Hello!

I am a complete beginner on mac and i have dont so much experince of it.
Soon I will buy a PB G4, but i have some questions concerning it;

1 Is it worth to buy it before the Tiger released or should i wait?

2 Is it true that within a year or this year a PB G5 will be released, that is unnoisie and slim just as the todays PB?

3 If so, will it have a resonible price or will it be tremendous more expensiver? and is it worth the waiting?

4 A PB G4, 1.67 Ghz, 128 MB radeon 9700, 512 MB RAM, superdrive, 15 inch. How is it compared with a PC( like a P4?), is it fast enough for Photoshop, some games (not Doom3 ) and so on...

Thanks in advance

Personally; wait till after Tiger has been released AND WWDC conference has come and gone.

PowerBook and PowerMac are part of Apple's 'professional' product line up, so if they're going to revise their product line up, they'll want as much exposure as possible - hence, the would release it at WWDC.

Regarding Tiger; wait. I'm waiting till around September/October; let the early adopters experience the pain; hopefully by then, Apple would have released one or two updates and all will be sweet.

Regarding what I see in the tea-leaves, I'd say that if there is an update, it'll be using MPC8641, however, that depends on whether Freescale get their sh*t together in the product production department.

1. yes if you can wait its only less than 2 weeks more if not you can just pay the extra $10 to upgrade

2. apple have had difficulties cooling the g5 so i doubt it'll be as slim and quiet

3. it'll probably be priced similar to the current models

4. well its the top end model i'm pretty sure its good for photoshop. i'm not too sure but it's probably as fast as a 2.8ghz p4 round about there

Thanks for the answer, the only problem is that i cant wait so much longer than 2 weeks becuse my Compaq Presario totally crashed, I started with XP and then win 2000 and then with Linspire (which I really liked) but i had a hardware crash and now i want a "real computer" with a "real OS" i liked Linspire much better then XP and 2000 but I have to use Dreamweaver and Photoshop and I had serious security issues with Microsoft so I wont never go back to them!

The same specs except for with a Pentium M would be able to play Doom 3 fine

well the p4 is really slow even with such a high clock speed so the comparison is not so direct. if you compare the g4 to a pentium M the clock speeds would be more similar in terms of performance

Erm, I must say I am kinda disappointed with my PowerBook for World of Warcraft performance, its a bit sluggish it seems, even when turning the detail down with a 128MB Radeon 9700, I got better frames on my P4 desktop with a 9700Pro 128MB, at about the same resolution too. Older games should run fine, Warcraft 3 does, Quake 3 seems to. UT2004 demo seemed to bite as well on the PowerBook. =/ it really depends on what game you plan on playing and how well it will run on the PowerBook. I honestly wouldn't rely on the PowerBook to play any recent games, it's just not really up to the task.

Application wise, it should be fine though. I have an external HDD connected to my PowerBook when i am at home and I boot from that, its a faster drive so that helps when I am at home.



A real OS? Hope you don't classify Linspire in there (yuck) as I would have picked a much different Linux varient than that one, I'm still unsure about it after testing it awhile back and it came with no GCC compile (Click 'N Run download, UGH) To be honest, if you have security problems, you sure aren't patching up Windows, as Linux and mac OS X have had some nasty security isuses as well, so it's just not Windows as you think it might be.

I have never lost so much time finding antivirus apps and adaware stuff etc etc as with Windows, I got totaly mad, It is the same on my dads computer running XP it is a hell with all viruses. We may have a very unluck, but then I tested Linspire for over a year and got extremely satisfied, especially with all security issues.
the bad things with all linux distos are that Macromedia nor Adobe are developing their products for linux and it is central programs for me.
the other bad thing is that I got a hardware crash in it happend both with Windows and Linspire...

Btw, is Tiger more RAM-demanding than Panther or is it still good with 512MB from the beginning?

The more advanced computers get, the more ram demanding they will become. Requirements for memory will not go down but rather up as time progresses. If you have the extra cash to put in a gb total, then so do it. Panther really showed us what a little more memory could do for the platform and I suspect the same for Tiger.

To be honest, it's not all that hard securing about any OS, be it Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X. It's taken me longer to batten down a Linux distro because of some of the inheriet flaws that made it vurnable, with Windows, I slap on an antivirus and spyware detector, and all OS's a firewall if it is directly connected to the net.

And you really don't want 512MB of RAM, get at least 1GB if you are going to be doing photoshop and dreamweaver, bet it PC or Mac. I also suggest you don't get the ram from Apple, it's quite overpriced. Crucial.com will give a much better price on RAM specifically for a system, that's where a lot of people pick up their memory for Mac's. I got my extra 512MB from Crucial, and the system hums along fine with 1GB. I really haven't gotten too much into DW or PS on the Mac, so I am unsure if the 1GB is enough or not.

Thanks a lot for the tip! Am I right that in nowdays if you buy a PB they will save one ram-slot empty so I can fill it up later?

Is it easy to insert the extra Ram by myself? (as with a pc) and is it exactly the same type of RAM as Apple use?

**** what a price difference USD 87 for 512 MB!!! I live in Sweden so it is a little bit more expensiver here, Apple.se takes 182 dollars...

I really apreciate the tip!

like most notebooks they have an extra slot to upgrade. its fairly simple to install it yourself. Taking apart powerbook
i believe they use SO-DIMM DDR 333mhz

Yeah, they leave a slot open, there are only two slots in the PB, and if you get the base amount of RAM, there's only one stick of 512MB in there.