As for past performance, I have a Mac II fx I got used (no way I'd pay $10,000 for a computer, even if it WAS the fastest desktop available!) -- still runs great after 15 years.
The beauty about surfing the trailing edge, and a 240D is nothing if not that, is that you are buying the _best_ stuff that was available at the time. For cheap. That ibook, unfortunately, is not the best that Apple made even when new. And they have made some lemons, too. Unfortunately I don't expect the move to Intel (ugh) to do anything for the quality of their products. In fact, I don't see why Intel will even continue to develop high-quality stuff (assuming they ever did, of course) as there will be nearly zero competition. "Of course you've got a choice, you can buy the GMC or the Chevy." The NeXT couple of years will show whether this move was good for Apple and/or us, though. I do know that at my prior job the management was hugely interested in PC's in linux clusters as a replacement for our aging multi-CPU Sun. Look at the numbers and sure, the PC's looked good. Light benchmarks and the PC's would kick butt. Load them up, though, and watch them come to a wheezing halt while the Sun, though slow, just buckled down and chugged through the job and finished, and without any weird non-linear scalings of response to load. Two people could not share a single PC as an editing and CVS box, though, whereas the Sun had _everybody_ on it. You could never tell if it was busy or not until every CPU was pegged, and even then it just started slowing down gracefully. The people who had to _use_ the machines, of course, didn't get a vote. -- Jim
