The Mac is certainly not for monkey, it is made from people with revolutionary ideas for people with forward thinking and a positive attitude. People who cannot catch up with the Mac either choose to follow or simply curse & swear.
In the early years of the Mac world, parts like RAM, hard drives or monitors are not easily available, even if you managed to found one, it's going to be very expensive. A 500 MB SCSI drive cost about $500, a 19" CRT color monitor will set you back even further at $7k, a pretty cut-throat price. Good news is now user accessible parts are easily & readily available from SLS, stuff like RAM, hard drive or external drive, LCD monitors or optical drive are abundant. So hard to get Mac spare part is a thing of the past, it's long gone!
After years of failure, Apple raised from the ashes and is proud to be in a shaped up condition and sexy in term of look & feel in design and ergonomically. Minimalist and clean line design concept is top of their agenda less is more. A slim aluminium keyboard, buttonless trackpad, concealed buttons on monitor and the latest, unibody a one-piece aluminium body, a 17" Macbook Pro with concealed battery compartment. Ask yourself how often you open up a battery compartment & replace with a spare battery. Besides, the battery's usefulness life could probably outlive your hardware upgrade pattern.
For a few bunch who still didn't know, you can install and run Windows OS yourself on any Mac computer (from ver 10.4 onwards) and it'll runs flawlessly. Unless you are a hi-tech geek, running Mac OSX on a PC is still possible, check this out,
http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2008/10/13519/. Now, who's accommodating who?
The Mac community will never hit a world computer user population of 80%. Analyse these, banks, government bodies and multi-national corporation all over the world won't switch to Mac just like that (click!). I work in an environment with both Mac & PC platform, we don't have any problem sharing files among us. Catching a virus from the Mac? That's a bad & baseless accusation. And one more thing, Mac don't recognise .exe files.
Guarding trade secret tightly control, it's part and parcel of a company operation, If you were a CEO of Apple would you do the same? Why not? Picture this, if someone steal your photo, and photoshop it a bit here, a bit there and altered your style, what would do?
If I remembered correctly, the first version of Mac OSX 10.0 was released on March 2001, 5 months later the same year, Windows XP was born and had grown up to be Windows Vista on November 2006. But sadly, even on the super sophisticated Vista, its still rely the the aging Bios technology to perform certain computing task. To date Vista OS looks & feels are much like their Mac OSX counterpart. Mac Widgets vs Windows Gadgets, Mac Finder vs Windows Vista Explorer, Mac iCal vs Windows Calendar & more... For Vista stability issues, kudos to the Mac.
Mac are expensive? You don't have to score 'A's in your maths subject to do a simple calculation. Buy any Windows laptop of the same specs and upgrade the OS to Vista Business/Ultimate and you'll get the answer a very small differential, use it to buy yourself a laptop cover or any other stuff if that could make you happy.
On the Mac, it comes in a neat package.
As for people who hatred the Mac so much, stop grouching, you never realise how much you're going to miss out from the Mac, and please do yourself a favor, scroll to the top of this page and take a good look at the poll results, 70% of the CS community can't be wrong. Lastly, you don't have to blow your mind on deciding either machine, it's a personal choice.
May I ask which Mac are you?