[Yossarian]

I'd buy a Mac

For real?

if they actually came with high end video cards

Well, you can build to order with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500, as documented here. That qualifies as high-end!

and if the software I use ran on them.

Well, you can reboot to Windows or Linux using Apple's free Boot Camp, or you can buy Parallels Desktop for Mac, which lets you run a virtual Windows or Linux machine without rebooting.

Right now Boot Camp holds the edge on the graphics speed, but the Parallels team says they're working on getting high-speed graphics drivers working.

(Also, VMWare is coming for the Mac as well....)

Such a shame.

Apparently, not really.... I guess we'll see you soon on the Mac side?

[JamesP81]

Well, you can build to order with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500, as documented here. That qualifies as high-end!

The Quadro is more for the professional than the enthusiast. I don't do a lot of video editing, so it doesn't really fit my application. I'm more into gaming. Apple offers a Mac Pro with 4 nVidia GeForce 7300 gts in SLI, but that's mostly a marketing gimmick; a single Geforce 7900gt or gtx will be faster. In fact, and it's inexplicable to me, but it seems that Apple has exerted its every effort to avoid offering a high powered nVidia graphics card for gamers in any of its machines. In fact, Apple has marketed everything else it possibly could except this. While SLI 7300s are good if you are a casual gamer, it doesn't cut mustard when we're talking about Half-Life 2 or FEAR.

And while I could run Windows and Mac OS on one machine, who wants to do that? The advantage of the Mac is OS X, not hardware (not anymore). OS X runs on the same hardware as Windows (that's why Windows can run on a Mac now). It defeats the purpose of buying a Mac to not use it OS X. What I really need is for the software and game publishers to release Mac versions of their software. There was a time about 15 years ago when the publishers did release everything for Mac as well as PC. I had a Mac back then, and it was great.

[JamesP81]

Not to mention that spending $1650 for a Quadro is tough when a 200-300 for some mark of GeForce 7900 will do as good or better job with games.