"The Good" Apple G4 17inch 1.5GHz Review

Right, since the more popular review post on this system is presently under flame and wasn't a very good review to start with (the spelling was simply atrocious) , I'll start a new one.

Well, first a little background on me to put things into perspective. I've been a PC power-user most of my life barring the first few years when I had an APPLE II. I game (excessively sometimes) and I have built and modded my own PCs since maybe the 286 days.

That said, I had to get a Mac for work reasons a few months ago (I work in films). Beyond the jitters of learning a new OS, I really didn't expect to use this thing for much more than work. Now, after 3 months, it had replaced my PCs for everything except gaming. With the exception of some lack of support to popular softwares, where most of them will run ok on Virtual PC, I've had very little problems with it.

System Specs
Apple Macintosh Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz
17inch Widescreen LCD Display (1440x900 Native Resolution)
1GB System RAM
Radeon 9700 Pro w/128MB VRAM
80GB 5700rpm HD (Ultra ATA/100)
Frontside Slotload SuperDrive Combo DVD-R/RW - CD-R/RW
Gigabit Ethernet
Wireless-G (AirPort Extreme)
Bluetooth
56k Modem

Ports
---Left Side---
Type I/II PC Card Slot
Power Connector
56k Modem Port
USB 2.0 Port
Headphone + Line-In (2 x Mini Plugs)

---Right Side---
DVI Connector
S-Video Out
Cat-5 Ethernet Plug
Firewire 800 (100MB/s theoretical)
Firewire 400 (50MB/s theoretical)
USB 2.0 Port

With a second DVI-VGA dongle, a second battery, and the world adaptor kit, the base price was around $4700 Cdn (yes I'm in Canada)...

Battery
I got a respectable 3 hours and 2 minutes running DVDs in the custom power-saving DVD mode (turns the HD off and runs in memory) with the display lights turned down.

At full quality I got about 2 hours and 6-7 minutes of playing with CPU turned down to "reduced" and 1 hour and 43 minutes on "highest".

Everyday utility though, I was able to get an average of around 2 hours and 30 minutes on a single battery.

Accesories
Well, the box (while nicely designed) didn't come with much. It included the restore CDs, the powerbrick, a separate power "clip/plug-wire", and a modem/phone cable (why not an cat-5 I don't understand). There's the obligatory documents and user guides plus a few Apple stickers, but overall pretty sparce.

The powerbrick is a worthy mention here though, it is as useful as it is beautiful. There's some nice user-friendly features on it including tabs to coil the wires on, a clip to keep the wires in place, a cap to protect the exposed prongs when not plugged in, and an interchangeable plug (for international usage).

Software
This is where the Mac differs from Windows. Most windows machines comes with very little useable software as far as creativity is concerned. Mac comes with its "iLife" series of software. iTune, iCal, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. These software makes "lifestyle-fun" much more accessible, gaining Mac's lead on the trendy niche market.

Gaming
What are games?? {drool...}
Ok, it runs KOTOR "1" really well, but that's almost a 3 years old game! Halo came out in 2004 too, along side of C&C Generals and Homeworld 2. All these games run beautifully but WAIT! These games take very little advantage of the shader technology, and are at least 1 year older than the PC/Console counterparts!

So games run well, but with so few choices, why bother wasting the space where you can put MUSIC?

Productivity
This is what Macs are good for. Since MS Office arrived on the scene for Macs there really isn't a reason to complain about Macs not being compatible with PCs on the productivity side any more. Any video/film works are done flawlessly. There's a lack of low-end consumer 3D package (like 3DS Max), but it more than made up for it in pro gear. On the pro side, it would cost at least $1000 more to upgrade the PC with components to make it do the same thing as a Mac. The only problem with the Powerbook here compared to a PC of the same price is the rendering speed. PCs around $5000 Cdn will be around 200% to 300% faster than the Powerbook, which rely much more heavily in hardware accelerations to make the tasks feel like they render in less time. When it comes down to pure rendering though, the Powerbook is FAR FAR FAR (that's 3 of them) inferior to PC laptops of the same price range.

Pair it with a Bluetooth wireless 3-5 button mouse and you've got something. Too bad it cost extra.

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While it'll never compare to the top of the line Sager, Alienware, Voodoo and other high performance desktop replacement systems. The performance is comparable to a high end $5000 productivity machine running from around 2.0GHz to even 3.0GHz (depending on tasks) due to the slightly more efficient RiSC-based CPU and the powerful underlying Darwin OS (it's a stripped down BSD with Mach Micro-Kernel).

It's quite a bit more stable than my Windows machines (yes, multiple) due to the fact that Apple controls it's hardware and writes OS X for its own hardware ONLY. There's also much less hacking and virii than my Windows machines, but I suspect this is the mixed blessing of a small install base.

