Apple Power Macintosh G4 (M8841LL/A) Mac Desktop

The apple g4 1.25 dual is a monster graphics machine. I use one everyday at work and take for granted how fast it is. I've forgotten about how long video rendering and applying photoshop filters used to take. I remember on a friends 233 Mhz G3 I used to take a nap or read a magazine article, and on my 400 Mhz I would check email. But now the dual does its stuff so fast I pretty much work in real time. This is the seventh Apple Power Mac I've used in my line of work and this one is by far the best, I wasn't too fond of the Quicksilver models because they were so loud and had some hardware glitches. At home I use a 400 Mhz G4 Power Mac and a 700 Mhz G3 iBook, they are a lot slower than my workstation at work. Areas that I most notice the difference, encoding AAC files for iTunes, at home I'm looking at speeds of 3x - 5x in terms of ripping music, at work it's more like 18x - 24x, rendering movies in After Effects and performing batch processing on image files for the web i.e. hundreds of thumbnails on a tight deadline.

Designwise it looks very clean and stylish, the use of polished steel in the front is a very nice detail, seems like a throwback to the days of the mainframe. I've always appreciated Apple's use of materials in the last 5 years, their exploration in the application of polycarbonate, titanium, steel, and aluminum for desktop and laptop computers is very innovative and sets them apart from all the cheap plastic computers destined to landfills in a few years. My only complaint is that power button on the front is a little rough Apple needs to bring back a power button on the keyboard like the old days.

OS X Jaguar runs very fluidly on this machine and shows off this machines capabilities quite nicely. The OS is a joy to use compared to Windows, and I'm find it superior to Mac OS 9.2.2 although it took a year to make that switch, what was holding me back from plunging headfirst into OS X? Mainly Quark XPress. I was reluctant to cut that cord to OS 9 since Quark is such a valuable program for me. However with the release Adobe Indesign 2.0 Quark is pretty obsolete to me now and Indesign is great at generating PDFs, something that I cannot say about Quark XPress. So for those of you still waiting on Quark, I recomend that you download the trial version of Adobe Indesign to use on some smaller print projects, the transition is very easy, a day or two at the most.

There's about a Gig of RAM in this thing which allows me to open over a dozen graphics application without any signs of slowing down the system. Out of force of habit I tend to shut down apps when using After Effects or working on really large PS files. Upgrades are very easy with the G4 Power Mac design since the side opens down in one pull of that tab thing on the side. Very thoughtful approach to case design.

The second video card really comes in handy since I can move my email client to the second monitor along with iTunes and all my application pallete menus. That leaves my main screen uncluttered and lets me focus better on the project at hand instead of micromanaging the real estate of the screen. I have yet to used the DVD burner on this thing but plan to soon. I like that they finally put the earphone outlet on the front finally, three years of fumbling in the back to plug in my headphones are finally over. I still pray that apple puts a USB or firewire port on the front someday to really make this digital hub more user friendly, I mean imagine the difficulty of connecting your iPod day in and day out if it mean moving this 25 pound machine around to access the firewire in the back.

Sadly the one aspect of this computer I am unlikely to ever know is how well it performs in running the latest games available for the Mac. You'll have to read elsewhere for that. Macs seem to have a growing selection of games, I mainly stick to Blizzard games for strategy, and console games for action.

For the most part the speed of the latest G4 is way more than what I would need at home, but when I am on the clock I'm glad to have it as a tool I feel it would give a lot of content creators a definite advantage in terms of using the latest software in the fastest way possible. The only reason I haven't purchased one to upgrade my old G4 is that I am holding out for the G5 to come out, whenever that happens.