Ah yes. The kind of case bought by all PC enthusiasts who have:
[list=a]
[li]Lost knuckle skin to stupidly-placed stupidly-sharp chassis elements[/li][li]Lost lots of time and hair due to stupid component positioning[/li][li]Increased our earning power past the point where we could only afford the cheapest of the cheap[/li][/list] 
Nowadays high-end PCs approach the level of industrial design that was standard in workstations a decade or more ago. The el-cheapo versions on the other hand are still the usual combination of 
:mad: :smack: :rolleyes: 
Fair enough. It’s hard to generalize about PCs, with all of the different manufacturers. All I know is, of the PCs I’ve owned or otherwise seen inside of, none had innards a tenth as friendly as the Mac I’m typing on now. One of them, I did literally have to disconnect everything else from the motherboard and remove the MB, just to swap one component. Apparently, I just haven’t seen any of the good PC cases.
It’s my opinion that you have to spend at least $100 these days to get a decent case. I paid somewhere between $100-$120 for the Antec. I’m not even talking about those stupid LAN party cases with the clear sides and whatnot.
a) We hardly ever have to reinstall the OS. A single installation of the OS is nearly always going to last you until the next version of the OS comes out and you install over the old one (archive and install, most commonly) and keep going. More likely than not, you’ll do a daisy-chain of such installations (10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8) over the years and retire the computer without ever having to reinstall the OS.
b) When we do reinstall the OS, we don’t have to reinstall our applications. A reinstall can also use archive-and-install, leaving all your settings and applications fundamentally untouched (except the Apple-branded apps, I guess). Then you’d do Software Update to bring all the freebie decimal-point updates up to current (which would bring your Apple-branded apps to current status).
c) Quite aside from which, about 92% of our applications don’t need to be “installed”. If I have two Macs and one has an app that I’d like to have running on the other Mac, I can just do a file copy of the app (or application folder) and it works on the destination computer. We don’t have .dll files sprawled all across creation, nor do we have a registry. The application “file” is actually a disguised folder containing the library files, or, if it’s an application folder, they’ll be in the folder. So wherever you copy it, everything you need is there with it. In the remaining 8% of Mac apps, there may be some essential low-level deelybopper that has to be installed with super-user permissions; these apps do come with an installer, and for these it’s true that you can’t just do a file-copy procedure to copy the apps. Even there, archive-and-install will often preserve whatever has been installed of that nature, so even then a reinstallation of your apps may not be necessary.
It’s extremely rare that a Mac user really needs to reinstall an application. I figure 80% of the applications on my current computer were simply copied over from my previous computer (so their installation date predates the manufacturing date of my current computer). Probably 55% of them date back to pre-OS X operating systems on that older computer, so they were never installed under OS X on the old computer either. Maybe 20% of them were copied over from the computer before that one and therefore were never actually installed on this computer or the previous computer. And yes, a tiny handful came from even older computers. You install a Mac app once, it’s generally the last time you’ll ever have to install it, unless you’re at someone else’s computer and installing it for them. They’re permanent, like furniture: when you move, you take it with you!
Fair enough. I have a Mac now as well–it took me a week to figure out how to install a program. I haven’t had it long enough to either upgrade the OS or need to reinstall. And I’ll admit, I haven’t partioned the hard drive either. I still keep backups of important stuff off the laptop, of course.
On the other hand, I can get a real good price on a nice Dell laptop…
adding a little to what AHunter3 said about installing applications: I think Macintosh OS X has a major advantage over Windows XP (and Vista too I think) - if you have two partitions, one for apps, one for data, or buy a new disk drive, you can easily move all your applications to a new location by dragging the application folder to a new spot. In Windows, you would have to uninstall and reinstall, or else be smart enough to know how to edit the registry to allow the application to work from the new location. I have run into this problem more than once when a C: partition was configured at an appropriate size initially but after many application installs it was low on space. I know you can choose a different location at install time on Windows, but it would be nice to be able to easily move the application folder later.
That reminds me of when I first got my Mac last year, I had to Google around to figure out how to uninstall a program. I couldn’t find any uninstall files for any of my apps. Turns out, for most programs, I just have to drag it into the trash. Imagine that. :smack:
We used to use this as a test for Windows tech interviewees: Take an installed version of Microsoft Office. Move or rename the Microsoft Office folder in Program Files. Make it work again, without moving it back.
We gave up asking this question when nobody ever got it working, or just gave up and said “The correct answer is: don’t do that.”
That USED TO BE easy–edit a couple .ini files and Bob’s yer uncle. Nowadays I agree that you just don’t do that. Life is way too short for that sort of misery.