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.
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. For what it is worth, I bought one of those $298 E-Machines recently and put PCLinuxOS 2009 on it. It was a very pleasant, very simple install --- everything went flawlessly.
The only fault that I found in playing with it was that using full screen mode with hulu was jerky. Otherwise, everything works quite well.