[HarmlessLovableFuzzball]

I build my own PCs for < $400 with stuff I buy from Newegg, and upgrade at will. And then upgrade/swap parts at will. I am no fan of windows, but Mac to me looks just too "gay" :)

[HarmlessLovableFuzzball]

Ignore phrase "and upgrade at will"; one too many.

[George W. Bush]

I build my own PCs for < $400 with stuff I buy from Newegg, and upgrade at will.

And buying Vista Ultimate costs $200 for system builders, $400 retail.

By the time you include a legit OS and some of the basics, you get into the price range of a Mac. Of course, if you use liberated or open source software, you can keep the costs down. But you can easily spend another $150-$250 on antivirus/antimalware/firewall software over the 3-4 years you own the machine.

It's not the price of parts or the hardware, it's the total cost of ownership.

BTW, go try to price yourself a quad-core 2.66 Xeon machine. You'll find, if you work hard, you might save $100 over Apple's price for Mac Pro. And Mac Pro has AppleCare and a solid OS.

People should understand that Apple really isn't interested in becoming Dell or Gateway or HP. Apple is for people who want something that just works and who are willing to pay for it. I'm not sure why a premium price for a fully integrated experience is so bad for computers but is considered fine or even good when you have such choices on, say, purchasing cable/satellite TV/internet as a package. Or to choose premium vehicles with all the goodies on them. No one ever pretended that Cadillac was for the masses. Why hold Apple to that standard when they've never targeted the cheapest-is-best computer market?

[rom]

I see you are using one of Rush's nicknames as your screen name. He uses a Mac, and probably doesn't think they are "gay" :)

[BlazingArizona]

I build my own PCs for < $400 with stuff I buy from Newegg, and upgrade at will. And then upgrade/swap parts at will

Then how much nosing around on Russian hacker sites it take to amass the drivers you need to make it run? How much is your time worth to you? What if you could pay a little more to just sit down and start using the computer right out of the box? AND to be able to start using Unix immediately, too?