Lots of people are asking questions about the new Macs recently announced at this summer’s MacWorld expo. The big news is Apple is discontinuing the 450 and 500 MHz G4 machines and replacing them with dual processor 450 and 500 MHz machines. Happily the price is staying the same! But us old war veterans have enough experience to know it’s not all goodness and light. How are our audio and MIDI products going to work in these new machines? Will they take advantage of the dual processor technology and run faster… or will they work at all?
Every time Apple has a major hardware update like this, the questions far out-supply the answers for the first few weeks. So far we’ve been able to learn that most audio and MIDI applications are going to be “compatible” with the new G4. Compatible means only that they will work. And even this is too general an answer because we can’t promise that every combination of components, or every individual’s system will work exactly as it would have on an old G4, but in general things look good. In a few rare cases a minor software or driver update may be needed. We expect many formal announcements in the next few weeks from various manufacturers about their specific issues.
This does NOT mean that there is an advantage right now to running your MIDI and/or digital audio application on a dual processor machine. In most cases updates will be required before your software can take any advantage of the second processor. In fact, bench tests done to date show that many operations are actually slightly slower on the dual processor Macs. This, of course, will change. In the coming months you can expect radical performance improvements as more and more software begins to take advantage of this quantum leap in computing power.
The inevitable question always boils down to, “Should I buy one of these new machines?” And of course the answer will vary depending upon your circumstances. Talk to your Sweetwater Sales Engineer about what you are doing and he or she should be able to make a sound recommendation. Here are a few short rules of thumb that are pretty consistently true under these circumstances:
- If you have a working system don’t do anything. Keep getting your work done and wait for the dust to settle on these new machines before trying to make a jump. If you communicate with your Sweetwater Sales Engineer he or she can help you determine when it’s smart to upgrade.
- If you are on the brink of buying a new system (not replacing a working one) you have a choice to make. You can wait (which means not getting any work done), jump in to a new G4, or play it safe and buy an old G4. I’ll assume not getting any work done is not an option for you so we’ll throw out the wait strategy right away. Here’s the bottom line: If you are going to be booking time with clients and have critical work that needs to be done, you do not want to waste time and resources out on the bleeding edge trying to figure out how to get your system to work. Sure, everything may work fine, but you may also be the guy who uncovers the problem that’s a show stopper for you. Play it safe, get an old G4, and get your work done. Upgrade later. If, on the other hand you can afford down time, or are comfortable working around minor to major idiosyncrasies in your system then go ahead and get a new G4. You’ll just be that far ahead of the game when software starts to be optimized for these machines. But be patient. This could take quite some time in many cases. You may be using a dual processor G5 by the time all the manufacturers get their code rewritten.