Ahh well thanks for all your guys' input. I happen to be typing this from my new Mac and I'm very pleased. Joeyconnick, your post helped me the most, and I appreciate all the advice everyone gave me.
Excellent Choice! If you have StumbleUpon, select Mac OS as one of the categories. I've found tons of great programs that way.
I don't like Macs that much.. I use them on a daily basis and they're much like a model - good to look at but not that interesting. The all-in-one form factor of the iMac is nice, but it's a complete ripoff. For the price of a mid-range iMac you could easilly get a computer with a quad core processor (iMacs only have dual), 8GB+ of RAM (iMacs only have 1-2GB in most configurations), and a high-end graphics card (iMacs have very low-end). We need to take into consideration that OSX is 64-bit, which makes use of your processor's full capability, and can improve speed by up to 2x 32-bit operating systems (which is what most non-mac computers run). Do a comparison of a 64-bit edition of Windows against OS X and you'll see that Windows is a much better platform. Adobe CS4 applications have GPU acceleration. That is, it taps into the processing power of your graphics card to improve load times. My computer has a 2GB ATI Radeon 4870X2, which is one of the fastest graphics cards on the planet. You can't get them in a Mac. My computer has the following hardware in it: AMD Phenom II X4 940 (quad core, 3GHz) 8GB DDR2-1066 RAM 2GB ATI Radeon 4870X2 and then there's my hard drives and disk drives and case and cooling and rarara... For the cost of my PC's components, you wouldn't be able to buy the lowest specced iMac, even though the lowest specs are the following: 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor (the actual processor model isn't listed lol) 2GB RAM 320GB Hard Drive (which runs at a slow speed of 5400RPM, whereas 7200RPM is the norm these days for computers) NVIDIA GeForce 9400M The graphics in it is PATHETIC! They not only used an integrated chipset, they used the MOBILE integrated chipset! My computer's components can be had for about $1500AUD. The lowest specced Mac is $1999AUD! And my computer runs a hell of a lot faster than any Mac I've used. My school has current-gen iMacs, and they're just horribly slow. It takes a good 5-6 minutes for them to fully load one of my 600MB Photoshop files, yet on my PC they load in about 5-10 seconds. This is from loading both off my USB drive and off the hard drive in each computer. Pretty sucky if you ask me. iMacs look prettyful, but if you want a powerful computer and some good bang-for-your-buck along with much better application and industry support, stick to a PC. Look, I'm all for personal choice, and I don't care if you choose to buy a Mac or a PC, but having false information put out there is annoying as hell. People think that Macs are superior at doing graphic design and whatnot, which is false. The same software is available for both Mac and PC, and with better hardware available for the latter they can get the job done considerably faster. Now that Apple uses hardware from Intel, AMD and NVIDIA, they don't have any edge on the competition. Most iMacs have the same guts as modern laptops, but with a different OS slapped on the hard drive and with a much higher price tag too.
One note George - typically when you run programs on a Mac, they have completely different and somewhat lower requirements than when you run anyone on Windows ^^ .
Even so, you can get remarkably better hardware for a PC with the money you'd spend on a Mac. And if Macs had lower hardware requirements for most programs then that means they don't have an excuse to be slower.
