Quote: I can't afford a darn Mac, but I hear they're not totally free of problems- just a ton less of them.

I run a mac and pc daily. A ton less than my pc is an understatement. But pc's are all different. As far as affordable macs, have you taken a look at gainsaver.com or one of the many other referb sites. My last three macs have been from gainsaver and never a hiccup. My last was a G5 dualie 2.Ghz. Eventually it won't be able to get on line when this version of my browser gets too old. But for audio it's all I'll ever need. It was around 700. Buy them stripped down and add the hard ware yourself it's cheaper and not hard to install. As a daily user of both [my pc is XP32 soon to become 64]I can tell you that they are constantly dumming down macs in the hardware department to make them more affordable. They even resorted to plastic for a while but I took this G5 to a gig as a back up for Biab and the pc they as are both still flakey as hell [ audio phile version] that mac weighs a lot more than 40 lbs. And the entire case is 3/16 aluminum but it feels like its steel. But the thing is even tho the engineering is still better in the case and` install stuff' environment, the real difference is in the opperating system. This is based on my experience with XP and os X. X and all the previous OS's are way faster in the work flow dept. Pc ethos seems to be why use one mouse click when three will do. In a word it's a lugubrious lump of dumb dos code. It irritates me daily. Unfortunately the audiophile version only runs on intell macs. Mine is the last of the motorola processors. I always ran Biab on macs till 2008. Below is from the gainsaver site. If it was me I'd go for something with the intel processors these days. Unless you just want trouble free audio forever and no internet on these after a few years.


Apple iMac - G5 - 17' 1.6 GHz - Apple Computer M9248LL/A
$219.10 used - GainSaver
Apple Power Mac - G5 - 1.80 GHz - Apple Computer M9031LL/A
$314.10 used - GainSaver
Apple M8570 Power Mac G4 Dual 867 MHz CPU 640MB Ram
$282 used - 5 stores

Ron

`15 Audiophile, Toshiba17", 3Mhz, 4gig ram, 500gig HD, Win7, Tascam 122mkII interface, Tascam 16 track 8 buss recording mixer, 2 Avalon747sps,CAD VX2 mic, AKG C1000s, mac and Digital Performer.