i am interested in buying my first mac whether it be and notebook or a powermac. i was wondering what kind of hardware is pretty decent for a mac and will get most multimedia editing done w/ fair ease. i dont have the funds to buy the top of the line macs right now but i would like to have one w/ panther os x. maybe i am crazy but it seems like the macs run faster on slower processor speeds than windows machines? is that true and can someone give me an answer? SOK

Well,used Blue & White G3's are getting pretty affordable now, as are the first G4's (the silver "yikes" ones )..Personally,I'm entirely happy with my G3 B&W (it's got a LOT of harddrive space, a gig of Ram ,450MH chip speed) and it serves me just fine...i've seen them on ebay for less than $500 or ocassionally less than $400..and a 450 MH G4 would be even faster, and they're coming down in price too.. I do lots of multimedia work ( i'm a musician) and i find it works acceptably well for high quality video and audio editing..the one gig ram limit isn't really a problem considering the speed of the machine..they're pretty well matched..and PC133 ram speeds it up over the stock ram too... Well, macs *are* faster at the same chip speed because they use a different architecture (called RISC, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer)..this means rather than process all the info that may be available, a RISC chip selectively processes only the needed commands..which speeds up things enormously... At any rate, IMHO the starting point should be the B&W G3's and to the extent you can afford better , do so..i'd recommend you check the 'completed items' listings at ebay to see what they've been going for recently...i'm assuming you don't live up here in Canada,where i live, or you could pretty much double the amount you'd have to pay - which is why i don't have a G4 :( HTH

I just bought an iBook G4 1GHz 12" and I absolutally love it. It runs Panther and I use it mainly for software development. The only thing I suggest, is get lots of memory, and don't get it from Apple. I prefer Crucial memory. Also make sure you get a big enough hard drive.