A little while ago I read this article on Tom's Hardware about an employee's decision to go for Macs over PCs. It's a wonderfully written article, showing the pluses and minuses of both sides. Add to that the fact that he's not an average computer user (the home servers and homemade RAID setup kind of give that away) and you can see the article is legit and the arguments are solid. While I agree with what he says, I don't want to switch over to Macs (though, the article is not supposed to be persuasive; it just makes a simple statement) permanently.
I've never owned a Mac personally, though my father has had a computer since the first laptop came out in the '70s, which means he owned a couple old-school Mac desktops (including a G2 [I think] that he modified to have built-in pinball flipper buttons, bought from a pinball supply store). I can't really recall much about that Mac, but I do believe I broke the 5-inch floppy drive by pushing it off a table (I was like 4; throw me a bone). Although, I do have experience with more modern Macs. My high school had iMacs everywhere: every teacher had some sort of Mac, whether it be an early Macbook or iMac and every computer lab had one of those early colored iMacs that looked like a small TV, with the exception of the video editing labs that had early G5s. I hated them (the iMacs more than the G5s). The mouse was awkward to use, they were slow and ugly, and every time I was in chemistry class chatting up the teacher, I felt a strong urge to try to yank open the case by the pittifully pathetic plasitc handle. I never succeeded, though, mainly because I'd feel bad for breaking my favorite teacher's computer. For my own personal computer, I had a home made PC; not state-of-the-art, but pretty damn good.
Then college came around and with it better Mac technology. Macbooks went from the oddly-shaped paperweights with a handle that occasionally came colored in puke orange to the sleekly designed white notebook known around the world. iMacs changed, too, and now no longer have that stupid circular mouse; although, the lack of a second button still confuzzles me. But when I started out at college, I didn't use Macs much. I had the opportunity to get a discount on a Mac through my school, but that was still during the times when I hated Macs. So my parents bought me a Dell Inspiron 5150 (as a going-to-college gift), which then made me hate Dell with a passion (I still never recommend the company to anyone who wants anything more than an internet-browsing word processor for uber cheap).
It wasn't really until senior year (I just graduated in May) that I truly began to appreciate Macs. In the meantime, I built a new computer in June/July 2006, and then upgraded it to my current rig (minus a few parts) in October 2007. It's now a Q6600, 8600GT in SLI powered, surprisingly behemoth of a system that runs Crysis well at high settings. But back to Apple for a moment. I had two classes that required me to use Macs: a communications class called "Writing for New Media" that revolved around web design and writing for websites and an art class, "Computer Art," that focused on Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. Clearly, a Mac is the better choice for these classes, since Adobe's image programs and Dreamweaver were originally intended for Macs. I do, however, have the whole Adobe Master Collection CS3 on my PC and find that it works equally well, if not faster, than it did on the computers in the Mac labs, which I believe are some incarnation of the G5.
Another point focused on in the Tom's Hardware article is the operating system. The author compares Leopard to XP. I'm not sure which version of Apple's operating systems I was using, but I'm fairly certain it was OS X, just not Leopard. I found the Mac OS to be confusing at the least and monitor-smashing annoying at most. I must admit here that I'm not familiar with all of the features of the Apple OS, but am going to proceed based on what I do know. For starters, I find the Mac program launch bar to be unnecessary. I realize that it acts as both a launch feature and a way to switch between programs that are open, but, while cool, I think the animation aspect of it is of no use (clearly). I much prefer Windows' task bar because it's much easier to tell which program(s) is (are) open, especially with the addition of the system trays.
Navigating through files and folders on OS X was also difficult. The way everything cascades across the window (how you see every previous folder at the same time) gets confusing; at times I found it hard to figuer out just where I was, exactly. Not only that, just trying to save something to my network drive took way too many steps. I'll take XP of OS X any day. I know what you're saying; I realize that I can buy a Mac with a Windows operating system on it. But that brings me to my next point.
Macs are too damn expensive. It's true what is stated in the article: Apple needs to lower the prices of their computers in order to attract new customers. To get a computer equivalent to my current desktop, I would've had to have shelled out an extra $2000 if not more! At this point from my perspective, it's up in the air whether or not their laptops are overpriced; I could say that they are, but I don't know enough about laptops to solidly say one way or the other.
Another thing I like about having a PC is the ability to completely customize it. Since I build my own computers now, I can go to any of a number of stores and buy pretty much whatever I want and throw it into the computer. Hell, I could even go so far as to hand-craft my own case, if I so chose (which I'm thinking about). Try doing that with a Mac (I'm sure you can, but you'd have to first buy a Mac, and then would you really want to mess with it?)
For these reasons, I'm definitely not going to make my primary computer a Macintosh. To me, it's just not worth it. I might in the future, however, purchase a Mac laptop, but for now I can't afford it and don't need one thanks to my amazing desktop. Maybe some day down the road when Mac drops their prices and makes it possibly to build one at home I'll switch over, but for now I'm sticking to PCs, especially when I can get a 1 tb hard drive for $180.
Apple, if you want to steal my business from the PC world, you'd better start cracking on dropping those prices.