I use both. Neither is ‘best’ - each has its flaws.
OS X looks the best, and has some fantastic features, but it’s more unstable and a little slow (on my Mac).
W2000 is less fancy but more solid and faster (on my PC, which has a similar spec to the Mac) and of course a greater number of programs work on it.
Macs are Unix boxes. What do you do?
For me; Macintosh since 1986.
I mostly use a Mac (at work and home). Occasionally I use Windows via Virtual PC. My wife telecommutes from home on an iMac, but used Citrix to run Windows apps .
Thanks for the info on the task bar!
I was going to add that I also installed virtual windows to see if I could do without buying the pc. It was not so fun and slow to use. Perhaps it was the program that I was running on it that wasn’t a good match (AutoCad). It was rather odd to see the XP interface on my mac.
For graphics intensive programs (I don’t know if AutoCAD is), Virtual PC is not a good match. And of course it’ll never be as effective as a full blown Wintel box.
FWIW, Windows 98 is less RAM intensive and might have better performance.
I pointed you to a free one, remember? 
2D/3D seismic interpretation and mapping. If anybody has a package for the Mac they’re doing an atrocious job of marketing it.
What I meant by a Unix box was something that can be used as a platform for Landmark’s SeisWorks or Schlumberger - GeoQuest’s IESX. The last time I used IESX was on a Sparcstation. That was in the mid-90s and I don’t keep up with Unix world. I’ve never heard of a Mac running IESX.
OSwise, it all depends on whose interface you like. I haven’t used OSX enough to say anything about its functionality, but it sure is pretty.
What seals the deal for me is the quality of the hardware.
I’ve never seen a Mac that wasn’t a complete piece of crap when it came to construction. My girlfriend’s IMac had to be driven to a store fifty miles from here so the video board could be replaced. Had she not purchased an extended warranty the job would have cost $330. This is for a video card whose PC equivalent might cost 30 bucks if you could still find one for sale. I’ll take unreliable Korean crap over unreliable Apple crap anytime.
We’ve decided to just give up on the laptop. The entire display screen is held together by 4 torx screws set in plastic. Well, they were set in plastic, anyway, until the strenuous action of opening the damn thing broke all the screw housings to peices.
Hmm…, I don’t really know, as it’s not in my world. What say y’all; are Macs really considered to be Unix boxes?
I meant like a Sun Sparc or an IBM R6000.
For stuff like web-browsing/email/word processing, its really a choice of personal preferance, though at the lower end, you can get a PC that can do all these things quite well much cheaper than any Mac. You do have to be a bit more careful about spyware & viruses with a PC, but as long as you don’t use that spyware installer, errr I mean browser Internet Explorer (I reccomend Firefox instead) or that virus vector, err I mean email program Outlook, and are don’t randomly open things you should be fine.
Right now both are stable enough for most reasonable people - the only times my WinXP machine has crashed were caused by hardware problems or running very buggy alpha software.
I reccomend trying out both WinXP and OSX to see how you like the interface; I personally can’t stand OSX, and I don’t like the fruity default WinXP interface either- I use XP with the older Win2000 interface that is available with just a couple of clicks. Or Linux with the KDE window manager.
For gaming, then Windows is the only way to go. Macs just don’t have very many games available. For graphics work, and artsy stuff, then I give the Mac a bit of an advantage, depending on the specific application.
Uh, no—no 1,000 loops included, not as easy to use.
Sure, it’s free, but it doesn’t compare to Garageband.
I write, lay out and publish books and booklets for a living. I do a lot of intensive page layout work, often including graphics and image manipulation. So naturally, making use of my 20 years’ experience in the computer industry, I use the best tool for the job. I use the Windows 98SE operating system on a PC. I’ve never had any problems. I’ve used Macs often. I’ve worked in several offices which had one or two lying around for supposedly ‘specialist’ tasks. I wouldn’t choose to use one, given that something like 98% of industry and 94% of home users run PCs and PC applications. What’s the point of adopting and learning an OS that can ‘emulate’ the same programs everyone else is running when I can run the real things, no emulation required?
