I got a new Apple iMac G5 from Absolute Mac computer store of Germantown, Maryland.
I bought a G5 iMac in late May 2005. It had been about three and a half years since my previous computer purchase. I was very looking forward to it.
It arrived in early June.
The most impressive thing to my so far is the screen size. I bought the 20 inch screen model. In just a few days, it turned me into a total screen real estate bigot.
Now the monitors and LCD displays on my other computers seem tiny by comparison. Except at work, that is. There, my manager was kind enough to show me how to turn up the resolution on the large secondary monitor she had gotten me several months ago.
The speed is wonderful too: I leaped from 800 MHz to 2.0 GHz (2000 Hz!!) in one jump.
Two days after I turned it on for the first time, Steve Jobs announced that he was taking Apple's Mac from a PowerPC (G3, G4, G5) CPU architecture to an Intel Pentium based CPU.
Oh, well.
It is still a fantastic machine that I bought. The new Intel PCs will not even start to come out for a year.
Thanks to Apple's flexible new software tools, developers like me can generate PowerPC and Intel compatible applications at the click of a mouse. When someone does something you sort of do not like but they make it so easy to deal with that you sort of do not mind - that means they have skill.
Jobs has done everything necessary in advance to make sure that current Mac users and future Mac users land in the new world of the Mac without a bump. He has earned a lot of gratitude with this play.
The Mac development tools are high level enough that most already knew how to run on different platforms: GCC C/C++/Objective-C compiler supports a lot more than just these two processor families, so no problem there; scripting languages just do not care what CPU they are running on; and the Java that Apple licenses from Sun ran on Intel before it ran on the Mac PowerPC.
So, the only code that will need to be changed is badly-written C family programs, and perhaps some device drivers or game programs that take advantage of assembly language. Apple is taking care of device drivers to some degree, I have a hunch. That leaves some games. These days, OpenGL is what 2D and 3D games on the Mac use - either directly or through the speedy Quartz API. I doubt even video games on the Mac make much use of assembly language now.
Apple will need to do Pentium versions of their profiling and performance-measurement tools and disassembly in the debugger. Those are no big deal. Apple's programmers probably do stuff like that just to relax. :-)
I am bullish on the future of Apple and its existing customers.
I bought a G5 iMac in late May 2005. It had been about three and a half years since my previous computer purchase. I was very looking forward to it.
It arrived in early June.
The most impressive thing to my so far is the screen size. I bought the 20 inch screen model. In just a few days, it turned me into a total screen real estate bigot.
Now the monitors and LCD displays on my other computers seem tiny by comparison. Except at work, that is. There, my manager was kind enough to show me how to turn up the resolution on the large secondary monitor she had gotten me several months ago.
The speed is wonderful too: I leaped from 800 MHz to 2.0 GHz (2000 Hz!!) in one jump.
Two days after I turned it on for the first time, Steve Jobs announced that he was taking Apple's Mac from a PowerPC (G3, G4, G5) CPU architecture to an Intel Pentium based CPU.
Oh, well.
It is still a fantastic machine that I bought. The new Intel PCs will not even start to come out for a year.
Thanks to Apple's flexible new software tools, developers like me can generate PowerPC and Intel compatible applications at the click of a mouse. When someone does something you sort of do not like but they make it so easy to deal with that you sort of do not mind - that means they have skill.
Jobs has done everything necessary in advance to make sure that current Mac users and future Mac users land in the new world of the Mac without a bump. He has earned a lot of gratitude with this play.
The Mac development tools are high level enough that most already knew how to run on different platforms: GCC C/C++/Objective-C compiler supports a lot more than just these two processor families, so no problem there; scripting languages just do not care what CPU they are running on; and the Java that Apple licenses from Sun ran on Intel before it ran on the Mac PowerPC.
So, the only code that will need to be changed is badly-written C family programs, and perhaps some device drivers or game programs that take advantage of assembly language. Apple is taking care of device drivers to some degree, I have a hunch. That leaves some games. These days, OpenGL is what 2D and 3D games on the Mac use - either directly or through the speedy Quartz API. I doubt even video games on the Mac make much use of assembly language now.
Apple will need to do Pentium versions of their profiling and performance-measurement tools and disassembly in the debugger. Those are no big deal. Apple's programmers probably do stuff like that just to relax. :-)
I am bullish on the future of Apple and its existing customers.
posted by John Collins | 5:31 PM
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