Which Mac OS for Mac Mini

Ive just dumped the old iMac G3 (400Mhz 128MB.... it was soooo slow) and bought a 1.25Ghz G4 Mac Mini 1GB off eBay for a sum of $300 AUD....

What Mac OS should I use on this machine - Im a Mac Noob!

I'll be compiling BlitzMax and messing with it mostly.

Cheers!

doesn't it come with an OS?

if not I would go with OSX Tiger which is 10.4.11

It does, think its 10.3.9... is this okay or should I upgrade?

I'd get the latest (10.5 Leopard) if you're looking to develop on it.
Xcode 3.0 and Objective-C 2.0 are worth it.

10.5 will run fine on it, but 10.4 is enough to run BlitzMax and compile stuff that will work on both.

Will this Mac Mini be okay with 10.5?

EDIT: jhans0n you answered my question before I posted by 8 seconds! LOL

Can I just do an update or do I have to buy the new versions?

Another question, If I compile on 10.5 will it work for all other versions?

Have you looked at how much it will cost as well? going from .x numbers isn't free on mac.

300 bucks seems a lot for an obsolete Mac. Did you specifically want a powerPC version?

its not too bad, really if you want to compile for mac then you need an intel and a powerpc

It'll cost you $129 USD to upgrade to 10.5. You may be able to find someone who will sell 10.4 for cheaper.

And yes, if you compile stuff on 10.5 it seems to also work on 10.4 - at least in BlitzMax. I can't tell you if it'll work for other stuff.

yes apple OS updates are free, not. you will most likely lose ilife install also which is another large chunk of change

stick with 10.3, your G3 had faster video acceleration then your "upgrade" to mini, and minis just get slower with added features of 10.4 and beyond, IMHO if you planned on working in 10.4 or above you should have bought an Intel Mac

This is why I've yet to dip my toe in the world of Macs :s

Yes, I'd wait for PPC macs to be buried altogether, unless they were doing billions of floating point instructions, they were typically 3 times slower than their PC counterparts of the time.

That and there is still probably 60-600 Windows98 users in the world to every one PPC mac user.

I think if I ever did decide I was going to get a Mac, it'd be just to compile games on. Not for daily use.

I had a play with MacOS in PC World a few weeks ago and its a nice enough OS.... its just.... I dunno. This Mac lark is such a minefield. Full of unjustifiably expensive mines, too.

One other advantage of not upgrading is that you can still run "classic" Mac apps, which you can no longer do under 10.5 as support for it was withdrawn in Leopard.

Thanks for the comments everyone.


I thought so... its like going from XP to Vista... Although at least MS changes the main version number!


Maybe, but overall its a lot faster! :-)


True, if you want to compile a universal binary, but a PowerPC build will run on an Intel Mac too... I do intend on getting a Intel Mac later on.


Gfk, thats what I'll be using it for anyway... it was just so painful doing this on the G3 (and setting the icon, putting the exe(?) in a dmg etc)


I know $300 seem a lot, but it looks like Mac stuff still sells for a lot when its old!!! Actually this was the cheapest by $50! And yes I did want a PowerPC for the reasons above...

Looks like Ill stick to 10.3.9... Cheers everyone :-)

Yeah I actually had a look on Ebay after I made that comment. In retrospect, it doesn't look like a sting :)