There’s nothing (computer-related) quite as scary as having a Mac hard-crash and then come back up in command-line-only mode. THAT was freaky.
I forgot to mention in my OP, although I meant to, that I have nothing against Apple at all (I first used one way back when the latest was an Apple II). I have always known they were superior, especially for graphics,and had great customer service. In fact,I talked both my son and daughter recently into getting Macbooks when their PCs got so bogged down it was not worth trying to fix them.
Thanks to all, for some really interesting posts. Quite a revelation. Things are worse than I thought. 
The only reason I never switched is that over the years I got so invested in PCs that too much at my age to try to relearn a different OS. Actually, starting in DOS and learning BASIC, I hated Windows when it came out, and I still do. In fact, I hate almost everything Microsoft, and avoid other programs whenever possible. I did not want or need any GUIs, but there they were. At least PCs had open architecture so I could build my own.
Also, Windows was always backward compatible until Vista (I think, as I still use XP). Frankly I still think Win 3.11 was the best, or least worst, of Windows. However, I realize now that most software is for people who don’t really know or care much about computers, merely want one as a tool, unlike we antiques who love the idea of computing.
Well, this thread was a learning experience.
Of course things go wrong. That’s like asking if there’s ever been a Saab that needed auto service. There have been times I’ve wanted to crush my flocking laptop with a cinderblock and other times I’ve stopped to think how much I love it.
I honestly think that it simply boils down to the fact that the latter experience is by far so much more common than the prior.
Nope. 
Seriously though, I’m on a ~4 yo MacBook right now, and can attest that programs do occasionally hang and have to be force quit, happens often enough to be annoying with MS Office programs. Anecdotally the laptops do seem to be more robust than PC laptops, you don’t hear about them completely bricking as much as PCs, but as someone mentioned that’s probably because you’re comparing $1,700 Macs with $600 Dells.
My biggest complaint is that I need a freaking $50 dongle to plug my monitor in.:mad:
Isn’t the new MacBook Pro “cutting edge” in that it’s the first to ship with the newest Intel chipset? Granted, that’s an outlier.
I don’t know about actual player support, but my Hackintosh has an LG burner that rips and burns Blu-Ray quite well.
My desktop and my laptop have both been great; we’ve had A LOT of trouble with the wireless bluetooth network at home. I don’t know if that’s a Mac thing or all wireless networks are shit.
I’m not sure what you mean by a “Bluetooth network”; Bluetooth is primarily intended to be a device-to-device protocol. Do you mean WiFi (IEEE 801.11a/b/g) local area network (WLAN), i.e. a wireless replacement for wired Ethernet Local Area Networking (IEEE 802.3)? A lot of things can impact WiFi performance, including interference from competing WLANs using the same channel or frequency, the presence of other interfering signals, radio-blocking or -absorbing materials, et cetera.
Stranger
Oops - I have a bluetooth and wifi icon at the top of my screen - I meant the wifi network.
having had a white iBook that ate logic boards for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I’d say hell yes things go wrong with Macs. Not to mention the not frequent but not uncommon kernel panics I had on OS X 10.0-10.3; the older ones were great, the desktop would freeze with blocks of crash dump text crawling across the screen.
[QUOTE=Balthisar]
Isn’t the new MacBook Pro “cutting edge” in that it’s the first to ship with the newest Intel chipset? Granted, that’s an outlier.
[/quote]
at best, it’s the first to ship with the fixed version of Intel’s latest chipset; Sandy Bridge and the 6-series core logic shipped months ago but a flaw in the SATA controller prompted a recall.
Some objective data:
*Consumer Reports * 2011 survey of computer users reported that Apple was the most reliable desktop, with only 13% needing repairs, a full 5% better than the rest, which ranged from 18% to 23% needing repairs.
But in laptops, the range was from 16% to 21% needing repairs, and Apple was smack in the middle, at 19%.
So 1/8th to almost 1/5 of Macs need repairs. Yep, things go wrong.
(These were large surveys, 62,500 desktop owners, and 75,000 laptop owners, asking about their machines for the last 5 years.)
