it has just come to me what i need to do in regards to apple hardware. i already have a 450 MHz G4 with 100 MHz bus and 1 MB L2 cache. it would be nice to have dual processors and a faster bus, but with the 120 GB internal, and external firewire devices in the future, i’ll be fine when it comes to storage. all i need is a firewire and USB hub to power all my devices.
what i need instead of a new CPU is a firewire DV camcorder or VCR! what i want to do on my new machine is serve webpages. what better “big iron” than the xserve? i want the generation two box, not the current 93 degrees hot box, but the optimized G5 box. i can never buy a machine that is compromised in such a fashion. i got my cube nine months after the new york 2000 announcement, just five months before it was discontinued. that’s the best time to get new hardware, unless you need raw crunching power. that time in almost near, as i want to deliver DVD on MPEG-2, a very processor intensive activity.
i’m hoping apple.com releases all new hardware across the entire product line so nothing will boot into classic. my solution is to get an exclusive OS X box in the future. of my list of equipment that will break next month, most important is the nikon film scanner. it would be nice to use my auroravideosys fuse again, but it’s been supplanted by DV firewire. now include in that progressive scan DV, and i can never go back to interlace. i’m very disappointed that all my audio rig is gone (value $1000), but with two programs and one device, i can get it all back. i need to get apple emagic logic audio anyway, along with either a USB or firewire audio interface. so no real loss. the programs i’ll miss the most are microsoft excel 4 and dantz retrospect. those i’ll be forced to upgrade. i’m waiting for photosphop 8 with foveon native editing (RAW) and final cut pro with progressive scan DV import. life is good. you have to make your own decisions when classic goes away. if you have enough computing power to take you through to the next hardware leap, with firewire 2, USB 2, and the G5, wait.