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.

[Dustan]

Hi! There...

It's always hard to compare these things... but for my own experiece I can try to point out some things..

1- The issue number one is a HUGE thing...and nobody ever talks about this when comparing the 2 platforms... how come pc users..dont' realize that Macs run better and more stable not because of it's charmy looks but because APPLE makes the machine and the system. This is a head start advantage of ..hey.. "this might give apple a better chance to make a better machine to work with demanding things such as audio!".. whenever Microsoft would make a computer or DELL would make a system... it would make the PC world a better place....isn't this obvious?!

2- 99,999% of Mac users are former PC users...and 99,999% of them don't go back, does that portraits a picture?. 99,999% of Pc users that prefer PC... have never ever tried to work with a MAC.... have neer owned a MAC... and most of them until recent times have never seen a MAC...hahah... just kidding...

the serious issues..are tooo long to discuss.. I am just trying to illustrate this discussion with some curious points... as for plug ins and softs.. I leave for the guys with more..blue balls under their forum status..... heheh

Have a nice work on whatever platform you choose...

cheers!