newbie q- why such slow speeds???

Take a look here for a previous discussion.

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11287

the best thing is go to an apple store and try out the new macs and actually spend some time with them

and try out a friend's mac machine

it's the whole overall mac experience and more than just cpu clock speed

anyway, go out and have fun with the new macs, they are truly fun

my company is leasing a Sun machine that costs well over $10,000 to act as a CAD server. CPU-wise, it only has two 900 Mhz chips. Given this is a free market economy, there must be something else attractive about the computer than just the "alleged" speed difference.

It's not just hte CPU clock speed that makes a machine fast there are more critical areas to performance.

Slashing the P4s core clock speed in half and doubling the bandwidth of the system bus would yield a much larger performance gain than simply doubling the CPUs core clock speed.

The chips have fantastic theoretical speeds and can perform MIPs, but you cannot feed them near fast enough to use it. The caches run dry and the CPU spins its wheels waiting for instructions and data.

Don't forget the all-important "pipeline". The Pentium 4 has a 21-stage instruction pipeline, while the G4 only has a 7-stage. The addition of that L3 Cache can't hurt none either.

Gus