- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
You are SO wrong.
Check out the Mac Pro. If you buy a DELL with the same specs, you can pay up to $1000 more. What abou the Mac mini. Decent specs, and it can be plugged into your TV to be used as a cheap home media system - music/DVD/Movies/photo libraries/Internet, etc. How much does a PC version of that cost?
iMac Displays crap on the usual flat panels. Buy and iMac it does video conferencing, photo albums, iTunes, pod-casting, web design, movie editing, music creation, and FULL integreation between ALL of the above - right out of the box, no downloads. No Viruses. No malware. Looks great. Vista? It's a bad rip off of Tiger, just as Win 95-98 was a rip off of MacOS 7-8. Vista still has a registry to corrupt and a billion .DLLs to lose. It will still use the 20 year old and slow BIOS booting. Leopard (which will lauch at the same time as Vista) will boot using the faster nad more efficient EFI system. Plus feature that will make Vista look like so much time-wasting.
You want to upgrade your PC? Well, you can upgrade you RAM. Macs and PC's have used the same RAM since the PC100 days.
Video card? Well, there are a million different cards out for PCs. Some of them are -blam!-. Choice? Well NVidia are good and pretty much an industry leader. Macs come with NVidia cards. There are fewer Mac cards out there, but that's 'cos the card that comes as a standard with your new mac is pretty good anyway.Try the card that will run two 30 inch montiors in tandem. runs full crenn video editing smooth as silk.
You want to upgrade your PC processor? Chances are either the speed abilities of the motherboard has changed, so you'll need one of those too, which means you'll probably need new RAM. Maybe even the for factor has changed, so thats a new case and PSU. Whats left? the drives? So desktop Macs are as upgradable as PCs.
I have a 3yr old 1.25GHz G4 Mac at work, with a 128Mb NVidia, and 768 M of RAM on PC2700 sticks. Halo looks great. PC at home is a DELL 2GHz with an NVidia 256 Card and 128Mb Card. Halo looks crap.
It can be that Macs can be pricey, but they DO innovate. Their OS rocks, Integrated high quality webcams on the laptops and iMacs, their mouse has a 360 degree scroll ball, their laptops have a magnetic power cable, so they don't get pulled of the dsk by accident. Apple design both the hardware and the software to integrate in a way that PCs just cannot do, sincerely BECAUSE of the range of stuff out there - PCs find it difficult and slow to standardise. Plus, macs look GREAT.
Pipe - smoke it.
Support? On a PC, which of the billion forums do you go to for advice?. On a Mac? Apple discussions site. NEVER have I interacted with a more well-informed, helpful and rabidly fanatic client-base.