Korin Hasegawa-John
- 2001.07.11
Since I see that some members of the Mac
Daniel staff aren't very enamored with older Power Macs, I
decided to write an article supporting them. In his column,
The Virtues of a G4, Michael
Munger says that for him "living without the latest, most powerful
stuff is unthinkable."
I envy him. Because I'm a high school student, I don't have a
whole lot of money to buy my Macs with. I would love to have a
G4, but I don't have
the approximately $1,000 needed to buy a used one. Instead, I opted
for a Power Mac 9600.
I am definitely quite satisfied with my purchase for the following
reasons:
- Price. My 9600, which is loaded with 288 MB RAM, two
4 GB hard drives, and a Jaz drive, only cost me $400. Of
course, my 9600 is a lot slower than a 350 MHz G4, the video card
is a lot less capable, and overall performance is about one-third
or one-fourth of a G4. Of course, the price was about three-eighths
the price of a G4.
- Performance. The 9600 runs older versions of Photoshop,
QuarkXPress, and many other pieces of software at an acceptable
speed. I don't get as many features with old software, but I spend
a lot less money for the older versions. Again, a tradeoff, but an
acceptable one for me.
- Expansion. I removed my computer's internal Jaz drive to
install a Yamaha CD burner. It cost me nearly $60 less than an
external version. If I had a G4, there aren't nearly as many
internal bays and slots for adding devices, so I would have to buy
external drives. Of course, I don't have USB and FireWire, but I
can easily add both for about $50.
- Legacy ports. I use a lot of legacy peripherals (SCSI
SyQuest drives, hard drives, and scanners) as well as serial
devices (printers, PDA cradles, and the like). I could add SCSI and
serial to a G4 with a Griffin card, but it would cost me $100. As I
said before, adding USB and FireWire to my 9600 is cheaper. Plus,
on a G4 I loose one of three precious PCI slots, whereas on the
9600 there are still four free slots. And replacing my devices
would be prohibitively expensive and also render them incompatible
with my soon-to-arrive legacy PowerBook 2400. (More about the
PowerBook in a future article)
- Upgrades. If I ever need G4 power, it's just $250 away
with a G4 upgrade card for my 9600. Of course, that wouldn't solve
the slow system bus and RAM problem, but it would still double or
triple performance.
I think that older Power Macs are a great option for people on a
budget (and those needing six slots!). After all, I could run an
older version of LightWave on my 9600. Undoubtedly, it would run
much, much slower than on a G4, but an old Power Mac is a very
capable computer.
You can do almost anything with an old computer that you can do
with a new one, just slower. Cheap, older peripherals abound;
4 GB SCSI hard drives go for as little as $30 on
eBay. Stay behind the bleeding edge. Spend less money and get
cool used hardware! You can't run OS X (well, you can, but Apple
doesn't officially support it on pre-G3 machines), but you just
have to know the computer's limits.
Getting older Macs working well is what Low End Mac is all about, right?
