Originally posted by Rezet
Well, Wyrm, i agree with many things you say.
Computers, cars ... they arent good investments at all. And I DO realize macs age slower. That's one of the PRO points in my opinion. You right at that if i buy a pc, in a 2 yars it will be worth around 400 bucks. While Pbook may still be worth over a thousand. Having to look at ebay at how much 500 Mhz ti still costs, I must admit that you are right.
Well, maybe you are right on this.
OK can u answer a few questions then?
How much is 1ghz 15" pbook is lower than 2.6Ghz P4 laptop overall, would you say? In percents.
Also Do you think SDRAM slows down 15" alot comparing to DDR?
WHich one would you say is FASTER 12" Pbook or 1Ghz 15"? And why? And Do you think even though 12" uses DDR and 15" SDRAM, it affects performance at all?
And just to know how fast 15" is, for myself, since i never worked with macs for real, If I launched Unreal Tournament on it which is G4 733 req speed, do u think it would go smoothly? would 12" perform better/worse?
And last, do you think it's a good choice to buy 15" now?
I can try to answer some of these questions, but I don't have all the answers. Maybe others can be more precise.
Q. How much slower is a G4 15" than a 2.6Ghz P4 laptop?
WA: It depends on what you do. If you browse the internet, use Office v.X, etc (or rip the occasional MP3) like me - I don't think my Pismo (500Mhz G3) is "that" slow honestly. Sure it is technically much slower than everything on the market now, but honestly it hasn't made me pull out my hair - which has happened to me on a Sony VAIO (P3-750). My Mac always sleeps and wakes perfectly, and I've only restarted it when I've installed an update or upgraded the OS (otherwise I just put it to sleep) - that's actually pretty funny (ok I admit to a few more times, but basically I never restart it). My VAIO (windows 2k) HAS crashed, frozen, blue-screened, been partially non-responsive, and had spiraled into the disk thrash of death. I could never get drivers for the wheel without installing Sony's software bundle - which was too much to maintain sanity - and Sony's support was dreadful, and video drivers sucked. My friend's Vaio (1.3Ghz P3) using Windows XP home mostly blue screens when waking up from sleep, wireless depends on the direction of the wind (seems like it), it looks cheap (well it was cheaper), and it creaks (hard to describe) sometimes when you type or move it. Sure it has been the brunt of jokes and laughs, but it's not something you display without adding "yeah - but it was cheap."
With my Pismo, and 2 batteries I've gotten about 6 REAL hours untethered (I was shocked at first - since my previous Thinkpad/Stinkpad got about 1.5 hours out of the box - and my Vaio was lucky if it reached an hour). I'm not sure what you get on a P4 2.6 laptop? 3 years later, 1 good battery, I still get about 2 real hours... enough that I don't have to worry so much about an outlet. So when it comes to getting some work done, I've found my Pismo has never let me down, whereas all the Wintel machines I've used have. Sometimes losing a hour of work causes you to spend more than a hour trying to re-create what you had - not to mention lost hairs, stress, and suffering as the feeling of re-doing work is never a "good" feeling.
Comparing speeds in an ideal world, the Sony is faster, hands-down. I'd even wager the G5 is slower than a Dell Workstation (I take Apple marketing with a grain of salt) - but in practice, one selling point that I truly believe is you can get more done - and have less stomach-problems doing it.
Q. SDRAM vs. DDR RAM
WA: Well hard to tell for what I do, but I'm sure there IS a difference. From what I've seen I know video plays cleanly on a 15" vs say a 17" - but this may have more to do with the Radeon9000, which I think is better than the GeForce Go 440 whatever on the 17". The G4 wasn't really designed to use DDR memory, so maybe this eliminates any real advantage. Maybe some users who do Photoshop or something can swear by DDR, but I can't tell.
Q. WHich one would you say is FASTER 12" Pbook or 1Ghz 15"?
WA: I don't know. I'd say the 15" - but it all depends on how much DDR memory bandwidth affects what you are doing, because that looks to be about the only advantage of the 12". If the G4 bus bottleneck really makes DDR irrelevant, then that point is moot. I do like 802.11G however, and I can't believe that Apple hasn't sold a PCMCIA version - you can buy a Linksys one which works pretty good, but then it has to be external - you have to modify a file, and reload kernel extensions (not for the faint of heart). I went back to using Airport 802.11b because almost every update clobbers the PCMCIA file - when I want to transfer a huge file, plugging in the 100M ethernet is not so bad. Depends on your wireless needs.
Q. Unreal Tourney
WA: Can't answer this question. But the my friend said his 15" can play Warcraft III pretty good. Nothing like a desktop however - games are still better there.
Q. do you think it's a good choice to buy 15" now?
WA: The golden rule for computers: it is NEVER a good time to buy. Something new is always around the corner. Suffering that, I'd like to get a new 15" someday soon, but I'm going to wait until they update the 15", since my current powerbook is still good. If I had to buy now, 12" for me is too small - maybe I'd go for the 17" over the 15" but that would be a tough call because I like 15" form better. Maybe you can haggle a better deal on the 15"?
I know buying something that has yesterday's buzzwords is hard, if not impossible to do - but I must admit, the stuff just works. In the end what is more important?
-Wyrm
