saxkiwi Loc: New Zealand

The question Im not too sure about is what is best to upgrade to... power mac or imac. Im told the imacs are only made to last about 5 years at the most but if youve got power mac then you can replace most if not all components to update. Anyone has any preferences or ideas? I currently have imac 24 inch

BHC Loc: Strawberry Valley, JF, USA

Don't tell Apple that. They've been using iMacs as work stations for many years.

By Power Mac, do you mean a Mac Pro or the old Mac with the 68000 or powerpc processor? The 68000 processor is obsolete and will not run any of the last three or four operating systems, much less any software written in the past five years. The last G5 Power Mac was made in 2006.

Mac Pro is a whole different game of Pong. Big, powerful and easily customized, they are also twice as expensive as iMacs and require the purchase of a separate monitor (or monitors). They are not really necessary unless you want to run a server for a WAL.

FilmFanatic Loc: Waikato, New Zealand

A computer that lasts five years and is still usable for serious work sounds pretty good to me. So 'only five years' is just fine. A mac pro costs some serious moolah

RMM Loc: Suburban New York

What do you want to do with your computer? If you're going to sit in front of it all day long editing huge photo files (24-36 MB RAW files), videos or sound, then a Mac Pro would be a good choice. While you can replace video cards or hard drives to keep it ticking, the processor will be the same one you purchased on Day One, and in 5 years, it will be obsolete.

My PowerPC G5 died a couple of months ago after about 8 years. It was running well until the end. I had added memory and a hard drive from another G5 which belonged to one of my clients, and had died. Some of the software I run on my laptop (Adobe Indesign CS5 and Photoshop CS5) wouldn't run on the PowerPC, where I ran InDesign CS2 and Photoshop CS2. Message: The software becomes obsolete faster than the hardware. It still ran the software I had well.

Now I have an iMac. Not as configurable as a Mac Pro, but as Bill41 says, the Mac Pro costs twice as much. In 5 years, both will be technically obsolete, and both will still be running.

So: an iMac with maxed out RAM will be a lot cheaper and capable of just about anything short of all-day-long professional editing of really large images or videos.

john901 Loc: Lancaster, PA

From the way you ask your question, I would guess you are not a "big time" computer user, needing the fastest, most complicated Mac available. Therefore, the iMac should be great. I am a heavy duty home user, and my iMac is way ahead of me. The new one is a super machine.

The five year and done story is baloney. Macs are well built; if you don't abuse them or wear them out from extraordinary use, there is no reason for them to just quit.

RMM Loc: Suburban New York

When I said a system would be obsolete in 5 years, I didn't mean that a system you buy today would no longer be functional. BUT...

If you can buy it TODAY, it's obsolete. Because engineering to manufacture next year's system is taking place today, and R&D for the year after that is going on in the labs now.

And operating systems and software applications are undergoing development all the time. Whenever a new operating system version comes out, some old software is no longer supported. New versions of software are written to take advantage of the new features in the operating systems.

If it's important to you to have the latest and greatest all the time, then five years is a very long timespan in the wonderful world of computers. If the hardware and software you have do what you need and want, then five years doesn't look so bad, and longer is at least feasible.

john901 Loc: Lancaster, PA

The questioner was asking about the Mac as a machine, not its software. As new software is developed, you upgrade the software; you don't have to buy a new Mac.

I have an older Mac I use a backup for some things. When I bought this Mac, it ran System 9.0. It is now running Snow Leopard and will soon be running Mountain Lion. Yes, it is a few nanoseconds slower than my new iMac, but who cares!

RMM Loc: Suburban New York

Hardware and software are separable up to a point. And somewhere along the line, the software requires features in a version of the operating system that won't run on your existing equipment. Just out of curiosity, what Mac ran system 9.0 and can run Mountain Lion? PowerPC Macs could only run up through OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and Apple dropped Rosetta, which allowed PowerPC applications to run on an Intel Mac, in OS X 10.7.

BHC Loc: Strawberry Valley, JF, USA

Many older Macs will still run OS 9, but for a Mac to run OS 10.6 (actually anything after 10.5.8) or later, it must have a "newer" imbedded systen Intel based processor. Mac's support of the PowerPC ended at that point although many universal programs will run the same on both systems. In addition, many of the older programs can still run newer Macs through the use of a second boot partition and an emulator. At the time of the switchover, many Macs that were supposed to have older processors got Intel CPU's. If you have a late plastic case and/or interchangeable battery, you technically have a PowerPC Mac, but you may have the hybrid board that will allow you to run just about anything. Apple has never let anything such as a new release keep it from an interim transition. No wonder Flextronics had to have so many separate adapters and dongles! BTW! The famous "Peoples' PC" or Apple IIe was such a roaring success that it was only prodeced for a total of 10 months.

And just because it will run a particular OS does NOT mean that it will run all the programs of the previous, a sad lesson I learned when I upgraded to 10.6.