They probably mean the Classic Environment. If you want to boot Mac OS 9 Natively, any software that will run on there you'd only ever need a ~500Mhz G4 to run it fantastically (My main OS 9 Workstation is a 450Mhz G4, and its likely to stay that way for the foreseeable, even though I have a OS 9 capable MDD, with 9.2.2 installed, just as no OS9 audio program I have even fully uses the 450).
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For music production - Older Powermac G5 or brand new Mac Mini?
- Thread starter meisterjager
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They probably mean the Classic Environment. If you want to boot Mac OS 9 Natively, any software that will run on there you'd only ever need a ~500Mhz G4 to run it fantastically (My main OS 9 Workstation is a 450Mhz G4, and its likely to stay that way for the foreseeable, even though I have a OS 9 capable MDD, with 9.2.2 installed, just as no OS9 audio program I have even fully uses the 450).
Once upon a time I believed that, too - but if you look closely, it's pretty much nonsense.
- It has two HD bays - But external hard drives are cheaper than bare ones nowadays, and you don't need SATA for hard drives at all.
- You can swap the graphics card - Sure, but compare the most powerful cards (Radeon X800 for AGP, X1900 for PCIe) to the 320M chipset in the Mini. You don't gain that much, if any at all.
- It has PCI/PCIe expansion slots - If you'd have a FibreChannel-connected XSan, you wouldn't care for the price of a brand new Mac Pro in the first place. RAID card? Most people are fine with RAID0,1,0+1 that Mac OS X offers, and it works fine with the external drives mentioned above. FireWire card? Get a hub. Audio hardware? Get the FireWire versions.
- You can swap the CPU - Yes, but with what? Choices are pretty limited. Not that I wouldn't like to swap my Minis CPU with a 3.06GHz Core2Duo, which technically would work as fine as in the MacBook Pros.
- RAM: 8GB of 1333MHz DDR3 is not that bad after all, and as much as any DDR1-PowerMac G5 can take (except the late-2005 model, which takes up to 16GB DDR2).
An internal SSD (or two in RAID0 in a Mac Mini Server) plus as much external hard drives as you want, preferable via FireWire, are pretty much the best you can do. I guess most people are fine with a 3TB one (or two 3TB ones in RAID1) anyways. The PowerMac G5 isn't even capable of using the full potential of newer SSDs, as it has SATA-1 ports rather than SATA-2 like the Mini does.
After all, my mid-2010 2.66GHz Mac Mini reached a GeekBench score of 4067:
That says it all, doesn't it. As I said once before: Murphy's law states that components double it's density every 2 years - in the case of the Mac Mini, they just shrunk everything by factor 3 in six years, in the case of the Mac Pro, they increased the performance by factor 3 by doubling the cores and increasing overall efficiency of the CPU.
See, three times as fast. Sure, the 12-core Mac Pro is more than 1.5x as fast, but so would a 8-core PowerMac G5 compared to the 4-Core be - or a Core2Quad Mac Mini to the Core2Duo for that matter.
The next Mac Mini is most probably going to ship with 2.3GHz and 2.7GHz 2nd-gen i7 and Thunderbold like the 13" MacBook Pro. Just wait a couple of weeks, and it will be one more step ahead of the machines mentioned above.
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What a load of absolute claptrap. For audio production expansion can be vital. If you want to use ProTools with any complexity, or want to use the full range of audio hardware, you want the ability to add connectors the Mac doesn't have, or doesn't have enough off. And a FireWire hub just isn't suitable for some Audio Hardware situations. (For some things yes, but for others you really don't want to have it off a hub, as I know of some Audio Devices that can easily saturate a FireWire 800 connector, and would be awful over a FireWire hub). I can't think of a single even prosumer music artist or producer who would want to be limited to just the few FireWire and USB connectors a Mini provides. Once you go past GarageBand, you really want to not be limited to the very limited expansion a Mini has.
Yet again, a $500 PowerMac G5 or a Mac Mini with thousands of dollars worth of equipment doesn't make sense.
Besides, I pointed out that the next Mac Mini due in a few weeks is going to carry Thunderbolt, which is basically external PCIe x4 - and has 12.5 times the bandwidth of FireWire800.
If you're between a PowerMac G5 and a Mac Mini, you're not likely to spend millions on equipment anyways. If so, a new Mac Mini is always the wiser choice, as it runs Lion and the latest builds of audio software - plus being faster and having future-proof Thunderbolt.
For the current-gen Mac Mini, you could daisy chain your FireWire audio hardware and hook up your hard drives via USB, as the hub is intended for devices that come with one FW800 port only - which should be mostly the case for hard drives, but not audio hardware. This should be sufficient for everyone who considers a Mac Mini for music production in the first place. Most prosumer audio interfaces still ship with FW400 anyways, MIDI interfaces with USB. Controllers, even with motor faders, mostly hook up via MIDI or FW400.
But the costs for a prosumer audio interface, some MIDI interfaces and a controller are somewhere between the cost of a 8-core and a 12-core Mac Pro, thus people buy the next best thing and a Quad- or Six-Core Mac Pro.
If you prefer a PowerMac G5 over a new Mac Mini, I'm perfectly fine with that. Have it you way, but don't complain that you are i.e. restricted to Logic 9.0.2 and probably end up with Logic 8, because Logic 9 does't run that well on PPC at all. Or can't run the somewhere in the future upcoming Logic X. Or, as already stated, Cubase 6.
You basically put up everything against "I might spend $5.000 on equipment in the future and there is a minor chance that I need more than one FW800 port", which dissolves itself into "I might spend $4000 on equipment and $1000 on a used Mac Pro in the future" and/or "My Mac Mini has Thunderbolt".
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My point is that many people get a lot of "Old-High-End" gear on eBay, so in many instances, for someone who has laid out only a few hundred dollars to get what was top of the line 5 years ago, will do one heckva lot better than a Mac Mini. You dont seem to get that a lot of people buy a lot of their music gear used, as its a heckva lot cheaper. And a lot of us stick with older software as we dont need the very latest. If youd bothered to read the thread, youd see I already recommend a Mac Pro, as its the best of both worlds - software compatability, and you can use all the awesome former-high-end equipment that is hitting the market now. For instance, I saw a G5 compatible ProTools card, with the interface for $300. Thats a LOT less than $5000. A lot of us buy most of our gear used as we want the higher-end features without the outlay of an expensive professional interface. Ergo, buy it used.
You also CANNOT daisy-chain certain audio hardware. In fact most of it doesn't support daisy-chaining, or a hub, as it doesn't work very well. Especially if you end up with more than 1 interface. Also, when do you honestly think Audio Hardware will start to support thunderbolt? Some vendors have only just jumped to FireWire 800 ,and even if they did, it will still take 5-6 years from today for Thunderbolt devices to permeate the music world to the point where I can get ALL my interfaces and gear into my machine via Thunderbolt. Until that point the G5/Mac Pro 1,1 remains the better buy.
i use sheepshaver (also have a tiny Tiger partition if necessary), but I don't boot straight to OS9
This discussion is again the reason why I was always wanting apple to just put a second firewire port in all their models instead of a ton of slower USB ports no one really needs.