Imac Or Ibook For Music? Options

So, I'm a pc-man, but SO tired for PCs... I think I'm not the only one... So I've been thinking about a mac. I make music with computer, so I need some power, but also stability (which PCs don't seem to offer...). I can't afford those G5s or even G4 (the one which look like computer, not iMac, eMac, or laptop...). PowerBook is too expensive too. So my choices are iBook and iMac. I thought about the 800Mhz G4 (12") iBook, or maybe the 933Mhz G4 one. How big is the difference in speed of those two iBooks? I would probably take that 640mb memory (which is the maximum) for those. So is the 933Mhz one worth the extra 200-300€ (or something like that in $s). And then the other one choice is the iMac (15") There's 1Ghz G4 processor in that and the maximum ammout of memory is 1Gb, which is more than in iBooks. Also, the memory seems to be a bit faster in iMac, because it's DDR 333Mhz, while it's DDR 266Mhz in iBooks. That iMac would cost about 1600€ (again, something like that in dollars), whit 1Gb memory (if I won't buy that memory from apple, cause they seem to have quite expensive memories). So, which one would be the best choise (price/quality ratio)? And can you say, what kind of pc do those macs match, (I know that the Mhz-ammount is not compareable). If you bother answer, I would really appreciate that, cause I really don't know anything about macs, and I don't believe in salesmans speaks.

[dixiechicken]

Petronome!

Comparing PC:s to Macs are a pretty tricky thing to do.
Due to the differences in the hardware and software.

My iMac G4-800MHz, with Panther OS-X 10.3.2, 1Gb ram & 120 GB Maxtor 7200
(slower systembuss and no L3-cache)

Feels on par with my brandnew Compaq NX7000 notebook,
1500MHz Centrino, 512Mb ram & 60 GB 7200 rpm nonstandard disk.
(fast frontside bus)

Thats most of the time for ordinary applications. (Ms office and the like)

While my iMac chugs along steadily without any great variations in speed & behaviour
my Compaq notebook shows great variations at times for no obvious reasons.

Thats mostly due I suspect to the piss-poor implementation of multitasking in WinXP-prof.
( all off a sudden opening the Controlpanel can take a minute )

The big advantage to Max OS-X is stability, security, almost no viruses,
( on my iMac at home I dont even use any anti-virus software at present - generally a very bad practise -
try that on a win xp pc and se what happens ) multitasking and memorymangement.

However the OS-X is a pretty resource hungry os, the more memory the better. Can you install/afford at least 1GB ram?
Do it!

Get the fastest Mac you can afford.
( although Panther is much faster than earlier OS X versions -- speed is not a very strong point either ).
( in comparison with other *nix systems )

One more thing to bear in mind: generally speaking due to the vertical integration in a Mac ( Apple designs both the hardware & the os & other software ) you will experience "very little hassle" installing software and hardware. True plug & play was a fact on the Mac long before (years) - Mr gates coined the phrase.

At one time I spent 14 days trying to install/connect an UMAX 630 SCSI-scanner to an PC Win NT-4 w. sp3.
( getting correct scsi-card drivers, gathering info on how to do it )
Doing the same on my old Mac PPC 6100 took me 15 minutes. Using inbuilt sccsi-port and the UMAX drivers written for
NOT the PPC-processor but the older 68K (68030/40) cpu:s.

Cheers: Good luck and welcome to Mac-Heaven
Dixiechicken