I'm not one to come out with false facts so I'll just basically say the truth about the matter. I've been visiting this site and many other Apple sites regularly and what I've basically concluded is that the MAC is a much NICER machine than anything the PC has to offer, but not faster or better in any way.
Everybody fails to mention that when the G4 beats the Pentium 4, it's done in Photoshop 6. Anybody who took the time to read about Photoshop 6 will know that this version takes advantage of Altivac on the G4. It's guaranteed that Photoshop will run faster if it's practically custom-made for a processor. Aside from that, why choose the Pentium 4. After watching Steve Jobs' comparison on apple.com, all I could say was 'ok dude, enough bullshit'. He claimed that the 4 leading processors are the P4, the Itanium, the SPARC and the G4. That's laughable considering the G4 holds less than 5% of the market and the P4 and Itanium are pretty much being destroyed on the market by AMD's products. How come Jobs never mentioned the Athlon?
It seems to me that the reason it wasn't mentioned is simply because the Athlon is actually quite comparable to the G4. Of course, the G4 is pound-for-pound the better processor. However the Athlon destroys the G4 in so many programs that the comparison is hardly worth making. Play games, use Office suites, encode/decode MP3's, DivX's or AVI's! You're way better off on the Athlon. When a GeForce 2 gets 131 frames a second on an Athlon and the G4 gets 52, you know something's terribly wrong.
All Steve Jobs basically declared is that if you're using Photoshop, and ONLY using Photoshop, then you might as well get a G4. If you're using a variety of different programs, you're much better off with an Athlon. Considering the price of the Athlon compared to a G4, you can get dual Athlon's with 512 megs of ram and a GeForce 3 and still pay less than a G4 system.
The next agenda now is the OS. People will say that Windows sucks. Frankly, 95, 98 and especially ME suck. I agree with you on that. That's why BSD and Linux have become viable options. However, nobody is dumb enough to sacrifice the immense amount of software available for the Wintel platform to touch an alternative OS. That's why you have Windows 2000. Nobody has anything bad to say about 2000. XP maybe, but 2000 is beautiful for a home system. Considering the events of the past days, I wouldn't recommend using 2000 for a server considering the numerous amount of exploits, but if you're at home and have critical update notification turned on (allowing you to patch holes before you get attacked), then you're in a FINE place.
Anyways. I love the MAC. I'm frankly fascinated by its history and adore Steve Jobs. The fact that he's born on the same day as me doesn't hurt. Nonetheless, it would be important for him to DROP the price of the G4 and especially the price of RAM (RAM on the PC is dirt-cheap now, why can't it be the same on Apple-made systems?) to fully compete with the PC. If we can get a G4 at the same price as a high-end Athlon, then Apple will actually destroy the PC market entirely (that and mentioning its lack of holes in the OS). Otherwise, it'll hold onto 5% of the market and keep trying to convince people who already USE the mac that it's faster than the PC in one task.
Btw, it wouldn't hurt to have Apple motherboards, processors and other components sell as a separate package like the PC so anyone can upgrade at ANY time. It sucks to buy an entire package every time you want to upgrade.