06-25-2008, 08:32 AM

I've been offered an old iMac G5 for not a huge amount of money (£250). I need a computer for university and have been eyeing up Macs for a long time now. I want to spend as little as possible because money will be tight next year!

So I'm considering refurbished and 2nd hand Macbooks and iMacs. Question is, if I were to buy this G5 (it has a 1.8Ghz CPU and 2Gb RAM) would it run things like Aperture happily enough? I have to admit to being completely confused about Apple operating systems, could it run the latest one or is it now specific to Intel chips?

TIA.

06-25-2008, 10:54 AM

Assuming you have a PPC imac, then you will NOT be able to run the newest OS version (10.6) that is coming out within the next year, but you will be able to run 10.5 Leopard (like i am now) on that computer. thanks

06-25-2008, 10:55 AM

o and i think it will run aperture well enough

06-25-2008, 11:03 AM

Originally Posted by justin_clark93

Assuming you have a PPC imac, then you will NOT be able to run the newest OS version (10.6) that is coming out within the next year,

While that is entirely likely, it has not yet been confirmed.

That news is a rumor based on an alleged screenshot of Snow Leopard's system requirements. The grab supposedly comes from an early version of the OS seeded to developers at WWDC.
Seeing that the pending release date is still a year away, anything could be possible.

There is nothing on the official Apple site to either confirm, nor deny anything.
The only hint is that it will be a 64-bit OS, so perhaps G4's and lower will be out... but the G5 chip is a 64-bit chip.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

06-25-2008, 11:58 AM

10.6 won't change any APIs so all software should run on Leopard (10.5) for way beyond 2009. This is one of the reasons Apple could afford to leave PPC out of 10.6

To answer the OP question, it really depends on exactly what you want the machine to do. The G5 is now essentially 3 generations old and by next year will be 4 generations old. However, that does not mean it cannot do what you need it to. For general browsing, watching movies, world processing, photo editing etc, it should be fine for the next few years. Aperture runs a lot better on Intel chips than PPC chips now, but many Pro users will have their old G5s and it's still a capable machine.

06-25-2008, 02:20 PM

Thanks for the help all. It's what I thought, probably ok but getting a bit long in the tooth now. It's tempting at the price, but I don't want to be buying into obsolete chips, as there's no upgrade potential whatsoever.

I'll keep looking for cheap Intel Macs!