On Jul 4, 2006, at 10:06 AM, Jan Melander wrote: > Then I don’t believe that the new Intel Mac Pro’s will give us that > much > faster machines, Yes they will be faster then the current G5’s, > Apple could > not sell them otherwise. But You will not get the 3-4 times > improvements > seen in the portable line since the G5 is still a fast chip and > reports are > that the fastest of the dual cores are close to the G5’s, not > faster... Yep. Apple's most urgent reason for switching to Intel was the fact that the notebooks were stuck a generation behind, and that low-end Macs were too expensive for their performance. Both these things yielded a great powerjump for the Intel followups, but there is no huge gain so far to be made with PowerMac G5s. In addition to that, I don't think it's that likely that "intel-only plugins" will appear so soon, if ever at all. It should be little or no effort for programmers to keep working in the universal binary format once they've made their code Intel-compatible. Only when new processors have features _required_ by new software will support for older processors drop, but this isn't the case any more now than it was with any previous processor. The G5 can do lots of things the G3 can't, but still most of today's software runs on a G3. (By the way I wouldn't be surprised if Apple kept an eye open for a usable G6 PPC coming out for new top-of-the-line high-end models, and stayed universal for that reason). Finally, if you want your system to last 5 useful years, this doesn't have to mean that you have to be able to get new software for it for 5 years. If you already managed to stick to one system for that long, you know that it can also mean sticking to the software that works for you. Ok, this should balance out all pros and cons enough to leave you in complete doubt. ;o) Maurits.