mac question (1 Viewer)

hi, here's my question: between a 1.25 Dual G4 and a base 1.6 G5, which one should i get? the prices are comporable; right now i have an early G4 and i don't know much about mac's. the apple guy said that G5's run in osX natively while G4's run in OS9 and go up.

for my purposes i run Illustrator 10 and Photoshop 6, so i'll need to go back and forth sometimes (between OS's).

also, if i wanted to burn DVDs, like a collection of trailers in vob format from my own DVDs, and maybe a simple menu, would i need additional DVD authoring software apart from iDVD?

thanks

1. Go with the G5.

2. Why do you need OS 9? Illustrator and Photoshop are both available on OS X. Even still, the G5 can run OS9 in emulation mode.

3. Don't know but I'd suspect you'd need DVD Studio.

I doubt either DVD Studio Pro or iDVD will takes VOBs. You need to extract the MPEGs first. And then the question is: will iDVD take already-encoded MPEGs without trying to re-encode them? I forget.

//Ken

If you don't need to buy one right now, wait for MacWorld SF Expo (2nd week of January).

Perhaps nothing will come out of it, but IBM will be shipping 90-nanometer G5 processors soon. They will run faster, consume less power, and generate less heat than existing G5s. PowerMacs may get a speed bump. Rumors point to 2 GHz on the low-end, and up to 2.5 GHz dual G5 configurations on the high-end (mid-end somewhere in between).

I checked, and iDVD does not take MPEGs.

//Ken

Hopefully this isn't too late. I was going to buy a G5 tower and then Apple tanked the single CPU 1.6, moved the single 1.8 to the bottom of the line and added the dual 1.8 to the mid range. The motherboard of the single CPU G5 is missing some features you may want. The clock speed of the bus the RAM runs on is slower than the dual boxes, and the PCI slots on the single are standard, versus the PCI-X slots on the duals. Knowing Apple and their commitment to being at 3ghz in 2004, I would wager soon the dual 2.0ghz G5 will be the low end with dual 2.4 and 2.6 models being the mid and high.

Also, careful on where you buy from. Bluetooth and a Radeon 9600 were "musts" on my list for a G5, but I discovered that none of the G5 boxes sold through the Apple store physical locations could be obtained with these unless you order it directly from Apple. The best they could do was offer to sell me an external USB based Blutooth adapter. Not what I wanted. So I decided to get the Powerbook now and wait for the next evolution of the G5.. since Apple lets you only apply the student discount to one system per year (and the student developer discount only one time ever) I elected to use it on a more expensive system.. I'll eat the $300 price difference on the Pbook in favor of $1000 in savings on a G5+display.. hope this info is helpful in your purchase decision.

Isn't Apple's student purchase program great