[Bigfoot]

A friend of mine just took delivery of a new 20" G5 imac yesterday... same day as the new intel models introduced. He called Apple and said they would exchange without penalty for the new intel model.

He bought the imac to use Garage Band exclusively. I would guess there are no drivers out for any of the interfaces yet. So does he exchange and wait for the drivers? Also is it true the the Intel chips are only 32 bit where as the G5 are 64bit? We're kind of perplexed on what to do here. Any advice folks?

[baw]

I'd keep the G5.

[harrisjamieh]

As far as i know, all the drivers will be in place, because the drivers are from the OS, not the BIOS/processor, and the intel version of OSX is, as I was lead to belive wilst watching the keynote, exactly the same as the PPC one.

I am in almost the exact same boat as your friend, only thing is that i've had my iMac 9 days and have used it, though im still rather confident I am getting a replacement either from Apple of John lewis. I would 100% change it for an intel, no doubt about it.

As far as 64/32 bit goes, you have two cores in the intel, so 32+32=64 hehe (i know im talking total crap, but what the hell :-)) On a serious note, I really dont rekon you would notice a speed difference between 32/64 bit, expecially when doing relativly non processor intensive stuff like garageband.

As I say, if i were in your friends boat (and I kind of am..) then I would (and am going to try to) swap if for the new one. At least then you have a much speddier machine, and the newest thing out

[Busemann]

Exchange it.

'64bit' is essentially just a PR thing. What matters is real world performance and the new ones are much faster. Drivers won't be an issue either.