Or, he could buy an external hard drive and just hook it up to the FireWire.

On the Mac Pro, I have 4 hard drives. None are HDD, but I can write to the external as fast with the Fire Wire as I can the 3 internal hard drives. I had the external hooked up to the wife’s Mac Book Pro and it seems to load up pictures just as fast as it does on the Mac Pro. On all the machines the externals and the 3 internal hard drives are three slower than having your files on your main hard drive. So you are losing speed any time you put the files off of the main drive to a second drive, whether a HDD drive would make up the lost speed or not I do not know.

I think if you get the Mac you are talking about, it will do the programs you listed just fine, and better than the Dell you have now. The wife’s Mac Book Pro was one of the cheaper models; 2GB of ram, slower processor and it isn’t all that much slower than my Mac Pro with its 16GB of ram and 8 core processors. The real difference is load up time of big files in adobe bridge

My Dell is a Vostro 1710 with a few upgrades 3 years old, paid about 2 grand for it:
17” monitor
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5ghz
4GB of Ram
Nivada GeForce 8600M GS
300GB HD

The wifes Mac Book Pro is 3 years old, paid $1200:
Going from memory, because I am at work I think its specs are this:
Intel Core 2 Duo I think it is 2.1ghz
2GB of Ram
160GB HD +/-

I am using the Dell to type this, and from my personal exerience of these two I would choose the Mac Book Pro over the Dell.