Just to quickly document the fact, I finally made it in to an Apple retail store ("brick and mortar") this past weekend. Here are some quick impressions...

Ran around the store trying out iPhoto on the different hardware they had set up. They had iPhoto set up well, with around thirty or fourty sample images you could move around and set up for export however you'd like. On a 600 MHz iBook through the 800 MHz G4 iMac, iPhoto's performance was still pretty poor. Made me feel better about my 500 MHz iBook, but worse about the Mac in general. Much of Apple's hardware, even with Quartz Extreme (each machine had 10.2.1 installed with plenty of RAM), still hasn't closed the gap with the slowdown introduced with the new OS. iPhoto on the dual 1 GHz PowerMac, however, I'm happy to say, ran like a dream.

The Apple store was also nice enough to have an internet connection for each machine set up in the store. I was able to download and install Netbeans to give it a shot. At first I was shocked at how slow it ran -- editing Java code seemed as slow on the dual GHZ as what I was used to on my 533 Celeron with Windows 2000. Then it occurred to me that I was using Eclipse on the 533 when I program in Java, and that Netbeans runs quite a bit more slowly (*duh*). Unfortunately, this means Netbeans runs about as quickly on the dual GHz PowerMac as a single 1 GHz Pentium, give or take (purely going on feel after just a minute or two of use). Certainly fast enough to do your programming, but still not fast enough to make me want to develop Java primarily on the Mac, and sure as heck not an affordable alternative to Windows/Linux on x86 hardware just yet.

And finally, there was just enough software on the shelves, somewhat tastefully displayed, that I think you wouldn't not buy a Mac because of software deficiencies. That revelation was probably the most positive experience I had in the store. Microsoft Office was sitting right there, front and center, and even the games rack had enough of [admittedly last-year's favorites on Windows] a selection to make a prospective Mac user go ahead and pull the trigger. Granted, these aren't software packages I'm dying to purchase (AppleWorks/AbiWord does me just fine), but for a typical home PC user it was good to see.

Hopefully in another year the consumer-level Mac will have enough juice to run the more processor-intensive iApps (like iPhoto and iDVD) well. With the dual processor PowerMac, luckily, hardcore Mac users in the present finally have the power for an OS X equipped Mac to quite nearly make sense as a solid PC upgrade. Now if the new G5 would just finally make it to center stage...