Well, that's cool that it can do that then. But can you tweek the hardware? For example, overclocking your CPU, diverting system RAM as additional video RAM, or creating RAM drives? Again, these are just some examples that come off the top of my head.
What about the ability to upgrade individual cards/components, versus buying an entire new computer? I haven't seen any suppliers carrying MAC component cards, etc.?
Really, IMO, for the cost of a MAC as opposed to a PC, I'll stick with the PC, as I can more easily afford it. When you come right down to it, a PC with Linux or Unix can be just as useful as a MAC for what I'm using it for.
I can do all of those except overclocking. I haven't checked recently, so am unsure whether it's possible or not, but I would imagine it would be. I've never had a need to do so.
For what it's worth, I switched to macs while I was working as a computational programmer on linux based systems - using primarily beowulf clusters to run massively parallel simulations. I was doing a ton of coding in C++, as well as some side projects in java, python, FORTRAN (<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eek.gif" alt="" />) and some scripting in perl.
I did all of this on a linux desktop running a LFS (that's linux-from-scratch) home-rolled distribution that I compiled from source from the ground up.
Then my boss bought us all G4 ibooks. Within a day, I had a full Gnome UI installed, plus all the GNU programming tools you could possibly desire. I had every single linux program I could ever need, and a whole new catalog of extra software that was WAY slicker and more polished than anything available on an open source platform. Within a month, I was using Apple Xcode to do all my programming - it blows every other IDE I've ever used out of the water, and it is essentially a slick graphical frontend to all the GNU tools, with the ability to drive down into the command line versions as needed.
In addition to that, I didn't have to recompile my kernel to get my sound card working, and upgrading X didn't break my entire GUI, leaving me to hunt through configuration files for three days trying to get it fixed. Everything simply worked, giving me the opportunity to actually get work done, instead of screwing with my computer. On top of that, I found that all that tweaking and tinkering that I had prided myself on for the last near decade of linux-only computing was actually a royal PITA, and I liked having my computer be a means, and not the end, as it often was in the past.
Basically, my opinion exactly echo-ed your argument, nearly word for word, until I actually USED a mac for a significant amount of time.
All the power of a full-blown UNIX system with almost none of the headaches, and a GUI that is slicker, more efficient, and more straightforward than anything else on the market.
Yeah, the hardware is somewhat more expensive, but to me it's worth every single penny.
