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The need for speed

Apple's G5 chip promises faster personal computing than ever. But will it reverse the company's declining share of the market?

Charles Arthur
Wednesday 02 July 2003 00:00 BST
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Last week in San Francisco, they were applauding like it was 1999. In August that year, the then interim chief executive Steve Jobs showed off new hardware - "a supercomputer on a chip" - that was comparable in speed with anything in the Intel world, and seemed easily to outrun rivals in real-world tests, such as the Photoshop "bake-offs" that Jobs seemed to love. In 1999 there was also a preview of an update to the Macintosh operating system, due out later that year.

Plus ça change, you might say. Rather than the Motorola G4 chip running at 400MHz, last week it was the IBM PPC 970 (Apple calls it the "G5") running at up to 2GHz, more proof-positive bake-offs, and Jobs promising that "within 12 months we'll be up to 3GHz - this architecture has legs". There were also demonstrations of the new "Panther" version of the OSX operating system (with more visible at www.apple.com/macosx/panther).

Of course, given Moore's Law, you would expect that in 12 months the G5 would be up to 3.3GHz. (Strictly, Moore's Law says that the number of components on a given area will double every 18 months but, in general, clock speed follows it too). So one shouldn't feel spoilt by Jobs's promise.

Apple's problem is that for four years its processor upgrades have fallen short of Moore's Law. Add to that a radical update to its operating system - from "classic" OS9 in 1999, to OSX in 2001, which made the program the user was looking at seem slower, in return for stability and a fairer bite of the processor for all - and everything from the processor to the display feels as though its speed has fallen behind its PC rivals.

It's ironic, given last week's crowing (with benchmarks "proving" the G5 to be "the fastest desktop personal computer on the planet"), that in the past couple of years Apple has strongly denied that the speed difference compared with Intel chips matters. Even more ironic is that what Apple's faithful clients in the music, video, publishing and other creative industries really wanted from the company was an easy path to OSX. Many in those industries are still using software that came out in 1999. They'd like fast machines, too, but have delayed purchases because tight economic times mean they've had no free cash. Add the fact that Apple machines made since January start up only in OSX (though they still run "Classic" alongside it) and you have extra reluctance to buy. Consequently, sales of professional desktops, previously the money-generator for Apple, have been falling steadily for a couple of years.

Yet a confluence of factors suggests that trend is ready to reverse, and that Apple could enjoy the benefits. The G5 is revolutionary: a 64-bit machine running, at its heart, a variant of Unix, able to use up to 8Gb of RAM and address up to 18 exabytes (18,000 billion gigabytes) of disk space. It whirls data about on a processor bus running at 1 Ghz - faster than that on Intel machines now, which run at up to 800Mhz. And it is very fast when you're in the driving seat - applications start so quickly that you feel like the weak link in the chain as you dither over the keys. Intel, meanwhile, insists it will stick with 32-bit machines; the move to 64-bit will be painful for Windows users, and seems to be years away.

Who wants the G5's power? People in the video industry, who are always happy to bat pixels around faster; those in the audio business who want to add another sound effect to a mix (digital effects drain processing power); and folk who, having got a taste for OSX's stability, like to have lots going on at once. There are also new groups: scientists - especially in the life sciences, where it is standard to crunch vast amounts of data in the search for new proteins and drug candidates. The Apple machines are thousands of pounds cheaper than the Silicon Graphics and Sun machines that have so much of the business there; but their Unix underpinning means a shift over would be far easier to do than in the days of OS9. Indeed, Pascal Cagni, Apple's head of European operations, is now deciding precisely which scientific organisations to target with the news about the new machines. That's a whole new market that Apple might see blossom.

Among existing markets, one of the most interesting announcements to emerge last week in the aftermath of the G5's launch was from the Guardian Media Group (which publishes The Guardian and Observer newspapers). It is shifting over to OSX - and also to Adobe's InDesign, which runs "natively" on OSX. The shift will be completed by 2005. The loser? Quark, whose Xpress product GMG uses to lay out pages. Last month, Quark announced Xpress 6.0, its OSX-native version, but it arrived more than a year after InDesign, and three years after it was abundantly clear that Apple was not going to let OS9 live. That delay may be disastrous for Quark.

"In the US, lots of people have tried InDesign out already and liked it, but in the UK people are more conservative," one Apple hardware salesman told me last week. "They'll move to something if everyone else does, but not otherwise." The GMG's decision to move to InDesign might trigger a cascade of similar moves in British publishing. It would be an interesting lesson in how the market penalises those who take it for granted.

Meanwhile, many Mac fans lapping up the details of the G5s are asking: how soon can we get a G5 laptop? Apple executives were guarded about this last week, because the chips are so hot: the G4 consumes about 41 watts in a desktop; the G5, nearer 80 watts. That means shorter battery life and a hotter lap. Rely on Moore's Law to shrink the size, and hence power consumption and output, of the circuits enough to make a laptop feasible. When? "Not any time soon," said one Apple executive last week. A quick calculation suggests that six months would be a reasonable period - now that Apple is once more obeying the laws of computing.

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