So why the requirement, anybody know?
The introduction and addition of FireWire coincided with almost significant upgrades and redesigns across the Mac line. The PowerBook went from black G3 Wallstreet line to Titanium G4. The PowerMacs went from the Bondi Blue and white G3 towers to grey and white G4. The fruit colored Fisher Price styled iBook was reshaped into the contemporary white style, and the iMac DV series came out. In truth, other things being different, there is little difference to Tiger (OS X 10.4) and VoiceOver between performance of a 1999? 350 MHz G3 PowerMac (not officially supported) and an 350 MHz G3 iMac DV (supported). I imagine there are firmware issues and minor subtleties. Karen (or anyone who cares to answer), even with a FireWire card, can you run iChat AV with iSight? What about booting in target disk mode? The system requirements for OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) were relatively modest, a G3 with 128 MB RAM. The next versions, 10.1(Puma), 10.2 (Jaguar) were the same, and 10.3 (Panther) merely added the (soft) requirement for native USB. Tiger (finally) doubled the RAM to 256 MB and asked for FireWire. To this day, there are active projects (like xPostFacto) and hackers committed to getting versions to run workably well on officially unsupported hardware. http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/ In balance to this, many of us thought the G3 was underpowered for OS X. Even with a G4, unseemly (at the time) amounts of RAM (512 MB) were needed to get acceptable real-world performance out of the early versions of OS X. The fact that the latter versions resulted in significant performance boosts was quite the unexpected but delightful surprise (and, of course, remains unheard of in the Windows world). I would love to hear from Karen and other folks with G3 Macs. Was the speed boost you got from Panther as noticeable as what you got from Jaguar? What about the move from Panther to Tiger? Or, as is the case with Karen, why have you not upgraded? Please help me by share your experience. Uninformed speculation is probably not useful. This is important to me as I just won a G3 iMac off eBay and need to decide how to configure it. I attach very little value to Dashboard or Automator or VoiceOver for the individual I am setting this computer up for, so mostly I am wondering about apparent performance and feel. The individual does not have broadband, so Panther has a significant advantage in requiring less maintenance updates. I don't plan to get enough first-hand use of the machine to perform benchmarks. Should I go with Panther or Tiger? Thanks! http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=9718484537
