With the very high end Mac Pros comparable in price to PCs with the same specs, why does anyone (and by anyone I mean people in the market for a new, high end machine) bother buying a new PC anymore? Similar price, same exact specs, and you could either get the ability to run Windows or you could get the ability to run both Windows and OS X, which each have their advantages.

This past summer, I purchased a Dell Precision Workstation 690 just weeks before the Mac Pro was announced (I received it only days before). When the mac was finally out, it very coincidentally had the exact same specs as my new Dell down to the processor, the ram, even the video card. While I did get some extra perks such as 15K SAS hdds with a PERC raid card in RAID 10 as opposed to 7200 RPM 3 mbps/sec SATA that Apple offers (unless you want to get an Xserve), I keep wondering whether I would have been happier if I held out for the same machine with the ability to run OS X too.

Aren't pc's easier to upgrade, customise (hardware) and replace parts cheaply if they go wrong, compared to macs?

Well, for one thing, macs tend to cost more (correct me if I'm wrong).

For another, I may be wrong here, but I thought that PC components don't work on a mac, and many monitors and mice don't work with macs also.

Compatibility is another thing: many gamers like myself basically only use the computer for gaming and things such as MS office and internet browsing: it just doesn't seem worth the hassle to partition your drive, etc.

It's true you can't get a cheap mac. But if you're in the market to buy a high-end workstation (such as the Dell I purchased a couple of months ago), the price for the same system was very comparable through Apple.

Macs work fine with all keyboards and mice. For a monitor you're going to need to go with DVI as opposed to VGA, which is the de facto standard for a couple of years already.

Microsoft has MS Office:Mac which is actually more fully functional than their Windows counterpart. And if you don't want to partition your drive (which is about 10 minutes of time anyways) then there's always Parallels which lets you run Windows from within OS X.

> It's true you can't get a cheap mac.
On second thought, I take that back. You can get an Intel-based mac mini for less than $600, and dual boot it with OS X and Windows.

There are definitely disadvantages to Macs.

Customizability is quite an issue for expert PC users. You certainly can't build a custom Mac, and for many buyers the products Apple offers don't suit their needs/budget. Perhaps they don't want to spend more than $1000 on a laptop.

Secondly, you have to remember that the price of your dual-booting Mac goes up, because Windows XP isn't thrown in with the deal like if you buy a modern PC these days. Although XP isn't terribly expensive, it still costs money, and that's probably the biggest reason why I don't install XP on my MacBook (I'd love to try out Visual Studio 2005 which I recieved free in the mail, but that's another story).

But yes I agree with you, there's getting to be less and less of a need to avoid Macs these days.

If I wanted a mac, I'd buy a cheap generic PC and install a MACOS there. Not hard to do these days.
On the other hand, Macs aren't easier to use than Windows PC's, we're not in the 1980-90s anymore

PS I personally use Debian

I don't much like Apple as a company, but that's not why I don't bother with their OS's: I already have an iPod and I MUST have an iPhone, but it just annoys me that they make you use only what they want you to use: it's illegal to put OS X on PC components. You can't use iTunes with other MP3 players. That sort of thing.

yeah if ms did that ppl would have a fit

how about if ms made thier own pc that only windows could run on and it would run on nothing else? - people would cry Antitrust but somehow apple get away with it

Macs are also hard to upgrade i believe and are expenisve

my pc has a good gfx card, core 2 duo, 250gb HDD, 19" TFT and 1gb RAM with XP Pro and vista upgrade cose me £499 whereas a similar mac would be ££££

Actually it is. Not only is that illegal, but it's also very difficult. The only way you can get Mac OS X running natively on a PC is if you build a special custom PC that's very similar to the original Apple Developer Machines that they rented out before the Intel Macs were released.

Then, you can't even run the latest version of OS X on it because Apple has fixed those security holes. You would have to download a pre-release version of the Intel-based OS 10.4. So it's actually not that easy.

Really? Are you forgetting about the Zune, which has a DRM scheme very similar to the iPod's? Since people have pretty much gotten use to the iPod's scheme, it's actually not caused a huge uproar.

Actually that is partially true. Don't know if you've read this, but in some cases this is true:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/04..._aargh_i_cant/

Depends which models you're talking about. About the only thing that cannot be replaced in a Mac Pro is the motherboard. Mac Minis are hard to upgrade, true, but so are a lot of PC laptops.

A more correct term would be "high-end". Apple laptops can be compared to similarly-priced Sony laptops. Apple MacBooks and Sony Vaios, in case you didn't read it, were the highest-selling laptops on Amazon.com.

As mentioned in a previous thread, it's likely that the Apple computers are quite higher priced in the UK than here in US and Canada. Which is unfortunate, as it would be ideal if tech toys were similarly priced throughout all reigons, but that can't be the case always.