Mac vs. Windows: The Debate for The Rest of Us
This little question is the third rail of technology journalism. No other aspect of personal computing attracts so much emotion, or lands so much hate-mail in journalists' in boxes accusing them of bias. To make my own background clear: I've got a Mac on my desk at home and a PC on my desk at work. I swear at both. If it means anything, I've gotten a little more hate-mail from Apple advocates than PC partisans.</br></br>But apart from those true believers, there are people who would just like to know which platform will be a better fit for their own purposes. There's no right answer, but here are a few things to ponder:</br></br>Cost: At the entry level, there's no longer a big difference between the prices of Macs and PCs. The cheapest PC-and-monitor combo with 64 megabytes of memory (a realistic minimum) at Best Buy's site costs $580 after a rebate. The cheapest iMac system available costs $800. That $220 isn't pocket change, but it's not a huge gap, either.</br></br>Apple stays roughly competitive with its rivals throughout the iMac line. But between $1,500 and $2,000, Apple has nothing to compete with Windows machines. If you're looking for a computer with some open expansion slots and a 17-inch monitor, a desktop PC will be awfully cheap compared to a Power Mac G4.</br></br>Reliability: Both operating systems crash. A lot. Yes, it's possible to fine-tune either system to a remarkable degree of stability, but most users have neither the time nor the aptitude for that kind of tweaking. (I'm not addressing Microsoft's more reliable, more expensive and more resource-intensive Windows 2000, which is designed for business use.)