lifetime

I am just ahaead of buyin a 12" g4 ibook which i will be using for office,surfing and some dvd viewing (and music listening). I am wondering what is the average lifetime period of macs - how long will it be before this ibook will be obsolete ? pcs are obsolete in a year as we know.and that sucks.

it will be a long time before it's truly obsolete...most PC's really aren't obsolote after a year either....many people around these parts are using Macs that are several years old, loaded with OSX, and running most apps...unless you are into the the latest games I would not worry...

The only obselete you will see in a mac is the processor speed. G5's are slowly emerging, but its the beliefe of most people it'll be awhile before those hit the Notebooks. Seeing as how your Ibook just became a G4, I'd say its G4 chip has about awhile before its replaced. But this summer/fall could mean an upgrade for the Ibooks but its a minimal upgrade just with the ram and a Mhz to the processor speed.

As far as your Ibook becoming completely out dated. That would take about 4 years atleast. (granted you had plenty of ram.)

I have had my powerbook for the last couple of years.. Im on my third year and it still works beautifully for me. My whole business is run off of it.. so it has to work well.. very well. And if all you are doing is surfing and dvd viewing.. I don't see it ever going obsolete.

Cheers!

i have a G3 with panther and everything runs pretty well. i cant play all the games though.

thanks for encouraging answers guys.for those mentioning games, i don't really plan to play games on mac so that's not an issue.thanx again

for notebook, i would say 3-4 years. after that you may have some hardware problems. like screen may go black, or cds wont eject, keyboard may break down. it depends how you use it.
for those tasks, you listed above, you can have it for 10 years