Seems like the wrong time to jump ship. I considered it. I can build a 1.4GHz Athlon w/ GeForce 3, RAID drives, etc. for $1,400. And that's in a nice, server-style tower case (expensive). I went as far as to purchase the motherboard, heatsinks, DVD drive, and floppy. Then it hit me. Regardless of how much faster that machine would be than a Mac (and yes, the 1.4GHz Athlon does indeed easily defeat any G4 out there presently)...I just couldn't bring myself to run Windows as my home OS. No. It feels proprietary, after using OS X and its Unix underpinnings.
We're at an early stage with OS X. It's an exciting time. There's new hardware on the way (and I think we'll be seeing dual 733's and potentially dual 8xx's--quite capable of running OS X very, very swiftly). There's native apps on the way--portings of Unix apps, OS 9 apps, PC apps. It's a stable OS using the best kernel out there (Mach + BSD), the most advanced GUI out there, and the single best applciation development toolkit included for free. (NeXTSTEP Developer, which had the precursor to OS X's kernel, and all the same dev tools, used to cost $5,999 -- no hardware in that price.)
It seems this is the worst time to jump ship. So I'm returning/eBay'ing what I've ordered to build the PC and am about to jump on the next G4 offering. I felt I'd regret the move to gravely.
(I admit... part of the decision had to do with me popping in "Pirates of Silicon Valley" the other night and watching a few minutes... made me patriotic.)
blakespot