G5 or white intel imac?

[utstudent]

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im looking to buy either a imac g5 or the white intel imac for my dad. He will be using it for emailing, music, video simple stuff like that. So my question is , is there a significant power difference in these two processors?

 

[VeganHipster]

I would buy an Intel iMac just so he can get to at least Snow Leopard or Lion.

 

[raver001]

Get the intel Mac.. Just for ease of compatibility and support.

 

[AdrianK]

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im looking to buy either a imac g5 or the white intel imac for my dad. He will be using it for emailing, music, video simple stuff like that. So my question is , is there a significant power difference in these two processors?

The earliest Intel iMac gets a geek bench score of ~2400, the G5 iMacs score between 840-1179; that is a huge difference. Go with the intel for sure, it will be great with Snow Leopard.

 

[speacock]

Intel

We have a G5 PPC Mac Pro (or PowerMac or whatever it was called before it got an Intel processor) and a C2D Intel MacBook.

We are about to get rid of the G5 and buy another Intel based machine there are 3 reasons why the Intel based systems are better from our perspective:

1. Applications - The number of applications available for the PPC is shrinking fast - All the latest Adobe products are Intel only, OS X Lion is Intel only, Microsoft Office 2011 is Intel only, several of the Photoshop plug-ins we use

2. Performance - Even our little C2D MacBook with 4GB RAM and it's 5400RPM disk which cost £900 leaves the £4000 dual processor G5 with 8GB RAM for dead performance wise, Photoshop filter times of 20 mins come down to 2 min or less

3. Reliability - Software (that you can get) for the G5 seems to get more and more flaky; whether that's because the machine is getting old or because vendors devote less time and money to testing on the PPC platform I don't know, but our G5 is very unreliable now.

Of course the G5 is cheap second-hand, but I'm guessing cost isn't your main consideration, if it were I guess you'd be looking at PC rather than a Mac anyway.

 

[Qwaf]

Just go with the Intel. You'd regret getting a PPC Mac now for anything other than collecting them, for the reasons mentioned above. Compatibility and better performance.

 

[YanniDepp]

G5 can only run Mac OS X Leopard
Not really worth buying one unless it's pretty cheap. A lot of software is moving to be Intel only.

Core Duo can only run Mac OS X Snow Leopard
If you can find one cheap, it's worth it. But you're quite limited by RAM (2GB officially, 3GB unofficially).

Core2Duo can run Mac OS X Lion
If you can find a Core2Duo for a little more than a Core Duo, take it. It runs the latest version of Mac OS X.