mac question

[turnipmonster]

so, my current mac is a powerbook G4 (667Ghz) with 1G ram. for a lot of
my music stuff I like to use garritan personal orchestra for
playback and it's fairly memory/processor intensive, and is thus pretty slow on my current machine.

ideally I'd like to get a new mac. the dual G5 is not out of the
question, but I am wondering about the wisdom of a purchase like that
with everything moving to intel.

my other option is a mac mini, which seems like not a very big upgrade
(I think it's a G4/1.6 or so). also I would have to buy ~4G of ram for
it. the problem with buying a regular G5 is I have a nice monitor
already and don't want to pay for a machine with a monitor.

the mini and 2xG5 are obviously at the opposite ends of the price
spectrum. if I got a mini I would be fine with getting another computer
again in a year, if I bought a 2xG5 I'd like for it to last me a little
longer.

basically any thoughts you longtime mac users have would be helpful.
I'd also like to hear from those using a mini with processor/memory
intensive apps like audio stuff.

wait? get 2xG5? go with mini and get an intel next year?

[send_the_msg]

i would definitely hang in there until the intels ship. if that means getting a mac mini then do it (btw it should be quite a bit faster than your pbook). also i would check craigslist for used machines.

[turnipmonster]

ok thanks for the help. question about the new intels, any old mac software I want to run on them will have to go through an emulator (invisible to me probably), right? will the intels run older software at the same/faster speed?

--turnipmonster

[send_the_msg]

apple's compiling software can allow anyone to make intel/ppc hybrids, but that doens't mean people will always do this (as it adds to the total file size). what this means is that not all apps made after the intel switch will work with ppc and over time that number will increase. however all intel macs will be able to run any ppc app through the emulation you mentioned.

as far as speeds go, emulation naturally makes it slower, however i have heard that because the p4 is faster than the g5, it evens out.