I've had the luxury for the past 20 years of being able to play with other peoples computers, both Mac and PC and I've owned both. I came from a PC background, and on first playing with a Mac I hated it, but things change, and I soon had one of my own. It's been retired now and replaced with a pretty powerful PC with a few Terabytes of storage for video editing, mainly because I couldn't afford the difference in price for a Mac with the same spec.
Don't beleive the myth that you can't get viruses on a Mac - the first virus I ever came across was on a mac classic (anyone else here remember them?) It spread like wildfire through our network, and had all of our IT staff tied up for days cleaning machines. I saw quite a few more Mac viruses long before I ever came across a PC one, and never saw anything quite so bad until Blaster came along. The only way to guarantee a computer will not get a virus is to lock it in a room surrounded by a Faraday cage and run it off batteries. Or don't switch it on
In an environment with almost an equal number of Macs and PC's (and we're talking about hundreds of machines here) we saw significantly more hardware failures on PC's than on Macs. However we spent significantly more in total on Mac repairs than PC repairs, because a Mac fault always cost a fortune to fix. Things have gradually changed, and both Macs and PC's are equally reliable (as long as you buy a decent brand PC), and PC's are still slightly cheaper to fix.
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Apple are the only people that design and build their hardware" - Dell might want to debate that point with you, as would a number of manufacturers. Where was your iPod made? (Answer - China). The first Apple laserwriters were HP laserjets with different electronics (which was good to know because you could buy HP spares cheaper than Apple parts!) and many of the original Apple colour displays were rebadged Sony monitors. Many of the parts in modern Macs are neither designed nor manufactured by Apple.
The issue with iPhones is mainly to do with the fact that it can't be integrated into an Exchange environment. My iPod Touch works fine on Windows XP.
Fully agree with RedDavid - a properly patched Windows XP system is an extremly stable machine, and as for server operating systems, we have machines which have been running for months on end without the slightest glitch - when they
are restarted, it's usually nothing to do with them having a problem.
macs are £ for £ slower than PC's? Not strictly true - you can't just judge performance by clock speed. (I remember putting up old PowerMacs against PC's with twice the memory and twice the processor speed - the macs always won!) Even now that Apple are using the Intel platform, it's not just a clock speed comparison - Apple do have a bit of an edge on OS efficiency. But who cares anyhow - it would be hard nowadays to buy a machine which is underpowered for the average user!
The Apple GUI is more intuitive? Yes it is - there is no doubt about that - I've seen dozens of cases of non computer literate people who struggled to do anything with a PC take to a mac like a duck to water. But who wants to play with the OS all day? Anyone involved in media is probably pretty computer literate, and will have no problems handling either MacOS or Windoz, and if they can't they ought to be questioning whether or not they want to get involved in computerised recording!
Which is best? Well I like both dark chocolate and white chocolate! Benoit, the real answer is, you need to try both! Go to an Apple Store and play around with a Mac for a while. Grab a member of staff and ask him to prove to you that it's worth the extra cash! Price both of your upgrade options, and then decide whether or not moving to Mac is worth the extra money (because it will almost certainly be more expensive). Having had the chance to play with both, to be quite happy I'd be happy with either - both platforms have advantages and disadvantages.