G5 Arriveth!

I’m here in Silicon Valley, visiting with my family and meeting my nephew for the first time! Such beautiful weather! I left a freezing and snowy Munich to arrive in a nice, warm and sunny San Francisco!!

Anyway, one of my duties while here in California is to purchase a much needed item: a new computer! Of course this will be a Mac. Since my current machine is about 8 years old, I think it’s about time to retire the current machine (G3 blueberry mac, 450 megaherz, 512 ram machine) and shoot for something much higher. My current Mac, what used to be Apple’s highest end machine, is now much less than what Apple’s current lowest end machine has to offer (iMac or Mini). Plus, I’ve had two major incidents with my current machine, problems with OS X (G3 support of OS X can be rather flimsy sometimes…) and a blown power supply at Christmas time. Now, besides those problems, I think the quality of the Mac shines through based on the fact that it took 8 years for these problems to arrive, a long life span for a computer. I don’t hear very often about machines that live so long.

But I am now buying a Mac when I am in Los Angeles this weekend. To get a preview of the Mac I will be buying, I tried out an identical machine that sits in my brother’s office. I ran some basic little tests on the machine. When I fire up Photoshop on my current machine, by itself it can take up to 30 seconds and up to a minute while opening a file at the same time. On the G5, it took 1 second alone, and maybe 2 seconds when opening up a large file. Man, what a breath of fresh air. Starting up other major programs, like Final Cut Pro or similar monster programs, the start up time was incredibly quick, say two or three seconds. I also observed my brother editing large audio and video files together while using Final Cut Pro, and the response was amazing: no hesitating, hiccups or complaining of any kind, that I could see.

I can’t wait to get this machine. I’ve waited a long time for this, and the hour is close at hand. I will certainly write much more about this after it is sitting in my home office back in Munich.

Daniel