
MAN, am I sick of the RISC vs. CISC, G4 vs. P4 vs. Athlon debates. And the argument that Macs run better because Apple controls both the hardware and the OS, leading to better total integration between the two is hogwash.
I remember just a few short years ago and the ultra-hyped release of OS-8. Initial public releases of OS-8 installed on Performa 6500 series using the 603e CPU had a nasty tendency to trash the hard drives' boot sectors, making them unbootable and in fact, rendering all the data on them unrecoverable for all practical intents and purposes.
That Apple released for public sale an OS that acted like a boot-sector virus on hardware that they themselves made is a gaffosaurus if ever there was one. Didn't Apple even try the OS on all the machines on which they expected it to be run? Why not? They made every single one of them. They must have had examples of them on hand.
On the other hand, Microsoft has been pillaried for far less egregious errors even though they don't control or make ANY of the literally millions of possible hardware configurations on which their OS is to be installed.
How about the original iMac keyboards and mice? Both were ergonomic atrocities. But they sure photographed well.
I love the new OS-X. But I hate Apple for their proprietary hardware. A few years ago, Power Computing was building faster and cheaper Macs than Apple. Apple's solution was to jerk the license to their OS, buy out the company and dismantle it. God forbid there be any competition. So MacOS lovers are forced again to buy Apple hardware at a higher price than they should have to pay were it a free market.
I also hate Apple because for some reason, they think MacOS users want the computing equivalent of designer jewelry when in fact, most of us just want the computing equivalent of

computers! Just because we appreciate the virtues of MacOS doesn't mean we want computers that compromise affordability, serviceability, expandability, cooling efficiency, legacy compatibility and ergonomics for the sake of making them look like high-tech tissue dispensers, table lamps, and toilet seats.
And just because we bought an overpriced new Mac doesn't mean there is lots of money in the wallet left to buy all new peripherals, just because Apple decides it no longer likes SCSI ports and 8-pin serial ports and AppleTalk networking. The great god Jobs not only takes these ports away, in most of Apple's newest and biggest-selling offerings, there are not even open slots to retrofit support for these older standards. So now all our external hard drives, scanners, zip drives, network cards, serial and localtalk printers no longer work. Yes, it's true that almost all PC's use USB for peripherals now, too. But most new PC's still also have DB9 serial ports and parallel ports, for those printers and modems we still want to use that need them.
Adapters? Get real. USB-to-SCSI? (YUK!) Serial-to-USB? localtalk/ethernet bridges? By the time you buy all this kludgeware, you may as well have bought new peripherals. And if you do buy all these adapters and manage to install and configure them, your system will become a nightmare of a patchwork camel - not exactly the image that Apple promotes, is it?
Apple seems hell-bent on building for us the perfect, beautiful computers they think we ought to have, rather than the low-cost, adaptable, upgradeable, USEFUL computers we WANT.
Why should MacOS users be trapped into either putting up with Apple's bullshit or holding our noses and switching to Wintel/Lintel? The reason is simple. Proprietary hardware. As much as I like Apple's operating system, I refuse to be trapped by their hardware platform. So I use Windows XP, DAMN IT!! Because it works and I can get my work done and my computer doesn't cost me an arm and a leg and I can upgrade it cheaply and to my satisfaction from a myriad of free-market options.