux is available; a 64-bit OS X is not foreseen until late 2005. Not that Linux is a bad OS — I should know! — but frankly the case for Linux on this particular hardware is rather limited. For one thing neither of the systems in question supports anything close to 16 gigabytes of memory at this time (which would be a good instance of 64-bit support being necessary, or even useful). Also 64-bit-enabled applications remain a rare breed on any OS. So, another, albeit minor, point scored for the AMD64 platform, at least as of March 2003.

Other considerations

The G5 definitely has the cooler case. I couldn’t deny that in a million years. That being said the Super Lanboy case is nothing to sneeze at, and it’s undeniably lighter. Personally I like the side window and the LED front fan, but those would never have been deciders. All in all it was $70 very well spent, I think.

Both computers enjoy a reputation as being fairly quiet in a typical setting. I’ll take the word of G5 reviewers’ at face value here. The dual-processor model is a radically different story, but as someone who’s built a dual-processor (AMD) system I know that comparisons really can’t be made, for simple reasons of physics. Also the G5 DP model appears to have issues with defective power supplies, which Apple is working on.

I’ll not go over the issue of software availability for the respective OS’s, because frankly that’s the stuff that flame wars are made of, and I don’t care to start one on the subject just now. However I couldn’t help but be frankly offended at the listed price of components on the Apple Store site. I don’t think you could be overcharged more if you were a woman dressed as a stripper going to a neighborhood garage for repairs you weren’t sure you needed!

It was really shocking to see very ordinary components being sold OEM for prices which were sometimes 50 to 100% over retail costs. I can definitely see where those “fleecing” accusations aimed at Apple are coming from. What’s more, several options which really should exist for customers simply aren’t offered, at any price, which is mind-boggling.

For example, Apple wants to charge you $125 to upgrade a system from 256M to 512M memory. That is just a blatant ripoff in a day and age where one can purchase a single 512M PC2700 stick for $85 from a reputable dealer (Crucial). Even buying the upgrade to 1G, in 2×512 configuration, costs hugely more than buying 2 512M modules from Crucial, and that’s supposed to be an upgrade from 256M!! I’m not pulling numbers from my butt here, just looking them up from the Apple Store web site.

Apple’s hard disks are also ridiculously overpriced. You shouldn’t be paying much more than $1/gig for 7200rpm SATA drives, and yet the cost of upgrades on the Apple site is pretty extravagant compared to my own researched, reasonable prices. Also because Apple does not tell you what brand the disks are included, you can’t go and buy another disk somewhere else if you want to build a mirror array, for example. Personally I don’t see much of a point in SATA if you can’t build an array on it, yet for some reason it would seem that Apple’s SATA controller is not capable of doing just that.

Should that be the case it certainly explains why twin-drive combos are largely unavailable, except for the 2x250G combo (which is still overpriced, but by a slimmer margin). There is no indication there that these drives are delivered in a RAID configuration, so I have to assume that they’re not, even for the more expensive G5 models.

Also as I said the Radeon 9800 Pro video card OEM is being sold for more than I paid for the All-in-Wonder 9800, which includes extra software and a remote, so Apple fails to impress there as well. There is no rewritable DVD drive available on any of the models either, which is very puzzling from a company that was in the avant-garde of bringing DVD authoring to the masses.

Conclusions

This isn’t one of those “why you should switch” articles, really. Mostly this reflects mostly my personal reasons for abandoning the Apple Way and focusing on other forms of computing, despite my erstwhile allegiances. My remaining investment in MacOS software is practically nil, and I was building primarily a gaming box, something which is not the Mac’s forte — although things are improving there.

Obviously my experience is hardly representative of the average Mac user, or even mac techie, at this time. If you own $2k’s worth of software for the Mac, some of which is only available for the Mac, then it’s probably worth your while staying the course.

That being said, it does appear that Apple has in fact entrenched itself further into the market of niche computing, and has practically given up on being a major player in desktop computing generally. To the unconverted, spending over $2500 for what, stats-wise, appears to be the equivalent of a system you can build for $1700, is practically tantamount to folly. Then again as many a flame war has shown explaining computing in terms of numbers and dollar values is oft decried as sacrilegious by the average Mac zealot (I should know, I used to be one).

Given the evidence the only thing I can conclude is that Apple is quite happy being the niche player, and frankly there’s nothing specifically wrong with that attitude either. To use a rather forced metaphor of car brands, BMW is quite comfortable appealing to its own small but loyal and wealthy consumer base, and there’s no indication that it’ll disappear overnight — in fact it will continue existing for quite some time and give its shareholders a decent value. However if I were to buy a car based on budget and value, BMW wouldn’t even be in the running for my dollar. If money were not an object, and I began caring more about less tangible benefits, then it would be higher on my list.

Likewise for the G5… yes, it’s a 64-bit processor, but so is the K8/AMD64. The memory is not as fast, the motherboard is much less well-featured than the Asus K8V, and several vital (IMHO) configurations are simply not available, but the G5 is a damn cool machine, and offers the OS X experience, which no other brand offers… but the benefits of this are intangible, and to me frankly immaterial.

So, I’m happy with my purchase. And no doubt that people who buy G5s are also happy with their purchases, but it was time for that parting of the ways.

Never mind the Taliban: many extremist forces with close ties to power in Washington want to turn the US over to a Christian version of the sharia. The army took care of the religious extremists abroad, who will take care of it here?