This is the celebrated journal of Mr. Simon Collison A.K.A Colly

G5 alive! Or, The Gift of Firewire

27th November 2004

Yesterday, I finally unpacked one of our two new G5s. This office is starting to look like some kind of filthy Apple Store - one where the staff don’t clean, they just drink Coke and leave stained tea cups everywhere.

As I look around, there are all sorts of Macs - two G4s, a bendy-neck iMac, two 15” and two 12” Powerbooks, one of those eMac (Stormtrooper’s toilet) things - oh, and a Dell (which we call the “Dingly”). As of today, these are all old hat. I don’t want to look at them. Once they were beautiful (except the Dell). Once they were fast. Now, there’s a faster, sleaker dog in town. Yet, it’s not just the machine that is impressing me. Wait until you read about the set-up…

The new iMac G5 is fast. Very fast. It loads Photoshop in about 4 seconds, and loads Illustrator without groaning like an old man. It looks great, and the big white block below the screen is no longer in my field of vision. The plugs and ports are all in the right place, and it’s as quiet as a mouse (a real mouse, geeks). Importantly for me, I can get two browser windows side-by-side on the 20” display - perfect for comparing windows and cutting and pasting code. It’s got 250 GB of hard drive. I love it.

Mac-to-Mac firewire

However, the biggest bonus - and this is where Apple really sealed it for me - was the knackered old Powerbook to new iMac transfer. Three screens in, my new iMac asks me if I want to import stuff from another Mac. Well, yeah - that sounds great.

Great?! Magnificent. Simple instructions and a cup of tea later, my Powerbook is now some kind of Firewire magician. All of the following have been transfered to the new machine: All applications, all email and settings, all MP3s, all files, all system and network prefs, all browser bookmarks, all user information - bloody everything! I could have selected to just import a few of those items, but what the hell? The progress screen said it was gonna take 4 hours at one point, but lo, it was soon shrinking to under one hour. Eventually, the process took about 35 minutes.

Unashamed love

So, I have a perfect clone of my trusty old laptop. I really cannot see how Apple could do any better than that, save for actually building my websites for me. Sometimes things impress you. Sometimes you worry that you’re turning into a geek. In this case, I don’t care. G5, I think you’re fucking ace.

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