Opinion: Why the G5 Will Force You to Upgrade


Wired's story on the ever-upgradeable Cube tells us one thing: some people will never give up on their ideal PC.

Apple put its Cube 'on ice' about 2 years ago, but enthusiasts can buy - retail - a 1.2GHz version. For the brave, there's more to come if you overclock.

That's the upgrade market: PowerLogix, Sonnet and Newer Technology keep churning out faster G3 and G4 upgrades. Doesn't matter if your CPU is soldered. Doesn't matter if you need ROMs on your daughtercard. You can flash the new with the old.

Until now.

Welcome to G5 Macintosh. New processor. New mobo. New RAM. New everything. Even a 'new' OS, designed to take advantage of at least some of the power offered by 64-bit computing.

Now you may be able to buy the fastest G4 Moto can manage to put out and dump it in your Cube/B&W or iMac. But you won't be able to upgrade to a G5. Never. Ever. Ever.

Why? Because you'll need Apple's fancy-schmancy new mobo architecture to go with it. No simply unplugging that ZIF-socketed G3 and plugging a G4 in, like a Lombard or Wallstreet. No.

No, you'll have to buy a Power Mac G5. Or, if the rumored G5 road map is to be believed, PowerPC 970-based CPUs will be trickling down to the iMac, PowerBook and, maybe, even iBook (eventually).

That's the PC upgrade cycle. You want it? You buy it. No more upgrades for you.

But that doesn't mean the death of upgrade companies. Far from it - although whether IBM will permit third-party firms to purchase batches of G5s is far from clear.

There will still be a healthy market for existing G3/G4 and PowerPC equipment. Heck, Sonnet even has an amazing array of upgrades for the LC series of 'pizza box' Macs. (where I work, they've just put up a bunch of LCIIs, IIIs and Quadra 605s for tender). No, people who frequent Jag's House, who maintain SE/30 servers aren't Apple's target audience. Nor, for that matter, are the Cube devotees.

But if you're still chugging away on a Bondi Blue iMac, and mulling over a CDRW upgrade, Apple wants your dough. Or at least in the next 18 months they will.

For now, they're just happy to get the Pros' money, who've all ordered DP 2GHz G5s. Higher-spec G4s will keep iMacs ticking over, as will faster G4 PBs and Gobi iBooks.

But once the G5s do ship en masse, who's going to want a G4? Yes, I know, we can all say (plaintively), "who needs a G5?" But Macs - consumer ones especially, but PowerBooks as well - aren't about need. They're about want. Let's face it: you'd be crazy not to want the fastest Mac you can afford. Price cut on an 867MHz PowerBook? Great. Buy it. But if you can spring for the 1GHz, you'd buy it, right? All the better for future-proofing your investment.

Let's face it: many of us don't really need more than a G3 Wallstreet. For most day-to-day tasks, it's more than adequate. But not if you want to do voice dictation, edit huge Photoshop images, capture and edit DV at full frame rates, encode MPEG-2 in close to real time - and run OS X at a decent speed.

No, to run the latest software and hardware, the newer, the faster your Mac, the better.

Which is why, Apple knows, it's got virtually all of us locked up for the next few years as we await our G5 (iMac, eMac, take your pick). Like fish in a barrel.