Just a quick thought on the relative performance of PowerPC Macs vs. Intel Macs. Recently, I had the opportunity to “acquire” a PowerPC-based iMac 17″ Flat-screen. For those who don’t have Apple’s iMac naming down cold (including yours truly), that is the G4-based iMac with the hemisphere base and the super-cool screen on the swivel arm (picture is available at the prior link). After installing an Airport Extreme card, I had the machine up and running on the home network. I promptly installed Firefox (since I’m not a Safari fan), and voila, I had a good-looking casual web browsing and email terminal functioning. Aesthetically, the machine is great. I especially love how easily the monitor can be moved on the swivel arm. However, I couldn’t help but notice how slow the machine is (it is a 1GHz PowerPC G4 box with 1 GB of memory).

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