I can't afford a Mac, but is this PC good enough in the mean

It depends on how much they are charging you for either of these machines- you can get a much higher spec'd computer brand new from dell for $300 including monitor and everything.

http://www.myspace.com/11505663

the mac has.. not one of those flatscreen monitors but a regular box shaped one.. if that helps.

the gateway is going for around $150- $200 and the mac i havent been able to hustle a price on yet. id really like to hustle that mac instead. any idea how much that mac should go for? i know they only made three processor speeds on the G4... one at 1Ghz, the other a bit faster, and the other one besides that a bit slower.

ah.. nevermind
i'll just get an intel imac instead

Yeah...be aware they're still working out some issues, and you have to use the Rosetta translation background app, which steals some resources. Shouldn't matter much though, as your needs are fairly simple. Macs are way less frustrating to work on than PC's, for me at least. Core Audio/Core Midi is brilliant.

Of those two mentioned, I'd take the Mac. I'm suprised that Gateway hasn't given up the ghost.

triskelion:

I suggest you go for the Mac no matter what. You *can* afford it - a Core Duo Mac Mini is not that expensive, but it's an amazing computer. Macs are not just great-looking, silent and reliable computers, OS X is 10 years ahead of Windows in terms of ease of use, eye pleasing and flexibility, not to mention it's incomparably more stable and secure, and how fantastic the OS is integrated with the hardware.

P. S. You are hearing this from a person who used Windows for 1 year, then switched to Linux and used it for 4 years and 6 weeks ago switched to Mac. I still keep on using Windows and Linux occasionally on other's PCs, but oh my what a huge difference it is to get back to a Mac...

I second the recommendation of the intel-based mac. it's the least risky computer out there at the moment in the sense that it's the only one that can run all of the major desktop OSes: OS X, Linux, and Windows.

BTW if you haven't seen the ads that are showing on apple.com with the Bill Gates lookalike, they're a blast. Check out the one called "virus".

-illiac

OMG, those are hilarious! Is that the kid from Dodgeball?

Love the "Japanese Camera" one.

Erm...?

The last released version of desktop Windows was XP in 2001, so it's not hard for Mac OSX which gets regular updates to look nicer. Apple is known for having a visual bias, making products look slick.

But who cares about looks, I want reliability, clarity etc, extra bells and whistles just cause problems when your machine is under load. One of the original designers of the Mac OS designed it such that the interface didn't detract from the application. It seems now the OS must be visible and the Mac is going along the route of other OSes.

If you have used Windows for such a short time then it is likely you are going to find something else you have used long easier to use. I switched my net machine to Windows at the weekend and had to switch it back to Linux again as I couldnt bear Windows after using Linux for so long.

Price performance ratio is better on Windows, greater choice of hardware and if you dedicate a PC to being solely a music PC then you won't have many problems.

Macs are expensive and when they were PowerPC I thought the premium was worth it, however Macs are now just polished Intel boxes, I don't like Intel processors and so I won't buy one. Why they couldn't use AMD I don't know (AMD dual core is a better implementation, memory latency is lower etc).

PCs are perfectly capable, if you know Windows well then you can disable and remove a lot of bloat and it will run very well.

As far as OS designs, both are a bit frankenstein under the hood. OSX's kernel has about 4 layers to simply create a thread, plus different interface systems. The scalability of OSX as a server is rotten. Windows is a mix of APIs and all sorts, there's a DOS emulation layer in there, posix api (or used to be).

For the unknowledgeable user a Mac is easiest, for a computer veteran either will do. PC has more software available and more hardware available.

Evaluation of a computer system is not in how long it takes to start a thread, or how many flock()'s it can call per second. It is measured by a distance between your idea and it's ready implementation.

FWIW, Apple make a system in a class of it's own, because it's user-centric. People who are creative hate to waste their time, they want their ideas come up on screen or from the audio outputs as fast as possible. And after 1 (unhappy) year on Windows and 4 (quite happy) years on Linux and now 4 *orgasmic* months on OS X I can tell there is no other system than it that can provide such a pleasant creativity environment.

I fully agree, I used to use Amiga computers and having the hardware and OS created by the same people is a more reliable solution. Not to mention the Amiga's MIDI timing was rock solid due to lack of distance between hardware and OS libraries.

Anyway, my point is if you know your stuff you can install Windows on some good hardware, bonzai the Windows install to remove all the rubbish and then load up your favourite sequencer.

Having the flexibility to create your own PC with a fast RAID implementation is useful.

I've made me one reservation known, I don't like the fact Apple went for Intel. I loved the PowerPC architecture and wished they had moved to AMD64.

Apple are charging too much money for an Intel based machine, I thought the premium was worth it for quality Motorola processors but cheap Intel rubbish? nah.

Apple's stuff is well worth it because It Just Works No Matter What®