Powerbook Cost Justified? Options

[darcyb62]

It has finally come time for me to upgrade my hardware. I have been currently been using an old PIII 500mHz with 512Meg of ram and a slow hard disk. I use Tracktion for my host and with a lot track freezing, it becomes somewhat usabe (but just barely)...

Up until recently I had been considering staying on the Windows side, but with the recent introduction of the Mac Mini I decided to take a more serious look at what Apple could offer, so I've tried to do a bit of comparison. I'm committed to purchasing a notebook and I tried to target $2500 (Cdn) for cost.

This is what I have come up with...

On the Apple side:

Powerbook G4 combo drive
15.2-inch TFT Display
1280x854 resolution
1.5GHz PowerPC G4
512MB DDR333 SDRAM
80GB 5400rpm Hard Drive
ATI Mobility Radeon
9700 (64 MB DDR)
Backlit keyboard
Gigabit Ethernet
FireWire 400 & 800
Analog audio in/out
DVI & S-Video out

Cost is $2499 (cdn)

On the PC side:
Dell Inspiron 9200
Intel® Pentium® M 755 Processor (2GHz/400MHz FSB)
17" ultrawide xga+
1 gig sdr ram
128MB ATI's™ Mobility Radeon™ 9700
24X CD-RW/DVD Combination Drive
60GB 7200rpm Hard Drive

I might be wrong on this, but it seems to me that from a performance perspective, Dell would be the better option. In addition, there seems to be a greater number of low cost / free plugins for thw Windows side verses the Mac side (but I might be totally wron with respect to this as my experiience to date has been solely limited to the PC side).

I am really trying to justify the move to Mac but its been a difficult journey. Hopefully this forum can help provide me with some added insight.

Thanks.

[jeffca]

The biggest reason you buy an Apple laptop is build quality. Most other laptops feel like and look like they're made out of recycled milk cartons.

If you have the chance to get you fingers on a PowerBook, give it a test drive. It's as capable as any laptop when it comes to real world performance.

I've got a 1.25ghz 15" PowerBook and a dual 2ghz G5. Quite frankly, if I could own just one, the laptop would be vapor. For the $2500 you have to spend, very few computers even get in the same league as a G5. It's a beast.

While running a Mac isn't the cheapest way to go, there is a good reason why half of all Avid editing suites and about 90% of professional ProTools systems are Macs. It's not because the tech heads that use them won't learn a new OS. In fact, Avid was fazing out Mac development until they received a backlash from its customers. And Alias sells almost one third of its seats for Maya to Mac users.

Personally, I have never once felt hobbled by the Mac OS when it came to audio. Since I also do 3D, it would be nice to have SoftImage or Houdini on the platform, but you can't have everything.

Best of luck and I hope you enjoy whatever you get. You can do great work on either platform. It ain't the tools, baby...

Jeff