Product Reviews

Apple took the computing world by storm on 19 July at Macworld Expo New York. Steve Jobs announced a wide range of new products for both consumer and professional users. The key parts of the professional product announcements were the upgrading of the Power Mac G4 range, new monitors, and a totally new Mac - the visually stunning Power Mac G4 Cube. A new keyboard and mouse were also unveiled, which was big news, given the unpopularity of the circular mouse.

We got our hands on the new Power Mac G4 and a pre-production G4 Cube straight after Jobs' keynote speech, and gave them a thorough testing with Apple's new monitors, keyboard and mouse.

The G4 Cube

The new G4 Cube may well redefine the way computers are considered as much as the iMacs did two years ago. It looks radically different from almost every computer ever made (apart from the Cobalt Qube Linux server and Steve Jobs' own long-dead NeXT Cube, a decade ago). It's visually stunning, a silver cube suspended a couple of inches in the air by an enclosing clear plastic shell. A slot-loading DVD-ROM drive built vertically into the top means the ejected discs pop straight out of the top. Once you get over the sleek, science fiction look of the device, the most striking thing about it is its size. Everything has been packed down into a compact shape measuring eight inches square. Cables are plugged in underneath and trail out through a space in the rear of the supporting shell. There are no built-in speakers, but a pair of external speakers, designed by Apple with hi-fi specialist Harman Kardon, are supplied as standard. These are grapefruit-sized crystal-effect globes with a speaker embedded in each one. They're tethered to a tiny amplifier unit, and connect to the Cube via a USB cable. They won't fill a fair-sized room with sound, but they're excellent for local use.

Turning on the Cube is a matter of pointing at it. There's a proximity-sensitive pseudo-button on the top of the Cube, which senses when a finger is virtually touching it and turns on the computer. Once running, this serves as a sleep/wake button, with shutting down only available from the Finder's Special menu.

The G4 Cube has no fan, which means it's practically silent when running. Cooling is done via a heatsink placed at the bottom of a central 'chimney' which rises through the middle of the Cube. Its features are virtually identical to a G4 tower machine: a 450MHz G4 CPU, 100Base-T Ethernet, a 16Mb ATI 128 RAGE Pro graphics card complete with the new ADC (Apple Display Connector) socket and a regular VGA port, a maximum of 1.5Gb of RAM, and, of course, FireWire, USB and a modem. Other configurations, including a 500MHz CPU, are available from the Apple Store (www.apple.com/ukstore).

Getting at the insides of the G4 Cube is simple: just flip it upside-down, press the base to pop up a handle, and the inside of the Mac can be pulled out as one unit. This reveals the RAM slots and AirPort card socket, and, for engineers, the hard drive, DVD, CPU and graphics card. (The handle can be locked via a standard Kensington security slot.) But this easy access highlights what has been left out to fit everything into such a small space. Apart from adding RAM, there's no internal expansion, no empty drive bays, no PCI slots, and the CPU doesn't appear to be user-upgradable. In a nutshell, the G4 Cube is a very powerful, capable G4 Mac, but has no traditional expansion room to speak of. So is this a problem?

This issue is better approached by asking who the G4 Cube is for? Apple's high-end 'pro' customers traditionally value expansibility almost as highly as raw horsepower, and the average consumer would baulk at paying over £1200 for a computer which doesn't include a monitor. However, this still leaves the majority of users - the many mid-level (as opposed to power user) creatives, or business users after powerful rather than budget systems. Basically, this machine is for users who want the kick of a serious Power Mac G4, but don't need to add expansion cards.

A few years ago this would have been unthinkable in a computer aimed at the general professional market. But the industry's adoption of USB is a done deal and FireWire is following suit - gone are the days when adding circuit boards to computers was the norm. Now virtually anything - hard drives, high- and low-end scanners, DVD-RAM and CD-RW drives, ISDN, TV tuners, cameras and so on - can all be linked via FireWire or USB ports with a minimum of fuss. Most Mac users simply don't need PCI expansion. If you can accept that, then the G4 Cube becomes a very good choice for all sorts of users.

One of the few disadvantages of this, assuming you're not one of those who really does need PCI slots, is the limited amount of RAM supplied as standard. The Cube's 64Mb really isn't much these days, and while it will allow general work

ADVERTISEMENT

right now without much trouble, 64Mb is the absolute minimum required to run Mac OS X. We recommend you consider buying more RAM right from the start, although admittedly upgrading it later is child's play.

