The PowerBook G4 Titanium 500 MHz sells for US$3499 which is US$900 more than the 400 MHz configuration (US$2599). While you get 100 more MHz, 128 MB more RAM and 10 GB more hard drive space, for the extra money, Macworld’s Andrew Gore reported
in tests of Photoshop filters that are Altivec (Velocity Engine) -savvy, there is no distinguishable difference in speed between a 400 and 500-MHz G4 system. That means the delta in performance on Altivec-related benchmarks (except for Lighting Effects), is less than one second!
This certainly might give buyers who are looking to get the fastest Photoshop speeds reason to consider the cheaper PowerBook configuration. Why pay more for a less-than-a-second difference?
But benchmarks are relative, so there is no one single measure that will suit everyone.
As we reported here back in November the venerable MacBench is no longer useful as a benchmark tool for testing the performance of your Mac. This leaves Mac users in a bit of a quandary: how can you compare performance of modern Macs?
Steve Jobs loves to talks about Gigaflops, Macworld uses Speedmark 2.1 (which is not available to the public), pixel pushers like Photoshop scripts and filters, music junkies like MP3 encoding, but no one can seem to agree.
Is the extra US$900 worth it to you for the 500 MHz model? Why? What is your barometer for Mac performance these days? Post your thoughts using the feedback link below.
