Well... My 2 cents on Macs, why not?... given that I've never used one... it seems I'm fully qualified! 
When you buy a mac, you buy the hardware, the design and the OS.
.A similarly specced machine of any other brand costs little more than half of a mac.
.The design... I have to admit, they are pretty, the UI is... after some getting used to... intuitive and quick and bouncy, and pretty, and cute and gay and girly, and directed at the hipster, the designer, the advertiser, the creative minds. In that respect, it works.
.Traditionally, it suffers little from viruses... however, the surge in mac ownership of the past few years has made it worthwhile investing in viruses for mac... so those are on the rise, while the users are convinced they are invulnerable just because they're not running windows... disaster waiting to happen?
.I once helped a friend pick out RAM to upgrade his macbook... for something like 4 GB of RAM, apple was asking for ~$100, at a time when 4GB of RAM for a pc would cost ~$35... turns out, mac requires RAM with some very specific (and non-standard) timings, making it a bit complicated, but not impossible to find ram at a decent price.... if you're ever in need, here's the magical site all geeks should know: http://www.crucial.com/store/drammemory.aspx
.OK, macs do tend to bring some more gimmicks than the spec sheet indicates. I've seen a fairly old macbook (~2008) with accelerometers so that you could tap the side of lid (where the screen is) and it would change to the desktop on the left or on the right, depending on which side you tapped. It also comes out of the box with the software to take a picture of the guy opening the lid and, if it's not who it expects, it sends a warning to the owner's e-mail and turns itself off, or so I've been told... quite neat..... but gimmicks!
So, yeah... when you buy a mac, you should know what you're paying for.
To some people it's just a sleek, pretty, computer that just works.... to others, it's an infuriating attempt at making it behave.... I think I'd fit in the latter group, so I go with ASUS and, so far, win7.... I recently changed my work pc (pentium IV@ 3GHz) from winXP to Fedora 18 and, apart from some hiccups, I'm happy with that linux.
When you buy a mac, you buy the hardware, the design and the OS.
.A similarly specced machine of any other brand costs little more than half of a mac.
.The design... I have to admit, they are pretty, the UI is... after some getting used to... intuitive and quick and bouncy, and pretty, and cute and gay and girly, and directed at the hipster, the designer, the advertiser, the creative minds. In that respect, it works.
.Traditionally, it suffers little from viruses... however, the surge in mac ownership of the past few years has made it worthwhile investing in viruses for mac... so those are on the rise, while the users are convinced they are invulnerable just because they're not running windows... disaster waiting to happen?
.I once helped a friend pick out RAM to upgrade his macbook... for something like 4 GB of RAM, apple was asking for ~$100, at a time when 4GB of RAM for a pc would cost ~$35... turns out, mac requires RAM with some very specific (and non-standard) timings, making it a bit complicated, but not impossible to find ram at a decent price.... if you're ever in need, here's the magical site all geeks should know: http://www.crucial.com/store/drammemory.aspx
.OK, macs do tend to bring some more gimmicks than the spec sheet indicates. I've seen a fairly old macbook (~2008) with accelerometers so that you could tap the side of lid (where the screen is) and it would change to the desktop on the left or on the right, depending on which side you tapped. It also comes out of the box with the software to take a picture of the guy opening the lid and, if it's not who it expects, it sends a warning to the owner's e-mail and turns itself off, or so I've been told... quite neat..... but gimmicks!
So, yeah... when you buy a mac, you should know what you're paying for.
To some people it's just a sleek, pretty, computer that just works.... to others, it's an infuriating attempt at making it behave.... I think I'd fit in the latter group, so I go with ASUS and, so far, win7.... I recently changed my work pc (pentium IV@ 3GHz) from winXP to Fedora 18 and, apart from some hiccups, I'm happy with that linux.
