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

[boze]

thx for being diplomatic, gs94- i appreciate it.

it's just that i don't think we as mac users need to hoodwink anybody into thinking you need to spend $1600 on a 12" pbook to make music on a laptop. these days with the continuing osx migration of our favorite apps and plugins and instruments it's actually still an awkard time in some ways.

plus as somebody who's only in the past 4 months running an xp system for audio i'm in kind a 'emperor has no clothes' mode since i've been paying through the nose for so long and it's not like apple doesn't have plenty of hw and sw issues of it's own. the fact that it's a mac forum shouldn't keep us from being up front about the fact that you can do anything on a 2.2ghz P4 Toshiba laptop for $1050 that you can do on a $2000 pbook except for run Logic and Soundtrack.

in some ways i feel like it's the blind devotion of much of the mac community that keeps us living with things like this long-ass wait for the 15" aluminum powerbook. it's nice to be aligned with something other than wintel, but osx is not exactly the green party in this equation.

and what you call my 'agenda' (i know you weren't trying to call me out, i'm just saying..) i perceive more as my 'experience'. i've recently bought a really usable vaio laptop for a good price and i'm doing audio (mostly reaktor, which runs like 300% better under windoze) and having a fine time. it makes me think twice about the prices people are paying for 867mhz or 1ghz of G4 in a laptop and the G5's aren't here in a mobile form factor to save us just yet.

it's not that i'm trying to get ppl to buy PCs, it's that i'm trying to testify about my recent experiences producing on both platforms with sony and apple hw and draw some conclusions about value based on those experiences.

-- sorry to carry on this way in your thread implodr, the new 15" pbooks make the situation somewhat brighter now so you got that going for you if you want a mac--