I've been in the computer bis for over 12 years(mainly as a hobbyist) and have worked on PC's and Macs.. while the early PC's couldn't compare to a Mac at that time, its a majorly different story now. Apple is touting their "NEW DVD-CD-RW Drive", pc's have had them for 3 years, just in the last 18 months they have been made availible to the consumer. They're price is comparable to the Macs, in fact its cheaper. A decent ATI Card or Matrox card for the PC and a fire wire port or USB 2.0(which is now availible), will blow the snots out of a Mac. I know, I've seen it. As to Maya on the Mac, this is the first iteration(sp), Maya was orignally design to run on Unix, which OSX is based. So it wasn't much to pop it over. In my eyes the PC is more then just a workstation, its my MP3 jukebox, gaming console, web dev center, and 3D Workstation. I dare you to open 3D Studio Max, Maya and Poser at the same time on a mac. You're mac will tear itself apart. I've seen a G4 come unglued doing that. I run a 1ghz AMD T-Bird, with 512MB of DDR, 2 80GB Western Digital ATA 100 Hard Drives in a RAID0 config. Couple that with a 20" Sun Microsystem Direct Frequency(using a vga adapter) Monitor, Soundblaster Live! Platinum(Live! Drive included), Elsa Gladiac 2 Pro 64mb DDR(still a $400 card), and Klipsch Audio 4.1 THX speakers with a 400watt sub on it, I run circles around the newest G4's made. My scores in 3D Studio and a few others on the heavy bench marks are higher than that of P4 1.7's. No joke. The other thing I love about the PC, is if you know even just a little bit, you can tweak the hell out of the system, pushing up its performance bar. I find the Mac interface unintuitive, clunky, and the newer versions look like Christopher Lowell puked on them. Still, if that's what you like, go for it. I'll stay a PC Power user, with my fully mod'd case, and tweaked hard ware :)