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PPC Diehard: tell me why I should not want a 1.67 PB?

California

California

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Aug 21, 2004
3,885
90
I have no logical explanation for it, but I am a PPC diehard.

I love running my 23" ACD off a 12" PB G4 1.5ghz with 1.25gigs of ram.

However, is it slowing down on Leopard. Even with Dashboard disabled, I am getting in trouble when i have multiple windows open.

So, of course, what I want is a two year old Powerbook G4 15 INCH 1.67.

It can only take 2 gigs of ram, tops

How dumb is this? I don't want to go intel, it is just some girly weird thing, i can't explain it.

How much will I be limited by two gigs of ram?
 
2 gigs is fine for now but id say it is the min working amt of ram reccomended in this day and age with leopard.


seriously, intel is soooo much better.......just give in...you know you want too:D
 
To ACTUALLY answer your question...:rolleyes:

2 GB of RAM should be plenty for Leopard, at least in my opinion, I don't think it's limiting.


2 gigs is fine for now but id say it is the min working amt of ram reccomended in this day and age with leopard.
Click to expand...
Use Leopard on 512 MB for a while. You'll realize 2 GB isn't the minimum amount, rather, it;s more then you need. (1 GB is about the right amount, maybe 1.5)

BTW, PPC diehard fan here too. :)
 
No

Let it go, man. The Intel laptops SMOKE the PPC ones. It's not even close.
 
Cassie said:
To ACTUALLY answer your question...:rolleyes:

2 GB of RAM should be plenty for Leopard, at least in my opinion, I don't think it's limiting.



Use Leopard on 512 MB for a while. You'll realize 2 GB isn't the minimum amount, rather, it;s more then you need. (1 GB is about the right amount, maybe 1.5)

BTW, PPC diehard fan here too. :)
Click to expand...

oh i have an emac 1ghz with 512mb on leopard. absolute pain to use. so unresponsive
 
dukebound85 said:
oh i have an emac 1ghz with 512mb on leopard. absolute pain to use. so unresponsive
Click to expand...

I can well believe that!

My macbook has 1gb, and it works nicely. I don't feel a need for 2Gb at all; in fact it occasionally seems to run faster than my desktop which has 2Gb and Vista installed on it.
 
1.2GHz iBook = 5fps MAX H.264 encoding from DVD

2.4GHz MacBook = 35fps H.264 encoding.

7x faster = PPC is deader than disco.
 
Yes, the least you can get away with for leopard is a PowerMac G5 Dual. (which is slower than the Mac Mini)
 
Youd be throwing your money away "upgrading" from 1.5 to 1.67. Thats worse than buying a 2.1ghz macbook and then buying a 2.4ghz macbook later as an upgrade.
 
Well as far as performance goes Leopard runs very nicely on my 1,67 ghz G4 pb with 2 gb ram. It still serves me well as my mobile graphic design machine and has no problems with multiple CS3 Applications running too. I mostly do vector illustrations in Illustrator and layouts in InDesign though.

Depending on what you do, I think you can still get many useful years out of such a machine.

That said, I wouldn't buy one today, only if it were some extremely good deal. Depending on your luck on ebay you may even get more money for your 12" pb than you'll have to pay for that 15" one. In this case... why not?
 
Think of the resale value of the PPC machine you would buy...in a few years, it really won't be worth anything since pretty much everything will be for intel (this is just my speculation...). Is Snow leopard Intel-only? If so, you have a slim chance of getting a decent resale value on the thing.

What's so good about PPC anyway? Arguably one of the best transitions Apple ever made.

Was it more reliable? Crashes less? *confused*
 
I came of "Apple" age when I got to this forum four years ago.

I know many people at that time who believed the PowerPC superiority over Intel. A guy friend of mine lectured me for hours on the superiority of the IBM chip. Then I started to play around with PPC machines, got the hang of opening them up and not being afraid to swap hard drives, I started to understand what Apple was actually manufacturing and designing.


Put it to you this way, the first time i ever opened a machine was in August 2004, literally the last day of my warranty of my 1st generation Powerbook Titanium. I was on the phone with Apple because I was completely scared of putting a stick of ram in the machine. I was sweating. Shaking

I was so nervous to touch that machine, that, yes, I snapped off the ram holders and Apple ended up having to send me basically a new machine with a brand new logic board (Thank God I was on the phone with them whilie I was so nervous).

All that to say, I got over my fear very fast and began to love Apple. I suppose I felt a bit nervous about the Intel DRM move -- from what I understood at the time of the switch was that PPC machines do not have the same sort of "spy chip' inside as INtel does.

I could be totally wrong but I'm just very happy with my 2006 purchase of my Powerbook 1.5 12 inch -- apple care for another full year -- and if it wasn't for the ram limit, I wouldn't care.

I still cannot believe Apple is going to phase out PPC users with Snow Leopard. Makes me want to sue them a little for making my machine obselete while it still has Applecare on it!

That's my stupid story. I haven't thought about it for a while, just knew that getting a bigger powerbook for the ram bump is probably not the smartest move. It's just that i know how to work on the PPC machines and am still slightly more suspicious of an Intel motherboard than a PPC.
 
Pixellated said:
Yes, the least you can get away with for leopard is a PowerMac G5 Dual. (which is slower than the Mac Mini)
Click to expand...

Is that true about the Powermac G5 Dual being slower than a mac mini?

Pixelated -- where did you get that name? I think I know but wanted to ask.
 
26139 said:
Let it go, man. The Intel laptops SMOKE the PPC ones. It's not even close.
Click to expand...

What you meant to say was the Macbook Pro smokes the Powerbook. The current PPC chips hand Intel their own ass on a daily basis.

And yes you are right on many levels for wanting a PPC machine. Then theres the whole RISC vs. CISC. The computers seemed much more solid and stable. And although not in benchmarks, and rendering in Final Cut etc. seemed to run OS X much smoother. Not to mention the Powerbook smokes any Intel machine in terms of build quality.

And now we are entering a phase of Apple deliberately bloating their OS so Intel get more hardware sales, just like Microsoft and Vista and the buggy, heavy crap that is Direct X. Luckily Snow Leopard should not apply to that, as Apple have made it clear that it will be a Intel only release, meaning that PPC owners will have to upgrade to a new machine, removing the point of purposely bloating the OS.

Vote with your wallet and boycott Intel I say. It's all an illusion.
 
California said:
Is that true about the Powermac G5 Dual being slower than a mac mini?

Pixelated -- where did you get that name? I think I know but wanted to ask.
Click to expand...

Depends on the Power Mac.

Get a new laptop if you can afford it. I had a 1.67 PowerBook and my current MacBook Pro smokes it out of the water. You won't regret it if it's in the budget.
 
California said:
Is that true about the Powermac G5 Dual being slower than a mac mini?

Pixelated -- where did you get that name? I think I know but wanted to ask.
Click to expand...

Hi California - it's good to see another die-hard PPC fan on this site still!

My first mac was a Dual 2GHz PowerMac. God that thing was built like a brick *****house. It just purred with quality. Once rumors on the Mac Pro surfaced, I sold the PM and bought a MP.

From a build quality perspective, I regret that choice - prime example to all you Intel lovers - the casing surrounding the Optical drive actually scratches as one takes out the optical drive. Another example is the HDD bays - that level of quality just wouldn't have shipped in a PowerMac.

My dream machine remained - the 12 inch PowerBook. Another unit built with quality in mind. Go buy me an Intel machine and I can rip it to shreds vs a used (but well looked after) PowerBook in seconds.

Despite the raw processing power increasing a fair amount, my beloved is the 12 inch.

iPhone 2G was built far better than the 3G. Again, I speak from personal experience. My 3G glass screen isn't flat on one side, the 2G was absolutely flawless.

Am I having a 'moan' -- maybe, but I have spent a shedload of cash on equipment for years. My prized possession is the 12-inch. Rock solid reliability. Don't believe me? Go look on eBay for a 12 inch PB - your chin will hit the floor. :)

Oh, and an Intel Mac Mini can smoke a Dual G5 for H.264 encoding - C2D really does smoke the G5 in many applications. Problem was, as soon as people started getting a hang for optimizing for G5 - Intel came through and their superior compilers are very very good.

F
 
I just purchased a 1.67 ghz PB, with an new battery that set me back $640.

It's a very high price to pay for a 3 year old notebook, minus the cosmetic scratches, it works like new. There still is that wow factor, there's still the backlit keyboard, and basically everything you expect in a Mac. People will bash and say why didn't you get Intel, o it's so much faster, PPC is garbage.

With 1.5 gigs of ram, it runs Leopard pretty good, just make sure you manage the apps you are running. I'd say Leopard takes up to 512 megs by itself.

My sister has a 12 inch PB with 768 megs of ram running Leopard, it slows down very quickly when you start to multi-task, but it is a very solid e-mail/net/itunes machine.

In all honesty, if you are only doing E-Mail/iTunes/Safari, you don't need the fastest processor on the planet. You could honestly live with a G4, but Apple must continue to innovate and stay up to date or else nobody would want their products.


But back to my point about PPC still being very much alive...Unless you encode or do CPU intensive work, PPC is still a viable option.

My Mac Pro does the heavy lifting, but I'm 100000% sure that a G5 would have sufficed for me (but the parents insisted on a new computer, eh can't complain).

So yeah, go ahead, and get that powerbook and enjoy it!
 
That would be a waste of money! You should save up more and buy a used mbp on ebay, for around just a little more than an old pb. Loving PPC's is just an excuse to buy a computer faster with the small amount of money you have saved up. With Snow leopard on the way, I would always go with intel! :)
 
hiya


you can love the PPC as much as you want of course. just don't complain that it's not as performing as the CPUs of this year when running the software of today.

have a look at some of these benchmarks:
http://www.primatelabs.ca/blog/2008/06/mac-performance-june-2008/

The best Powerpc score is 1952 for a 2.5Ghz 2xG5. The MacBook Air scores 2012 on the same testbench.

Just buy a new computer and add some PPC stickers :)
 
Disco Dead ?

Chundles said:
1.2GHz iBook = 5fps MAX H.264 encoding from DVD

2.4GHz MacBook = 35fps H.264 encoding.

7x faster = PPC is deader than disco.
Click to expand...


Who ever said disco was dead that's news to me lol ?

Another PPC die hard here i'll stick to Tiger and my dual G5 until those quad G5's come down in price on ebay lol
 
The ppc fanboyism in this thread is nauseating. The fact is that buying a powerbook this day in age, unless you get an amazing deal on it, is NOT a good value. Any intel machine will run circles around it in the vast majority of apps. And there's a strong possibility you won't be able to run 10.6 at all.

Don't believe the hype, folks. Ppc is dead, gone, and soon to be forgotten.
 
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