My wife has a 15" MacBook Pro, which she got from her job when she started a couple of years ago. She had a choice between the Mac and a few different Windows-based laptops, and went for the Mac at my suggestion (i’m a Windows 7/Ubuntu 10.04 user).
I’ve actually been surprised at how many niggly little issues the Mac has had over the past two years. It’s not like it’s ever been out of commission, and most problems are minor, but it will, as others have said, hang programs on occasion, and a couple of times when this has happened the whole computer froze up and the only way to get it to do anything at all was to physically remove the battery.
The optical drive often fails to read any CD or DVD media that is inserted into it. Even when it does work, it often requires waiting for four or five minutes while the drive hunts around before it recognizes the disc. And i will never understand why Apple refuses to put a hardware Eject button on their optical drives.
Recently, the wireless card stopped working, and at the moment my wife can’t afford to be without her computer for the length of time it would require to have it looked at, so in order to get on the internet at home, she plugs in a 50-foot ethernet cable that we run down the stairs from the router.
I still think Apple make great computers, and if i had money to burn i’d love a Mac Pro with twin 6-core Xeon processors, 32 Gig of memory, and a 30" cinema display. But the little problems we’ve had with the MacBook have certainly made something of a mockery of the Mac fans who seem to respond to every single problem suffered by Windows users with “Get a Mac.”
Steve hates buttons.
it may have been the word “zealot” that threw me off. 
And with good reasons that go beyond mere esthetics. Mechanical buttons are intrusion points into the chassis where dust and gross moisture can enter; they tend to wear and sometimes fail with use; they collect dirt; they often interrupt the form factor of the chassis, making it more costly to design and manufacture, or else, patched together shapelessly and without protection. And it’s not just Steve Jobs; you’ll find all kinds of appliances now that have few or no buttons, relying on touch screens and surfaces for actuation and control. I have a television for which all the controls on the front panel are completely concealed within the frame with no physical buttons whatsoever, which is a far more pleasing form.
There is really no reason to have a hardware eject button on the drive, unless you are expecting the drive to fail, and I have to say that the CD/DVD drives on the MacBook and MacMini are a lot easier to access and cleaner to use than the ejecting tray style that has become nearly universal on Windows/Linux laptops. But quite frankly, Jobs would like to see an end to any kind of magnetic or optical removable media, transferring data via solid state device (if you must) or by wireless networking (preferred), and as protocol bandwidth and ubiquity of networking increases, this will be the reality; DVDs and even USB drives will become as anachronistic as reel-to-reel tape and 8" floppy discs.
Stranger
Funny you should ask. I just replaced my 7 year old iMac yesterday after it burned up its third logic board. It was too old to replace again, so I got a new iMac.
The best think about Mac is it’s resistance to viruses and other attacks.
That and the fact that they become part of the family rather than just an appliance.
This is a joke, right? Right?
That’s an attempted low blow. With the prices of apple computers they better be part of the family. Or is it a race thing? Since most Macs are white you can treat them like family and not slaves? Its okay for my Macintosh to crash because well, it’s only human… Logically, what is it about OSX that allow you to accept it into the family and not Windows?
I don’t think it’s so much OS X, it’s the industrial design and the user experience. I think “part of the family” is overstating it, but the Apple devices in our house are much more likely to be regarded as having some kind of identity than the Windows machines, despite the fact that the Windows machines all have names (e.g., Computo) rather than descriptors (like Dad’s Office PC).
Or it could just be a whoosh.
Up until a couple of years ago I often used some sort of Mac laptop (can’t recall the exact type) with an early-to-mid version of OSX (from well after the “Macs never crash” meme started), and I saw a lot of crashes just web browsing. Maybe that was a Firefox issue, but it was much less reliable than when I’ve used Firefox on any PC. At least when my PC crashes, it’s doing something that a Mac wouldn’t even attempt.
It has to be the operating system because the cheapest desktop apple offers is $2,500 which isn’t bad because of free shipping but it uses the same hardware as any other pc. I’m sure OSX can be loaded onto any computer, right? Steve Jobs is awesome at persuasion (nlp?)…