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Comment by feelin_googley | Hacker News Reader

I would bet there are still quite a few G5's to be found in recording studios around the world, not to mention G4's and even a few G3's.

Post-2004, did Apple follow up with a suitable replacement for the G5 in that context, i.e., audio engineering? What was it?

Addendum: By "audio engineering" I mean "DAW" use with software such as Pro Tools, DigitalPerformer, etc. and some non-Apple, dedicated hardware for line level inputs and outputs such as that made by Digidesign, MOTU, etc. (The performance of "web browsing" on today's bloated web and other tasks not related to running the above software, which may include older versions, is irrelevant.)

Maybe Apple's acquisition of Logic had something to do with what happened?

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G5, why not, G4 maybe a few, G3, definitely not.

I've a G3 Powerbook Pismo, it's not usable anymore for even basic task like web browsing (yay, 60 second at 100% CPU to load gmail, and with the most minimal setup I could come-up with).

For music, just no, for basic recording, it can do the job, barely, but for music editing (mixing tracks, applying effects, etc), you need a decent computer.

The modern web is an especially poor comparison. A big part of the reason why web works at all on modern computers is due to the intensive optimization efforts put into browsers, efforts that aren't backported to older operating systems or architectures. Chrome V8 will run on OS X 10.5 but not on PowerPC. So on a modern Macbook you'll get highly-optimized code from the JIT, and on an older G3 you'll get a much slower interpreter.

Native optimized apps that were made contemporaneously, like music studio software, are a different story. If it worked well on a G3 in 2000 it would still work well today. So maybe you have a bunch of plugins that you love using that you can't track down new copies of, or you don't want to pay for newer versions, or there's a computer in the corner with Gigasampler.

Music editing doesn't actually require that much processing power or I/O bandwidth, at least by modern standards. Quick back of the envelope math--your Pismo, if it runs at 400MHz, has a budget of ~200 cycles per byte to keep up with 16 tracks at 44.1kHz. That's easily doable, even if GMail is a mess.

Anecdotally, I remember looking at CPU utilization when I was working with DAWs back in 2000 or so, and it was never very high. You certainly can fill it with expensive plugins or huge stacks of oscillators, but even on a G3 there's a lot you can do.

PCI -> PCI-e? Companies invested heavily in Avid/Protools hardware that is still perfectly fine, but doesn't work on newer systems.

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