Re: Re: Re: Small changes coming soon
Originally posted by Bregalad
The 1999 era 466MHz PC I have collecting dust still runs
Most 1999 era PCs do not.
For non-Altivec enhanced applications it probably outperforms your G4 upgraded B&W too yet I'd be lucky to get $200 for it. On that basis a comparably equipped B&W is worth, at most, $300.
That would be true, save for a few things. You can buy a 3 year old Mac, and expect it to run for 3 more years. I just retired my last 9600 (circa 1997) to eBay. It was running OSX 10.2.3 (yes, a hack was necessary), with decent performance for mainstream tasks. It
'll prolly be used for 2-3 more years. I had both a G3 500, and a 604e, and BOTH ran Jag acceptably. You can eek a lot of life out of an older Mac.
Back to B & W's, I have a B & W 400, running as a dev server, with Jag, Apache (38 individual sites), MySQL, WebObjects, and a whole boatload of server strength software. It may not get good frame rates in Quake, it may not have the horespower to stream video to world+dog, but it works, and it works well & reliably (something Windows has yet to acheive, and Linux can't offer a non geek).
Furthermore, for someone like my [insert non tech savvy relative here], it would be a great and usable machine for the next 3 years. The OS is current, the software is current, etc.
Lemme know in three years if you are still using your PC.
Of course if prices were based solely on performance, the dual 1.25GHz PowerMac would have to be around $1600 to compete against PCs with equal video editing performance. We all know that pigs will fly to the moon under their own power before Apple releases a competitively priced tower.
Since I read all these great comparisons about how PCs are x seconds faster, I do wanna point out one thing.
If you have to spend 100-150 minutes per week dealing with:
500 pop up windows
1 critical update
4 BSODs
2 .dll conflicts
5 virus scans
5 spyware checks
10 unnecessary reboots
...but your Mac is 50 minutes slower (in raw procesing time), the Mac user still does 50-100 minutes more per week of work.
I've seen the same thing happen around many offices (as a consultant, I've done a lot of hardware site, upgrade, rollout, and installation planning for small & large companies). The brains in accounting give the creatives a bunch of shiny new Dell's.
The creatives laugh at the UI, fight the system, don't want to tinker with their registry's, then have to tinker with their registry's, break things, call IT (cause they can't fix it anymore), and fail to produce. They are still earning money while failing to produce, as is the IT monkey doing the repair.
After 30-90 days of this, they get their old Macs back (missed dealines + recent change == undo), and accounting get a bunch of 'almost' new Dells.
As has been said a million times before, the better something works, the more it costs. In a market where people are earning $75+/hr whether their machine is running or not, it's best to keep the machines running, no?
