[Sussex] PPC or Intel

[Ronan Chilvers]

Hi Dominic

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 04:24:49AM -0600, linux at oneandoneis2.org wrote:
> My girlfriend wants an Apple laptop, and in a moment of madness, I  
> offered to buy her one.

DOH!!!!

> But she can't decide if she should get one of the older ones with a  
> PPC processor, or a newer one with Intel Inside.
> 
> Having seen all the Holy Wars when Apple made the switch, I can't  
> imagine that asking on an Apple forum would get me terribly far :o) So  
> does anybody here have any advice as to how much difference, if any,  
> the different CPU arch's make?

Performance-wise, the last tests I saw, the intel machines were a little
slower than the G5 ppc machines.  However that was quite an early
version of the intel version.  I believe the performance is now much
better.

The main issue I see is how future proof your machine will be.  As with 
the OS9 to OSX shenanigans, if you buy a PPC now, you may find that in a
couple of years you can't get any software for it.  The new 'Universal'
stuff seems like a bit of a band aid to me and I can't believe that
people like Adobe and Quark are going to be happy to support and compile for 2
different architectures for very long.  We have several G5s here in the
design dept and we will be faced, in the not to distant future, with
software upgrade problems.

Since Apple is moving, ultimately, over to Intel, I think I would be
looking at the Intel machine.

Alternatively, buy her the PPC laptop, stick something like Ubuntu on it
and you're all set for years... Sorry - this is a linux list after all!!
:-)

Laturrs
-- 
Ronan
e: ronan at thelittledot.com
t: 01903 739 997

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