Adam IBM thinkpads are good, and I given that around 50% of Mac laptop owners I know have had to send the thing off for repair within the first year (and quite a few of them more than once) I think Mac laptops suck, although they do appear to be getting better again so ask me again in another year.
Well - guess they were unlucky - the iBook has had a fair run of dodgy motherboards, but I gather an extra generous replacement program fixed many of those. I'm certainly getting one to replace my G3 Pismo this year which has zero spent on it since I bought it. And it still has a fairly good resale value.
When the Dual G5 was first made available it was very hard to build a X86 based machine with the same real world performance for much less money and that's completely ignoring the fact that they are one of the best designed and built Workstations I have ever had the pleasure of pulling to bits.
Also look at how expensive a Mac that will play Doom III nicely costs compared to an x86 gaming rig.
You're starting to sound like a Winders troll there!
You can beat the Mini Mac on a straight price/performance comparasion, but factor in subjective things like near silent running and the tiny form factor and you'll struggle to find anything to compare. Just off the top of my head a MiniITX board, case, memory, Hard drive, Slimline CDRW and PSU comes to about £250 retail (and that's for less performance and does not include an operating system or any manufacturer support)
There have been many other small form factor PCs in the past, tbh I'm not too worried about how big my computer is as it sits under my desk. Also you have to factor in the one of the design flaws of the Mac mini with its dodgy dvi/vga adaptor which isn't compatible for the vesa spec which to me suggests a big Apple design flaw (so it isn't *always* sensible design).
From what I gather it's a low voltage thing that only shows up on certain monitors? As this is a version one product, guess it'll get resolved in the next revision. Tough on the early adopters I know, but it's not that it won't work with ANY monitors, just SOME.
The machine I am typing on was originally a 1.4Ghz Athlon with a Ge-Force 2 card which cost 600 quid, the motherboard died and it cost 50 quid to replace with a newer better motherboard and around the same time I upgraded the gfx card to a geforce 4 for 100 quid. At christmas I upgraded the cpu and gfx card which cost me 200 quid for a 2.mumble Ghz Athlon and a GeForce 6600GT card and the upgrade required me to buy some new ram (total 1GB). Every time I have upgraded the machine I have sold many of the bits on ebay.
When I add up what it has cost me over 4 years (1050 quid) and what I got back by selling bits (150 quid, and if I had sold the geforce 2 card I would have got another 50 quid) It has cost me 850 quid to have a machine that is more than fast enough (and at the beginning was fairly high end) for nearly 4 years with no upgrade projected for another 2 years I would say that works out as a bit of a bargain compared to an equivalent Mac (in fact, looking at the Apple store online, an equivalent (but admittedly slightly faster) G5 Mac would cost me about 1361 quid. God knows what the price would have been if I had stayed with Mac kit from the beginning.
Probably 1361 quid... As was stated at the beginning, it's the appliance thing. Many Mac users buy their kit like other people buy stereos or TV's. They use it till they fancy another. I'll use this G4 iMac for about 2 more years and get the latest and greatest to replace it. Obviously they break for some people, - I've a 93 or 4 vintage LC that won't boot, but I've never had a hardware failure in anything else yet. That's about 40 or 50 machines. This that one I've a 1989 Classic upstairs, still runs just fine, never been opened. Logic battery died years ago, but it ticks along. It's a mindset thing. I buy my Mac to do a job. If it earns me enough I buy another.Phil