Pro
-Sexy Machine
-Cheap for professional use.
-Efficient Processor, nice OS.
-Fun to use out of the box.
-Less hack-prone

Con
-That DAMNED 1-button mouse!
-Expensive for normal consumer use.
-Heats up pretty good due to under-powered fans.
-GAMES! WHERE ARE MY GAMES!!!??!
-All work and no play makes Cybbie a damn homocidal maniac ready to go on a rampage!

Agreed, Lightwave is around the same price. I think Maya is on the Mac but I don't think SoftImage is... of course I could be wrong.

3DS is more of a low end product but Combustion isn't, how odd is that? I actually liked 3DS a lot back in the DOS days, but I haven't really touched it since Max, and for good reasons... the GUI is just so convoluted and klunky I never got around to it. So after 1998 or so I stopped upgrading my licence for 3DS for DOS and had since abandoned my 3D pursuits (I suck at it anyways).

As far as games is concerned... most of them are released through Aspyr, who's a decent porter but they never bothered to optimize the codes much... resulting in such mess-ups like C&C Generals (which runs sweet on my PC that is the same spec [so really it is much slower than my mac] btw).

Doom 3 would be a nice port because ID's doing it themselves, although it's set as "it'll be released when it is done". I would really love to see a Mac port of Half-Life 2 though, I think it's a superior engine and a far superior story structure. I've been running it nicely on my old 1.6GHz PC box (clocks faster but actually runs hella slower than my 1.5GHz PB). Too bad that when it gets released on the Mac (if ever) I would probably need to buy another new licence of it to play it.

So far Valve has no (publicised) plans regarding to the port since Mac is pretty much OpenGL-centric while the graphics are handled through DirectX/Direct3D in the Windows version of Half-Life 2. Although I did find an interview somewhere that stated that a port wouldn't be very hard since the Source engine in extremely modular and no doubt could handle it. The reasons Valve doesn't have any plans to do it is so far rumored to be politics and money, not tech skills.

As far as mice are concerned I use a 5 button mouse (from Microsoft... ehhehehe...), while the acuracy when running Intellipoint leaves a bit of room for improvements, the three basic buttons and wheel works flawlessly without extra software right out of the box anyways. I did install Intellipoint (Microsoft Mouse on the OS X... d'uh) so I can use the side scrolling and the back+foward buttons. My Wacom pad comes with a super acurate 2 button scroll mouse but unfortunately I can't use it at the same time as my pen.

BTW, how's everyone finding the review? A bit more useful than the flammed-to-heck "I LOOOVE MACs" review that was posted I hope?

Well, since MentalRay was incorporated into Max the renderer should be quite a bit better compared to the old scanlines. MentalRay is a pretty good renderer imho. I like the Maya 6 interface although I've only seen the software in demo, it seems pretty intuitive.

Honestly though, the Mac hardware is a lot more sexy than its PC counterparts. Now if all the popular apps gets ported to Linux or FreeBSD then we'd all be running that and forget about the cross-platform issues.

BTW, what did you mean it lacks detail? If you mean benchmarks then I can't provide that as all the more popular benchers are either not available on the Mac or cost money.

Anyhow, I've just came back from a friend who's gotten the new G4 Powerbook. That thing has a few features that are superior enough to be worth a mention.

1. The keyboard is redesigned so it no longer unstick as much, the one I had (Rev D I think) suffers from that a little. I heard that it's a much bigger problem on some users.

2. The fiber-optic illumination on the keys is actually usable now. When I was using my keys at night and plugged-in, I often also have my screen up at max. The lights from the screen makes the dim light useless that way. It's MUCH brighter now, maybve even in the double-digit times range.

3. The scrolling trackpad. While the Mac continues to suffer from the lack of 2+ button mice, the new addition of scrolling made browsing websites much easier. Even though it still wouldn't beat a two button with a scroller it is a welcoming change. It does feel like the wrong solution to a problem though if you look at it in the perspective of "why don't they just add the buttons anyways?".

The rest of "innovations" are not really worth going over in details though. The advantage of having a faster machine (by a measly 150mhz), 64mb more video RAM (should've been 128mb to start in the 1st place), dual-link output (how many people you know has the 30inch cinema display anyhow?), standard 1GB RAM (kindda helpful but only if you multi-app or render heavy graphics) and a faster burner (how many people who NEEDS the 5min less wait time per disc and haven't already gotten an external burner?) is really marginal.

The reduced price-tag (by $500) pisses me off in that I paid a premium (or rather my work). But that's not really much of a complaint...

My views is that IF you don't already have a Mac laptop and is willing to shell out the money then it is kinda worth it. If you are like me who's gotten the last generation Powerbook then it's really useless to upgrade for a marginal performance boost. You are better off waiting another year or so and get the G5 Powerbooks (whenever that's gonna be...)