I don't use a Mac but have friends that do.
From DR. MAC: (may require free sign up at the Houston Chronicle)


"After a month I replaced the PowerBook with a dual 1-gigahertz Power Mac G4. In two words, double wow -- that's a "wow" for each processor. Once again it's the fastest Mac I've ever used by a good margin.

After I packed it full of RAM (1.5 GB, the most it can support), it was amazing. I could edit video, surf the Web, send mail, write a story, back up to another hard drive and paint a picture, all at once, with absolutely no degradation of performance.

The new PowerBook and the Power Mac are noticeably faster than my existing PowerBook G4/667 and my Power Mac G4/500. If you have the need for speed, these are the two fastest Macs I've ever tested.

So which is better? That depends upon what you do. Photoshop filters were faster on the dual 1 GHz, and rendering speed in Final Cut Pro was faster as well. Furthermore, since Mac OS X supports dual-processors automatically, the dual 1 GHz ran OS X 10.1.5 faster than any single-processor Mac.

If you use processor-intensive applications or run OS X full-time, consider a multiprocessor Mac.

If you don't use heavyweight graphics or video software, you might wish for a dual-processor setup, but a single-processor Mac is all you really need.

I have no complaints about the dual 1-GHz Power Mac."