Good thread and sincere and well-observed advice all around. Nice to see in a thread with this title!
If you can, take some time with machines like you're considering buying.
Jay preferred his 17" G4 Titanium Mac notebook to his PC, "some trash 800mhz noname." You'd have to be dead, seems to me, to do otherwise, and I'm a PC guy from way back.
Compare machines at the level you'll be buying.
I think hollip3020 and a few others hit on an important thing: get what you feel you want, if you have a preference. If it's a Mac you
want, you might be satisfied with a PC, even pleasantly surprised -- but some part of you will never really be happy.
And, conversely, there are some of us who probably fear that no matter how much we might admire aspects of the Mac, we would always be chafing at the "company town" aspects.
Not to mention the false-karass of fellow Mac users... "Ooh, you got the blue one..."
When I was young and foolish I had a Saab 96 [the 'cool' one from the 60s-early 70s] and I got to really hate my fellow SAAB owners, God love 'em. The'd flash their lights at you. Because you were driving the same brand of car. Real get-a-life stuff. Well, it was the 70s. At least some of them were good for leads on mechanics, which was
extremely important -- even though the hopeless p.o.s. only had about 50,000 miles and was a couple years old. It was a nightmare; the last "cool" car I ever bought. My mechanic Swen [no, really] said, "If I was back in Sweden, I'd drive a Volvo, maybe. But this is America. Get a Japanese car. Or even an American car. Look at me -- I will only work on 4 brands of car: Saab, Volvo, Merccedes, and Rolls/Bentley. Why?
Because it's making me rich. I drive a Ford pickup. The money I save will put my kinds through college. Buy yourself a nice Toyota."
Er... Where was I?