I should have made it more clear percived quality. though it used to have a ginuine claim to different with powerpc, i understand why they made the change (read head of thread) but i feel it was the wrong desicion from a technical aspect x86 is still year behind powerpc in multitasking effeicintcy (its interesting how many feaures of old powerpc are working their way into x86)

also dont buy WD hds complete trash drives...... 

heh and more on the pc connection, ive fired a few fx cards overclocking them, and modding out macs, and pcs is fun

macbookpro was ratted as the best windows pc by pc magazine, last year sometime. but i got mine for work and installed windows on it to play pc games, and unbuntu on it to dick around in linux 

well thats your op, but linux is a lot of work to maintain and expand upon, most people dont have the technical know how to do it, or the time, linux is a luxury, of people with the time, and the love of tech with no worreis of losing money  

There are three reasons:

a) maintaining a linux box requires more technical know-how

b) the user interface is ace

c) there are many software niches that aren't properly covered by open source software.

As for price, I suggest you read my first post in this thread - 8 months ago was january, and apple pushed a new macbook revision in february. You were looking at the point where the price difference was higher. Had you waited one month it'd be different. It is to be noted however that apple does prefer to toss up budget towards cpu rather than gpu tho.

Here is a price/spec comparison.

Mac book (regular one, not a pro) - $1149

http://www.bestbuy.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&langid=EN&sku_id=0926INGFS10099350&catid=22156

Specs -
CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1GHz
Ram - 1Gig
Hard drive - 120 GB
Drive - combo drive (WTF is that)
Screen - 13.3 inches

Similarly spec'd PC from same store - 699

http://www.bestbuy.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&langid=EN&sku_id=0926INGFS10107931&catid=20354

Specs - CPU Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz
Ram - 4 GB !!!
Hard Drive - 200 GB
Drvie - 8X DVD+/-RW MultiFormat DL w/ LabelFlash
Screen - 14.1 inches

Now I know its gateway, who are like Dell and its not HP, Toshiba...etc. But the specs are much better for the Gateway at 40% less cost.

Also, this is a regual mac, not a macbook pro. This means that its the plastic white shell (not the metal one) that will heat up until it burns your testicles off... At these prices, is anyone surprised that they get so much revenue?

I've used a Mac and I didn't like the OS...but there really is nothing wrong with it. Its a functional system for people that want to use it for sure. However just like a PC, it does crash...your data gets lost...there are things you can't do that you could on a PC...its missing drivers when you need them most...etc...

What I'm trying to say is that people need to examine their needs from a computer machine. Some may need a mac for some video editing software some may need a PC for some database tool...but for day to day computing (gaming, word poressor, internet...) there is no denying that PC's have more features and are better value.

Until industry starts buying Macbooks, 20 percent will be a high water mark.

I am not going to say that Macs are not good -- I once thought that until I used one. But so much of the corporate and government structure of the US is run on PC-based software, that it will be a long time before that changes. (And yes, I know that the Mac can run XP and such -- but Big IT is a conservative beast).

Mike from Morgantown

PS -- True story. I once worked for a newspaper that went to a Mac-based system to put out the paper. It did not get WYSIWYG software (What-you-see-is-what-you-get -- standard today in Windows and Macs but pretty much limited to Macs 15 years ago). The vendor oversold the software, it was buggy, and one night the paper almost did not get published. Note that I am talking about a 100,000 circulation regional daily newspaper -- not a small local paper.

I have a 17-inch macbook pro and it works fine. Not sure if it's worth the extra cash though.

The same age old arguments flying back and forth... disolitude's comment above is one of the few of reason: to each his/her own. Although I'm not so sure about the missing drivers and stuff, that hasn't happened to me (yet). But yes, my mac has totally crashed on me a few times, although for the overwhelming majority of time it is performing rock solid. Not that Windows is/was terribly unstable either, at least from 2000 onwards in my experience, but I'd say that OS X is more stable than the flavors of Windows I've used.

I really like my mac, been a mac user and owner for 2 and a half years now, before that I was always a PC man, starting from using DOS sometime in the early/mid 80'ies. One thing I am pretty confident about, though: OS X and Windows are sufficiently different in their design philosophy that mixed use will create more frustration than anything. I guess especially if you're mainly a Windows-user, as evidenced by the complaints about the difficulty to really maximize a window in OS X. That was one of my complaints when I started using OS X as well, but in a short while I got used to the OS X way that windows don't have to cover up the whole screen, and now I practically never want to maximize anything. Apples and Oranges; it's a matter of learning a way of work, and I can't really say either is markedly better than the other.

One thing "us Mac people" ought to remember is that Macs are not meant for everybody, they are designed very carefully for a certain target audience, and Apple doesn't really seem to want to go beyond that. There's no point in pushing Macs for everybody and their dog, it's just not the way even Apple wants to go.

Did you even read the thread?

@Plaupius

A specific example of me missing drivers on a mac was when I was going to europe with it on a plane and my windows crashed (it was already wonky before I went on the trip) and I tried watching the movies I brought with me to entertain me during the 8 hour flight.

None of them would play on a mac OSX... I had VLC and Divx installed on the windows xp partition...but since I rarely used mac OSX, all I had was quicktime.

Stories like this happen to windows users all the time...but for some reason people think that macs are immune to this problem.