Why must Apple draw me towards them?

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

sorry, with that price, i can build a computer with twice the ram, a real video card (9600GT or better), and a 4600+ duo and all storage medias.

That's the biggest difference between a Mac and a PC. You can get twice the PC for the same priced mac. Mac will never be more than a nitch market until that changes. Oh, and when they start having games written for them again :-)

You might build a PC with twice the specs for the money, but I get a computer with half the stress.

I'll attest to the long-term durability of Macs--we had one in a college computer lab for most of my collegiate career, and (aside from a bad call when ordering--get AppleCare, folks!) it was the least trouble I ever had with a lab machine. We deployed four iMacs by the end of my senior year to replace the Dell computers that were at the end of their lifespan, and they are a dream to administer. The four computers (Anderson, Blanchard, Dillon, and Flair--the Four Horsemen) are all ridiculously solid, particularly on the keyboards that take the brunt of most college students' two-in-the-morning-essay rage. Mac OS X is easily locked down to keep folks out of apps they have no business in (Terminal comes to mind), and Winclone allows ridiculously easy imaging of Windows XP on all the machines. I still preferred users to use OS X's guest account, which reverts to a squeaky-clean state on logoff with the right restrictions, but I could just as easily come in and roll back an XP partition in about 20 minutes. (I'll also note that the lab was closed for the switch on a Friday night and open in time for the Sunday night paper crowd. Aside from a wee bit of heavy lifting, the entire deployment was a one-man operation.)

They're a tool, a more expensive tool, but I firmly believe that this is one case where you get more than what you pay for. If I can get folks who begged me to put back in a Dell going on Mac OS X in a few hours (true story) and switch completely after over a decade of Windows in about a day and a half, anyone can switch.