How fast of a Mac do I need?

[icemanjc]

Also with the new MacBooks coming out, the older ones drop way down. Such as when I saw this MacBook with 15 minutes left, it was $355. Thats cheaper than what I got my iBook G3 900 mhz for about a year and a half ago!

[adric22]

This is most fascinating. I bought a 12" iBook from somebody on Craigslist. It is a 600 Mhz unit and I have installed the same operating system and run the same applications side by side with my Clamshell 366 Mhz. Guess what? There really isn't much difference in speed. Youtube videos play about the same (which is about 1 to 2 frames per second) and VLC player doesn't do any better on 640x480 divx movies on either one that I can tell. However, I do notice some web-browsing improvements on firefox on the newer one. Still, I'm thinking a G4 model would probably be a minimum requirement for me. I think I'll sell this one back on craigslist and keep looking for a G4.

[adric22]

I take back what I just said about the Divx movies.. I was trying to play those over the wireless connection, which I do all the time from other computers. But I guess the 802.11b is too slow for that. When I copied the movies to the harddrive and played them from there, they were fine.. well, almost fine. I can see that it skips a frame every now and then.

[Jeffo]

So the question is.. will a 500 Mhz do the job? 800 mhz? What exactly do I need. I know that with a Windows PC, my experience has been that 600 Mhz tends to be the breaking point for that kind of thing.

I have the snow ibook G3/500mhz and with the lower res youtube it would not play the videos smooth at all, it was bad. now that youtube is playing higher res videos it does not stand a chance at all. and this machine has 640mb of ram in it.