1.25 Ghz G4? My 4 year old Athlon XP would destroy that.
No, it wouldn't.
ThinkSecret is an extremely credible source. I'm sure it took a lot to convince Steve Jobs to do this, but if they say it, he's doing it.
Eno_, I have a PowerBook G4 400mhz which was kinda slow on OSX 10.1 but it really flies with Panther. Apple's OSX people have done a fantastic job.
Freepy, unfortunately, no. Many software vendors, including Adobe, give crossgrade prices - you can buy the Mac upgrade for your PC version of Photoshop for the upgrade price. Microsoft offers the Office Student and Teacher edition for $150. So switching is pricey, but not unreasonably so.
People who compare Macs with PCs based on cold hard cash are deceiving themselves. The cost of virtually guaranteed virus, worm or spyware outbreaks can be many times the cost of your computer in lost time and aggravation. And unlike Linux, the Mac allows you to use software you're familiar with instead of going into the brave new world of free software that may be free, but that really wasn't designed well for consumers.
Speed isn't an issue. A 1.25ghz G4 is plenty fast enough for what people actually do with their computers.
Heck, my ancient PowerBook G4 with a 400mhz processor is fast enough at anything involving word processing, spreadsheets, email or the web -- and that's all most consumers need.
Although just for the record, a G4 Mac is typically about double the speed of a Pentium IV with the same clock speed. So a 1.25ghz G4 would be about as fast as a 2ghz Pentium IV. That was a pretty fast computer only a year or so ago.
D
The Athlon XP didn't even exist four years ago, being barely three years old. Aside from that, clock-for-clock, a G4 is a bit faster than an Athlon XP and a lot faster than a Pentium. The problem with the G4 is that now Pentiums and Athlon XPs have over double the clock speed, and the G4's better efficiency can't overcome that.
But speed isn't the point in this market. This will be competing in the slow Celeron and Sempron market, so should have comparable performance.
A 1.25 GHz G4 is equivalent to an Athlon 1700+, which was released 09/10/01.
There is no one-to-one correspondence between the GHz rating and performance because of the differences in architectures.
Actually, it probably wouldn't. The G4 is a PowerPC RISC processor, and if you just compare the processor clock speeds, it's even more whacky than if you try to compare the (true) clock speed of an AMD processor to that of a P-4.
Depending on the task, the G-4 can do similar tasks at 1.5 - 3 times the speed of an Intel processor.
You'd really be shocked to see the graphics performance of a 700MHz iBook!
Mark