[Cube] Cube or Mini

[Kunga]

While I agree with Scott you should get the new Core Duo mini - NOT  
THE CORE SOLO, I do not think PPC based Macs will be obsolete nor  
dead issues any time soon. The base is too large for Apple to turn  
its back on. The idea that Steve is so insensitive to the base of PPC  
Macs is really over the top. There are about a score million PPC macs  
in circulation. The oldest iMac runs Panther just fine. Anything with  
a Firewire port runs 10.4.5 Tiger perfectly well. I doubt Leopard  
will not run on less than the base that runs Tiger.

Where the idea comes that PPC Macs are obsolete is beyond my ability  
to comprehend. I just bought a PPC G5 that has 4 processors in it. It  
is as fast a Mac as I could buy right now. It's top of the line. And  
yet it is too slow for multitasking video processing work.

And in a year it will be slower than the bottom of the PowerMac or  
Mac Pro line with a single Quad Core Intel 64-bit processor. Top of  
the line will have Two Quad Core processors for a total of 8. But  
more importantly, the next OS X 10.5 Leopard will manage our work  
over all these processors much better than Tiger ever will.

But I just want to weigh in here that I don't see Apple turning its  
back on PPC Macs for anytime over the next 10 years. I know people  
who are still using OS 9 on Macs that pre-date the iMac. They are  
perfectly happy Mac users. I don't think any of us PPC Mac owners are  
going to feel left out when Leopard ships by January 2007. I believe  
Leopard will give me an even faster Quad than I have now - and make  
no mistake, it is WAY TOO SLOW. And that slowness can be  
significantly attributed to the Tiger OS rather than the hardware.

There are many times when I have to wait just as long on this Quad  
for something to happen as I did on the 500 MHz Cube. So it's not the  
hardware that's slow. It's the OS that still needs a lot of  
improvement. Which is one of the reasons I am miffed that not all Mac  
owners upgrade to the next system as soon as Apple releases it. Each  
increment has resulted in a significant performance improvements even  
on the oldest supported systems.

Bottom line, I don't think any of us need to worry about Apple  
abandoning any of us with PPC Macs. Universal code does not mean  
Intel with PPC tags. It means code written to run best on both  
processors. There are just too many of us, 25 MILLION for Apple to  
forget about.

-- 
Taylor Barcroft
Santa Cruz CA, Beach of the Silicon Valley
URL http://FutureMedia.org
RSS http://feeds.feedburner.com/FutureMedia
iTunes http://tinyurl.com/8ql87
barcroft (gizmo)
kungax (Skype)
kungag5 (iChat-AIM)


On Mar 3, 2006, at 4:11 PM, Scott Strungis wrote:

> Get the Mini...Don't get me wrong.  The Cube is a fine little Music
> Player, MAME box, and DVD/AVI/MPEG etc player...But the Mini is now  
> based
> on the latest tech and it's only a matter of a couple of years  
> before His
> Infinite Steveness makes our Cubes obsolete and unupgradeable (is  
> that a
> word?).
>
> I wasn't paying a lot of attention when we all switched over from  
> 68k to
> PPC, so I do not know how long it took, nor who suffered as I could  
> not
> afford a Mac back then and it wasn't my problem.
>
> What I do know now is that my Pismo, Cube, B&W, and Beige are  
> pretty much
> a dead issue real soon...And I hate to part with any of  
> them...Considering
> that I paid $600 for my upgraded Cube a little over a year ago.  
> (Geforce2,
> Airport, and big HD as well as 512 megs of RAM and a DVD)
>
> Get the Mini.  For your sanity and your wallet's sake.