Um, no. The 32bit powerpc Macs are molasses slow -- especially the iBook. I have two of them and have done extensive development on the platform. The new intel macs are _much_ better though.

EDIT: and don't forget that OS X threading performance is the the suck. It degrades rapidly with more than about three things putting load on the system. Use a Mac with linux for a few days and you'll be amazed. However, this doesn't stop me from recommending macs to everyone.

d

 

Vs dell, gateway and toshiba ill take the apple anyday. Just works, everytime. But then again I use mine for video, and internet. Not games, cause they suck at games. thats what xbox is for. I tried many pc's for video editing and they all sucked for the most part.

 

I wasn't really talking about any specific application, but just the general point that the motorola powerpc processors (g3, g4) have not been a good performance buy in a long time. The IBM 970 core (G5) is pretty good, but the rest of what apple has been selling for the past decade has suffered from very low performance/dollar.

To a lot of us, it looks as though the entire platform market has shrunk down to just Power64 and x86. It's pretty remarkable I think. Look back ten years. In 1996 there were tons of architectures and it they all seemed to have a solid future -- Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, x86, pa-risc, ia-64, and powerpc. Everybody was hedging their bets that x86 would be gone in ten years. Low and behold, it's all that left.

d

 

Dude your talking way above my head here, so Im gonna go with the your right on this one. But Ill never buy another PC again, just to many bad experiances. I had to buy my wife a pc for her job, she asked me to set it up. I turn the thing on right out of the box and i get the message "your virus protection is out of date" then all this other stuff just pops up. Just gave me flash backs to old hourglass land. So I have been very biased for the last day or so, LOL. I do plan to get a macbook real soon though, i used my boys and was real quick and smooth. Also I have yet to use any curse words against the apple, I have to us pc's at work all day long. Dont tell the military but im sure i have hit the keyboard enough times to break a few of them.

 

www.quatech.com

i use a spp-100 @ work

good luck

 

thanks for the link!!

 

for future reference, some ems have trouble with high speed usb~serial adaptors. it was suggested to me to find one that was not fast.

 

http://www.usb-port.com/uc232.html - works very well for me. Replaced a Targus (what IBM suggests) brand.