Mac mini Dual core vs. G4 500MHz Dual tower w/ non native applications

Question

I have a Power Mac G4, Dual 500MHz. I wanted to upgrade to the G5 tower, but am getting concerned that I will be buying an obsolete computer as Apple migrates to Intel. I use Microsoft Office and Adobe's Creative Suite 2 (CS2) primarily on my G4 and am really tired of the slow performance. I was thinking of buying the new Mac mini dual core and add an additional 7200 RPM external Hard Drive to improve the drive performance until the new Intel towers come out. I know that the applications I use are not written for the Intel processor. Does anyone know how well these applications perform on the Intel mini vs. my old old G4?

Answer 1

In a year or so, there will probably still be more PPC Mac users than Intel ones, and I doubt that any smart company will end support for PPC Macs that early. Apple provided developers with a way to create Universal Binaires for two reasons : to avoid the confusion introduced by two versions (PPC & Intel) of the same app, and to force (i.e. strongly encourage) developers to support both platforms for quite some time.
There's no doubt that a PowerMac G5 will run Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), and probably the following version too. CS3 will be Universal, and will thus run at full speed on both PowerPC and Intel-based macs, and there's a chance that CS4 could be Universal too. If you buy a PowerMac now, it probably won't be outdated before three years or more.
While the Intel Core Duo is much faster than a G4 and quite a bit faster than a single G5, I think that a Dual G5 could be about as fast as they are (maybe a bit slower "per-gigahertz", but Core Duos don't reach 2.3/2.5 Ghz yet anyway) ...
Regarding the fact that Office runs well under Rosetta but not CS2, that's because CS2 is a much more demanding suite of applications, which probably features a lot of AltiVec code (software sepcifically optimized for the G4/G5's Velocity Engine - which wasn't originally supported by Rosetta and now is, but translating PPC code into Intel x86 isn't fast, so translating code that's supposed to run very close to the processor itself must cause an even grater performance loss). Even though Photoshop probably won't run slower than on your dual 500 Mhz, it probably won't run much faster, so if you don't want to get a PPC Mac, then I suggest that you keep your G4 for now and wait until Apple releases the next generation of PowerMacs.
On the other hand, one of the reasons why your G4 is slow with Photoshop could be because you don't have enough RAM. Most people who have used the latest version consider that 512 MB is a minimum, and 1 or 2 GB are recommended. If you only have 256 MB or so in your Mac, why don't you just add some memory and wait until the next PowerMacs ?