You mean, you still run SuSE on an Apple machine? Or do you have another system just for linux?

First off Apple is a niche player. They have a loyal fan base and then an odd mixtures of those who want to use a computer that "just works" without being a nerd and powerusers/professionals.

A lot of companies opted for Macs to replace aging DEC/SUN/Irix Unix workstations. I can remember a 166Mhz Sun SPARC workstation with 2GB of ram costing $16,000 each and that was like six years ago. So a 10Ghz Quad-core Power Mac with 8GB of Ram for $7,500 is a bargin to those folks.

But really why do people spend so much for PowerMac machines? Apple Pro Tools. It's the software, not the hardware. Granted these tools are directly geared towards video and graphics industry. I mean our copies of the Compositing Application Shake were $3000 each. If you want to run Shake on Linux, it costs $5000. So you can actually buy a base-level PowerMac AND Shake for what it would cost for Shake on Linux.

As far as pricing goes, that really is a myth for the most part that Apple is more expensive. At the local mall there is both an Apple Store and Sony Store. Compare the laptops in each...they are within a few dollars of each other for the same basic features. Now I will admit that the fact the Viao towers come with a built in video capture system is a nice feature (why Apple does NOT do this on the iMac and ESPECIALLY the PowerMac series is beyond me...), but still it comes down, at least for us, to: "Can you run Final Cut Pro on anything other than Mac?" No.

I know that everytime I went to price out a laptop or home computer, I've found Apple to be within dollars or cheaper. I mean my Mac Mini was $850 plus $50 for the DVI to TV adaptor, mini-jack to RCA, and PS/2 mouse & keyboard to USB adaptors. I use my 42" LCD TV as the monitor (although I need to splurge and get the wireless bluetooth keyboard and mouse). I get iTunes, iMovieHD, Garage Band, and all the other iLife software that allows be to do anything I need. It was $100 for a cheap firewire video capture device so I could record our old VHS movies to DVD. And it was easy to use with no hassles. Everything just worked and iMovie is extremely powerful for home movie editing. If you have a firewire or USB Mini-DV camcorder, you don't even need the video capture card, just plug it in. My two Sony Digital Camera's I've owned...just plugged them in and iPhoto pops up and down loads the images from the memory card: no need to load special software or drivers.

The other big factor, that is hard to calculate, is I need not worry about spy ware, mal ware, or viruses as much. They still exist for Mac, but are not as many.

Basically four years ago I got tired of my AMD tower crashing due to heat issues in Windows, the lack of many appliactions and divers for Linux (my printer [both HP820CSE and HP712C], scanner, nor sound card EVER had working drivers) and I was leaving to go out of the country for about a year. So I bought an iBook and never looked back. All by OSS Unix goodies, all the Apple only goodies, I could boot into WIndows 2000 via Virtual PC, and all my favorite commecial application like Photoshop and GoLive all on one laptop. Yeah, I'll pay a few bucks more for that convenence.

abhiram, I never actually owned a Mac before (as I don't have the money), the latest machine is a Pentium 4 running SUSE Linux (maybe PCBSD later) and Windows XP (for games only).

Yet, I've cheered for Mac and always wanted one.

xboxrulz