Cheapest OS X box?

Idealy, you'd get a Blue&White G3 Power Mac tower. Jaguar runs on the older beige G3's, but I'm pretty sure Panther is dropping that support. Also, you might check out an iMac, they're pretty cheap and perform decently. I'd look into one of the later models, the ones with the slot loading drives. I have one, and I think they're terrific. Plus, they got airport slots, firewire, and VGA video out, if you want to hook them up to external monitors or projectors.

Personaly though, I'd go for the Power Mac, as its just more expandibly.

a 600mhz g3 imac can be had for like 700 dollars and if u put more than say 128mb ram in it it should run OS X just fine

i agree with the suggestion of a blue and white, these machines can be upgraded to up a g4 550 (soon a g4 1ghz) or a g3 800mhz as well as up to a gig of ram. and as for the beiges (which can go up to a g4 1ghz or g3 800mhz) panther will drop support for them. the system requirements have from the blue and white up. another good choice is the sawtooth g4 which has an agp card so you can buy a quartz extreme capeable gfx card.

hope this helps.

by the way, i run jaguar on a g4 450 and it runs just fine (with 448mb ram) just make sure you get as much ram as you can, the more you get the more performance you'll gain.

I'lll concur with the peanut gallery and suggest a B+W G3.

I just bought some for the office and they are great. Max out the ram and they run jaguar smoothly and can handle most tasks just like a new ibook does.

I wouldnt do any dvd authoring, but for around 500 bucks you have a great OSX box. Plus these babies will resell great as I cant see them going below 350 for at least another 3 or 4 years.

150 bucks for 4 years is unbelievable. No PC can claim that.

-Doc

Why not just buy a refurb eMac? For the price of a used G3 plus the upgrades, sometimes just a little more, you could have a nice G4 with all you need. Maybe more RAM. I saw one for $599 on the Apple Special Deals page awhile ago. PowerMax and SmallDog often have deals on used and refurbs.

Though I do wish Apple had a cheap, headless Mac. It would be very popular. I'd buy one. Even if I had to upgrade it with more RAM, drives, etc.

I'd go with something that could support Quartz Extreme, like the Sawtooth mentioned earlier or a cheap eMac as also suggested. Using OS X is so much nicer when the video card can handle all the advanced graphics without having that loaded onto the processor.

don't get a used machine more than 2 years old. It will just break down on you and you will have to pay more money than its worth to fix.