Apple with Intel — My Personal Take

Well, seems everyone is weighting in on the Apple to Intel move. I thought I should relate my personal dilemma surrounding the switch.

Background

I have/had an Apple Power Mac Quicksilver 2002. This is a dual 1GHz machine with 1.5 GB of memory. Perfectly good for my iLife work, HTML and Perl coding.

Was it Tiger?

It all started around my move to Tiger. I upgraded, but I started to get some intermittent crashes and problems. I couldn’t really pin-point the issue, so I did a backup and install installation over the upgrade install, preserving my user preferences. This only seemed to make matters worse. I was nearly convinced that it was some Tiger compatibility issue with my older system.

Based on some of the errors, I began to think that I might have some bad memory. So I pulled out the faulty chip (after a little trial and error) and still the crashes kept occurring, in fact more and more often. When I couldn’t even boot from CD, I finally realized that this wasn’t a “Tiger Issue” but a hardware one.

Seeking Professional Help

I live a little outside London, so I thought I was going to have to travel quiet a bit to get some technical help. Turns out that Computer Warehouse are within two miles of my home. So I took the system in. They claimed there was a six week wait for help due to the sheer number of new macs that were being configured by the staff.

About a week later they called…

Diagnosis, el morto

Yes, the worst of all possibilities, one of the CPUs was deal. A replacement (with labor) was 800. A good friend confirmed I could get an upgrade CPU for about {-L}600. This is nearly the cost of this system on ebay.co.uk right now! I can’t really justify fixing the thing…

Quick Thinking… Get a Backup

I do backup regularly to DVDs and mac.com; however, it would stink to pull it all together… so I convinced the rather nice tech at CW that if I bought a Lacie Big Disk from them, could he backup my disks with the temporary CPU he put in to test… Phew! ( From what I understand my older drives don’t fit in the new macs. )

‘I’ Day

Yes, the Apple World Wide Developer Conference is today, the day of the bad news… and wham… Apple is moving to Intel. DOH!

Not only is my computer dead and I need to get a new one. Not only was I saving to get a Powerbook, but can’t because I think I really need a Powermac replacement first. But Steve Jobs announces the switch to Intel!

What do I do!

Option and Help!

Here are my options as I see them:

   
PRO CON
Buy my identical system on ebay and stick my old drives in and wait to see what happens with apple over the next 18 months. The price of these system for the past few days is nearly the cost of the current low end new Apples… the morons.
Buy a Powerbook now (I want one anyways) and see what happens. The Powerbook is likely to get the biggest boost from the switch to Intel
Buy a mini now and give it to the kids later. The mini is also like to get a big boost from Intel and might not be powerful enough for iMovie and the like.
Buy a refurbed Powermac now and just wait for second generation Powerbooks to come along as I won’t be able to afford it very long. The cost is high and it will still be a good system when the world stops writing apps for the PowerPC architecture… what a waste.

So, what should I do? If anyone can help, please let me know.