More power to ya! 
I’m sure it works fine for plenty of people–just an issue of probabilities.
My boss deserves all the credit for that. According to him.
I should add that before they switched over, their band name was Fleetwood Personal Computer.
Why shouldn’t I care what my computer looks like? I have a certain decor in my home, and I want my electronics to match. I also want the cases to have a refined style to them. Most PCs look like crap. Big, boxy and ugly. You couldn’t pay me to let anyone see an ugly Dell in my home, even if it were running an OS more usable than Windows.
They work properly. They are immune to the constant influx of viruses, trojans and spyware that are commonplace on the Windows side. They have a much, much more complete featureset than the Windows OS offers (God, you can’t even make a PDF with Windows out of the box… utterly useless). They are pretty. The operating system is pretty. They are the only computers that run all of the programs that I consider useful.
There’s no Nisus Writer Express, no Keynote, no Pages, no NetNewsWire, no Safari, no OmniWeb, no iCal, no iPhoto, no iMovie, no iDVD, no .Mac Sync, no Final Cut Pro, no Motion, no DVD Studio Pro or anything even acceptable as an alternative for any of them on the Windows platform.
When I enter a person’s information into my Address Book on my Mac, it is instantly available in my email program, my IM program, my calendar program, etc, across the board. Plus, when I get home from the office, it will be there, too, and on my laptop, without me having to do one more bit of typing.
When I tell the spell check function that my name is a legitimate word in an email, I don’t also have to go and tell my Address Book, or my calendar, or my word processors, or even the text fields in my web browser (which, yes, are spell-checked).
I can create “Smart Folders” which work as live search queries, gathering together documents I’ve flagged with comments and labels from disparate folders and drives into one location. There’s nothing remotely like that on Windows.
The list goes on and on of things that are totally, 100% seamless on the Mac, and which are basically impossible on Windows.
Such as?
One of the trainers who took my training group when I first started this job was a mac-phile. Even though a good 95.5% of our customers are PC-only users, and we don’t support the macputer at all for broadband, at least half an hour or more out of every day was talking about how much better and easier to use a mac is, and how nifty they are to troubleshoot and how great they are all around. Which, in some regards they are. They can be a lot easier to set up than a PC, and less things will go wrong with them. All of which was great, but didn’t help us in our day-to-day lives.
But neither Windows nor the Mac OS is better when the problem on the other end of the phone is with the mouth-breathing meatwear who doesn’t know their arse from their elbow. Then both are just as bad as each other. :smack:
Yeah, but won’t Apple drain your wallet when it’s time to upgrade?
I was planning to do this in IMHO, since I really don’t want a flamefest. And don’t take me the wrong way, but your temper is such that you are one of the last persons I would like to see in such a thread.
Can I please, please steal this? I know a few hundred pounds of USDA Prime, at the very least, and this is the perfect descriptor.
Wow, you’re all class. You’ve also guaranteed my participation.
Well, that’s the end of that idea. Pity, I really did want to know.
And I really did want to try to address your issues.
Feel free. Share the love 
The problem, based on my previous experiences with you, is that you would destroy such a thread in two posts. The kind of vitriol that most people reserve for their most bitter political opponents, you dish out over people whose personal preferences on the most trivial matters differ from yours. I would also have to add the disclaimer that I haven’t used MacOS X and so wanted replies from people who liked MacOS 9. You would probably consider that alone to be worth a couple of insults, at least.
In my experience, it’s no different than PC software and OS wise. Since Macs come with a lot of stuff standard: nice memory, decent speed, top of the line graphics and colors, unique extras, etc., there isn’t a lot of extra cost.
The programs I use, since I’m a designer, are expensive. But that’s not exclusive to Mac, that’s Adobe and Quark which (as we all know) are seperate entities altogether. I think the price difference comes in with the standards and the almost complete immunity to viruses, spyware, etc. But YMMV, of course.
I love my PC as well, it just doesn’t seem as resilient as my Mac and the colors on it suck. Which to the average user means nothing, to those of us in the printing business, it makes a huge difference. But as far as doing more technical projects, regular typesetting (with little formatting), email, and internet usage I get too frustrated with my Mac. Honestly, I don’t think I could be happy without both of them on my desk. They have different strengths and weaknesses.
At least one person has already tried a Mac/PC opinion thread in IMHO and wasn’t very sucessful at firefighting. Short of strict enforcement from the administration, I don’t think it’s possible to avoid flames even in an opinion thread.
Depends on what kind of upgrade you’re talking about. RAM, hard drive, video card, monitor, those sorts of things, you can get from the same third-party manufacturers from whom you’d get the PC equivalents. (Of course, the monitor part doesn’t apply to all-in-ones any more than it would to Dell or HP’s all-in-ones.)
I can’t offhand think of any common upgrade that you’d have to go to Apple for, but I’m sure they exist.
OS 9?! What would be the point of having a thread about OS 9? Apple hasn’t made a computer capable of booting into OS 9 for years. No major retail software runs on OS 9. Good Lord, I’ve used Macs all my life, and I don’t remember a thing about OS 9. That’s pretty ancient. You wouldn’t get much in the way of a valuable response.
If your issues with Macs are based on OS 9, then you have no issues with Macs.
Of course, you probably take the above as an insult.
You know what would be really cool? A perfectly round mouse.
It’d sit there on the desktop, looking al Euclidian in its perfection.
So round. So stylish.
It’d be so fabulously pretty that I wouldn’t at all mind constantly having to look at it and reorient it so that lateral motion on the hand didn’t translate into diagonal motion of the pointer.
It would kick ass.
I’m just curious what you use for email, etc (the areas you defined as deficient on a Mac), and whether the differences between the platforms in those areas have to do with the specific software or the platform itself. (I don’t use either mac or pc for my email, so I have no convincing to do-- part of my job is testing and documenting various email clients, so this is a curiosity question.)