OSNews

It all comes down to that: a simple matter of taste and convenience. There are advantages in both platforms, and you will buy either system depending on what type of work you do, how you do it, and finally, your taste in GUIs.
It's true that at this point PCs are much cheaper and faster than Macs, but it's also true that PCs have an OS with a GUI that is just boring, even with the new skins, while Macs have an OS that has a beautiful GUI.

I used Windows XP a lot (I even wrote a review for this site) and still use it, but I found a way to get the entry level new G4 tower, with dual 867 Mhz CPUs, and I couldn't be happier with it. True, 867 Mhz is a number of two years ago in PCs, but Mac OS X takes full advantage of them, as well as of the Altivec instructions in it, and it shows. I do video editing, and rendering and encoding video works amazingly fast in this computer. But the best part is that I can do a lot of other things with the system while doing those intensive tasks, and the system is still totally responsive. PCs may have very fast processors these days, but I'll keep this dual processor Mac to any single processor PC any time. Of course, they're not comparable to Dual Processor Xeon PCs, but those cost a fortune, much more than the Mac towers.
Of course that for the casual user that only does internet and simple stuff, and of course for hard core gamers, Macs just aren't useful. But for video editing on a budget, Macs present a good advantage, mostly Final Cut Pro, which is only available for Macs and it's a professional video editing software for a thousand bucks, and there's no such thing on the PC. On the PC, you either use Adobe Premiere, which is unstable and useless for complicated projects, or jump to spend thousands of dollars on AVID solutions. And even editors that usually work with AVID stations that cost several thousand dollars get impressed when they have the opportunity to work with Final Cut Pro. As a matter of fact, a mainstream movie that is still in shooting is being edited on Final Cut Pro workstations:

http://www.creativecow.net/forum/read_post.php?postid=1033757985119...

As for the overprice of Macs, yes, they are overpriced, but it's logical when Apple only has 5% of the market. Dell can afford to sell their machines at ridiculously low prices, they sell millions and millions of PCs at those prices and still get a profit, but Apple can't afford that. And the lack of processor speed is a misfortune that Apple has to suffer because of those idiots at Motorola. Apple has been putting Motorola CPUs in their machines for years, and suddenly Motorola gives its back to Apple and say we don't give a damn about Apple anymore. What can Apple do? Turn to another CPU architecture of course, but that can't happen overnight. It's a long and complicated process. It will take years to accomplish.

Now, it may seem that I'm one of those Apple evangelists, but I actually think that most of Apple's marketing tactics suck and are on par with Microsoft's, in some cases even worse. Those switch ads are a piece of crap, that cute girl telling that she saved Xmas cause her father couldn't connect the digital camera to his PC and she connected it to her Mac in a snap is just a load of crap. If the PC works OK connecting the camera and downloading the pictures is as easy as on any Mac, and if a Mac has problems like many of them do perhaps she wouldn't be able to download those pictures to the Mac anyway. The point is that both the PC and the Mac can work without a hitch or be a mess depending on who's the owner and how he or she maintains the OS.

Sebastian