“touched” a Mac was your original phrase.
I didn’t just “play with one at a store”. I have many friends who use and own Macs (I even used an original Apple Lisa back in the 80’s, and by the way the old Commodore Amigas were better than the Macs of that era) and I’ve used Macs many, many times and didn’t just “play” with them and still find them to be just computers good or bad and in many cases slower than many PC’s.
Macs and some Apple products are in many cases beautiful and elegant (more so than most PC’s) pieces of good industiral design but in real world use are not any better or in many cases as good as or as fast as good PC’s for some applications. Plus there are many specific software products (like lots of financial trading platforms) that are not ported over to the Apple platform and are necessary to the business world.
Macs are good for graphics design and music (but not the only ones) but for many other uses, not so.
Despite all this, I am still considering buying either a Mac laptop or mini with the Intel C2D CPU to use when I visit Mac based friends and to take advantage of a computer with a CPU and computer that uses both OS’s and can handle my financial programs. Plus the MacBook’s are small, affordable and light. Better than my old 8 pound PC laptop which is heavy, slow and has limited RAM.
Fair enough.
I agree about the Amiga... I still have my Amiga 3000 in the garage. The Amiga could run Apple MacOS in a multitasked emulation faster than a Mac with the equivalent processor. It used to drive my Mac using friends crazy.
For those "specific software products," the Macs can run all of them under BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare as fast or faster as most PCs. I grant that requires a Windows license and partition, but it addresses the issue.
Plus the MacBook’s are small, affordable and light. Better than my old 8 pound PC laptop which is heavy, slow and has limited RAM.
You might want to wait a few months. First the MacBooks are due for a product line refresh that may include replacing the traditional back lights with low energy consumption LEDs as well as a speed bump in the processors. Also, rumor has it that Apple s working on a sub-notebook that will drop the internal optical drive and shed significant weight.