Robert,

It's not entirely true, but in some cases you're right, you probably won't see much difference in price between fully loaded top of the line machines. If I go to Dell and pick out a top of the line precision with dual Xeons and match it to a Dual 2.0 G5, there won't be much difference in price.

However for lower than top of the line, it's a bit of a different story. For example precision 450 vs. a dual 2ghz G5.
450 G5
CPU dual 2.4 xeon dual 1.8 G5
video Quadro FX 500 128 meg Nvidia FX 5200 64 meg
RAM 1gig 512meg
HD 120meg 160meg
DVD-burn8x 4x
Firewire yes yes
Price 1849.40 2499.00

Each has a couple of points in it's favor and you might say that the G5 is a better chip, but I will get to that latter. There are advantages the G5 has that aren't listed above like 64bit, comes with the iLife apps, and PCI-X slots, but none of those will help Carrara, though they may be things that are important to you.

Another advantage comes when you can pick and choose parts or you do a homegrown. For example if I'm just looking for a render monster for Carrara, I can strip down that Xeon to a plain CD-ROM, small hard drive, and a cheapo video card saving a nice chunk of change. For some of those things even if I want them top of the line, I can buy after market and still save money over upgrading the base model from dell. However if I buy from Apple, I don't have the choice of a 40gig hard drive.

For homegrown systems, you could build a dual Athlon MP box for probably about 1k + cost of windows that would be good for games and would be as fast if not faster than the top of the line Mac rendering.

If you're looking in the portable arena right now, the G4 has really fallen behind compared to the Pentium mobiles. Compare a Dell Inspiron 8600 to a 15" powerbook, similarly equiped, both 15 widescreen, firewire, dvd burner, 80gig hd, 512meg ram, ATI 9600 video, and about 4 hrs real world battery life. The 8600 would be a few hundred cheaper, will have a higher resolution screen, faster burner, more video ram, come with a 3 year warrenty, and render nearly 2x as fast as the 1.25 G4 (this is based on Cinebench scores, mileage may vary with Carrara). Now the 8600 is a couple of pounds heavier and only has 4 pin firewire so doesn't win on all points.

This is not to say that the Mac doesn't have it's strengths, but as far as Carrara is concerned the platforms are about on par. A equivalently clocked PIII, P4, or G4 will be within 5 to 10% render time. I have not personally run Carrara on an Athlon or a G5, but from results posted in various "how fast is my machine" threads, Carrara renders a bit faster on the Athlons, and the G5 runs about the same as a G4, except of course it's clocked faster. There just isn't anything in Carrara that needs the G5's delightfully outragous bandwidth. Maybe something with really big textures and tons of geometry would show a bigger gain, but I haven't seen anyone try that.

Ease of use is entirely subjective so I'm not sure how much feedback I can give here, but it really doesn't bother me to move back and forth. There are things and tools I like on both platforms, each has something to learn from the other. Neither one strikes me as better, just different. I find typing on a Mac keyboard a little awkward because of the positioning of the cmd key vs. the ctrl key and because of how Home and End behave so I tend to type most of my code on the PC. I bought my wife a G4 ibook recently which also allows me to maintain both platforms on the road via Virtual PC. I love it. It's convinced me that I need to take a serious look at the powerbook when it becomes time to retire the inspiron I use most of the time now. However after a few months with it, the wife prefers Windows and still finds OSX frustrating.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins