Originally Posted by BBKing

Worth mentioning that the OP was comparing an 800Mhz G4 with a 2.6Mhz unspecified Intel processor. Don't compare Mhz to Mhz except within the same processor design, it's completely pointless. For instance a 1.3 Mhz Pentium M will be comparable to a >2Ghz P4 in the same machine (I have a 2Ghz P4 laptop, and the newest models of the same laptop use Pentium M at 1.3 or 1.4Ghz, yet run faster).

Intel, who have always had the fastest speed in terms of raw Ghz, unsurprisingly have spent a vast amount of advertising budget promoting the myth that the greater the Ghz, the greater the processor, which is now untenable as their best chip (the Pentium M) is unfortunately clocked at similar speeds to the opposition, so they'll have to sell it on something else, like how it actually performs. Shame.

G4 is not the Apple version of P4, it's a totally different processor architecture called POWER made by Motorola/IBM (not 68000 any more, Proppin, that was a while ago!).

Other chip architectures such as the AMD K8 (Athlon64/Opteron), the Fujitsu SPARC64V and the Sun UltraSPARC are all clocked far lower than Intel's Pentium 4s, but can cream it in the real world (they're also all 64bit). So don't look at the raw speed to compare processors.

All of which being said, a Mac will be, price for price, slower than an equivalent Intel/AMD based machine. However you get a well designed, great looking system with a robust Unix based OS, less risk of security compromises, that can do pretty much anything a PC can do, with the glaring exception of any kind of proper gaming, beyond a few notable ports such as SimCity4.