need advice on a Mac....

[afhstingray]

ok, im posting this on behalf of a friend, he used to have the apple desktop in the picture in his office, but has since moved jobs. he's not a tech oriented person, so he dosent know what the model is.

essentially, since he needs a new computer, he wants one that performs about the same as the one in the picture, would be very appreciative if anyone here could advise on

1) what the model in the picture is
2) what macbook model today would match it (cheaper the better


Cheers!

[MoffiaJ]

That's either a powermac G4/G5 or a mac pro, not sure if any of the macbook models will match that performance and it won't be cheap as the cheapest notebook Apple offers is 999. Although a used Macbook pro from ebay should porb perform admirably if he isn't doing power work.

[afhstingray]

really? i thought that desktop was at least a year old? the cheapest mac at 999 wont be able to get close to it?

[MoffiaJ]

that's why i said G4/G5 or...idk if the base macbook would measure up or not, it might do fine

[jonlumpkin]

really? i thought that desktop was at least a year old? the cheapest mac at 999 wont be able to get close to it?

Apples only "Desktop" is in fact an extremely expensive workstation using a server board and often twin PowerPC or Intel Xeon cores. In addition, it is generally offered with a fairly powerful GPU and several hard drives (often in RAID).

No notebook can really match these specs.

The 15.4" MBP with a 2.4-2.8GHz C2D and a Nvidia 9600GT will perform well, but it still isn't in the same class.

The 17" MBP performs almost exactly the same as the 15.4", it just offers a higher resolution display.


It may help if you know what applications your friend runs. For example, you will need a lot more power for running a DV suite like Final Cut Pro, than you would for just doing normal office and web work.

[doh123]

I cant get it to open the full picture, but guessing from the front of the case looking like it has 1 optical drive, that is more than likely an older PPC G5 system... current Macbook Pros actually come pretty close in performance of the stock Powermac G5s.. and often better, but could be worse.. it depends on the Powermacs configuration. Either way thats a desktop thats about 3 to 6 years old, so its not too hard to match if it was a stock machine... we have no way of knowing, because it could have been a decked out $15,000 machine, or it could have been a stock $2000 machine.... I'm guessing by the picture and other peripherals it was probably lower end, and a Macbook Pro, or iMac would beat it overall. If its an older single processor G5, the current Mac mini could beat it easily.

[MidnightSun]

Apple's been using that case for a while, so it's hard to tell what the specs are. Tell him to boot it up, and go to the OSX "About" menu and list the described specs.

Chances are, if it's a newer Intel Xenon-based Mac Pro, a MBP will have less processing power.

[doh123]

Apple's been using that case for a while, so it's hard to tell what the specs are. Tell him to boot it up, and go to the OSX "About" menu and list the described specs.

Chances are, if it's a newer Intel Xenon-based Mac Pro, a MBP will have less processing power.

Mac Pros all have always had 2 optical drive bays in the front.. that picture only has 1, it cannot be a Mac Pro, it has to be one of the G5 Powermacs.