Over Yule
dinner, a friend offered me a free computer. Not really
vintage by CCtalk standards, I guess. A dual-core 2GHz G5 Mac Pro.
I'd take one. It's the last PowerPC Macintosh -
Strictly speaking, the last Power Mac was the quad G5, which was a dual-CPU,
dual-core 2.5GHz machine (and my daily driver: I bought it new in 2006, just
shortly before the Intel transition was announced). Not only is it
collectable from that standpoint, it's also a not unreasonably beefy machine
even by current standards (and the beefiest you'll ever get that can run
Classic). Probably for this reason they still fetch as much as a grand on
the used market.
Meanwhile, TenFourFox evolves. I got the last bugs out of JavaScript JIT
type inference over Christmas, and there should be test builds up tonight
for those here who are interested (see the TenFourFox development blog).
I still think there is a lot of life in Power Macs. My two main desktop
machines and my main laptop are all PowerPC (G5, iMac G4 and late iBook G4).
I plan to get at least 10 years out of my quad, and I have a spare unit
identically configured, just in case.
--
------------------------------------ personal:
http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems *
www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at
floodgap.com
-- Never trust a computer you can't lift. -- Mac rollout, 24 January 1984 -----