Mac or PC?

[daverx]

I'm about ready to buy a new PC. I do mostly web development and design, so I need something that will be the best for this. It's for both business and pleasure, but it's my first big purchase after getting into the OP biz. I guess this sounds like small potatoes to some of you but it's big deal to me.


I am torn between a Powermac G5 and a Dell Dimension XPS. I am familiar with macs, as I've owned two of them (most recently a Powerbook G3 right around the time OS X first came out). All I really need is Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver. I want what is best for web work, and not much else matters. I rarely play games.


Does anyone have any other suggestions? I'd like to do this as cheap as possible, but I still want it done right, if i'm going to be spending any money, it has to be good.


Also, I plan to lease it. I understand that if I select a dollar buy-back option at the end of the lease, I cannot deduct the whole cost of the rental as a tax deduction, I can only deduct the depreciation, correct? I will probably do a 10% option or a fair market value end-of-lease option. Any advice there would be appreciated as well.


Thanks in advance.


-daverx

[drugsdr]

If I was shopping for a new pc I'd be seriously looking at one of those Ti books, but that is just me.

I think you left out one factor which is important. Security.

You can save yourself the trouble of 99.99% of virus, worms, trogans and back doors by running something other than Microsoft Windows.

For this reason I'd say go Mac if you are already used to them.

(Or go linux or BSD if you have balls)

[MedsDirect]

Is your compute use primarily Graphic (Photoshop) or code (Dreamweaver)? We run both systems in my design and programming companies.


If its design, I'd highly reccomend the Mac G5. A comparable PC system that takes advantage of proper graphics caching for design (not gaming) and can handle the memory requirements of high detail design work is very, very hard to arrange. We have one PC graphics workstation running on an accelerated abit motherboard with a hyperthreaded P4, 2 gig of synchronous ram and a 128 GeForce FX ( the pro/TI version) and it matches the macG5. No other configuration we've tried works (they all lag really really bad on brushes, raster filters and photo manipulations).


In contrast, our typical development workstation ( an Athalon xp2200+ on an asus motherboard with 756 ram) can do massive find and replace updates, database queries and template updates way faster than the mac. You can also run SQL servers easily and locally to test database integration.


In my opinion, if you do both design and development, go with the abit I mentioned. It's a custom build though so not likely to end up in a lease program. Also, it costs about $1500 to build (without monitor or other devices) so it can easily approach the cost of a basic G5. Not sure about lease cost comparissons though, we resell our old gear to clients so we have never needed to lease.

[redex]

MAC is great for DTP but a PC has so many software offerings. Then again, Linux is sweet and virtually virus free. Hell, get one of each, you sell meds online. You can afford it! smileys/smiley2.gif

[Star]

Pay cash and deduct the whole amount from your 2003 income (up to $100,000).