You know Ray, this thread is what prompted the appearance of the Decepticon's logo under my name. I am on the dark side. I grew up with a commodore 64, then 128, then an amiga 1000, then 2000. Then my mom brought home macs... She was a graphic designer for years and is most certainly a mac person. I on the other hand got into coding, and I quickly discovered that coding for mac was a thing to abhor. (I had to end up coding in borland running in softwindows because it just wasn't happening otherwise...) It's true that you didn't encounter ".dll hell" that can arise on pcs, but instead you used to have conflicting extensions half the time you installed new software. I like them, don't get me wrong, and OSX/Jaguar are great, but it's too late in the game for me to get pulled in. The only things macs have going for them now are the OS and physical designs, although in those two areas they far surpass pc. I did discover something extremely discomforting regarding Jaguar security. You can aparently boot from an install cd, hit two keys at the login screen, and then set the root password to be whatever you want. Not at all acceptable if you have sensitive material on your computer....
They made some serious marketing mistakes early on, which now amount to the hardware lagging behind similarly priced pc hardware. The claim that the g5 is the fastest pc on earth is completely false (any reasonable system costing ~$1k less built around amd's 64 bit processor will beat it on all but two or three benchmarks, I'll find the articles for the non-believers if desired.) So...I guess what I'm saying is that for economic high end performance, mac is not a feasible option. (This is what I personally look for in a computer.) Granted the pc systems that compare are not as readily available, and one might even have to buy the parts and build the thing themselves, but all assembling a computer amounts to is an expensive jigsaw puzzle. Anyone capable of configuring a $5k home stereo system and tuning it properly could easily assemble a computer with information readily available on the internet.
For useability and stability, mac wins hands down, no contest. In fact I worked at microsoft for a short while on the upcoming version of windows ("Longhorn"), and they had macs set up in numerous places throughout the windows buildings and encouraged programmers to see how various aspects of the mac OS worked...
