Saturday, January 15, 2005
Thoughts on the timing of the G5 PowerBook
Well, I suppose I should take a moment to welcome all you new readers into the fold. Although many of you arrived here under rather surreal circumstances, you're more than welceome to stick around, as one thing you'll find very quickly is that I'm anything but a one-issue candidate. The Mac platform has as many interesting facets as it does users, and over the years that I've been doing this, there have been few places that I've been afraid to venture into when it comes to exploring what's out there. What has my eyes wide open this weekend is the fact that one of Apple's overseas suppliers seems rather convinced that we're just around the corner from seeing none other than the G5 PowerBook. And as the owner of an aging early-model Titanium PowerBook, this week's news has forced me to sit up and once again re-evaluate my own Mac situation, and the fact that I've already end-of-life'd my current PowerBook.
I'm also aware that many of the new people around here have no idea what I'm talking about when I reference such things. I had a guy write in this week wondering how I could write that the Switch campaign was a success without doing anything to back it up. Long-time readers know just how many thousands of words I've spent over the past year explaining the delayed-yet-evident success of the Switch campaign, so for more on that subject I'll simply point the new people to the archives. But as far as my own PowerBook, I'll recap just a little bit of where I'm at with that. Close to a year ago I bought a used 667 Mhz G4 Titanium PowerBook and it's been very good to me, but it's showing its age, It just keeps up with me, and like any power user, I feel like I could be accomplishing a little more if my Mac was faster than I am. Last year I was under quite the budget constraint, or I would have simply bought a brand new Aluminum PowerBook and been done with it. But I did what I had to do at the time, and before long it'll be time to pay the piper in terms of acquiring something (brand) new.
About a month ago I wrote a column detailing why I'd decided to "end-of-life" my PowerBook, by which I simply meant that I wasn't going to dump another penny into it unless it needed a repair in order to keep it useful. In other words, no more RAM upgrades, no SuperDrive upgrade, no new software that's going to come bundled with my next Mac unless a particular title come along that I really need. Why? Because every dollar a put into my current PowerBook puts me one dollar further away from my next one.
Because upgrading from one G4 laptop to another G4 laptop doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I'd decided early on that I'd wait until the G5 PowerBook was a reality before even considering a new PowerBook. And oddly enough, it was the act of writing those words that got me thinking about making a pre-emptive lateral move to something that was not a PowerBook. I mean, the current G4 iBook is more than twice as fast as (and 100% newer than) my current PowerBook, so why not make the leap downward, as it were? But then I remembered the one and only reason why I didn't go that route last time: screen resolution. Both the 12 inch and the 14 inch iBook top out at 1024x768 resolution, which while plenty for most tasks, just isn't enough to get work done in apps like DreamWeaver or Keynote, and I spend quite a bit of time using both. In mid-December I tried to wean myself off the extra screen space by throttling my PowerBook's screen down to 1024x768, but after two weeks of tearing my hair out, I gave up and went back to the maximum resolution. So much for the notion of the 14 inch iBook acting as a stop-gap solution.
At that point I knew without question that my next laptop would be a G5 PowerBook, and seeing how there was nothing out there to suggest that we'd see one of those any time soon, I figured I had all the time in the world before I would need to address the situation. Until yesterday, that is. Because although you never give such reports more than a marginal chance of being true, one of Apple's Taiwanese manufacturers seems to think that not only is he going to be building G5 PowerBooks for Apple as early as next quarter, he's going to be building G5 iBook as well. And although that last part casts doubt on everything else he said, what it means is that I do have to at least consider what I'm going to do should the G5 PowerBook suddenly show up on the market in, say, May or June of this year.
I see three main questions that I need to resolve fairly quickly so that I can put myself on the most advantageous path:
1) Which new G5 PowerBook model do I buy? Actually, this one isn't all that hard. A quick glance at the specs of the current G4 PowerBook models tells me that even the low-end 15 inch model provides more than I need. And I can't imagine that the low-end 15 inch G5 PowerBook would any different. So at least I now know about how much funding I have to squirrel away between now and then.
