iPhone or iPod touch?
From Edmund Harris:
Dear Dan,
I've been enjoying your site for a few years. It has helped me put
Macs into use at my school.
I have a question that could be a column: What is the better value,
an 8 GB iPhone at $200 or an 8 GB iPod touch at $300?
It would seem the iPhone.
What would be the drawbacks to buying an iPhone over the iPod
touch?
Thanks.
Ed
Ed,
In two words, the big difference is the service
contract you have to sign with AT&T for two years of service at $60
or more per month. You'll no longer be able to buy the iPhone without a
service contract. That makes it $1,600 over two years (less whatever
you may already be paying for mobile phone service) vs. $399 for the
iPod touch (plus whatever you may pay for WiFi access on the go).
Dan
Linux and Macs
From Claudio Miranda, following up on Linux/PPC Far From Dead:
Hi Dan. Thanks for writing back.
Yeah,
Debian has always been a great
distribution for older hardware. As a matter of fact, I used to have an
old StarMax 4000 running Debian 3.1, and
it ran decently. Mind you, I had to use a lightweight theme for GNOME
at the time, and I only had a 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 video card, but it was
still quite usable. I was even able to use the PS/2 two-button mouse on
the PS/2 mouse port, and it worked nicely. I've also installed both
Ubuntu and Debian on a 600 MHz "Snow" iMac, and
while Ubuntu does slow it down a bit due to its overhead, Debian runs
much snappier on it than 10.2.8 (they came with Jaguar preinstalled).
However, the more RAM you can throw at Ubuntu, the better the overall
experience.
BTW, there's a package called mouseemu
that can configure any key on the keyboard to function as a mouse
action. I've used this to get the "control-click" mouse function back
as pressing F13 (or whatever key GNU/Linux configures the right-click
as) gets kind of annoying. Enabling the "control-click" is as easy as
uncommenting a line in the mouseemu config file. The only caveat is
that you lose that control key for Ctrl-based commands, which can be a
problem if you only have one. Thankfully, you can map that function to
any key on the keyboard you want.
As for the guide, that sounds like a wonderful idea. If you need any
information or testers for various Unix flavors and distributions, let
me know. I'd be glad to contribute to this LEM project. I've got my
iMac G5, my Quadra 650, and I can
get a hold of that StarMax once again (gave it to my father to hold for
me) in order to help out.
Regards,
-Claudio
Claudio,
Thanks for the information. This is going to be a real
learning experience. For instance, Mac users are used to being able to
boot the Mac OS from an external FireWire drive, but most Linux distros
don't (or at least didn't) support that, making it difficult to move a
Linux boot drive from one Mac to another. We'll have to work up a
checklist of things like that which should be mentioned when reviewing
a PPC distro, along with whether there's a LiveCD to try it out
with.
Dan
Sounds like a plan. I don't have any external FireWire drives to
test with, but I can give it a go with USB. I have an external USB hard
drive adapter kit that I use for moving files back and forth
. . . I can possibly test it out by installing a Linux/ppc
distro and see what happens. I'll keep you posted.
-Claudio
Ubuntu, Debian, YDL, and openSUSE
From Jeffrey Kafer:
Dan,
Congrats on your success with Xubuntu.
BTW, I doubt that you would see much of a performance difference
between an Ubuntu install and a Debian install, since Ubuntu is a
slightly repackaged fork from Debian's testing branch. In other words,
Ubuntu is Debian that has not yet made it to Debian-Stable. Some people
call it a pre-release of future Debian. However, you should find that
an install to the internal hard drive will be much more responsive than
running from a LiveCD.
So long as Debian supports PPC, it will not be too much work for
Ubuntu to do so. Especially since Ubuntu now relies on community for
testing and support.
It's a bit sad that YDL 6 no longer officially supports G3s, as that
distro has a different lineage than Debian/Ubuntu. YDL is a PPC branch
of CentOS, which is a community-based re-release of Redhat. In other
words, its focus is stability for use as an Enterprise OS. According to
the TerraSoft website, your iMac, which was fully supported under YDL
5, might still work under YDL 6 with some devices (sound/video) not
being fully supported. I think YDL 6 requires a DVD drive for
installation.
openSUSE is another free distro with roots in an enterprise focused
distro, SUSE. I've found both to be more stable than Ubuntu. I've never
had cause to complain about the stability of Debian-Stable, but stable
lags behind most other distros in terms of new features and such.
