> Alright, understood. Sorry I interpreted things wrong. There are a whole
> lot of people who complain about the cost of OS X who really could
> afford it, but are just whining for some stupid reason. It's odd,
> because I really don't remember anything like this in the past with
> various OS upgrades.

Something that's easy to overlook with OS X though is that though your
computer might *run* OS X, that doesn't mean it'll be fun to run.
I've got an iBook 500 right now, and though I use OS X daily, booting
into OS 9 is like getting a brand new, roaring fast machine (tried
Camino again for the first time since Safari came out and that, by
itself, doubled my frustration with speed. Thank heavens for Safari).
You almost have to upgrade two generations worth to get the kind of
speed you're used to getting in OS 9-, which is why I can't wait to
get a G5 tower. I think that's probably also why you don't remember
this degree of complaints, though that's a bit strong, with older
upgrades, where the perceived performance penalty wasn't nearly so
high.

And heck, if I'm a typical personal computing person (PCP?), I just
want Internet, email, mp3s, and instant messaging. There are several
good OS 9 IM clients, Mozilla 1.0 does okay and IE 5 still does quite
well, and iTunes is available for OS 9. MS Word or AppleWorks work
quite well as well. Outlook Express is a great email client, and
there's been no better email client ever written than Em[at]iler. OS 9
is a great system, in my horribly biased, Mac-loving opinion.

If that's all you're doing (ie, no new software needed), no need to
upgrade to OS X. And going from, say, a 117 MHz 603e to a 466 MHz G3
is a great upgrade that will make that old box pretty snappy. Not to
mention you can keep your favorite ADB keyboard & mouse, use Appletalk
over the modem port to build a really cheap network, keep printing to
that rock-solid ImageWriter II, etc etc... Just be ready to reboot
every so often!

Ruffin Bailey

Ruffin Bailey wrote:

> Something that's easy to overlook with OS X though is that though your
> computer might *run* OS X, that doesn't mean it'll be fun to run.
> I've got an iBook 500 right now, and though I use OS X daily, booting
> into OS 9 is like getting a brand new, roaring fast machine (tried
> Camino again for the first time since Safari came out and that, by
> itself, doubled my frustration with speed. Thank heavens for Safari).
> You almost have to upgrade two generations worth to get the kind of
> speed you're used to getting in OS 9-, which is why I can't wait to
> get a G5 tower. I think that's probably also why you don't remember
> this degree of complaints, though that's a bit strong, with older
> upgrades, where the perceived performance penalty wasn't nearly so
> high.

A 500 MHz G3 is a little slow, definitely. But a 700 MHz G3 or 500 MHz
G4 is perfectly adequate. It's a question of having enough memory,
really. Although there might be other limiting factors with an iBook --
I've never actually got to use one. :)

> And heck, if I'm a typical personal computing person (PCP?), I just
> want Internet, email, mp3s, and instant messaging. There are several
> good OS 9 IM clients, Mozilla 1.0 does okay and IE 5 still does quite
> well, and iTunes is available for OS 9. MS Word or AppleWorks work
> quite well as well. Outlook Express is a great email client, and
> there's been no better email client ever written than Em[at]iler. OS 9
> is a great system, in my horribly biased, Mac-loving opinion.

I totally agree... although I would definitely recommend OS X to anyone
entirely new to the Macintosh that has the hardware to run it.

Greg Weston wrote:

> I've run all releases of OS X on G3s slower than 500 MHz without a
> great deal of concern. A run through the archives of csm.portables and
> various web forae seems to indicate that there's a higher-than-average
> level of dissatisfaction with the iBook 500 in particular. People made
> specific claims about performance that I couldn't reproduce on a G3/300
> and didn't recall from my time using of a G3/233.

It might be a question of cache. Are iBooks as in-your-face about caches
cooking as Powerbooks?

In article <JENKa.300111$ro6.7428082[at]news2.calgary.shaw.ca>,
Steven Fisher <sdfisher[at]spamcop.net> wrote:

> Greg Weston wrote:
>
> > I've run all releases of OS X on G3s slower than 500 MHz without a
> > great deal of concern. A run through the archives of csm.portables and
> > various web forae seems to indicate that there's a higher-than-average
> > level of dissatisfaction with the iBook 500 in particular. People made
> > specific claims about performance that I couldn't reproduce on a G3/300
> > and didn't recall from my time using of a G3/233.
>
> It might be a question of cache.

Unlikely. The G3/233 I mentioned was an original (cacheless) Wall Street
(with, for the record, 160MB RAM). There should be no slower OS X
machine, but iBook 500 owners were regularly telling me not simply that
OS X was subjectively too slow but that specific features routinely took
specific, overlong amounts of time to invoke.

G

Steven Fisher <sdfisher[at]spamcop.net> wrote in message news:<JENKa.300111$ro6.7428082[at]news2.calgary.shaw.ca>...
> Greg Weston wrote:
>
> > I've run all releases of OS X on G3s slower than 500 MHz without a
> > great deal of concern. A run through the archives of csm.portables and
> > various web forae seems to indicate that there's a higher-than-average
> > level of dissatisfaction with the iBook 500 in particular. People made
> > specific claims about performance that I couldn't reproduce on a G3/300
> > and didn't recall from my time using of a G3/233.

Just fwiw, I did try out Netbeans (from Netbeans.org), a Java IDE
written in Java, and a very complicated Java client-app, in an Apple
retail store a while back. The 800 MHz iMac and G4 laptop I tried ran
noticibly slowly, to the point that I'd compare them on par with my
533 MHz Celeron box (hang on, not Mac bashing!). Furthermore, only
the DP Powermac gave me what I'd feel was an acceptable level of
performance for iPhoto on those three machines. The 700 (iirc) MHz G3
iBook was not anywhere close to an order of maganitude faster than my
500 MHz iBook (here, I didn't try Netbeans). And with iTunes
routinuely taking 25% of my processor power, my machine just can't
keep up like I'd like when I'm doing anything development-related in
OS X.

Here I was told that the iMac's poor performance was a cache issue,
which I'll believe. The consumer models just aren't going to have the
same performance as the Powermacs. Still, the Powerbook was awful
slow (Java & iPhoto) for the price.

But this is just to say that I can't imagine an iMac 233 not being
slower than my iBook 500 from what I saw in the store that day. That
said, I'm a Java developer, so I'm imagining I'm a little biased on
what constituents good, fast performance. Move to OS 9, though, and
all those problems go away (but Java drops to 1.1.8, which is no good
for me).

I wonder why people with "slower" iMacs wouldn't be as put off a iBook
owners. That is strange, but for some reason I don't doubt it. Was
your 300 MHz Mac QE compatible (though, still, that didn't make a
large difference when I tried out the iBook 700)?

And any way you slice it, I can't wait to try out a G5. I think
performance issues for Macs in X are beginning to become a thing of
the past (and already are in the towers). Still, I do miss Em[at]iler.