There has been a lot of hubbub already now about the new iMac
colors, but I realized something today: It doesn't matter,
at least not to me.
I consider my self a power user. I have a pretty powerful system,
but I would use a new iMac with pleasure. Yes, even the Dalmatian
one. (Which is not, since it's blue, really all that
dalmatian-ish.)
However, I have also read a bit about Apple and their new music
strategy. As a musician, as well as someone who relies upon Apple
products (and therefore Apple's continued existence), this concerns
me. I think Apple is going on about it all wrong.
You see, first of all, Apple is betting on MP3s as the
music format. That's fine, in and of itself, disregarding the
persistent gripes from audiophiles about sound quality. However,
consider that most of the time people spend working with MP3s, other
than listening to them, is sitting and waiting for their computer to
encode and decode them. I would honestly be surprised it the
500 MHz iMac encoded more that
2, or maybe 2.25, times as fast as my trusty ol' iMac
233. That would put it, on a good day at a moderate quality MP3,
maybe at 5x-6x encoding. That's pretty darn quick, but for $100 less
than a new iMac, my "new" 7300 will
rip the same CD at 7x or 8x. Plus, since it doesn't go any faster at
the lowest quality settings, I'm pretty sure that's a limitation of
the CD-ROM drive, not the CPU.
The amazing part? My 7300 is actually 140 MHz slower than
the new iMac.
Enter the Velocity Engine
By Apple's own admission, the G4 is superior for any kind of
multimedia work. Even without using Photoshop, I have found that to
be the case. Using a program like iTunes, which is based on SoundJam
MP (my encoder of choice), which supports the Velocity Engine, there
is absolutely no reason that at least one of the iMacs shouldn't have
a G4 CPU. The argument for a G4 powered iMac is stronger than ever
now, 15" monitor or no 15" monitor.
Apple is shooting itself in the foot by not going out of the way
to make the music experience as seamless as possible for new users.
People in general, and especially musicians, are a generally
impatient bunch. A G4, even a slow one, would go a long way towards
speeding up the few multimedia tasks (like MP3 encoding) which the
computers are being targeted for, while the rest of the system - the
5400 RPM hard drive and the 100 MHz system bus - prevent the system
from actually being faster than the G4 towers.
RCA audio in and out on the motherboard would be nice too, but now
I'm just dreaming.
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
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matter,
at least not to me.
