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phonezilla
 
 
2005-03-09, 09:55

Hi folks,

I have done tons of reading, and I also have tons (well, months) of likely lead time before I actually buy a machine. However I'm now having a difficult time choosing between an iMac G5 and a Power Mac G5.

Currently, I'm on a G4 Cube with a 17" Studio Display. The biggest problems I face are a general slowness with the 450MHz CPU (rock!), and occasional USB audio dropouts... which turns out to be a pretty typical Cube issue. The system certainly isn't a dog, but it could be faster.

The majority of my work today involves Photoshop. I do pretty extensive editing of digital photos, and am looking to expand this in the future, perhaps to a commercial level. Plus if I had a SuperDrive, I suspect I'd dabble in video editing - so that expandability would be nice. As a bonus I enjoy GarageBand, but the Cube has issues with more than four tracks. Finally I am a web designer and developer by trade - but I don't consider things like TextWrangler to be very CPU intensive, as they run splendidly on the Cube.

My initial choice was the iMac G5, given I have a Cube. I greatly appreciate the quiet nature of the machine, I like the design quite a bit, and I also like its compact nature. But having seen the reports lately of "bulging capacitors" over at Macintouch and the like has left me wondering. So I'm also considering a Power Mac G5, but the caveat is that a new monitor would blow it out of my budget (I'm hovering around the $2k mark.) Thus I'd have to live with the 17". Now, I'm not against living with it - the monitor works just fine - but I do feel the pinch from time to time when working with that size of a screen.

In addition, I like being on an infrequent "massive upgrade" cycle. Back when I had a PC I was upgrading my kit every 18-24 months. The Cube is my first Mac, and it's about four years old. I like the idea of longetivity.

With the caveat that the Power Mac and iMac lineups could change before I buy, and I'll likely wait until Tiger's released to upgrade, what system(s) would you recommend?

Thanks in advance.
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