New PowerMac G5s were released yesterday (my time), and they've been covered all over the web. MacRumors has a post about it.
I'm somewhat… underwhelmed… by this update. In comparison to the G4 days, the 500MHz increase is great, but it's been a year since the last update. I'm aware that IBM has had yield problems with the PowerPC 970FXs, so I wasn't really expecting 3GHz G5s. But… The only new machine here is the Dual 2.5GHz machine. The other two are basically what we had in the last revision, with 8X SuperDrives (instead of 4X). The Dual 1.8GHz machine also takes less RAM, has no PCI-X, and a worse graphics card. Why spend R&D and engineering money developing this new low-end machine? I don't get why they didn't just keep the old Dual 1.8GHz machine… Maybe they couldn't afford to sell them at that price, who knows?
Others have said that the machines are using the same graphics cards that were in the G5s a year ago, which is a bit of a disappointment, too.
One thing I was happy to hear about, though, was the system migration app included with the new machines. MacNN has a blurb about it, taken from MacFixIt. It transfers all your files, documents, settings, etc from the old computer to the new one, over FireWire. It would save stuffing around with File Sharing or manually copying over folders. I hope Apple includes this with all computers in the future, as it's a great program to have!
One other tidbit of information that I found is that there are not going to be any 3GHz G5s anytime soon. If they can't ramp up the Megahertz of the processors, I hope IBM can make the processors more efficient and powerful. I also hope Apple makes the machines a bit more price-competitive and feature-competitive to PCs. A better graphics card would be nice…
The article also says that there will be no PowerBook G5s this year, which I was expecting. Hopefully we'll see them at MWSF! Then I can sell my Rev. A PowerBook 12″ and get a brand-spanking new PowerBook G5! (It's also pissing me off right now… The fan runs constantly, and sometimes sounds as bad as the fan in the bathroom! I probably should take it to an Apple Store…)
