PowerMac wish list
Now that Apple has started the ball rolling on Intel-based Macs, one can only hope that in revising the existing PowerMac, more attention will be paid to the truly useful features for digital photographers. Please, Mr. Jobs, make sure the desktops include the following features:
- It’s about time for a built-in digital-camera memory card reader. Impress us with dual slots, so we can download two cards at once.
- 12 memory slots instead of 8. We don’t like paying twice the price per megabyte for higher-density DIMMS. Give us four more slots.
- Room inside the case for 4 SATA drives, and preferably 6. That way, we can make a reasonably-fast striped RAID without having to add an external box. Add motherboard support for those drives, too.
- Motherboard support for eSATA with port multiplexing capability so we can just plug in an external box. Two ports, please (each of which supports many drives).
- Another PCI Express slot or two. Lots of users fill up all the available slots.
- Keep Firewire 800, and provide two ports, not just one. While you’re at it, fix the outrageous Firewire 800 sustained-write bug (described in various places on barefeats.com). This bug causes PowerMac G5 performance to be 1/2 that of a PowerMac G4 when writing to Firewire 800 volumes.
Now, in addition to the above, give us long-deprived Mac users the opportunity for some really fast performance. Offer the very fastest Intel chips with the big caches. Offer dual and quad-chip versions, so that we can have 2, 4 or 8 cores (eg the PowerMac OctaCore). But also spend some marketing dollars rewarding software vendors that design their products to actually exploit the potential of such machines.
Finally, no machine is worth the trouble if it isn’t absolutely rock-solid with great software. Please stop uglifying the various parts of MacOS. Delete the useless Dashboard project, and spend that money on best-in-class stability and performance.
Noise, dynamic range and resolution are being explored. So far, my Nikon D200 has not shown any of the striped noise pattern seen in some online posts.
