Originally Posted by
rydabent
Macs are over priced, and on some you cant even replace the battery yourself. Macs are usually connected with the education community. Everyone else uses Windows based machines, as they have tons more programs written for them.
True back in the early days of Apple, when they used the educational market to seed their products and grow market share. Now, this is no longer true. Macs are
consumer oriented, and targeted at those who don't want to mess with all the stuff PC's make you mess with. Educators and most students tend to be on the geeky side, and able to handle PC owenership responsibilities. If you want it to "just work", and don't want to pretend you're an IT geek, you get a Mac, giving up some flexibility and some extra cash for that benefit. SIngle brand integration makes for a seemless product; you just don't have as many option and have to pay more. We have both in our home network, and I must say I have tired of the effort required to keep the PCs up-to-date, virus free, working with the printers and the router, and troubleshooting problems the kids and my wife run into. I now have an Apple router, which just works, and I'm about to retire the massive quad core PC I built, for serving media and doing video editing, in favor of a MacBook AIR. I'll keep my media in the cloud, thank you very much, and have access to pretty much everything, everywhere I go. That's where computing is heading, and Apple is (once again) leading the way.
By the way, I have an IBM ThinkPad I bought in 2001. It was my second ThinkPad. They are one of the more solid brands, as PCs go, although it has been repaired a couple times under warranty (mother board replaced, then the screen), and the audio no longer works. It sits on a shelf and I use my iPhone.
And one final anecdote. Before I had owned a PC (I was carrying one of the original ET Macs around on business trips back then) I remember being at Comdex and seeing all this hullabaloo about Multimedia PCs.
That must be something special, I thought and so I stopped by a booth. Boy was I shocked when I learned that meant they (oh my gosh, can it be true?) actually had
sound, something every Mac owner had enjoyed since, well, there was a Mac!
Bottom line: If you like to play around with the OS and DIP switches, get a PC. If you just want to use applications, get a Mac.