What might prove more of a problem in the future is the graphics card. This appears to be a slightly non-standard device, so it isn't yet clear if it can be swapped for higher-spec 3D cards in the future.

This is certainly not a machine aimed at the iMac-level customer, although it will undoubtedly find its way into homes all over the world. A consumer-focused 'iCube' would have reduced the impact of the new iMacs, but as the G4 Cube it fits very well as a fairly affordable professional machine, slotting in neatly under the new Power Mac G4 MP models.

The G4 Cube will redefine the way the world thinks about computers. It's certainly a milestone in IT hardware design, and it will be very interesting to see how PC manufacturers attempt to copy this model. The heat generated by today's Pentium processors may well be too great to confine to such a tight space.

Power Mac G4

If you really do need expansion room and absolute top performance, then the upgraded Power Mac G4 range should make you much happier. The familiar Graphite G4 tower design hasn't been altered much - in fact, the only external differences are the lack of hologram backgrounds on the rear panels, and a white rather than green power light on the front.

The real difference lies inside. Apart from the bottom-end 400MHz model, the Power Mac G4 line has gone dual-processor: the 450MHz and 500MHz models each have two G4 CPUs rather than one. These are placed side-by-side on a single ZIF processor board, with a heatsink (about 50% wider than before) clipped on top. This should push the G4 tower line right up to the front of the power-user's wish list again.

Of course, Mac OS 9 only provides passive support for multiple processors, so right now users will need to use MP-aware applications to see the benefits of the extra processor. In our tests performance was very good across the board, but things really picked up when the two processors were called into action together. Currently, only a handful of applications - such as Adobe Photoshop, DeBabelizer and SoundJam MP - are MP-aware, but more should become available very soon. And when Mac OS X ships the system itself will be able to actively manage the CPUs, assigning different application processes to them as necessary.

The G4 has two FireWire ports. The earlier G4 models had a third FireWire port inside the case, designed to allow easy installation of internal FireWire hard drives. This has been dropped, almost certainly because virtually nobody ever actually did this. What hasn't been changed is the graphics hardware. The ATI RAGE 128 Pro is still a very capable graphics card, but it's no longer cutting-edge technology. In addition, we were hoping for a 4x AGP port rather than the same 2x port used in previous G4s. Still, the performance is excellent, and isn't likely to disappoint.

The Ethernet hardware has been dramatically upgraded. Previous Macs used 100Base-T Ethernet, 10 times faster than the widespread 10Base-T standard. Now Apple has upped the ante again by fitting the G4 MP Macs with backwardly compatible gigabit Ethernet - 1000Base-T, 100 times faster than 10Base-T. Gigabit-ready network hubs and switches are still relatively rare, but this move will drive the adoption of gigabit Ethernet throughout the Mac industry, and change the way networks are used. The long-term importance of gigabit Ethernet can't be over-stressed, and by building in what's otherwise a very expensive option Apple has placed the G4 at the forefront of this whole market.

Disk capacity has been increased. The 400MHz model comes with a 20Gb hard disk, the 450MHz has 30Gb, and the 500MHz has 40Gb. The build-to-order options on the Apple Store include a 72Gb Ultra160 SCSI drive, taking the total internal storage capacity (using the three drive bays) up to a massive 216Gb.

Specifications like these are a dream for network managers as well as high-end creative professionals, so it's no surprise that G4 MP server models, bundled with AppleShare IP, will be available by the beginning of August. Interestingly, there's no mention at the moment of models supplied with Mac OS X Server, but this should change as the 'client' version of Mac OS X is finalised.

The most pleasing thing about the new G4 range is the price. Apple has added a lot of high-level features to these Macs, but the price remains exactly the same as before. Of course, cynics might observe that without some enhancements the line would have been due for a price cut, but we're still getting a lot of real power-user technology for our money.

Amen

Apple's industrial design team have really come up with the goods. The G4 Cube is extremely stylish yet doesn't compromise on power, while the Power Mac G4 MPs offer cutting-edge networking performance and serious processing muscle. The new monitors perform very well and complement the look of both the G4 MPs and the Cube, and the new mouse and keyboard designs finally remove the weak link in the Mac chain. The question marks over the graphics hardware and the Cube's apparently non-upgradable processor should be noted, but they're still great performers and extraordinarily desirable. So which do you want, the Power Mac G4 MP or the G4 Cube?