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.

[GitGeezer]

Quite correct. When I bought the TiBook I decided to save a little by going down from 800 to 667. Probably a bad habit from the PC world where memory gets the budget instead of processor speed. I would also reccomend the AppleCare extended warranty. Again, I wanted to save $300. The aluminum cases are a much better idea. I have a client that actually draws on his. Add some dents & dings and it begins to take on an indestructible personality.

Problems with Live 4.1 (Live 2 seemed to be a little more robust) include glitching with just a few loops and one or two recorded audio tracks. Reverb as an insert effect stops it cold. The effect bus approach works, however. Absynth 3 may be ok but it sounds like it might be gently glitching also. CPU maxes out on many of the factory presets.

I'm now seeing minimum requirements for almost all Mac software and hardware at 800Mhz G4, G5 or dual G5 preferred. So, to keep the hardware current with software will probably cost $1000 to $1500 per year at $3000 to $4000 for a new computer every three years. Time to add a new budget entry...