The b&w G3 400!
To the three people who guessed correctly, congratulations! To the 9 people who guessed poorly, shame on you all! >

It was going to be the G4, but once I saw that it did not have any RAM nor hard drive, that was a real turn-off for me. I went with the G3, and decided that I'd soup it up.

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Personally, I'm from the school that both were overpriced in the first place, unless this was an ebay auction and the price included shipping.

As for the 128mb RAM and 6GB disk in the G3, I find it hard to consider either as a determining factor as both are so small/inexpensive as to be considered throwaway. You, yourself, acknowleged that when you mentioned the 40gb drive and 256mb DIMM that you bought.

Two factors were never mentioned, BTW:

1) B&W ROM revision

2) Video card

For me, the B&W ROM revision is a potential dealbreaker. It's just not worth the hassle of dealing with a Rev. 1 unless you want to commit to SCSI-only, an ATA PCI card, or poor IDE performance.

As for the video card, I don't think the B&W is going to have shipped with anything better than a Rage 128 while the G4 is more than likely going to have at least an AGP Rage 128 Pro (faster card on a faster interface).

I'm one of the people who voted for the G4. Admittedly, the G3 is, out of the box, a complete system, but you're going to be replacing most of what made it "complete" anyway. The upgrade path for the G4 is much better than that of the B&W, as others have pointed out. Also, it was described as being cosmetically challenged as opposed to just dusty. About the only advantage I can see is the better support for "legacy" OS versions and ADB by the B&W.

Anyone who could put two and two together, and who read the iMac story would realize that this G3 wasn't for me, but for my friend. I gave him his first-ever Mac, the original bondi iMac, over 2 years ago. That Mac has since gotten even older, and I've decided to upgrade him to something newer and spiffier.

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All the more reason to have gone with the G4. With the B&W, most of your upgrades will involve either a nominally faster processor (500mhz G3 unless you want to spend big bucks) or a G4 pull from a Yikes!, more RAM, a bigger HD, or a better video card (Radeon 7000) which is still limited by being on the PCI bus. With the G4, you could run and unsupported Leopard install with the existing CPU, add a Quartz Extreme compatible (or even CoreImage) compatible video card, etc.

IMHO, the B&W is a nice upgrade from the Bondi iMac, but the G4 would have been the better longevity move.

John