I have had my PC for nearly 10 years, did one OS change (from Windows 98 to XP), did two hard drive changes, expanded my RAM twice, just changed my processor...it cost me $400 when I bought it but with all the upgrades it cost me $959 total.

On the Mac OS at my job when it was bought it cost $800, we did OS changes four times (Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and now Leopard), when the hard drive went out, we had to send it out because the unit is one unit, we can't take it apart because they don't want you to do that. So far it has cost $1200.

The difference: I can go into my PC and do whatever changes I need, whereas with our Mac we have to send it out for repair and get dinged for shipping and handling if we have to send it to Cupertino.

Add this fact: When I switched over to XP from 98, I only had one crash. With all these changes we had with the Mac I have had enough crashes that it would equal the same number of cast members of AS THE WORLD TURNS when they had a very big cast.

Finally, I am not one to jump onto the latest thing that Apple comes out with because if you have to introduce a new product imporved upon the original product introduced a few months earlier, then it really isn't worth having.

The second big reason Macs cost less is that you don't have to buy anti-virus software (much less waste hours running them). In the eleven years I have worked on "sick" Macs as an independent technician, I have never found a single virus.

Richard Dunn/Dr Mac

Los Alamos, New Mexico

"I don't dispute that the PC was a better _value_ for years in terms of how most people chose to define "value". However, this utterly fails to explain why Apple didn't go out of business back then, nor does it explain why Apple is making big marketshare gains today."

You want an explanation? Try the fact that Microsoft (yes, THAT Microsoft) saved Apple in its darkest hour with a $150M+ bailout. No largesse, to be sure--the DOJ's Antitrust Division was bearing down on Redmond like a pack of lions on a three-legged antelope at the time, and there were similar movements by European regulators (which remain an ongoing issue for the company).

Apple survived pre-iPod because it provided a convenient way for MS to claim there was some sort of competition going on. There wasn't, and isn't. So don't pretend that your precious survived on inherent competitive merit.

If only $50 was all it took to fix a PC.

My family has spent more than $300 on techs to try to fix problems with my mother's computer so she can simply use email and play word games on her desktop. If she lived closer, maybe we would have been able to find a cheaper way around it, but even after completely wiping her hard drive and re-intalling, the thing wouldn't work within days.

Granted, she's working off of a local wireless network that she understands how to fix about as well as she does how to perform cold fusion, but really, it should take more than that...

We spent months, off and on, trying to have things fixed for her so she could email her grandkids and do her minimal surfing...punctuated frequently by phone calls that start "It's not working again, I can't get online..."

After several heated debates within the family, I finally bought her an iBook. Six months later, she has not had a single problem. Not once. Doesn't lose the network. Doesn't give her the blue screen of death. Doesn't misbehave at all.

One story? Sure. But having worked in creative environments my entire career that have people on both Macs and PCs, my favorite statement from the IT guy sums it up: "I never learned that much about getting deep into Macs because I never had to...they just work. The PCs have always been the reason I have a full-time job."

There certainly has been a dust-up over this article. It's actually a good piece, but the title is so overblown that no one seems able to read without arguing. If the title changed "Once and for all" to "Just one more reason" then we wouldn't be arguing here. Of course, that is probably the point.

I don't think I've said anywhere that I think that PCs are superior to Macs. Just that my own personal experience with a Mac was bad for some quite specific reasons--it kept crashing when I played the one game that came bundled in it, it didn't run some of the software I needed to use unless I payed more for a program to run Windows within it, and because after using DOS and then Windows-based machines for so long, and being dyslexic, I had trouble since so many things run "backwards." Some people who run specific programs or have specific needs, particularly artistic ones, find PCs problematic. Like I said, but like hardly anyone is acknowledging, many of the PC users here have no problem whatsoever saying Macs are darned good machines, at least as good as PCs, yet for one reason or another they prefer PCs. The tech people who work on both of them develop preferences, and obviously Windows has some serious problems, but overall the only two people I personally know who work on both kinds of machines at work have PCs at home--but they're both gamers.

But I do, in fact, LOVE my PC and laptop computers. Which is lucky because I use them so very much. And I love some of the fun features Microsoft has added to Office, and some of the features that are built into the operating system. Of course, what's fun for me is stupid or a pain in the neck for some other PC users. That's exactly the point. We are individuals. There are two big commercial corporations building operating systems (one of which also builds the computers needed to run their operating system). Neither company is a religion. Neither computer is a god. But it's an either-or situation for bazillions of individuals. Whichever we choose, for whatever reason, we're neither superior nor inferior to anyone else, at least not because of our computer choice.

But I am not a liar. My XP professional computer really has never once crashed. The fact that one person honestly seems to believe that I must be a liar tells me he's been indoctrinated, and chosen his computer not for rational reasons but because of some irrational beliefs.