2) What do I do with my current PowerBook at that point? I can keep it as a second machine, keep it as a backup, or eBay it. Even when I've had acccess to multiple Macs, I've been the type to want to do all my bidding on a single machine. It's just too laborious to try to remember what's on which machine, or to limit each one to certain tasks, etc. The whole point of having a laptop is that you can take everything with you, not some things with you. So scratch the notion of a second machine. As far as a backup, what point would it serve unless I had to send my new PowerBook in for service? Even if that happened, I've got my hundred year old clamshell iBook that I can fall back on for (very) short periods of time. So it looks like eBay is the way to go. Even though a G4 PowerBook this old is bound to fetch a decent bounty.
3) What do I do with my current PowerBook in the mean time? This, of couse, goes back to not wanting to dump any more money into it than I have to. So will I buy iWork next week? Yes, both because I know I'll use it heavily right away, and because it's not likely to come bundled with my new PowerBook anyway. Will I buy iLife '05? I doubt it, both because I'm only an occasional user of iPhoto and iMovie (although I love them both dearly), and because the suite will definitely come with my new laptop. So the big question, of course, is Tiger.
My first thought was that if I'll be ditching this laptop soon anyway, then there's no reason to put Tiger on it for a short period of time just to turn around and dump it. The other side, though, is that if I try to sell this PowerBook without Tiger on it, I'm not likely to get as much for it. But then I thought about the fact that Tiger may not even be released by then, and it makes me wonder if I just might get this all in under the radar: buy the new PowerBook with either Tiger on it or a voucher for Tiger, and sell the old PowerBook while Panther is still considered an acceptably current operating system. Ah, so many variables. Just have to wait and see how things play out, I suppose.
So in short, I don't know much more than I did last month. The good news, of course, is that just because a G5 PowerBook becomes available, doesn't mean that I have to buy one right away. If I can stretch my current rig out long enough, I might even get away with waiting until after the G5's first set of revisions. Hmm. I like having a gameplan in place so that I can later choose to either stick with it or deviate from it (as opposed to just winging it one way or the other), but this just might have too many variables.
When it comes to my next Mac, I may have to simply make things up as I go along.
Well, I suppose I should take a moment to welcome all you new readers into the fold. Although many of you arrived here under rather surreal circumstances, you're more than welceome to stick around, as one thing you'll find very quickly is that I'm anything but a one-issue candidate. The Mac platform has as many interesting facets as it does users, and over the years that I've been doing this, there have been few places that I've been afraid to venture into when it comes to exploring what's out there. What has my eyes wide open this weekend is the fact that one of Apple's overseas suppliers seems rather convinced that we're just around the corner from seeing none other than the G5 PowerBook. And as the owner of an aging early-model Titanium PowerBook, this week's news has forced me to sit up and once again re-evaluate my own Mac situation, and the fact that I've already end-of-life'd my current PowerBook.
I'm also aware that many of the new people around here have no idea what I'm talking about when I reference such things. I had a guy write in this week wondering how I could write that the Switch campaign was a success without doing anything to back it up. Long-time readers know just how many thousands of words I've spent over the past year explaining the delayed-yet-evident success of the Switch campaign, so for more on that subject I'll simply point the new people to the archives. But as far as my own PowerBook, I'll recap just a little bit of where I'm at with that. Close to a year ago I bought a used 667 Mhz G4 Titanium PowerBook and it's been very good to me, but it's showing its age, It just keeps up with me, and like any power user, I feel like I could be accomplishing a little more if my Mac was faster than I am. Last year I was under quite the budget constraint, or I would have simply bought a brand new Aluminum PowerBook and been done with it. But I did what I had to do at the time, and before long it'll be time to pay the piper in terms of acquiring something (brand) new.
About a month ago I wrote a column detailing why I'd decided to "end-of-life" my PowerBook, by which I simply meant that I wasn't going to dump another penny into it unless it needed a repair in order to keep it useful. In other words, no more RAM upgrades, no SuperDrive upgrade, no new software that's going to come bundled with my next Mac unless a particular title come along that I really need. Why? Because every dollar a put into my current PowerBook puts me one dollar further away from my next one.
