Congrats. This argument is now 28 years old. The IBM PC came out in 1981, when I bought my first one. Prior I had an Apple ][ (minus) that I ultimately poured $7,000 in to. I traded my motorcycle so I could buy a second $500 360K disk drive. I paid $120 for 16K of RAM. My friend paid $1000 for a 10MB hard disk for the Apple.
I bought Apples for my employer, too. But then something happened. PC clones appeared for a mere $1000, far cheaper than a $2,000 IBM. Apple, which could have owned the market, insisted on high margins and never dropped their prices on anything, including the first Macs. I was faced with an excruciating decision. I loved Apples, but the fact is I could buy two clones or one Apple. My vision was to get a computer on everyone's desk. Meanwhile, my bibliographic utility, which ran on a mainframe, decided to switch out its dumb $3000 'Mod1' terminals with PCs and the vendor of my in-house minicomputer decided to create a backup system on PCs. I was forced to PCs. I was forced to a GUI. I did not want to go there either time. If Apple had allowed clones, they would own the market today.
Over the years I have run nearly every OS out there, transitioning from Apple DOS 3.2 to Apple DOS 3.3 (thus allowing 144K disk drives instead of 116K) to CP/M on an Apple and an Osborne, to every flavor of MS-DOS there ever was, Windows 286, 386, 3.0, 3.1, and 3.11, then onto to Windows 95 (I attended the opening ceremonies in Redmond), and all the way to Vista. I look forward to Windows 7, which is by all accounts very nice. And in between I've run stuff you never heard of: HUGO, Ugli, and Glug, for starters. You may remember GEM and Ventura. I've never found anything better than Ventura. I loved it. I've run HP-UX, Solaris, BSD, and many flavors of Linux--since it came on two 5-1/4" floppies. At a certain point it juts becomes a little fuzzy. I had always thought the phrase "I've forgotten more than you will ever know" was an arrogant statement, but, you know? I kinda understand it.
Out of that experience I've come to some conclusions. One is that today a computer is simply an appliance. It is a gateway mostly to the Internet. If you have some specialized needs, such as pixelsmith and his $30,000 worth of software, it makes tremendous sense to get a Mac. But if you use your PC to surf the net, do email, and some word processing, and not really much else, there's no good reason to get a Mac, the cheapest of which is a mini without a screen at $599 that is not a laptop. Most are twice that much. My Compaq Presario now sells for $299 locally. I've had it running five years on XP and it has NEVER seen the blue screen of death. That issue went away many years ago, though obviously still remembered.
Having been through this for 36 years now--I started on the CDC 6000 at the U Dub that Bill Gates used as a teenager in 1973--I have to say that one is not any better than another. They have become so close to each other that it doesn't matter, especially when you compare to the past. Different strokes for different folks. I'm happy to be away from Ugli and Glug. But I still miss my Apple ][.
... I was only trying to help
