Can I play Call of Duty 4 on a Mac? If not, why are we still talking? Macs are all about aesthetics but I like the ability to buy the latest hardware upgrades for my PC and install them myself. People who complain about crashes/viruses/clunky apps are simply lazy or unskilled or both.

One misconception about Macs is that there are not as many peripherals as there are with PCs. At one time this was true, but not any more.

In the old days, most peripherals went inside the computer. But now days, the usual way is to plug in a USB or Firewire peripheral. Or possibly Ethernet.

My Mac has a standard router designed for PCs. It plugs into my Mac's ethernet connector, and works flawlessly. My Mac laptop uses WiFi, the same Wifi every PC uses, and has no problem. My modem is a PC cable modem -- works great. I have a USB printer that also works on PCs. My firewire hard drive is formatted for the Mac, but if reformatted I would bet would work with Windows (maybe I am wrong, but I won't be reformatting it any time soon). I use a wireless Microsoft mouse, also for the PC. Works perfectly.

The only limitation the Mac has is that there are fewer programs written for OS X. This will change. But for the 90% who use the computer for internet, photography, word processing, spreadsheets, and for MP3 files, the Mac works fine. And it is easier to use. And it never crashes. And it has file search and management capabilities the blow Windows out the door.

I don't understand why there has to be an argument about a product that is so clearly superior.

Is Farhad power tripping here or does he really think that his short, almost nonsensical, and extremely limited analysis going to "prove" anything?

Others have pointed out that resale value is not the main determiner of cost. I used to own an iBook whose logic board failed just two weeks outside of warranty. After Apple refused to repair it, (reasonable enough I suppose) I did some research and discovered that there were many many people whose logic boards had failed in exactly the same manner. I also discovered that some of these people had had their logic boards replaced as many as 5 times! The reason? Apple was aware that the logic boards had a design flaw but rather than issuing a recall was simply keeping quiet and replacing the boards as they failed. But of course no luck for people like me who were outside of warranty.

To make a long long story short, I started working with another guy and we mounted a media campaign, started a class action and eventually I got a call from an Apple VP who told me that Apple would be issuing a worldwide 3 year warranty extension. They then "fixed" my iBook with yet another faulty logic board, which then failed again one year later. More on the story here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibook

Never mind that $1500. machine was really really really slow (they told me I should buy more than 512 meg memory) and that the mouse, which is one of the main ways we communicate with the machine, only had one button (it's a bug - not a feature). Forget the fact that everything I did had to be converted to something else so I could talk to the rest of the world (yes, I could buy more translator software = < $$$$). Don't factor in the several hundred hours I spent working on the project to get Apple to "think different". No, just consider that if I had sold the iBook after one year (and moved all my files, added my extra software, plug-ins, extensions, copied my email et al) I could have gotten more money than if I had an ugh, Wintel machine. Of course, the fact that the generic Wintel machine I bought at the same time, is still working fine after 4 years, is meaningless in terms of Farhad's analysis. It's the resale value stupid.

Expensive software, limited interoperability out of the box, high cost of repair, very expensive peripherals, memory etc, all add up, literally to a much higher TCO for an Apple machine. But hey, it's "worth" more because it's really pretty and people will think you are cool. No, they won't.

So according to Farhad's analysis, the hundreds of hours of work to get it fixed, and the one year of waiting and waiting for a slooooooow machine to do some work so I could get paid added nothing to my TCO. No, it did, and it was ridiculously high.

Farhad is correct on one point though, I should have sold it and bought an easily upgradeable, works the way I want it to, PC, after one year.

And Farhad, a machine with a 250 gig HD is useful, while one with an 80 gig HD is almost useless for people like me who do multimedia (which is what Apple is supposed to be better at, but are not anymore) and 512 vs 2 freaking gigs of memory is a major difference, in that memory, rather than processor speed, is one of the biggest determiners of raw system speed - which some of us who use computers for work consider a big factor in determining TCO. So equating an anemic, underpowered Apple system to an adequate Wintel system is not even a fair comparison to begin with.

Need I add I just bought a very nice 4 gig MP3 player that was much cheaper than an iPod and still plays MP3's all without the virus-like iTunes sucking up resources on my system? What's my TCO on that?

Which I don't. I still have all three computers - and all PCs - I've ever owned. The first, which I bought when it was a year old, is now closer to eight years old and still in great working order and gets used when we need something set up long term (i.e. a huge scanning job). But that one didn't have ethernet capabilities, so we got my second computer from a family member who was upgrading. This computer was already at least 3-4 years old when I got it, and as bargain basement as you can get, but it served me well for a further two and a half years. That one ran into virus issues, but we were able to resurrect it, even with most files still intact. When I headed off to college, though, it was time to get a newer, faster computer. Which brings me to my current PC, a Toshiba. I picked this computer because it met my needs and was a quality system. Oh, and it has a functionality that is important to me, but you just can't get on a Mac - it's a tablet. And I intend to use it for at least 4-5 years before I move on.

When you assume that everyone disposes of their PCs once they hit the 2-year mark, you're lying to yourself. I think the burden is still on you to show that Macs hold up better than PCs over longer periods. Which, quite frankly, I'm not entirely sure you can do. I work as a student in the IT department of a small college, and we're currently in the process of selling off our three and four year old machines for faculty and staff. This includes Dells being sold for $50-100 and Macs being sold for $100-150, prices which we get based on current eBay selling prices for similar machines. Sure, the Macs are going for more, but not by much - it might make up the difference in purchase price, but that's about it. At best, I'd say it's a wash.