VirtualSite: "things like Illustrator and Photoshop -- are much more stable on the Mac than the PC, since they were written specifically for that architecture then ported to the PC."

I would be interested in seeing anything that might back this perception up. The code for Photoshop has been altered and changed so much since it's time as a Mac program that there doesn't seem to be any reason to think it is specifically written for the Mac at this time.

As for the stability issue - that is an odd one. We run Photoshop on a bunch of machines as do our clients, 90% of the time on Windows 2000 & XP and there are absolutely ZERO stability issues. None.

Ah well, one of each is nice if you have the $$$ but if you have to pick, go for the PC. There is no reason to lock into the Mac platform these days. they no longer have any advantage for art production.

Barbarellany: "One last note, Most of your graphics software is on hybread cd's that have mac already on them."

Not Poser, 3DS Max (oops - no mac version at all.... :) ), Premier or After Effects. Neither is Illustrator or Pohotoshop.

In fact, NONE of the high end software I no of is on hybrid CD's.

Barbarellany: "Mac is the way to go. The new Power Mac G4 w/ dual 1 ghz. Comes with Super drive (CD&DVD Burner)80gb hd, GeForce4 MX graphic card"

And is priced way, way too high. Since the MacOS doesn't handle dual CPU's natively (OSX does though...) having two of them is of little real value that I can see for most uses - but some apps Do support it. You can get dual Athlons for much less money, heck you might get dual 1.8 ghz P4's for that money.

The DVD drive is nothing special, PC versions are easy to find.

The GeForce4 was kind of interesting, till you see that Apple has totally hooked up with the slowest version of that chip to be made available and that the PC versions of the card are much faster.

ronknights: "Poser and Adobe PhotoShop are the graphics programs I use the most"

The current version of Poser will not be helped any, though there is a lot of reason to believe Poser5 will make use of hardware acceleration to display the working space (in other words they seem to be making all the right changes, and this is clearly one of them).

Photoshop >IS< helped by a fast/good graphics card. Not the 3D accel, but the 2D performance is a big factor in how well Photoshop works. not for filter processing, but for drawing and manipulation of layer positions.