Personally I think the new iMac's are ugly. But that's just me. I have a 17" iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo with the ATI card) I bought last year. Haven't gotten 10.5 yet, figured I walk in to the Apple store and pick it up when I do the rest of my Christmas shopping this year. I've talked to a couple people who swear 10.5 is faster than 10.4. Guess I'll find out soon.

I have an old 2Ghz Celeron Dell laptop with XP Pro and only 512MB of ram (Max it would hold). The DVD/CD burner still reads discs, but won't burn anymore and the battery needs to be replaced. I usually end up running FreeSBIE on it most days. I have XP pro on my iMac I run via Parallels so I still have a windows box that runs Falcon 4.0 A:F without any problems.

A lot of the people I know, and my friends say they really hate macs. The fact is the only mac machines they have used are lower than OS X, so they've only experienced macs with OS 9, or 8. And truth be told, those OS's aren't that very great, and I would probably choose Windows over those ones. But OS X has really stepped it up, it's really easy and fun to use, and the GUI is amazing. The only mac I own right now, is a old iBook clamshell G3, it not be very fast, it's only 366mhz, but it's running pretty fast with Panther. I do my school work on it with no problems at all. I tend to get more work done on my mac, than my windows machines. I'm going to upgrade this Christmas hopefully to a Intel based mac from my old PowerPC.
Another thing that I hate when people say they hate macs, is the "one-click mouse" thing. The whole reason behind the one click mouse, was to have it so it wasn't confusing, you only had to push 1 button. But they've changed it with the new macs, you can just use 2 fingers with the track pad, and it will right click, and even the new mighty mouses have a right click. It's not even that hard to click if you have a old mac, you just have to push the ctrl key, and click.

With MacOS X Leopard, you can install Boot Camp and install Windows natively to play all your favourite games without buying a crappy PC. However, just a note, Leopard has its fair share of problems, so I'd wait for 10.5.1 if I were you for them to iron out the first batch of bugs.



That is true, a lot of people are still thinking back to pre-MacOS X and haven't looked at the new MacOS X and its stability and performance. Also, what's sad is that most people don't see the power of UNIX because they've been blinded by Microsoft and their antics.

xboxrulz

I love Mac but it's realy hard Tu buy it. It's So expensive. Want A great Os??? Leopard I think.

Mac Lover

I know that in general Macs are less susceptible to viruses and are more stable, but it depends on the user. Your dad probably just isn't a good computer user. What I'm trying to say is that I've had a windows machine for six years and don't even run Anti-virus software on it. I don't need to because I'm just careful. So for people like your dad the mac might be the way to go, but for a savvy user, there is nothing wrong with windows.

True and not true, you can be only be careful with viruses, but Windows machines are very easy to puncture through when it comes to other aspects of security like a hacker attack and running exploited code. On Mac, you can be intruded, but it takes a lot more steps and countermeasures to puncture through. Even if you did, you won't be able to touch any system files until you figured out the password.

xboxrulz

I think that Mac computers are a great thing. The security is excellent and I've heard that the support is much better than most computer manufacturers, although I'm 99% satisfied with the support from Dell. If I got a Mac, I would need to learn how it works thoroughly and reteach my parents how to use computers. I do use Safari and RocketDock to simulate a Mac though, they are quite nice.

Since Mac is based on UNIX, it is somewhat similar to Linux, although I'm not sure to what extent. Things that I would miss in Macs would be running security scans and similar tasks (Windows Update, etc) because they aren't necessary on a Mac. I also do not like the ease of use that Macs have. They claim that you can do amazing "multimedia" things in simple clicks, I do not necessarily like that.

1 thing that I have always pondered about was that can Macs actually run certain tools to write HTML (not WYSIWYG editors, but advanced text tools like Notepad++ or something similar).

And of course there is this one thing in Windows Vista that isn't present on Macs, my favourite system setting, the User Account Control. I'm dying to get Windows Vista just to experience User Account Control. It sounds very exciting, and I'd love to see the prompts pop up asking for my password. Of course there is a similar thing in Ubuntu, but it just isn't the same.

All in all, Macs are excellent. For new users, they can get acquainted to Macs pretty easily I think, but for the Windows user, adaptation may be a bit difficult to follow through.

Mac is awesome!!

It has been a while since I have used a Mac. I used it at one of my design jobs. It was like a G6... it was quite a few years ago. But I did like using it for Photoshop. I think if I were to really put money into my freelance gig, I would love to upgrade my PC and then possible run a seperate Mac for my graphics.

But I don't love hate one PC or Mac over another, I just like that there is competition between many good systems, and sometimes you can get really good deals for one, due to the expansion or upgrades of another OS.

I say keep it coming, but be careful of the 'lemons' out there... my good friend bought a Dell around a year ago, and it kept dying on him...