tonyballinger.com

Nothing motivates like a system requirement for a new Brian Eno gadget – and since his new software “77 Million Paintings” is going to require a G5 to create it’s generative soundtrack, then so it shall be. Not that I’m getting a new machine just to run video paintings. I’ve had the same dual 800MHz Quicksilver for 3+ years now, and while it does a great many things adequately, it’s just getting a little long in the tooth.

I had considered upgrading the processor in my machine to a dual 1.8MHz G4, and maybe throwing a faster video card in it. But that would come to around $800, and for that price a new machine started to look pretty good. Particularly because I keep a close eye on Apple’s page of refurbished machines, as well as those at Smalldog.com. I had seen a dual 2.0GHz pop up at Other World Computing last week for $1499, but you had to use Patchburn in order to use the upgraded Superdrive with Apple’s native apps. While that didn’t sound like a major hassle, it sounded like one more thing I didn’t want to think about during reinstalls, OS upgrades, and the like.

But today Apple listed some new machines in their refurbished section, including a dual 1.8GHz box for $1299. While other machines might have been a better value (faster memory, more video memory), they also would have required me to buy a convertor to use my ADC 20″ display, and I wouldn’t have been able to use my existing PCI cards (not that I’m likely to use them anyway). And you can’t beat a dual G5 for $1299. Even once I added 2GB of memory from Other World Computing, that’s still a pretty inexpensive box.

But for me, the most important reason to upgrade now is to still sit out the Intel transition. As more and more apps become Universal the Intel platform will become more attractive. But for now, I spent most of my time in Macromedia Fireworks, Dreamweaver, and the Adobe Creative Suite – none of which are going Universal anytime real soon.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.