Ok, so here's my deal:
I'm a mac guy, always have been, always will be, but I generally am your average web surfer/emailer with a large mp3 collection and I love to dabble in iLife programs. I have an iMac G5 1.8 Ghz Rev. A. I also have a Rev A iBook dual USB, which is bordering on 5 years old now and sure isn't as snappy as it once was and a G4 Quicksilver running at 800 Mhz (one of the few that has solely a CD-R drive), which has not been touched since I bought my iMac.
I love my iMac and convinced my wife to buy one with me at the same time. Some of the issues that I have with it, though are that when it computes processor intensive tasks (excuse my lack of technical expertise), the fans tend to get quite noisy and sometimes, even when it is done with those tasks, it takes quite a while for the fans to "come back to earth." Also, there are times when I do find it a bit sluggish, particularly when working in the iLife suite (I did buy iLife 06 and still find it to be so). Granted, I only have 512 megs of ram (funny I say only when my Performa 636 10 years ago had somewhere around 24 megs).
So Apple introduces the new iMac last week and my first reaction, as any Mac person, was to drool quite a bit and figure out how to swing it. So I contacted PowerMax and inquired about their trade in program. Ultimately for my 3 systems mentioned above, they offered me $1550, which I don't think is a terrible deal. With my eye to the sky, I began to have dreams of the new 20 inch iMac, until I saw some of the benchmarks. Now, you must remember that the Rev A iMac G5 had none of the cooler new features such as Front Row nor the built in iSight, which are both appealing to me. Plus the graphic card on the Rev. A is a paltry 64 meg GeForce FX 5200 whereas these intels have a 128 meg Radeon x1600, plus the larger HD, etc.
So now I have a dilemma, do I trade in my macs, spend a couple of hundred bucks on getting the 20 inch iMac with some memory or do I stick with what I have, knowing full well that the value of my systems are at this point losing a considerable amount of resale value the farther down the intel path apple goes? Basically I'm searching for my dreams of a snappy finder, decent performance in iLife and less spinning beach balls (as an aside, when apple redid the beach ball in one of their recent OS releases, was I the only one who was not excited that they spent time to make my least favorite pointer icon look prettier? It was like an ominous sign or something). Anyway, I'd love to hear what some of you, if you were in the same position, would do.
I'm a mac guy, always have been, always will be, but I generally am your average web surfer/emailer with a large mp3 collection and I love to dabble in iLife programs. I have an iMac G5 1.8 Ghz Rev. A. I also have a Rev A iBook dual USB, which is bordering on 5 years old now and sure isn't as snappy as it once was and a G4 Quicksilver running at 800 Mhz (one of the few that has solely a CD-R drive), which has not been touched since I bought my iMac.
I love my iMac and convinced my wife to buy one with me at the same time. Some of the issues that I have with it, though are that when it computes processor intensive tasks (excuse my lack of technical expertise), the fans tend to get quite noisy and sometimes, even when it is done with those tasks, it takes quite a while for the fans to "come back to earth." Also, there are times when I do find it a bit sluggish, particularly when working in the iLife suite (I did buy iLife 06 and still find it to be so). Granted, I only have 512 megs of ram (funny I say only when my Performa 636 10 years ago had somewhere around 24 megs).
So Apple introduces the new iMac last week and my first reaction, as any Mac person, was to drool quite a bit and figure out how to swing it. So I contacted PowerMax and inquired about their trade in program. Ultimately for my 3 systems mentioned above, they offered me $1550, which I don't think is a terrible deal. With my eye to the sky, I began to have dreams of the new 20 inch iMac, until I saw some of the benchmarks. Now, you must remember that the Rev A iMac G5 had none of the cooler new features such as Front Row nor the built in iSight, which are both appealing to me. Plus the graphic card on the Rev. A is a paltry 64 meg GeForce FX 5200 whereas these intels have a 128 meg Radeon x1600, plus the larger HD, etc.
So now I have a dilemma, do I trade in my macs, spend a couple of hundred bucks on getting the 20 inch iMac with some memory or do I stick with what I have, knowing full well that the value of my systems are at this point losing a considerable amount of resale value the farther down the intel path apple goes? Basically I'm searching for my dreams of a snappy finder, decent performance in iLife and less spinning beach balls (as an aside, when apple redid the beach ball in one of their recent OS releases, was I the only one who was not excited that they spent time to make my least favorite pointer icon look prettier? It was like an ominous sign or something). Anyway, I'd love to hear what some of you, if you were in the same position, would do.
