Power Mac G5 is Apple’s best work yet

For me, there is no administrative tool that compares to a terminal window. Apple finally addressed the thorny issue of Jaguar’s limited and poorly documented set of command-line tools. All of the OS X Server documentation has been reworked, and those docs are finally readable thanks to a retooled PDF engine that renders rich documents faster than you can scroll through them.

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I was delighted that Apple replaced Jaguar’s clunky Sendmail SMTP server with the more respected Postfix. In practice, I don’t find Postfix to be an improvement, at least not the way Apple has implemented it. E-mail is one of the few services in Panther Server that was obviously cobbled together from open source parts. Keeping those parts loosely connected fits open source principles. However, this is one area where Apple can and should add unique value for mainstream customers.

The killer Panther Server feature is Windows interoperability. Panther will provide authentication, VPN, and file/print services to Windows clients, which creates interesting possibilities for reducing license costs.

The Ideal Mac

For the work I do, the Intel x86/Windows platform has fallen out of step with my requirements. I need my desktops to move and process multiple mountains of data, located in various places inside and outside the system, while maintaining a smooth, rich, and responsive user interface. I expect that from clients and servers. In the months I’ve worked with the Power Mac G5, I’ve found that the hardware, Panther OS, and the quite remarkable Xcode development environment form an ideal combination of usability and performance. It’s the ideal Mac; Intel’s Xeon simply can’t compete. If Apple wants a competing architecture to worry about, it should set its sights on Opteron. Apple should continue to make hay while Microsoft and Sun adapt their commercial operating systems to the AMD64 architecture.

I find digital media production to be a better overall predictor of compute and throughput performance than synthetic benchmarks, and in this regard, the Power Mac G5 stomps the Power Mac G4 and leaves the Xeon (running Adobe Premiere) choking on its dust. In the latter case, the Xeon system isn’t primarily hung up by a lack of compute power. The Xeon is hobbled by a shared bus that operates at half the speed of the fastest buses in the Power Mac G5.

Looking Beyond

I don’t want to look ahead too far, but the G5 architecture is going to make one hell of a server. That’s not conjecture. I ran all of my performance tests, including Final Cut Pro, on the Server edition of the Panther OS without bothering to shut down Panther’s services. I don’t care if cooling requirements will prevent Apple from squeezing a pair of G5s into a 1U rack chassis. I’ll generously set aside two rack spaces if I have to. My lab’s Xeon servers already occupy that.

I’m also jazzed about the possibilities of G5-equipped notebooks. It’s no accident that Apple paid such attention to Panther’s text and graphics rendering, with improvements in speed and quality most apparent in Panther’s handling of PDF and HTML. These set up innumerable possibilities for the rich, real-time presentation of complex and changing data.

Data analysis and translation, digital media, security, high-bandwidth data gathering, complex user interfaces, software development, and network monitoring are types of common applications that the Power Mac G5 handled sublimely in my tests. That describes the kind of work I do every day, a breadth of activity that colors my opinion of this system.

More than anything else, the Power Mac G5 shatters the long-standing limits of expectation imposed by Intel and Microsoft. Maybe you’re not a customer for this machine, but very shortly you will see shades of the Power Mac G5 in every dual-processor desktop you buy. The risk that Apple takes here is the same one it took with the PowerBook G4, OS X, Xserve, and Xserve RAID. Maybe customers aren’t as dull, as timid, or as easily led as other vendors believe.

Correction

In this article, a dual-processor 3.06GHz Xeon system's I/O throughput -- in the comparison with the Power Mac G5's -- should have been noted as 1.3GB per second. It has been corrected in this article.