Mel's Macintosh Universe: The Power Center 150

Power Macintosh G5

The Power Mac G5 is Apple's newest and fastest desktop.

Apple's newest Power Macintosh is the 64-bit G5. It is supposed to be their fastest Mac ever (to date).

I breifly used one for the first time today (Sept. 13) at the local Apple Store. Here is a picture of the G5 connected to an Apple Cinema screen display (shown above).

The Mac is fast. I took a screenshot of the desktop and emailed it to myself from the Apple Store through my Yahoo.com account. The computer uploaded the 1.8MB PDF screenshot to my Yahoo account in no time. Of course all of the Macs there are connected to a high speed network, which meant that the email flew to my other address.

This particular G5 was running Mac OS X 10.2.7, a version of Jaguar that has been optimized for the G5. From what I have read, Jaguar does not support the G5's 64-bit architecture, but it does run like any other Mac on OSX.

For the short time that I was at the Apple Store, I played with iTunes for a sec, the Picture Viewer application and did some renderings with Adobe Photoshop. The small photos already on the hard drive did not showcase the full potential of the G5 or Photoshop. I wanted to see how the computer would handle a multi-megabyte photoshop file.... oh well.

Checked the system profiler and this G5 had the stock 512 megabytes of RAM, which is enough to run OSX. The profiler indicated that its 8 banks of RAM slots were filled with only 2 256MB sticks of Ram. I can't remember what the RAM ceiling is for the G5, but I am pretty sure it is at 8 gigs (1 gig sticks in each slot).

Compared to the 1.5 Gig ceiling for my present G4 Quicksilver, this puppy can hold a lot of RAM.

Of course like all things Apple, the G5 is not cheap. The demo model at the Apple Store was a stock model selling for $1995, computer alone. Add another thousand for a really decent Apple flatscreen monitor, more ram and other goodies such as software, and perhaps a 2nd internal hard drive.

One thing for sure, if I ever buy a Power Mac G5, I certainly won't be booting to OS 9. These Macs can't. I won't even bother with Classic when you got something this fast.

For an absolute certainty, this is the Macintosh that definitely leaves OS9 and all things classic far behind. It is a Mac for today and tomorrow. Great stuff Apple!

Mel's Macintosh Universe