macbook 13.3

I have a 3 year old powerbook and this cheap mac mini runs circles around it!! Even though it's completely low end, it's still fast enough to watch 720P HDTV and movies.

I upgraded it with 3GB of ram (though you have to do that yourself, apple will only install 2GB, but 50% more ram makes it MUCH faster. (the max it will recognize is 3.3GB but you'd have to install 4gb for that.. so it's kind of a waste)

You can EASILY hook it up to an HDTV through DVI-DVI, DVI-HDMI, or DVI-VGA. I do this when I download either a broadcast HDTV show or to watch a recorded show or movie from my cable box. You can record a digital stream to the mac mini through the Firewire connection of your cable box.

I recommend getting an external hard drive, and just using the internal drive for applications.
It seems to keep things snappy.

Anyway, I bought this mainly because I need to do 4 illustrations at 4 feet by 6 feet, I used Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and Corel Painter X all at the same time with documents ipen in each. I saved them as pdfs, and really never had to wait for any functions.

Only 3D and Video apps take time to render, everything else in real time.

So if you want a fairly inexpensive desktop computer (and understand you have to know a bit about computers to do any sort of upgrades) this is really pretty solid.

It's shipping with Leopard if you buy it from Apple Direct. Amazon won't charge you sales tax but Apple does, and you can get Leopard free from Apple for $10. and then you can decide if you want to use Tiger or Leopard from an external drive.