Because upgrading from one G4 laptop to another G4 laptop doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I'd decided early on that I'd wait until the G5 PowerBook was a reality before even considering a new PowerBook. And oddly enough, it was the act of writing those words that got me thinking about making a pre-emptive lateral move to something that was not a PowerBook. I mean, the current G4 iBook is more than twice as fast as (and 100% newer than) my current PowerBook, so why not make the leap downward, as it were? But then I remembered the one and only reason why I didn't go that route last time: screen resolution. Both the 12 inch and the 14 inch iBook top out at 1024x768 resolution, which while plenty for most tasks, just isn't enough to get work done in apps like DreamWeaver or Keynote, and I spend quite a bit of time using both. In mid-December I tried to wean myself off the extra screen space by throttling my PowerBook's screen down to 1024x768, but after two weeks of tearing my hair out, I gave up and went back to the maximum resolution. So much for the notion of the 14 inch iBook acting as a stop-gap solution.
At that point I knew without question that my next laptop would be a G5 PowerBook, and seeing how there was nothing out there to suggest that we'd see one of those any time soon, I figured I had all the time in the world before I would need to address the situation. Until yesterday, that is. Because although you never give such reports more than a marginal chance of being true, one of Apple's Taiwanese manufacturers seems to think that not only is he going to be building G5 PowerBooks for Apple as early as next quarter, he's going to be building G5 iBook as well. And although that last part casts doubt on everything else he said, what it means is that I do have to at least consider what I'm going to do should the G5 PowerBook suddenly show up on the market in, say, May or June of this year.
I see three main questions that I need to resolve fairly quickly so that I can put myself on the most advantageous path:
1) Which new G5 PowerBook model do I buy? Actually, this one isn't all that hard. A quick glance at the specs of the current G4 PowerBook models tells me that even the low-end 15 inch model provides more than I need. And I can't imagine that the low-end 15 inch G5 PowerBook would any different. So at least I now know about how much funding I have to squirrel away between now and then.
2) What do I do with my current PowerBook at that point? I can keep it as a second machine, keep it as a backup, or eBay it. Even when I've had acccess to multiple Macs, I've been the type to want to do all my bidding on a single machine. It's just too laborious to try to remember what's on which machine, or to limit each one to certain tasks, etc. The whole point of having a laptop is that you can take everything with you, not some things with you. So scratch the notion of a second machine. As far as a backup, what point would it serve unless I had to send my new PowerBook in for service? Even if that happened, I've got my hundred year old clamshell iBook that I can fall back on for (very) short periods of time. So it looks like eBay is the way to go. Even though a G4 PowerBook this old is bound to fetch a decent bounty.
3) What do I do with my current PowerBook in the mean time? This, of couse, goes back to not wanting to dump any more money into it than I have to. So will I buy iWork next week? Yes, both because I know I'll use it heavily right away, and because it's not likely to come bundled with my new PowerBook anyway. Will I buy iLife '05? I doubt it, both because I'm only an occasional user of iPhoto and iMovie (although I love them both dearly), and because the suite will definitely come with my new laptop. So the big question, of course, is Tiger.
My first thought was that if I'll be ditching this laptop soon anyway, then there's no reason to put Tiger on it for a short period of time just to turn around and dump it. The other side, though, is that if I try to sell this PowerBook without Tiger on it, I'm not likely to get as much for it. But then I thought about the fact that Tiger may not even be released by then, and it makes me wonder if I just might get this all in under the radar: buy the new PowerBook with either Tiger on it or a voucher for Tiger, and sell the old PowerBook while Panther is still considered an acceptably current operating system. Ah, so many variables. Just have to wait and see how things play out, I suppose.
So in short, I don't know much more than I did last month. The good news, of course, is that just because a G5 PowerBook becomes available, doesn't mean that I have to buy one right away. If I can stretch my current rig out long enough, I might even get away with waiting until after the G5's first set of revisions. Hmm. I like having a gameplan in place so that I can later choose to either stick with it or deviate from it (as opposed to just winging it one way or the other), but this just might have too many variables.
When it comes to my next Mac, I may have to simply make things up as I go along.
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