For a hardcore Apple Mac person like me, having a new PowerMac G5 to test-drive for a week was akin to being in heaven.
The Mac originally made professional applications available to everyone. Without Macs, desktop publishing, for instance, would never have happened. Without Macs, this newspaper, for one, would not have come into existence. It was possible to do on a shoestring all sorts of things that had been hitherto restricted to expensive typesetting machinery.
The same goes for image manipulation and much else. Apple Macintosh was the pioneer here — left to Microsoft and the PC-makers or PCs, we’d be able to do little more than send a few e-mails and cruise the Net.
Apple’s new high-end product, the G5, takes all this a way further. You might call it the professionalisation of leisure. Now, with the software that comes embedded in the G5, you can fix or entirely remake your pictures, copy and organise your home videos into a sequence and add effects, then burn them to DVD; you can collect music tracks and burn them to CD, and so on.
The G5 comes with iTunes, which is a brilliantly simple and intuitive way to organise a large collection of music. You’re stuck with lifting songs from existing CDs, though — or stealing them from free music sites.
The iTunes shop, where you should be able to go on the Net and buy songs to collect, is not yet available in South Africa. It’s illegal outside the United States — something to do with publishing rights and the protection of ”intellectual property”, which is becoming the shibboleth of globalisation. This is a great pity. Left to the local recording industry, it will probably take years for iTunes Net-shopping to become available.
Over the course of a week or so, I test-drove the new G5. My reference point for comparison was my four-year-old iMac, a machine capable of doing an awful lot, though often fairly slowly. For example, a complex PhotoShop file, saved with four or five layers, all in full colour, takes a good four to six minutes to save on the iMac. The same file, with even more layers and other fiddly tricks, saves itself on the G5 in the blink of an eye.
What makes the G5 so fast is its dual 2GHz processors. This means that while it’s busy doing one thing, you can do another.
While it’s burning a CD (which doesn’t take it very long anyway), you can play about with something else, without compromising the first task at all, and without the speed of the second task being in any way reduced. This is marvellous.
The G5 got a bit flummoxed with the DVDs, though. Perhaps it’s because this is a relatively new capability on any computer, or because DVDs are much denser than CDs, or just because the software on the G5 (iMovie and iDVD) is at an early stage of development.
Whatever the case, my first attempt to arrange a sequence of home movies (taken on a little digital camera, and hardly high-resolution) was frustrating. The program, iMovie, absorbs the movielets easily enough, and it’s child’s play to put them in a sequence and add a musical soundtrack. But add a few of the effects generously offered by iMovie — put it in black and white, add ”ageing” speckles and so on — and it practically grinds to a halt.
Burning the DVD was also a hassle, and here I think it’s the program that’s at fault. It feels like a Microsoft program: in other words, it tries to do your thinking for you. It simply won’t proceed unless you choose one of its quite horrible intro cards to preface the DVD with. It was hard to choose the least awful of them, and it was impossible to turn the option off or to construct one’s own intro. Hopefully iDVD will improve in time; get some real Apple people on to it, for heaven’s sake! We don’t need this Microsoft-style flim-flam for idiots.
Eventually, we got the G5 to burn a DVD that was playable at once in the DVD player. It did, however, take longer to burn than the total time of the movie we’d made. God knows what happens if you’ve compiled an hour or two of home movies; if they are reasonably high-res, keep your fingers crossed. It could take days to burn the DVD.
I am told that the optimal program for this kind of thing is FinalCutPro, which is optimised for Mac’s OSX and the G5. If that’s true, it makes the G5 a good choice for people doing professional movie work.
If not, it makes the G5 (which comes in at about R40 000 for the top-end machine) an extremely expensive home toy.
That said, it is a dream machine. Not only does it look fantastic — all that brushed steel — but, apart from the blips mentioned, it works like a Rolls Royce driving at full speed and all you can hear is the clock ticking.
And I was entranced by Garage Band. This music-making program is so simple to use, and has so many samples and loops available (though some, especially the horns, sound very plastic), that within half an hour you’re a composer.
I didn’t even do the tutorial, and consulted Help only once, yet over the weekend I pieced together more than an hour’s worth of home-made music. It sounds like a reasonably proficient demo; I’m sure I could fool more than a few listeners that I have a secret Moby remix or two on hand. And I can’t play a note.