I've had Apple hardware off and on for most of my life and have really enjoyed it. Naturally, YMMV...
1. It depends. Definitely get more memory than you think you will need. The mini is better specced than my 3.5-year-old 15" iMac, and I'm able to get quite a lot of productive work out of it (though it can be clunky at times). 2. I have an 800MHz G4 (the iMac) and 1GHz G4 (my wife's TiBook). I wouldn't use them for hard-core render boxes or gaming machines, but they handle the various Adobe apps pretty reasonably. I get some slowdown with heavier operations/larger files in Photoshop, but overall that does okay. I'd imagine pretty much any of the current hardware would cope with what you want to do. 3. Okay, I won't. The G5's are much shinier, anyway. :-) 4. Probably, especially if you factor in the aesthetics and the "it just works" aspect of it. Though at this point I would say hold off on a big expensive Mac until after the transition to Intel CPU's. But a G5 today should last 2 years without any problem; the transition period should be handled pretty well based on my experience with the 68k->PPC era. (This is a point on which mileage has definitely varied based on your requirements.) 5. There's a thriving free software (and cheap shareware) community for the Mac, where a lot of the real gems are. For "real software" like Photoshop, I don't mind paying because I do manage to get my money's worth out of the software. GIMP is great, and I wish them all the success in the world, but in the mean time, the Adobe people crank out far more usable (from an interface standpoint) software. (Not intending to start any flame wars, just saying what works for me.) My suggestion would be to get an iBook, low-end powerbook, or mini if you really want to get a feel for the Mac, then use that to ride out the transition to Intel chips. Apparently the x86 version of the OS really screams on that hardware... *drool* I'd love to have the budget to go all-Mac at home, but I keep a couple of Gentoo boxes around because I feel the need to occasionally waste whole blocks of days breaking and rebuilding things. (During which it's nice to have the Macs around in case I actually need to do something.) Cheers, MIke -- Mike Pirnat [EMAIL PROTECTED]
