I've been playing around with the thought of moving from a PC to a Mac.

if you don't want to read this, skip to the "upgrade options"

My current setup

Most of my time I spent moving back and forth between Linux and Windows. During the last upgrade to Vista, I got myself pc with Core 2 Quad, 8GB of RAM and GeForce 9800GTX+.

Currently I'm running dual boot between Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows Vista x64. Most of my work, around 80%, I can do on Ubuntu, which is mostly Ruby/Java programming. If that was all I needed, Ubuntu would be really great.

However, I also do quite a lot of Photography and Design, which forces me to use Adobe software (not only Photoshop). I also work with Wacom Intuos4 tablet, which doesn't really have great support on Linux machines.

I've tried virtualization both ways (Linux in Win and Win in Linux), but neither was anywhere near satisfying.

These are those of many many reasons I want to move to OS X.

Upgrade options

This is how I see my upgrade options:

• Mac Mini - cheapest solution, but worst performance
• iMac - more expensive, better performing with second LCD for free
• Mac Pro - could match my current PC performance, currently outside of the price range

When I compare the Mac hardware vs my current PC, it will be always worse, unless I decide to pump in a lot of money. The question that comes to my head, do I need to match my current PC hardware to get the same user experience with a Mac?

If I look at it from the Vista point of view, 2GB RAM is as low as it gets, 4GB is usable ... and the 8GB runs very smoothly.

PC HW != Mac HW?

If I bought the Mac Mini for roughly the same price I paid for my PC (Core 2 Quad with 8GB RAM), I'd get Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM. But I don't want to run Vista on it, so I can't compare the hardware directly.

Say that I want to do the same things on the Mac Mini as I do on my PC, eg. open up 50 tabs in Google Chrome and start working with a large PSD in Photoshop (couple hundred MB), would running on Mac OS X compensate for the lower hardware performance?

My point is, that if I'm about to upgrade, I wouldn't like to upgrade to hardware that runs a lot slower. Good analogy for this is Vista vs Ubuntu, where you can run Ubuntu smoothly on a low end laptop, but in Vista, you'd be happy to open a browser. Does the same principle apply to OS X?