Want To Buy My First Mac... Don't Know What I Need, trying to solve ignorance Options

[impl0dr]

well... i need some major help. i have been making music on my piece of crap pc for a couple of years. it is really slow, so i don't have many options as to what i can run on it. anyway... i'm looking to get serious about the whole music making thing and know that MAC is the way to go. i know some basics of what i want, but don't know enough about macs or making REAL music using REAL equiptment. so... on to what i know i want:

g4 laptop 12" or 15"
-i need a separate hard drive for my music. my wife intends to use this as her computer for her job too.


i know ABOUT firewire, but don't know anything about it. i do know that i can only get firewire 400 on the 12 and 15".


i have some synths, a 12 track mixer, a drum machine that i will adding to (of course) and would like to get to start really using them.


anyway, i don't know what's available as far as specs go or what i want/need to get in order to sucessfully create music.

so, as you can see... i need a lot of help here. i would like to make this purchase sooner than later and really appreciate your time. thanks

[dixiechicken]

Mac:s have always had a higher pricepoint than comparable PC:s.
(a fair comparison is hard to do for a variaty of both technological & market reasons).

The main tecnological reason is that Apple does development of both hardware & software.

The speed myths are always hard to debunk, I can state thouh that my Fujitsu Lifbook E-7110 P4-1,7GHz
with 384Mb ram & Win2K, is generally slighly slower than 800MHz flatpanel iMac with 1Gb ram, running Mac OS X.

I mean simple things like opening word, excel, coying files across the network, booting up the computer.
My Fujitsu felt pretty snappy until I installed MS Office Professional, Norton AntiVirus, Acrobat 5 & few other things.

Cheers: Dixiechicken