04-10-2006, 09:07 PM

We news and mac addicts heard about the iBooks' company claiming Apple wants to ship iBooks (or Macbooks) in June. Do you think we will see both core solo, both core duo, or a combination of both? What do you think the prices will be?

Also... I'm on the fence on whether (if it's like the mac mini configuration) whether I should get the core solo or core duo. Money is an issue, and I'd like to get it somewhat soon after it comes out (I'm saving up by mowing lawns, 300 more till 1,000). I browse the internet, play music/dvds, do schoolwork, do web coding, and podcasting. Is a core solo enough to power garageband very well for podcasting? I don't want to limit myself, if you know what I mean... If I want to get a new program or game that requires a lot of power, would the core solo still be okay? I'd load the ram to the max. Finally, what is better to get for leopard, a core solo or core duo. I'd want to get the most out of leopard from a laptop I want to buy this summer.

04-10-2006, 10:29 PM

I don't know how much of an advantage a duo would give you at the present time since most applications are not written to make use of two processors. However, I heard Leopard might include some technology for running two operating systems together at the same time. It seems that the duo setup would be well suited for a task like this one. I think if you really hold on to your computers and use them for a long time you might want to "future-proof" yourself a bit by getting a duo. However, a core-solo is basically a re-vamped Pentium M (otherwise called centrino) processor, which is still very fast by my standards.

04-10-2006, 10:39 PM

i suppose it would all boil down to price, in the end.

04-10-2006, 10:40 PM

All I can say is this: The Core Duo Mac Mini will play 1080p HD video without one skip, The Core Solo will not play 1080p without dropping frames. On other benchmarks all over the net, turning off one core in the Core Duo really hurts performance. Anandtech did a compairson test on the iMac G5 iSight Vs Intel iMac and tested the Intel with both cores and with just one (you can turn off one in System Preferences) and with just one core the G5 was winning in many of the tests.

I would always go for the Core Duo over the Core Solo if I could afford it for what I do on a computer.

04-19-2006, 10:26 PM

If you have the money you might want to just dig out the extra bucks and get the Duo, they will last longer in terms of speed.

04-21-2006, 11:47 AM

As always with buying a new computer, there are two major factors to take into concideration:

1. Money
2. Useage

As far as the price difference goes, I don't think there's going to be a huge difference. Maybe a few hundred or less (probably less than that). Could be wrong, but since the processors are basically the same type (just a difference of one or two cores), it can't be that huge.

Although, I would suspect that iBooks (MacBook) will only be offered in a single core flavor, while MacBook pro will probably be offered as single core, OR dual core. (I haven't looked into it yet -- maybe someone else here can provide more insight?)

Lastly -- what are you going to do with it? Browse the internet? Play games? Watch HD movies (as brought up above)? If you're using it for office type productivity, programming, and web surfing, there's really no need for a dual core system. But, if you want to play games, work with video editing software, etc, the higher price tag is well worth the preformance gain.