Aperture. A Great Tool For Selling Fast Macs

OK, that's a slight exaggeration, but not much.

I spent a nice day at Apple Yesterday learning the ins and outs of Aperture. We were all (6 of us!) sitting using Macbook Pros, whizzing along, capturing images, editing them and designing books. Having played with Aperture before I was now re-enthused to have another go. So I get home, open the old Powerbook G4 (17", 1.67GHz) plug in the drive with my Aperture library and fire it all up.
The first thing I do is turn on the new quick preview mode. I know my machine isn't quick and it always had problems displaying even thumbnails. Quick preview mode uses a RAW file's built in
jpeg preview to avoid having to process the RAW, it speeds things up quite nicely.
Oh, but if only it were all so good.
As soon as I asked for any kind of heavy lifting it all just ground to a halt. Even using the straighten tool became hit and miss, every mouse movement lead to some rotation, it was just delayed by 5-10 seconds.
I though about exporting a few images to Photoshop to do a photomerge, then I thought better of it.
Whenever someone says to me 'What computer do I need to run xyz software?" I've always said that anything will run it, it just depends how much time you have.
With Aperture however, you really must have an Intel machine
I't's not just about the time it takes to process your files at the end, with Aperture you're always processing the file.
I'll just have to hope that my Powerbook blows up sometime soon. Or maybe I'll buy an iMac, I could do with some work-home separation!