Good timing for this question. Forgive my long-winded answer. I bought a G4 1.25GHz MDD new, over 7 years ago. 2 years ago, my family insisted on a family room computer, and wanted a PC. $600, Vista #fail. 'nuff said. I found my workhorse G4 on ebay for sub $200, and bought it for the family about a year ago. Plug and play. My wife and daughter hit print and it prints to my home office printer. It runs the software to sync TV shows off our TiVos so my daughter can either watch on her iPod or burn to DVD. It hosts her iTunes library. It drives two monitors so I'm looking at 2 24in screens as I type this. It runs Leopard like a champ, bringing all the features that came with 10.5.
I. Love. My. G4s. As others wrote, I'm not a gamer either. I do some video encoding and that's where you can see the performance hit. But. When I have a video I want to encode for TV viewing, it may take 4 hours to encode an hour of video. It's not like a new Mac will do this in under an hour, more likely 2 or so. So for this single use case, the new machine still won't help when my wife wants to see a show that not encoded yet. Either way it takes planning and an earlier or overnight process. I'm just saying for the one thing a new machine will do better, I'm still loving my old ones. The G4 is friendly to upgrades. Maxed out the memory to 2GB. For $10 added a USB 2.0 card. Easy to add Hard Drives as I catch them getting cheaper and cheaper. When you look at Performance per dollar, I dare say the G4 MDD Macs are at the peak of that curve. I understand, "support" will start to fade over time, but I ask you, not as a PC user whom you might want to evangelize a Mac to, but as a happy Leopard user, with now 4 of these G4s around the house, what is your compelling reason for me to make the switch? (On the other hand - I drool over the iPad. I plan to buy it as soon as I can go to the Apple store and wait less than 2 hours on line to get one.) Joe -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