Seriously, the above is all true but is mainly just there to turn the tables on people who insist on suggesting that for graphic, design and publishing work you need to use a Mac. It’s just not true. And I do this to earn a living.
To answer the OP - try them both and see which one you like best. Try to see if there’s anything you want to do or achieve that absolutely can only be done on one platform or the other (e.g. many games are only available for the PC and not the Mac) but there probably isn’t. For 99% of people, anything you want to do or achieve, you can achieve on pretty well either platform. For many years this was not the case - some things only worked on the PC and others only on the Mac. But those days are mainly history, and the two have converged so much that there’s generally little to choose between them. So it just comes down to whichever one suits you best. Personally, I’ve just found it really worthwhile to go with the crowd and use the same OS that most people I know (professionally or personally) use, hence Windows, but YMMV.
Apple’s aren’t even slighty significant 0.0348, yawn …
*Apple market share rises slightly
By Jim Dalrymple
Market research firm International Data Corp.'s (IDC) latest research numbers indicate a small increase in Apple’s market share in the United States. For the current quarter (Q1, 2002) IDC shows Apple as the number six computer maker with a 3.48 percent market share. This is an increase of 0.4 points over Q4 2001 and a 0.25 point increase year over year. Worldwide, Apple is in ninth place with a 2.4 percent market share.*
Here is even a more recent article about Apple’s, now down to 0.032. How can anyone, except those who paid money for one, suggest that the market place is this far off base about the value of an Apple? zzzzzz …
*TMO Reports - Apple’s US Market Share Declines Slightly In 2003 & Fourth Quarter
by Brad Gibson
Apple’s market share continued to deteriorated in the US last quarter and for the year 2003 overall, according to data released by technology market intelligence firm IDC. Apple’s domestic market share fell fractionally to 3.2 percent from 3.5 percent in 2002 and its calendar fourth-quarter numbers fell 0.2 percent from the previous year to 2.8 percent.
In terms of actual position versus its Windows-based competitors, Apple placed fifth in US market share for 2003 behind Dell with 30.9 percent market share, Hewlett-Packard with 20.6 percent in second place, IBM in third with 5.2 percent, and Gateway in fourth place with 3.8 percent.*
I’m a big PC gamer so PC’s are my thing.
The kind of gaming performance I get out of my personally built PC cannot be approached by a MAC, and even if it could, I’d have to pay twice as much to get it
I also use the PC for video editing/web design. So far the PC hasn’t let me down.
Are we going to start an Apple-bashing thread here? I didn’t think this was the place for it.
I’d like to mention that I use both Mac and PC and have them side-by-side. (Sharing a monitor.) Anytime I have to use the PC (because I need it for something that the Mac cannot do), it’s very easy to turn it on.
I haven’t turned on the PC in several weeks. I’ve gone longer than that in the past.
This is not to say that I’ve never had a need for it, or to say that “PC Sux, Mac Rulez!” I like my PC just fine and I don’t think anyone is making a horrible choice if they choose a PC. I’m simply pointing out that my Mac is very useful to me. I don’t constantly feel deprived because of something I can’t do on it (anytime I feel deprived, a simple press of my KVM switch and bam! I’m on the PC). Most of the time, it’s simply not an issue.
I really don’t see why some people insist that PCs are some sort of assumed default choice. Both Macs and PCs are computers and they both can do pretty much the same thing for most users. They both willl run Microsoft Office, print out documents, browse around the Internet, create web sites using Dreamweaver, graphics with Photoshop, print publications with Quark or InDesign (I favor InDesign), and so forth.
When I seriously got into Macs, one of my friends, a PC diehard, warned me vehemently. “You’re REGRET IT” he said ominously. “Trust me, I know what I’m talking about—you will regret it someday.”
That was about four years ago, and I am still waiting for this fateful day when I’ll so bitterly regret it. It’s simply not as huge of a deal as some people seem to think.
Hey, you said inexpesive and easy to use. Can’t get any less expensive than free! 
So, you’re dismissing Acid before even trying the demo?