With Apple, everything is made by one company. This means it all just works. You plug it in, and there’s no fiddling. Poof. It works.
PCs, by contrast, are made by everybody. There’s no one company overseeing who writes drivers and who makes devices. Some things conflict with others. Being a windows user, you are probably more than aware of these pains.
Being made all by one company, Apple’s only competition is the PC, a completely different platform. While they do have some incentive to keep the price down, they don’t have the incredible competition that exists in the PC world to make the absolute cheapest parts. Overall, macs tend to be more pricey than PCs.
Early macs had much better sound and graphics than early PCs. Heck, Commodore computers that were an entire generation behind the PC had better sound and graphics than early PCs. Early PC’s sucked for sound and graphics. Early graphics design programs and sound related programs therefore naturally went to macs, and the PC has been playing catch-up ever since. If you do graphics design, you want a mac. There’s lots of great music software available for the mac. Whatever software you are using on a PC won’t work on a mac, though, so you’ll need to get new software.
Macs are not windows compatible, unless you run windows on a mac (and then, what’s the point of having a mac) you won’t get windows features.
Windows has something like 80 percent of the market. Macs, linux, and everything else fights for what’s left. Having only a fraction of the market means that if someone is developing something, chances are they are going to do it for the PC first. There’s lots of hardware and software out there that won’t run on a mac. There’s lots of web pages that won’t work on a mac.
Having something like 80 percent of the market, and Microsoft constantly acting like the Evil Giant, means that almost all virus makers target windows. There have been mac and linux viruses, but they are so rare that you can pretty much run a mac without any virus protection and not have to worry about it.