Perhaps you would care to elaborate on this and explain why you feel this way? I think it’s more likely as another comment mentioned – “he had a problem and believes it was caused by a virus”. When a paranoid former Windows user has even a slight Mac problem all their mind can turn to as an explanation is malware or maintenance like defrag. I can assure Windows users, their is no fear factor using a Mac, no self-corrupted or slow filesystems, no bad attachments, no wrong email messages to click on, no bad web sites that could compromise, no chance your machine could be relaying info to bad guys or used as a zombie pawn spewing spam to others. The normal Windows user lives in fear and a Mac user has none. No matter how you compare Macs to Windows machines, this one characteristic alone makes the Mac advantage priceless.

But I sense that for most people who want a mid- to high-end machine for more than just emailing and web browsing, and they’re looking at mass market Dells and HPs, Apple machines are a more than viable choice, and the “overpriced” complaints are just ignorant or dishonest.

The cheap one is a fully functional laptop and can handle needs of a basic user. But I prefer the more powerful one and use it for my work. The processor, HD, RAM, casing, screen and other features ain’t comparable on those two, the twice as more expensive is better on every aspect.

Since I got my first Mac (Mini) I instantly started to plan the purchase of a Mac-laptop, nevertheless my PC is working alright and does the job perfectly for what it’s meant for. What is most important, the price isn’t the issue – I wouldn’t buy a PC under $1000 anyhow for the job I want it to handle. I think that Vista is great OS, but out of those two I just want it to be Mac.

You can get a good laptop with $1500 and you can get a working laptop with $500.

If you want a good one, my conclusion is that it’s a more of an OS question better than a hardware.

Having built a number of PCs, and running Parallels on my Mac, I can say that installing Windows on a PC is just as hard, often harder, as installing it on a Mac – on the PC, there’s a driver disk (or download) for every device; on the Mac, there’s just one (or, for Parallels, no driver disk at all; Parallels will run the installer for you).

At the moment, .mac/mobileMe is a mess… Perhaps they’ll get if fixed soon, but until that happens… I would avoid it for now. I also wouldn’t use iWeb for anything serious; it’s really a basic program. I use RapidWeaver, and sometimes edit the files with TextWrangler, and push the resulting HTML (and css, js, etc) files up to a standard linux web server.

Time Machine does **NOT** store your files in a proprietary format; what’s on the backup drive is the raw files… any machine that can read HFS+ volumes (the standard format for a hard drive on the Mac) can read the data. The one sticking point, for switchers, is that PC’s can’t read HFS+ without a 3rd party utility, so this usually means that to recover data from a Time Machine backup you need a working Mac.

I don’t know where MacHadit is getting advice, but whoever it is isn’t giving accurate info.