[zzimbob]

For all of you iBook G4 users, how well do the iLife apps perform on your machines? Are you able to edit, create, and encode DVD movies with decent performance and successful burns? Is iPhoto fast enough to be usable? And do you get decent Garageband performance (I know that an external FW drive will help with this)?

My Pismo has served me well, but it's showing its age and almost out of HD space. I know that I could go for one of those G4 Pismo upgrades, but I want a new portable that can run the iApps decently. I'm leaning heavily toward an iBook as opposed to a PB because battery life, ruggedness, and airport reception are all very important to me. Also, I've got an iMic, so the lack of an audio-in port is no big deal.

Many thanks.

[donniedarko]

Originally posted by zzimbob:
For all of you iBook G4 users, how well do the iLife apps perform on your machines? Are you able to edit, create, and encode DVD movies with decent performance and successful burns? Is iPhoto fast enough to be usable? And do you get decent Garageband performance (I know that an external FW drive will help with this)?

My Pismo has served me well, but it's showing its age and almost out of HD space. I know that I could go for one of those G4 Pismo upgrades, but I want a new portable that can run the iApps decently. I'm leaning heavily toward an iBook as opposed to a PB because battery life, ruggedness, and airport reception are all very important to me. Also, I've got an iMic, so the lack of an audio-in port is no big deal.

Many thanks.

The iLife apps would great for me. I have made small videos for school with iMovie HD with no problems at all. I dont really have much experience with iPhoto. As a reference I have a iBook 12" 1..2ghz with 512mb of ram.

[jamil5454]

If you're set on making music, you'll probably want something a little faster (read: G5) for GarageBand. Well, at least GarageBand 1.1. I'm still using iLife '04. If you're not working with more than 8 or so tracks at a time then the iBook isn't slow. But, the tracking cursor is always red on my 12" iBook G4 (red for high CPU usage, green for low). Resizing clips in iMovie '04 leaves much to be desired, but other than that it runs fine. iDVD runs pretty good too. Not the best performance, but definitely plenty for making a project on the go. Also, an external firewire drive will only noticeably be a little faster, due to the increased latency of having to go through firewire. If you have FW800 and a 7200 RPM 8mb drive, then you'll notice a performance increase for sure. But the iBooks only have FW400. You'd do yourself good to replace the stock internal drive with a Hitachi 7200RPM 60gb.

BTW - I have 1.25gb of RAM. You should be fine with at least 512, though.

[D'Espice]

I can only help you with iPhoto since I don't use neither iDVD nor Garageband. iPhoto runs fine, although every now and then I wish it was a tad faster. But it's definitely usable. I have 1500 pics in my library and scrolling is fast enough. Editing pics is fast enough. It just takes a few seconds to load and sometimes a second or two to load a single image. But overall, fast enough and usable.
I'm using a 12" iBook G4 with 1.25GHz CPU, 30GB harddrive and 512MB of RAM.

[brother337]

iDVD takes a long time to render on my iBook, but, you know what? It takes a long time to render on my dual G4/1.25 at work also.

iPhoto runs acceptable for me.

I don't use iMovie, but I use Final Cut Pro 4.5 and I'm very happy with the performance.

I don't go crazy style making music with Garageband, but I've mixed sound effects for shows with no problems. This is probably the most intensive application for my iBook since it's all in realtime and the iBook's slow HD really suffers. Installing a 7200RPM drive helped greatly.

This is all on a G4/800, so I'm assuming that a 1.2Ghz or faster will handle it even better.

It's all subjective tho. What's acceptable for me may not be for others. I started editing video years ago on a 200Mhz Pentium with 32megs of RAM, and so *anything* seems better than that.

I'm using iLife '05, BTW.

[zzimbob]

Originally posted by brother337:
I don't go crazy style making music with Garageband, but I've mixed sound effects for shows with no problems. This is probably the most intensive application for my iBook since it's all in realtime and the iBook's slow HD really suffers. Installing a 7200RPM drive helped greatly.

Did you mix the sound effects successfully with the stock 4200 RPM drive? Or did you not do any of it until you installed the 7200 RPM?

Thanks - and thanks to all of the other replies so far.