Well, i'm messing with a used iBook G3/500 right at the moment. OS X does look nice, and the few OS X audio apps i demo'd are solid. And, dual-booting w/Debian unstable was dead easy to do, i have OSS audio working jest fine with the built-in set, and i'm hoping to do ALSA via USB audio soon, which will be kewl. I like the hardware platform. The display is noticeably better than most Intel laptops, certainly better than the used ones i was comparing to. The Firewire Just Worked, right from the Debian install kernel. I've been using it with a IDE -> firewire disk carrier. The unit is solid. The built-in audio is okay, my model has no real inputs (built-in mic) - you would definately be using USB or firewire for Real Work. Using Open Firmware at boot instead of BIOS is sweet. With Linux, performance is fine, even with the 500mhz chip. The OS X on the other hand, is noticeably slooower than Linux (2.4.21 + 2.5.72 kernels ), especially at reboot. And the Mac world is insanely closed, it actually surprized _me how little choice you have with OS X - near as i can figure, you buy most everything from Apple, pay a bunch more money than a comparable M$ product, or suffer. And since they are _not a huge monopoly, they seem to have little shame about being closed - i was very amused by the way they attempt to corral the first-time user into signing up for .Mac (Apple's version of MSN) during the OS X install, iTunes also. The main thing-that-makes-me-nutbar is the keyboard layout. That's fixable with X, and you can set up keymappings with sysctl for some Mac-specific things. Main installation pain is the Mac version of fdisk, which is....terse. So in conclusion, i'd say the iBook + external converter (USB/fire) would make a fine Linux audio laptop. Get a decent sized disk, and you can dual-boot with OS X, and that will motivate you to run Linux again. :) cliffw (PS - http://www.penguinppc.org - is a good start point for Mac links)