I look forward to reading more about your Linux adventures, and *BSD
too should you decide to explore further.
Regards,
Jeffrey
Jeffrey,
Thanks for sharing your experience with different
distros. I've just spent 5 hours downloading the openSUSE 10.3 install
DVD & am burning it as I type this. I'll probably try this first on
the iMac, then Debian.
Dan
Linux for Macs
Dan,
Since you're working on installing Linux on your iMac, you might be
interested in some of my experience a while back putting Ubuntu on a
couple of portable Macs:
In particular, if you're planning a dual-boot setup, I suggest
putting Linux on the first partition, for ease of switching between
OSes. The Ubuntu Forums are a great place to get help and share
information - though in my brief involvement there I found a lot of
people poorly informed about the Mac nevertheless pontificating their
ignorance with great self-assurance.
Frankly, although as you know I'm very interested in the idea
of Linux and Open Source OS and software, I don't really see them as a
real-world (i.e. non-hobbyist) alternative to Mac OS for Apple
hardware. Linux and its cousins are really designed on and for i86
hardware, as alternatives to Windoze, which is where I really hope to
see major advances in their use.
For any FireWire-equipped Mac, at least, I find a trimmed-down OS X
10.3.9 works just fine, so long as the limitations are kept in mind
(i.e. if a client wants to do anything complicated, I tell them they
should save their pennies instead and get a new/er Mac). But
pre-FireWire Macs at this point are in the same category as the
original 128 one of your correspondents demonstrated to an astonished
crowd at Millennia Mall (some of whom I'd guess weren't yet born when
that model first appeared): keeping them alive is fun for hobbyists,
but no practical use in the working world.
Don't get me wrong: I am such a hobbyist myself, to the extent I
have time and energy - but my clients are not. When I first started
learning about Linux, I briefly considered it as a way to resurrect
older Macs as cheap systems for impecunious clients, but after learning
and experiencing more, I don't really see that plan as practical. It
may be for older non-Apple PCs, but not for Macs.
I have a client who's attached to an OS 8-era piece of
shareware (developer now deceased) for writing music. He brought me a
233 MHz WallStreet
PowerBook he uses for working with it, which has turned into a real
maintenance nightmare. It forgets the time & date, so I got a
replacement PRAM battery, but now the battery doesn't work - so is the
battery bad, or the power manager? Fortunately (?), I have another old
WallStreet I can use as a tester, but that has required hours of hassle
to figure out if all its parts work.
So can I charge the client for all the time I've put into this?
Naturally it seems counterintuitive to him that such an old, now nearly
worthless piece of equipment should be so expensive to maintain, and
for me the hassle of spending (unpaid) time explaining why this is so
adds to the frustration. Although I'm known in my neighborhood as the
guy to go to for support for older Macs, I'm thinking maybe I need to
have a cutoff policy myself.
A while back some friends of mine bought a 1960s-era Mustang. Seemed
like fun, but they had no idea what they were getting into. Thousands
of dollars later (including replacing the transmission, which required
custom-made parts), they gave up and got a new car, and are now trying
to sell the Mustang, at a considerable loss.
A hobbyist is willing to put in the time and expense to keep a
beloved old piece of technology alive, but regular users just want
their tools to work with a minimum of frustration. As one of your
correspondents notes, getting Linux to work is no more hassle than
installing Windoze XP; but for the ordinary Mac user that level of
frustration is unacceptable.
Andrew Main
Andrew,
You make some good points, especially the Mac ease of
use ("it just works") vs. the work installing and maintaining a Linux
setup. With so many distros and desktops and GUIs, Linux is its own
worst enemy. Even downloading software for Linux isn't always a simple
process - which version of a program you install may depend on which
distro you're using. Too confusing for the average "I have a Windows
PC" or "I use a Mac" user.
