Bummed ( Part V )

Honestly, I never expected that there would be a 'Part V'.

I stopped into the Apple Store again late in the afternoon on Fri, Oct 20.  I went straight to the store manager and asked that he find out the status of my repair.  The shocker: they had decided a week ago that they could not fix the machine.  They had called a wrong number on the 14th and the 16th to ask what I would like to do.

I was a bit surprised about the wrong number thing, because I had made sure that they had the right number when I checked the machine in for repair, and when I returned to the store on the 6th they had the right number on the repair order, so ... whatever.

I talked with "the admin" who handles these issues.  She, very kindly, offered to replace the machine that cannot be fixed with a brand new Mac.  No shit.  That's cool.

She originally thought that she could give me a machine right away, out of the Palo Alto store's stock.  There was some paperwork that she had to do, so she suggested that I come back in an hour.  She asked if there was anything special about the old machine, and I told her that the only thing I cared about was that it was a G5.

I was really happy to get a new machine that same day, so I walked down University Avenue for 45 minutes until she called me back.  I asked her to read me the specs on the replacement machine, and she began to describe the new Mac Pro.  I politely pointed out that was an Intel machine, and not a G5.  Surprised, she said that she thought that what I meant was that the machine was a tower, and that since the Mac Pro was a tower and more powerful than the G5 that it would be an okay replacement.  Crap.

She had more bad news.  After checking with "her superiors" she found that she would have to order a machine, and it could take as long as 2 weeks!  Now, I kinda understand not replacing my busted refurb from store stock, kinda, but what I don't understand is why the new machine would take 2 weeks.  It's got to come directly from the factory in Asia?

So, let's recap:
1) I originally bought the refurb because I wanted a genuine PowerPC on which to run all of my existing software that has been customized (with AltiVec code) to run great on the PowerPC.  That machine is FUBAR. 
2) Apple is graciously willing to replace my purchase with the latest desktop Mac, the Mac Pro.  This is a helluva machine, with 2 2.66GHz Intel Woodcrest Dual Core processors (yeah, it's a quad), 250GB disk, yada, yada, yada.  It's been ordered, but at this point, I kinda expect that it will never arrive. 
3) I'm in this weird spot.  The Mac Pro is a great value in this exchange, but it won't run my software as well as the G5 would have.  I'm not sure that it will meet my needs.

Here's the technical discussion, for those of you who don't get this right away:
The high-end software that I use, like Adobe Photoshop, run great on a G5 because they have been specially built to take advantage of the G5 chip (AltiVec instructions) and the multithreading that is possible with 2 processors.  Those programs will run on the new Intel-based Macs, they are compatible, but they won't run as well.  You see, they were built for PowerPC.  So, on the new machines they will run in an emulator known as Rosetta.  The problem is that when run in the emulator, these programs cannot take advantage of the chip architecture for which they were built (and optimized), and because the emulator itself will run on only one of the processors, the program does not take advantage of the multithreading that you would expect.  The result, the program runs without the special optimizations and runs on only one processor.  So ... I can run my software on the new machine, in an emulator, on only one of the 4 processors, so it won't run as well as it would have on the old machine.

Oh, there's one more thing ...  The Intel-based Macs require twice the amount of RAM that the PowerPC-based Mac did.  I'm not exactly sure why, but I have verified this with my own independent testing.  It takes nearly twice the RAM to boot the machine to the Desktop, and then nearly twice the RAM for the applications that run in Rosetta.  So, I have to buy more expensive RAM for the new machine, and I have to buy twice as much of it.

So, after considering all of this ... I gave in to basic economics ... the machine that Apple is offering is flat out worth more on today's market than the one I originally bought, and I would be an idiot not to take it.

So, stay tuned ... Will the promised Mac Pro ever arrive?  What will happen next?

-- to be continued --