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Just because Mac's have a higher resale value does not necessarily mean that the total cost of owning the system is less than a PC.
Take one of my customers, for example. The hard drive in their iBook crashed. This drive contained a wealth of business data, some of which had not been backed up. Could they pop the hard drive out of the machine and bring it to a data recovery expert? Could they just put a new drive in the system and rebuild it? No. Why? Because you can't even open the damn computer except to upgrade memory. You have to go to the Apple store to have the unit serviced.
What happens if you want to run Windows applications like Microsoft Visio? You need to shell out $80 for Parallels or a similar product? Want a second button on the mouse? Gotta buy a new mouse as well because, heaven forbid, Apple sacrifice the slick single-button design for something that adds more functionality.
Apple does everything in its power to remain closed and proprietary. That costs their consumers time and money.
I've been in the IT services industry for 15 years and I can tell you that getting Macs to play nice with anything other than other Macs is hugely expensive, frustrating, and time consuming.
