Apple Power Macintosh G4 (Z03W) Mac Desktop

Have used Apples since Seventies. Have three now, Powerbook, iMac and this new G4. Got the very top of the line G4 in early May. Poured in 1.5gigs of RAM, two 80 gig drives, SCSI card, Qualcome tablet, pro speakers, more and hooked it up to DSL.

Upgraded from approx 360 G3, SCSI desk top model with just four gigs of internal HD (had additional LaCie SCSI external drives, professional AGFA Arcus II scanner, fast external LaCie RW/CD, and docked my Power book 3400c and Palm 500 series PDAs). Am a Photoshop/Flash/Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Pagemaker poweruser and rely on Microsoft office.

Except for my PowerBook, no other SCSI peripherals including my Epson printer would get recognized by the new G4 in either Classic or OSX. Hours on the phone with Apple, LaCie, Agfa and others were of little use.

I had to junk a ton of software, since I upgraded to Photoshop 7 with the purchase... it was my only OS-X compaitible software. At least two thirds of my plug in collection will not run in OS-X! Plus my font manager was incompatible, and until I upgraded that, I lost access to a ton of fonts. Indeed a significant percentage of fonts are still not compatible with OS-X.

OS-X is clunky, and it does crash. Yes, finally, when applications crash, the basic system stays alive, but OS-X itself every eight or nine times, crashes and the screen freezes and fills half way with what I guess is Linux garbage.

Fast? Well, not particularly in Photoshop. In fact, Adobe warns that Photoshop 7 is TWENTY PERCENT faster when you run it in OS 9! Holy Cow!

Why Apple felt it was necessary to develop a new navigation system for OS X is the real puzzler, Medieval theology is more transparent! If this navigator is intuitively obvious to the geeks at Cupertino, then they are as in contact with the real world as the Washington staff of any long term Congressperson. it is eeeeery how annoyingly new the OS-X culture is. For just one tiny example...

Most of us over a lot of years learned the advantages of the windowshade collapsing of files with a couple of clicks in the top bar. We could litter our screens with works in progress, all of them neatly available. That feature is gone... now things drop like Oscar the Ghost onto a "Dock" (where'd the navigator go?).... where they become stored like veggies in a stew. AAARGH! It goes on and on.

Now, I'm told that some of this is fixed if I want to shell out a hundred and half (including tax and shipping) for an upgrade OS. HEY! I jus bought this thing, and they are telling me that the OS is obsolete? Double AAARGH! This is insulting.

In all, I have experience far fewer efficiency improvements as a result of a 3 to 4 Thousand dollar upgrade of a three year old machine (maybe two hundred hours of adjustment time burned away in to this thing). And the new Palm OS for the G4/OS-X managed to loose all of my data prior to the first synch in May. Yes I backed up,but it took hours,and calls to both Apple and Palm to undo the problem, scaring the hell out of me.

Oh... I did get an iPod. It is cool, Itunes is cool. I can play music now which the old G3 really didn't permit. But then again, I have a stereo system and I HAD a cool LaCie RW CD... which was much faster than the built in super drive.

Junked.... La Cie external HDs, La Cie RW CD, Agfa Arcus II, Epson Printer, Kai's Power tools, a decade of collected Phtoshop plug ins, about 15% of my fonts. Am limping along in OS-9 with Office, the Macromedia Suite and Pagemaker.

Lost time for "Classic OS-9" to load whenever I need MS-Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I am struggling along on the Apple "Mail" program since I do not want to have to go into OS 9 for Entourage, or Eudora, or Outlook Express. But the Apple Mail program is a toy for a business person.

I have had to shell out replacement costs for the printer and scanner... mucho bucks. In all... I probably should have finally bit the bullet and gone PC. Sigh....