I think Linux has great potential for home servers,
simple Internet stations (web browser plus email client), and at the
low end of the PC market, where there actually are $200 PCs. But I also
think it can be a great way to repurpose one of those "outdated" Macs
that won't die. I plan on trying it on G3 iMacs, a beige G3, a blue
& white G3, and a 450 MHz dual G4 - and maybe some of the vintage
68030 and 68040 Macs as well.
Troubleshooting old Macs is a whole different story,
and one thing I don't miss from my IS days. As a hobbyist, tinkering
with operating systems, upgrading, and troubleshooting can be fun, but
I realize that the average user isn't interested in those kinds of
challenges.
Dan
Mac Resale Value
From JooYoung Park:
Hi,
I'm trying to find resale value for used Macs. Somebody told I can
find that from your website, but I could not. Can you please help me to
find that out?
I'm trying to figure out how much would be a fair price for Aluminum
PowerBook 15" 1 GHz (Sep. 2003, FW800). It has it's original 60 GB hard
drive and 768 MB memory, and the condition is overall pretty good. Just
there are many scratches on the bottom.
If you can just direct to a website that can show me the value, it
would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
JooYoung
JooYoung,
We don't list the value of old Macs as those prices
are both very subjective and in a constant state of flux. We'd have to
invest an awful lot of time covering two dozen years worth of Macs!
Fortunately there's Mac2Sell.net, an online price guide that
doesn't just give a base price - it lets you configure most of what you
might have added or upgraded, such as RAM and hard drive. And it covers
several different markets - US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Japan,
etc.
I think its prices are a little bit high, but not a
bad starting point. It pegs my dual 1 GHz Power Mac G4 with 2 GB
of RAM, an 800 GB hard drive (actually two 400 GB drives, but
Mac2Sell.net doesn't factor in extra drives), and a SuperDrive at $730.
(Mine also has a second SuperDrive, two USB 2.0 cards, and a SCSI card,
which would make it worth even more.)
Dan
Blue & White Frustration
Hi Dan,
My brother recently picked up a carload of free old Macs from
Edinburgh University. They turned out to be an original Bondi Blue iMac, a Blue & White Power Mac G3,
and a 17 inch Studio Display, all in working order. The iMac took our
parents interest, as they are volunteers in a tech museum where it
should feature nicely. Meanwhile, I saw promise in the Power Mac as a
server for my dusty old IDE hard drives.
Since the Power Mac's 6 GB hard drive had a password protected
install of Jaguar on it as well as a minimal OS 9, so I swapped it
for a blank 120 GB one and tried to install Tiger. I also threw in a
pile of RAM, verified in another Mac with 10.4. The installer kernel
panicked the first time, but completed successfully on the second. I
then let Software Update do its thing, but the 10.4.11 combo update
failed to install. That failed a second time too. Then I ran from the
old copy of the combo update I kept around when my own machines were on
Tiger, but that failed too. Strange....
Then I remembered the strange experience I'd had reviving a 400 MHz iMac DV. Firmware
updates! I downloaded the latest one of those (as discovered in
MacTracker) and ran
it from the OS 9 install. The firmware was already up to date.
Fair enough - so I tried a PRAM reset for good measure. Uh oh: now
Tiger wouldn't load at all . . . kernel panicks during
boot.
Digging deeper thanks to your info here at LEM, I verified that this
B&W G3 is indeed the early Rev. 1 board. That explains a lot! The
graphics card, however, is the later version, and the CPU heatsink is
the shape it's supposed to be on the Rev. 2. Interestingly, the
manufacture date sticker says the machine is from June 1999, so it was
probably one of the last Rev. 1's ever made. Could be that they mixed
and matched the bits!
I've tried different combinations of hard drives on the Mac's two
IDE channels and pulling out the extra memory, but I'm not really
having much luck. The machine is certainly the pickiest Mac I've ever
dealt with, though I must admit that it's also the oldest, apart from
that perfectly well behaved Bondi Blue iMac which arrived alongside it.
