G5 bis

I have seen an Apple G5 and an iSight for real, this Saturday at the Fnac Digitale shop in Paris. The beast looks exactly as I expected, with a sleek and beautiful aluminum case. I think it will pass the "designers desk test", i.e. they will place it on their desk rather than on the floor. It is easier to open than the previous G4 case. The design inside the G5 is clearly made to optimize the use of the entire enclosure surface as a heat dissipator. We could touch the (huge) radiators attached to the processors (yes, it was the dual 2GHz G5), they were cold while the left side of the enclosure, where the motherboard lies, was slightly hot. In the noisy environment we couldn't assert the noise from the fans, it was simply unnoticeable. There are holes all around the front and back sides, with no filters, so the fans may turn the G5 as a dust collector (I might be wrong, I'm just guessing). A guy was staring at Final Cut Pro 4 crunching his complex project in 20-30s for 1h of video, saying it was really impressive. And the G5 was running a non optimized version of FCP on Jaguar, so it was apparently not at its full potential. Another guy was bitching because the machine has only two hard drives slots. The Apple guy told him he could put two 250GB drives in there, so 500GB and that the drives would get bigger over time. I told him that if 500GB was not enough, he could plug disks all over through FireWire or buy a RAID unit. He continued bitching on and on with other rants ("They always screw up the first machines, like the last (sic) generation of noisy G4." Yeah, get a PC and your frustration somewhere else please).

The iSight has a clear family look with the same meshed metal enclosure. Very serious, professional looking. I haven't seen it work though. But when looking at it, I could hear the G5 talking to me with this HAL 9000 voice: "Hello Dave!". You know what I mean (thanks Doxa!)