True. But I’d say used Mac kit compares favorably to new Windows machines – any individual purely-local task may be marginally slower, but the entire system will be far more stable and usable (and thereby cost-effective, especially if you value your time).

I continued to use my 1996-era Power Tower Pro 225 on a daily basis until the motherboard failed last year. (Try doing that with a 1996-era Windows PC.) I’ve historically made most of my living from Windows software and systems work – but for the last 3-4 years, Windows is the last thing I use when I just want to get something *done*. When I was a young man, and had hair, I enjoyed “outsmarting” various MS software packages, making them work more-or-less the way I wanted and learning the deep internals. Now that I have other important things to do with my life, I can’t be bothered. I got Vista on a “free” Lenovo laptop when I signed up for DSL service here (Singapore); two days after unboxing it, I had Ubuntu dual-booting on it, and have started Windows less than 20 times in the last 15 months. Linux at least lets you see and control what’s going on, but it still fails the ‘It Just Works’ test. TCO, indeed.

I have to note though, that I have 0 problems with Windows, a bit more with Linux and only know 2 people who owns Mac – one of them returned it after about 4 months, he could not cope with the continues crashing and freezing. You know, the faulty series they had to recall for overheating all the time.

So, all in all, as far as I am concerned they are the same quality and price, Mac is better for music and graphics, Windows for gaming and general usage, Linux for practicing command line stuff.

I don’t understand the Eee either. I’m either carrying a backpack which fits a 13″ notebook, or just enough pocket space for a phone. It’s neither here nor there, and not even a tablet you can curl in bed with.