“On my tight budget, a low-end consumer computer is all I can afford,” Julio Ojeda-Zapata reports for The St. Paul Pioneer Press. “I can dream, though. What would I get, with a few more bucks to throw around?”

Ojeda-Zapata reports, “The obvious choice here is a high-end PC from Dell or HP. But I have an unorthodox recommendation: a Macintosh computer.”

“Macs used to be pricey but anemic compared with their PC brethren, in large part because of underpowered PowerPC processors. That is no longer the case. Today’s Macs use PC-style Intel processors, which give them comparable performance and let them run PCs’ Windows operating system along with Apple Computer’s own Mac OS X. Mac prices are roughly comparable to PC prices, too,” Ojeda-Zapata reports.

“I test-drove Apple’s two top desktop machines: the Mac Pro tower and the 24-inch iMac. I found both computers to be tempting options for PC and Mac veterans alike,” Ojeda-Zapata reports. “In testing the Macs, I chewed through high-end video- and photo-editing tasks with astonishing speed — faster on the Mac Pro, obviously, but plenty quickly on the iMac… If PCs and Macs provide comparable processing power, a computer purchase might be made largely on aesthetic grounds. Macs are hard to beat in this category. They’re gorgeous. Nothing on the PC side compares… Both Macs run multiple displays [and] the Mac Pro, astonishingly, runs as many as eight 30-inch displays when properly configured with multiple video cards and their DVI ports.”

“The Macs’ Intel processors mean they can run Windows XP. I used my Mac loaners to test Windows-friendly software and hardware and could hardly tell I wasn’t on a standard PC,” Ojeda-Zapata reports. “On the other hand, a PC won’t let you use Mac OS X. So if you’re a potential switcher who finds Macs enticing but still needs to use Windows, a Mac gives you the best of both worlds.”

Full article here.

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