[vibroking5]

i want to buy a power mac to run pro tools on. i need advice on when and what to buy. i'm looking at a 1GHZ g4. is that good? i've also heard things about maybe wanting to wait a little bit to buy, because new ones may be coming out?

[Leonis]

wait til the end of June if you can

[AssassyN]

Welcome to MacNN!

First off, the single 1Ghz PowerMac isn't the fastest machine...if you can, definitely wait until June/July as something big will most likely happen to the PowerMac line; a next-gen processor will most likely be unleashed and you'll see speeds in the PowerMac that kill the current PowerMac lineup. If you can, WAIT, it'll be well worth it.

[NYCFarmboy]

I used a G4 400 megahertz for 4 years..ALL last year the rumor sites said a new G5 would be out and to wait. It never came and we just got marginal improvements in the G4. I waited as long as I could, but went with the 1.42 a month ago. I'm ultra happy with it.

Seem to be alot of rumors that a new chip will come out or be announced in July.
Who knows.

They probably would not ship until late summer at the earliest.

However, some experiencce with apple.. it might be wise to wait for the bugs to be worked out of this new chip/system. They don't seem to beta test their hardware in real world conditions so you might want to wait and see how the new 970's pan out.

I understand the underlying archecture of the chip itself is changing from 32 bit to 64 bit, and that programs will have to be rewritten to take advantage of this.

That will take some time.

No matter what computer you buy, as soon as you get it, something better will come along the next week.

Find a computer that will do exactly what you need it to do today. If it can't do it, don't buy it.

Having said that, Apple will release a new G5 8 gigahertz machine priced at 1/2 what you pay for the 1 ghz today, 2 hours after you place your order.

[JB72]

At this point, I really would wait and see. At least wait to see what happens at WWDC this June.

You might think about buying an older dual CPU powermac to use until the 970 machines get here.

[AssassyN]

The post by NYCFarmboy just further proves you should wait; if the rumors went an entire year without coming true, that's just more proof that it *has* to come soon, escp. since shipments of these chips are moving to Taiwan. There's no definite evidence that new machines will be rolled out, but there's no harm in at least waiting until July to see.

[DrBoar]

Wait!
In January 1999 we had a generation change were the B&W G3 replaced the beige G3. Then the former top of the line G3/333 was beaten by the budget version G3/300 due to a faster bus better graphical card. The new line also sported new features like USB and FW as well as a very nice tower design
This time around the leap can be even greater

First of all the new CPUs will be way faster than the current G4s. The bus speed will be much better and hopefully also other aspects of severly lagging hardware will be fixed. I am hoping that the sound will improve to the multi chanel support that PCs have had for years, the current state of sound has not improved much since the Quadra days.

If you have to buy now (as I had to) the dual 1.25 is the best deal with more then twise the CPU power of the SP 1.0 it will age more gracefully over time. But graceful is her a relative term as I expect the coming low end single CPU to best the current top of the line dual 1.42 G4 What the dual 970 with higher clock speeds will to I leave as an exercise to the reader