amiga_3k wrote:
Price drop is not that surprising, really, as PowerPC is a dead-end in Apple-country. Combine that with the less than sexy looks of the eMac and the reasons are complete.
Exactly; YMMV also regarding the desirability of the internal CRT.
As someone continuing to support a relative with a 1.4GHz Mini, OS X should really be pretty happy, especially if the GPU is supported by the various accellerations. The question is whether the CPU has the grunt for the applications you desire; for instance, AFAIK even the PPC Mini does not quite have the grunt to work with HD video.
The main thing, in this era of cheap RAM, will be to try to get it up
beyond 1GB if possible. The PPC Mini has an inexplicable hardware limit; I seem to remember the eMac might be more expandable. OS X is only a 'modest' memory pig on par with Gnome/KDE and XP, but almost anything worth doing on the Mac involves large graphics and large Adobe software.
2GB should leave tons of headroom, and I believe is an under-$100 proposition these days. Remember, systems like the original Amiga and QNX6 feel so responsive because they just run out of memory without paging -- either you can fit your working set or you can't. Swapping to disk (in all modern systems) lets you exceed that limit until you're cursing that things have ground to a halt. (Photoshop plus Acrobat plus an excess of browser tabs -- or both Safari and Firefox running at once -- is certainly enough to get the 1GB Mini turning to disk, though it's still quite usable enough.)
