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There are 10 PC's used by 4 people in my office, and I know that 2 of them will break every year. That's quite a contrast with my Mac at home. It is 4 years old now, and I've never had any problems.

You're statics show that the mean time between failure (MTBF) for the PC's is 5.0 years. You would have slightly less than 50% percent probability of experiencing a failure of your Mac if it exhibited the same MTBF. The best one can conclude from your experience is that Macs probably do not have a significantly higher MTBF. It could be significantly lower (lower is better), wait twenty years. Also usage at home my not be as demanding as at the office. Can't tell.

I've had two Macs and four PCs at home. My wife's an elementary school teacher and the town's school department had a "pass down" system where new hardware would start life in the HS be passed down to the lower grades, so that in 1990 the kindergarten had Apple IIG's. (Kewl machines, really). Anywho, I had to keep Macs for compatibility. These days the schools are mostly PC based.

In my experience, dollar for dollar, I could get more functionality based on initial investment in the PC. In addition, peripherals and software were also cheaper and more available. Since I was the IT department, I fixed my own problems and my wife's. I had to keep learning enough Mac to get her out of trouble. (Same as aol. I only use it when my wife gets into trouble.)

My impression is that prior to '95, Mac was easier to get started on, but it ate up a lot of resources with the interface and cost much more to purchase. Since Window's '95 they are about comparable. There are some nice widgets out there for the Mac, but probably more for the PC. BTW, I've programmed on the Mac, PC, unix and VMS. (I made a living for five years knowing only two things, VMS Fortran and Huygens principal.) I consider my self an analyst who uses a computer, not a programmer, although I did deliver about ~40,000 lines of unix application code in the years after the market for Huygens dried up.) I suppose I prefer the PC, just because that's what I'm most familar with these days.

MTBF is meaningless when applied to such a small sample. What is relevant is that when my computer doesn't work, I can't get things done, and the projects I support miss deadlines. Some of these missed deadlines could cost the company tens of millions of dollars. We need more realiable machines, such as the current crop of Macs, with truly superior engineering.

My company buys top-of-the-line Compaq and Dell desktop computers, in the hope that they will still be useable in three years.

My primary computer is now about three years old. In the past three years, I have had to replace the HD twice, the CD burner twice, the flopply drive three times. One of my office mates just had to get a new computer because it was doing strange things that a software rebuild and a new HD did not fix.

I have used a MAC in the office in the past. My company was at one time the largest industrial user of Apple products (so Apple told us, at least). We never had the problems we've had since we switched to PC's. The IT department became so large that we outsourced IT to CSC. It didn't help.

I keep hearing the myth about software and peripherals being more expensive. In my experience, and that of a former housemate who was a computer consultant, the Mac and the PC use pretty much the same peripherals. In fact, in many cases one doesn't need to look for a peripheral that says it is Mac compatible.

A hard drive doesn't care what flavor of computer it's hooked up to. Printers come with multiple ports for USB and Ethernet, and don't know the difference. USB mice or keyboards the same. The price is identical, since in many cases its the same piece of hardware.

The same applies to the software that most people use. Most software is readily available for MacIntosh, and at the same price as for Windows.