Apple are the best makers of computers and OS but if like me you dont have much money then the G4 is probably the one to go for, as it has all the greatness of apple mac at a much lower price.
I got my G4 off of ebay for a very reasonable price about 5-6 months ago and it was a great change from my old dell PC which was painfuly slow and overloaded.
External Issues: The G4 Quicksilver is a very sexy and nice looking tower computer although some people dont like the sliver effect i think it makes it look sleek and proffesional, also some people dont like the fact that it is finished in plastic but i think this mackes it look nice and shiny. The clear handles are another nice effect as they distort any thing on the other side of them. One of the bad things about the G4 is that it is by no means silent and if you keep the original hard drive that realy dosnt help the noise issue, music can easily cover te noise but i wouldnt reckomend it for working in a quiet environment.
Internal Issues: I quite like doing animation, video editing, sound editing and such like things and OS X makes this so much easyer and more enjoyable. Also the whole user interface is much more fun/pleaseing to use than XP as every thing is smooth and animated eg. when you minimise a window it slides away and expose allows you to sort of fling windows around and choose which one you want in stylish manner. There are of course the issuses with compatiblity of programs [between mac and windows] and there are barely any games for mac but i dont play games so that dosnt matter too much and the only program i had on windows that dosnt work on mac is virtual dj and there are mac equivolents of this. Unfortunatly the G4 cant run parrallels or any thing so that dosnt help. The 733 is reasonable speed, hardly ever chrashes but it aint exactly speedy so if you are thinking of doing any thing very taxing i would recomend a newer mac but the G4 is perfect for students/teenagers as it has all the pros of OS X but with out the latge bill.
A few other handy features are the little speaker on the front for when you dont have and other speakers plugged in and the fold down side that makes upgrading easy as pie!!
