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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

This piece seems incredibly negative. My first ever Mac was the dual 2.5GHz G5 and I loved it - sure, it was huge, but it was also powerful (for the time, and for a good while thereafter) and looked amazing. Yes, mine did make a weird chirping noise periodically and I think it did eventually become a bit unreliable, but that was after quite a few years. I have nothing but fond memories of that machine.

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I agree. It is very easy to judge it harshly in retrospect. I find the comments about heat output especially strange. Perhaps they are forgetting some of the hotblooded pentium 4s of the day.

This was not a serious Anandtech review! It was funny and full of hyperbole. From our nice position 14 years later it is amazing how much power draw we had to tolerate back then.

To me it read like an affectionate piece, not a harsh critique.

That case was a beauty.

> From our nice position 14 years later it is amazing how much power draw we had to tolerate back then.

I find it incredible how indifferent and uneducated I was back then, about how much power it uses and what the consequences are on a larger scale. I remember keeping it powerd on 24/7 (of course with periods in which it slept). Nowadays I am (hyper)aware of the power consumption of pretty much every device in the house.

I still have a G5 for some specific software, and it has amazing power management. Nothing at the time even came close. It would put itself to sleep without fuss, and wake instantly and seamlessly. It certainly used less power than my newer linux x64 box over the course of a day.

I dunno, we had one of these at home for a while, as my wife worked at Apple and it was in the demo pool and we got to borrow it for a bit. It was my primary workstation for a while, and I was a big fan of anything not-x86 and a cheerleader for PowerPC at the time and this was the machine that made me realize what a dead end that architecture had become. I was sad when Apple went x86 but not in the least bit surprised, given my experience with that workstation.

Like others have mentioned here, its heat output was insane. I had to have the house air conditioner on on cool days because of that one room. In the winter, it was the warmest room in the house. It didn't even feel all that powerful to me, as I compared it to a newly build x86 system I had put together at the time.

Luckily Apple read the writing on the wall and corrected course accordingly.

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