New PowerMac towers from Apple. Slightly faster with no other major changes. Underwhelming to people who care too much about such things (who you lookin' at?) but in reality a perfectly fine incremental update.

Jobs had promised 3 Ghz within a year when the G5 was introduced last year, and now it's pretty clear that is not going to happen (this update tops out at 2.5 Ghz.) So of course there is much gnashing of teeth over the broken promise. Still, compared to where things were before, with Motorolla and the 167 mhz front side bus (Bwahahahaha!), IBM is doing a bang up job. Aside from bragging rights, I don't think it matters too much whether they are at 2.5 or 3.0.

But I wish they would have done something on the storage side. Why no dual optical drive option? Why only room for two internal hard drives? Why no option for hardware RAID? These are changes they could have implemented that would have placated the geeks. But maybe the geeks don't really matter that much. For almost all real world uses, these machines are fine.
- jim 6-10-2004 9:41 pm

Hey Jim, got any consumer advice on airport hubs?
- sally mckay 6-10-2004 10:52 pm


If you can wait until next month the newly announced AirPort Express is pretty slick. If you play music off your computer, and if you can locate the hub near your stereo, (and, I guess, if your computer isn't already right next to your stereo) then this is definitely what you should get.

Unless you need to support more than 10 simultaneous connections, or have need to add an external antenna, I can't really see buying the $200 AirPort Extreme. Plus, not buying this product punishes Apple for using the word 'Extreme' in a product name. (Although possibly the flying saucer design outweighs these negatives.)

But if you don't need the music streaming capabilities of the ap express, and if you don't require the product to be made by Apple, you can save money with a third party. The Linksys WRTG54 is the best selling wireless router. These are around $70, but you can often find mail in rebate deals that drive the price even lower. For Mac users I usually recommend Netgear stuff over Linksys just for the better documentation (linksys works with Mac, but they don't "officially" support it.) This one is $35 after the $25 mail in rebate from Amazon.

Just make sure you buy a G (802.11g) instead of a B (802.11b) even if your wireless card is only a b. Prices are the same, and G is fully backwards compatible with B, so it's silly to buy a B hub.
- jim 6-11-2004 12:08 am


dude! thanks.
- sally mckay 6-11-2004 12:18 am





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