Atwood

As a veteran mac and pc user, a few comments:

1. For those who are genuinely confused about the appeal of the mac, it's the operating system. It's much faster and easier to do *everything* on the mac than on the pc, and I'm including high-end power-user kind of stuff here. If you've never used one, fine say you don't get it, but please don't call those of us who are "in the know" stupid for our loyalty. You don't have the information you need to make that judgment. If you did, you'd probably change your mind.

I don't know a single person who tried a mac that didn't.

2. Barring technical or legal glitches in the coming weeks, this development is *unbelievably* big. In my experience there are more people who would like to own a mac but can't because they need windows compatibility...than actually own macs. With that barrier removed you will see a significant surge in market share for the mac.

Dont' get me wrong, we'll be in the minority for some time to come...

But... we're about to grow a lot.

3. Macs support most USB and Firewire devices, and virtually EVERY mouse, even multi-button ones. PC fanatics, *please* get over this non-issue. You demonstrate ignorance when you claim Macs are one-button machines.

4. Every serious technical comparison of PC hardware to Mac hardware that delves into the details (bus speed, HD seek times, battery life, etc.) finds less than a $150 variance for genuinely equivalent machines, as often in Mac's favor as not. The only difference between macs and windows boxes is there are no cheaply made macs. Though, if you really want a bargain, look at the mac mini. You can get it for less than $500 and it's faster with Windows than a lot of pc desktops out there.

5. According to the literature online at the moment, the Windows HD is fully or partially exposed to the Mac OS depending on how you install Windows. But, the Mac HD is in no way exposed to the Windows OS. So, while you can argue Macs might be more vulnerable to viruses now that they share chip architecture with Windows boxes and may be gaining in market share, having a Windows partition on your Mac machine doesn't increase the security risk for your Mac files.

6. Windows/MacOS Mac machines are definitely bad for Mac software developers (especially mac game companies) and for PC hardware manufacturers. It is very, very good for Mac users, Apple itself, Microsoft and any Windows software developer. Yesterday, for example, I had no intention of dropping a few hundred bucks on Windows XP and a half dozen games I've been drooling over for the past decade.

But tomorrow, that's just what I'm gonna do.

:)

Take care everyone. And buy a Mac. You'll thank me later.

- Atwood