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Guess what? A Windows machine can be out done too! Le shock! (It's like you made absolutely no valid point what-so-ever, only very very very vague claims.)

Hardware most definitely makes a huge difference, but the choice of OS is no small matter. A badly designed OS could bring your system to a halt in many different ways. Insecure OSes can introduce malware that takes up processor time. Who cares if your CPU has a quad-core 2 GHZ processor when the machine spends most of its processor time serving as a botnet. rolleyes

The very question of this thread has become confused by the fact that Apple now uses x86 chips in their laptops, meaning a new Mac is essentually the same as a PC. It's just a matter of what you want hardware-wise and OS wise. (My exploration of Mac prices suggested that Macs really aren't much more expensive than PCs.)

However, the popular commercials are really about the OSes that usually ship with these products. You have many choices, but usually they come down to the following:

-Windows
-OSX
-Linux

Windows is, by far, the bloatiest, least secured, and most locked-down of the three. Oh, but why is it the most used? Illegal monopoly practices, mostly. (It's not illegal to be a monopoly, but it is illegal to use your monopoly in anti-competitive ways, of which Microsoft continues to be found doing in court.) Unfortunately, this might mean that you need this OS, anyways. If you're primarily looking for a computer to do web and e-mail you don't need this. The main problem with getting a PC with Windows right now is Vista, possibly more secure (it sounds like it but that's a horrible metric to use) but also the most bloated and locked-down version of Windows yet.

OSX is in-between Linux and Windows in terms of ease-of-use. Apple added a GUI to OpenBSD (an open-source Unix implementation) ; this means the kernel has been around for a looooooong time and looked over by many people. People like it because it is well polished. An older Mac laptop (six years old?) is also capable of running the latest versions of Mac OSX.

Linux is kind of a mysterious glob. Its kernel has many eyes on it, possibly even more than OpenBSD. Heck, I, myself, have done work in the Linux kernel. Out of experience, I can definitively say that Linux is really good for a code savy individual. Lots and lots of work has been going into making it ready for average-user use. However, I don't have enough experience with the various Linux GUIs to tell you how effective they are compared to OSX.

It might be possible to run Windows programs under Linux and OSX... I've heard of Wine a lot... it's an attempt to emulate windows enough to run windows programs from Linux. As far as I know, it's not 100% compatable, though.


Personally, I still use Windows at home, but I will not switch to Vista (which sounds quite horrible) and if I switched to anything it'd be to Linux (since I don't plan on buying new hardware.) I've quite enjoyed using my Mac, though, and if I decided to buy a laptop in the future it'd probably be a Mac.