future limitations of PowerPC Macs?

[chrismacguy]

gamers with humen eye's and sense for reality ? most of them would see 60fps as torture and file a case ,because they believe 60fps are against the geneva convention

but you are right for normal humans even 15 fps are playable ,

like you do not need office 2011 and a intel iMac 27" i7 to write a letter , clarisworks and a iMac G3 running OS9 are more then sufficient for that purpose

different people measure in different ways when it comes to computing
some want the overkill computer even if they only surf on websites and email things that can be perfectly displayed on a iMac g3 /ibook G3
without any noticeable speed difference , but they want the iMac i7 /or MacBook Pro even if its only for telling everybody "hey look what i can afford "
i accept the fact a professional film cutter , who does it for a living , needs a fast modern Mac (newest MacPro )and he needs the newest version final cut pro 7 , because for him every second is translated into cash
but human x who just cuts a holiday video once a year can happy live with a PPC mac and iMovie or with final cut pro 3 or 4

i for example sit in front of my iMac G3 now and do not care at all if Word 2004 needs to bounce 5 times before it's loaded now , but others think even 2 times bouncing is already to slow and therefor unusable , and i absolute do not sit here with a stopwatch to know exactly how much time is needed to move a document from one folder to the other , and i would never dump my sweet little iMac G3 only because OSX tiger needs some seconds longer to boot compared with my core duo iMac running OSX tiger too on my sharing partition because of apple talk


for me speed(how long to move documents or folders,boottime) is not really a meassure to declare a computer as usable and worth to have or declare it as ready for the dump

ok i use a intel iMac core duo , but only because i had a bad experience with a G5 iMac but i just liked the design and because it did cost less then usual and was internally new (thanks to the previous owner who did get everything renewed under apple care), ok yes i upgraded the harddrive with a 10000rpm velociraptor 600gb , but only because i got that drive for far less then the rrp

See, I only use a Mac Pro because I need it for Final Cut Pro 7 and Wolfram Mathematica - otherwise Id be quite happy doing most of what I do on a PowerMac G4 (And in fact do do a lot of my stuff on my 2 G4s) - although I disagree with your statement about needing a G3 to write a letter. You can do it on a Mac 128K

 

[macgeek18]

i dont see vista as a flop ,if it wouldn't be for vista i possibly would have never made the move to linux and in the end to OSX , so i see vista as a great operating system to get people to try alternative operating systems , but i am not so sure if that was the intention of microsoft when they developed vista

but what has that to do with the question of "has PPC a future"

answer : a lot , at least in my case , as i do not swim in money and would never ever buy a computer on a loan or credit card the only Mac's in reach had been PPC Mac's and still are for most switchers to Mac , as you might see on ebay at the moment the demand is much higher for ppc Mac's then before , because the PPC Macs are still perfectly usable , within their limitations (and for normal computer users these limitations are beyond their needs anyway ) and there is the design , iMac G3/ G4 , eMac's and PowerMac G4's design just bring a smile to your face when you got one on your desk and it never gets boring to look at

and to get rid of some limitations get tenfourfox it made it possible to watch absolute stutter free youtube on my iMac G3 700mhz , ok only at 240p but honestly who needs more for watching some funny or less funny things at youtube
it made one thing clear PPC still has a bright future if people like these who develop apps like that get a bit support

and it shows one thing ,it is not only adobe and their flashplayer's fault like apple wants you to believe , it is the fault of apples safari and other browsers made for OSX and other apps , not coded with PPC in mind to make people buy intel Mac's, as i had a hackbook msi wind with a single core atom @1.6ghz , it showed me in direct comaprison that there is not a huge speed difference to a eMac 1.42 for normal usage , and more and more people buy nettops with atom processors because they realised for browsing, office and watching a dvd (what most do on a computer) and even for home usage of photoshop or final cut you do not need a intel i3 /i5 /i7 powered desktop


and for gaming you still need a windows pc or games console anyway so the point of "you cannot play modern games on a PPC Mac" is no point as you need to install windows on your intel Mac which transforms it into a PC made by apple and even a i7 iMac has still limitations (graphics card) when it comes to gaming

Thank you, your post just made e makeup my mind on getting a PB G4 12" 1.5Ghz. Thanks as it is going to be fun to have and a nice mac to add to the collection.

 

[SimonUK5]

Thank you, your post just made e makeup my mind on getting a PB G4 12" 1.5Ghz. Thanks as it is going to be fun to have and a nice mac to add to the collection.

I had a 12'' G4, and it was a very very nice machine until the GPU crapped out and i sold it(still selling) it for parts. Did everything i wanted it to and it was such a great size. Hopefully i can pick up another Powerbook soon

 

[laptoplover2]

Two hands are holding up PowerPC still, developers and linux.

I think that in the future Linux is going to be your only choice on a PowerPC Mac. I'm sure that our amazing Linux developers won't fail us and will pull off something ridiculously great. Linux MintPPC sounds like a great distro and Ubuntu PPC sounds promising as well.

In the mean time, I don't think Tiger or Leopard are totally dead yet, Tiger is on my iBook G4 and Leopard is on my 2006 MacBook. Both can run OmniWeb, a very, very fast and modern browser, and the latest version of Flash Player. YouTube plays great on both of them. Panther can still get older versions of Camino and Opera which aren't too horrible but it's sort of finished now. Either way for now PowerPC isn't going anywhere. Let's give it another 2 years though and see. I hope they survive cause I'm madly in love with my iBook.

 

[Imixmuan]

I hate to break this to you...

...you aren't really running the latest flash player. You are running a flash player from 2010 with major, known security holes that has been likely hacked to "look" like a new flash player. You might just get by with that, or you might not. Most sane people on PowerPC are moving away from Flash.

MintPPC. Developer has said he may not have enough time for another build. Which wouldn't be the end of the world, as its based on Debian, so theoretically you could just update Debian underneath the Mint11 desktop environment into perpetuity.

LubuntuPPC is what I am using right now. Its not OS X, but very good, and gives me luakit, the best browser on earth.

DescentOS is a newish distro, developer is working on a PowerPC release. I might just buy a new fast machine to "check it out".

Raw Debian is the most stable longterm option for PowerPC.

Omniweb for Tiger and PowerPC is end of life, hasn't been updated in Donkey's Years. Camino is now history, gone for good. Your best bet on OS X is Leopardwebkit or tenfourkit, if you insist on staying with Tiger. Install Leopardwebkit from the shell, and your Omniweb will then have access to a truly up to date webkit. Tenfourfox is at the wall again, blindfolded and waiting to be shot by Mozilla, hopefully Kaiser can pull off another programming miracle and get us past Tenfourfox 24. If not he'll keep security parity for as long as he can. I mean, we still have Classilla thanks to him. But that is where we are headed, without, as you say, a few very talented and dedicated developers.

 

[wobegong]

Omniweb for Tiger and PowerPC is end of life, hasn't been updated in Donkey's Years. Camino is now history, gone for good. Your best bet on OS X is Leopardwebkit or tenfourkit, if you insist on staying with Tiger. Install Leopardwebkit from the shell, and your Omniweb will then have access to a truly up to date webkit. Tenfourfox is at the wall again, blindfolded and waiting to be shot by Mozilla, hopefully Kaiser can pull off another programming miracle and get us past Tenfourfox 24. If not he'll keep security parity for as long as he can. I mean, we still have Classilla thanks to him. But that is where we are headed, without, as you say, a few very talented and dedicated developers.

Roccat (http://runecats.com/roccat.html) ??

I'm using this and very impressed, no crashes and no sites so far it cannot handle - it auto updated last night to v3.3 so it's certainly very actively being developed.