Besides IDE issues, it reports my two 512 MB DIMMs as 256 MB whenever
they are installed. The iMac DV (a few months newer computer) ran with
them just fine at full capacity. Perhaps it's just a little too old to
know what to do with double sided DIMMs . . . as the 128s and
64s I have to hand are all single-sided and show up fine.
Ideally, I'd like to use this old Gossamer to hold three or four IDE
hard drives (all safely under 128 GB), but so far it's managed to
really outwit me! Any ideas? The one obvious thing is a PCI card, I
suppose, but I'm not sure if they're easy to find for this system. An
old one from my PC of the same era seems hopeless, as its manufacturer
(Sunix) only have Windows 98 drivers listed on their website
. . . and I remember it always loaded as part of the PC's
lengthy BIOS stage at power on.
Oddly enough, in five years of using them, I've never dealt with a
Mac with slots before. What a newbie!
John
John,
RAM may be part of the problem, as the B&W G3 only
supports modules to 256 MB. I remember that my B&W G3 was quite
picky about RAM; I had to do a lot of testing to figure out which
sticks worked well in it and which ones eventually made it crash. I've
also had problems with Macs (the B&W G3 and my 450 MHz dual G4)
with Zip drives installed; taking them off the IDE bus fixed that.
Firmware updates were an issue with mine, and I had to
locate a copy of Mac OS 8.6 to install the first one. That was a
frustrating experience.
I had high hopes for the B&W G3 as a family file
server that I could throw a lot of spare drives into, but because of
the reliability issues (before I figured out the RAM problems), I never
got around to it. Now I'm thinking that it could make a great home
server with Mac OS X
10.3 Server installed, as Adam Rosen suggests it is the version
best suited to working with old Macs as well as OS X ones.
Anyhow, if the issue isn't RAM or something on the IDE
bus, check the jumpers that control
CPU speed. It's possible that the previous user did some tinkering
and overclocked it.
Beyond that, I'm stumped.
Dan
Leopard on AGP Power Mac
From Ian Wright:
Dan:
Enjoy your site. Thanks a lot.
I wanted to report that I have Leopard running on my G4 AGP Graphics 500 MHz (single
processor) Power Mac. I previously installed 1 GB RAM, and
that made a huge difference in Tiger. I also have an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 that I
flashed the ROM on last year to run in the G4. With 128 MB of memory on
the GeForce, Core Image is reported as: hardware accelerated. I also
have two 120 Gig secondary hard drives running as a mirrored software
RAID to store my iTunes collection, in addition to my boot drive.
Everything seems to be running smoothly and I can discern no
loss of speed because of the OS X upgrade. After a fresh restart, I
still have around 750 MB of RAM free. I am almost exclusively using
only Safari, Mail, iTunes, iPhoto, and Word 2004 on this machine, and I
fully intend to keep it in service for years.
I tried Leopard Assist, but it didn't do the trick. If I had to
guess why, I would say it was the nonstandard graphics card. I then
tried the firmware trick, which booted the install disk. But the
machine never even made it to the gray pinwheel screen and would just
power down on reboot after successfully installing the files from
DVD.
Finally, I simply used Carbon Copy Cloner to mirror a working
Leopard install from my G4
1.5 GHz PowerBook to the G4 AGP set up in Target Disk Mode, and
voilà! Works perfectly.
Keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
Ian Wright
Ian,
Thanks for sharing your findings. I had to take a
slightly more circuitous route, as the only Leopard machine I have
access to is a MacBook Pro: reformat my 2.5" FireWire hard drive
(salvaged from my late 400 MHz PowerBook G4) for Intel, install Leopard
to it on the MacBook Pro, make a disk image of the drive on my Power
Mac G4, reformat the drive for PowerPC, and restore the files from the
disk image. It was a bit slow on the 5400 rpm drive, but it gave me a
decent first experience with Leopard. I've since cloned that to a 7200
rpm 3.5" drive, and I try to spend some time in Leopard every day.
Dan
Dan Knight has been publishing Low
End Mac since April 1997. Mailbag columns come from email responses to his Mac Musings, Mac Daniel, Online Tech Journal, and other columns on the site.
