what do you recommend?

i am a professional photographer, and have considered switching to mac for some time. im currently on a machine running an intel 2.33 quad core, with 8 gigs of ram, and a nvidia geforce 9500gs graphics processor. with windows vista 64(blech!)

i do not game. but on a bold (or indecisive) day i may have lightroom, photoshop, dreamweaver, firefox, vuze, pidgen, open office, and maybe some other random smallish apps. running.

what would you say the cheapest mac i could get, that would be comprable to my current machine (im sure i would do fine on something with "slower" specs, i just basically want to be able to do what i want to do, without wanting to break my machine)

thank you!

From your current specs, you basically have two choices:

1) 15/17 inch MacBookPro
2) MacPro

Both are going to give you a speed bump in terms of CPU and the 17 inch MBP and the MacPro can give an equal amount of memory with what you have now. However, you may want to start with 4GB and see how you do and then upgrade since getting up to 8GB is going to cost you a bit.

Either of these machines will be able to handle your work load/tasks etc. with no issue. I am a software developer and require quite a few 'heavy' tools up and running during the day and I have an older MBP with the 2.33 Core 2 Duo and haven't exactly found a need to upgrade yet.

So, it's really just a matter of whether or not you prefer a laptop to a desktop, are you mobile..that sort of thing. Note, neither of these machines are cheap by any stretch of the imagination so, keep that in mind when shopping.

I love how the top end iMac was totally ignored. 3.06GHz iMac 24 inch with dedicated graphics would work too. And it actually outperforms the mac pro in a couple settings.