[SampleMan]

Macs are horribly expensive. When I last looked to purchase, the cheapest Mac was about four times the price of the cheapest PC. Coupled with the fact that I didn’t want a new monitor, I quickly overcame my idea of getting a Mac, which I had finally considered doing.

[antidemoncrat]

After using MS PCs for more than 20 years I got my first Mac. It was not too much more expensive than a comparably equipped PC but what a difference in operation. It comes on and shuts off about 10 times faster than a PC. Some of Mac software crashes occasionally but it recovers incredibly fast. Sometimes when a MS program quits responding, it takes several minutes just to terminate and restart the app. All said, the Mac blows any PC I’ve owned away. When I can afford it, my PC laptop is going bye bye in favor of a Mac book.

[antiRepublicrat]

Macs are horribly expensive. When I last looked to purchase, the cheapest Mac was about four times the price of the cheapest PC.

I'll go with Wal-Mart, the land of cheap, and their cheapest Windows machine. $298 gets you an eMachines EL1300G-01w:

• AMD Athlon 2650e 1.6GHz/12KB L2
• 2 GB DDR2 Memory
• VIDIA GeForce 6150SE Integrated graphics
• 160 GB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM, 8MB Cache)
• 18x DVD+-R/RW
• Multi-in-One Digital Media Card Reader
• 56K ITU V.92 ready Fax/Modem (RJ-11 port)
• 9 - USB 2.0 Ports (5 Front, 4 Rear)
• Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic

The cheapest Mac is double the price with a mini:

• 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 3MB L2 cache
• 1066MHz frontside bus
• 1GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics 128MB RAM (256 MB if you have 2 GB RAM)
• 120 GB HDD
• Slot-loading dual layer 8x DVD+-RW
• One FireWire 800 port
• Five USB 2.0 ports
• Built-in 802.11N and Bluetooth
• Gigabit Ethernet
• OS X Leopard

On the PC side: Little larger hard drive, more memory, faster DVD drive, card reader and a modem. Tempering that is that few use modems these days and the DVD drive is only single-layer. Also 2 GB is the realistic minimum for Vista. The bad: The processor is an Intel Atom (read: Netbooks) competitor and the graphics are ancient.

On the Mac side: It has a MUCH faster processor, bus and memory. It has only 1 GB, but that is Leopard's realistic minimum. It has wireless, Bluetooth and Gigabit Ethernet. It has fewer ports, but one of those is Firewire 800 (VERY fast). The Mac also doesn't have a low-end, castrated operating system, but the complete, fully-capable version.

It's seriously a case of you get what you pay for. Just upgrading the PC to the full Windows will get you quite a bit closer to the Mac price, but then you have to upgrade the processor, video and memory (most of your system) to run the full version well anyway.

And you only needed a $20 adapter to hook a Mac mini up to your current monitor.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"...When I last looked to purchase..."

When was that? 1989?

Today, the cheapest Mac is the Mac Mini, about $600, and it's a premium machine compared to what you'd get for the price in the Microsoft side of the aisle, especially if you factor in the antivirus, anti-malware, firewall and disk-defrag stuff a PC needs and a Mac doesn't. And any Mac is way more secure and stable and functional and easy to use than a PC, and you can run Windows on it if you need to.

I really have no dog in the fight, as I go between Mac and Windows and Linux all day long... and in fact my Mac is running Windows in a virtual machine right now as I type. And I'm here to tell you that this "Mac is 4X more expensive" stuff is as false and misleading as an Obama campaign promise.