[mercmerc]

Right now I'm working on a 667Ghz Titanium Powerbook G4, with a recently failed hard drive, which has forced me to boot from an external Firewire drive (running os x 10.4) to have a workable computer. Needless to say, I feel like I'm computing on a narrow ledge here. So I need something new very soon.

I thought about the G4 laptop option now that people will be trying to unload them, but passing up on a G5 seemed unwise. If the software upgrade prices weren't so high, this would be a no-brainer, but the Intel upgrade prices they are charging are like really high. I heard the $49 quote, but that's only for those who are super up to date. If you have FCP 4.5, like me, you've got to pay a whopping $200 bucks to have a usable app. Sounds small, but for me, that amount is big (when added to the price of a new machine with RAM maxed out). That, and I'm not totally confident that the pricey upgrade won't be really buggy somehow (FCP is very finnicky).

To crystalize all this down, really, since true speed gains in FCP (with third-party vendor plug-ins) are probably a year away, this decision is really about retaining RESALE value. Which is very important to me. If I hadn't been able to sell my two year old powermac G5, would even be able to entertain these choices. If I buy a G5 iMac iSight right now, it'll work just fine for my needs, but in terms of resale, I strongly doubt anyone would touch it a year from now as a resale item (at least not at a decent price).