I'm a unix admin, looking to possibly get a mac. How much 'mac' should I get? I know I'll need to jack up the ram a fair bit. What level of cpu will give me acceptable performance? How much difference is there between G3 and G4 of equiv mHz? I'll be compiling some software, heavy web use, digital camera stuff, some scripting, moderate-heavy usage, not games, no graphics heavy stuff. Wide open question, I know. Just looking for some experineces.

The most generic answer would be "as much as you can afford." Let's just say that buying something with a G3 wouldn't be the best idea. Just about anything else depends a lot on how much you expect to upgrade or expand the system down the road. p

If you are looking for a desktop machine I would recommend looking for a G4/400, or 450, or even a bit higher. The price will be right for the hardware horsepower, and you can run both OS X and OS 9.x on it. It will be more than adequate for what you spoke of.

If you are thinking on just play to learn I'll go with "fieraci's" oppinion. But, if this is serious stuff on a realistic budget for a first time mac user (switcher) I'll try a monster/hechizo mac. In other words something you could yourself. - Get a high ( tall ) rack mounted alluminum PC case and remove the power supply with lots of empty bays. - get a used G4 733 dual processor or higher on ebay, lower than that it will screw up your camera/video stuff. - Remove all pieces from the G4 and place them on the PC case. - Get yourself an extra CD-ROM. Combo and super drives take forever to read a CD properly. - Eventhaugh graphics is not your thing it paids to hve a good graphics board such as the radeon 9000 9500 dual head boards - Get a couple of used monitors one has to be and LCD and the other a regular 19" viewsonic - If you like fibre channel cards and disks o the PC an UNIX machines you'll just love it on a mac or o SCSI 320MB/sec raid solution. In both cases 5 disk is ideal. Your machine has got to be dual processor since UNIX IRIX and MacOS X+ work so much better on dual machines. NOTE: Wahteveryou do, DO NOT get a new 1.x GHZ machine it will be a lot more expensive than waht I recomend. Try this for starters: http://www.macopz.com/buildamac/ Has a bunch of lonks to G4 parts supliers Oh yes, I am a used apple dealer and consultant

"I am a used Apple dealer and consultant." "Buy [xxx] on eBay." "Get fibre channel ... or SCSI 320 raid." Uhm, two words: Over Rated One more word: Budget You also forgot that he's gonna need a new PSU and some serious case mods to make a bare G4 board work in an ATX case. p

Jason- I was in a similar position - wanted to network Mac/Windows/Solaris/Linux boxes and get familiar with various quirks. I got a G3/266 last summer. Installed various Mac OS versions from 9.1 - 10.2.1. Crashed and burned a lot. Replaced Hard Drives/RAM/etc and tried to learn Mac hardware quirks coming from a PC background. Just played with it to get familiar with Mac stuff - both hardware and software. Decided I wanted to play with a G4 this year. Got a G4/400 a couple weeks ago. Opened the case to add some RAM, but haven't played with the hardware much. Mostly use this when I want to use Mac-only stuff like the Safari browser. It's not lightning fast, but I paid a fraction of the cost of the new Macs and it serves my purpose. Having watched a lot of eBay auctions, G3's can be had for (MHz)x0.85 or less (I got my 266 for $227 - maybe could do better now). Lower end G4's seem to go for MHz+$100 (I got my 400 for $500). Mark