Ah, loanbanker, you've seen the light
I've been usin my Powerbook for a few months now. Greatest technical decision ever, choosing to get an Apple laptop for school rather than a PC based one.
"j00 1053r, m4c5 4r3 ph00r KiDz. ph33r 1iNux!!!" - OS X has a Darwin core, which is an open source collection of system projects. At the very heart of OS X is FreeBSD.
"There's no software for Macs" - Well Microsoft has created an OS X version of Office, and it runs better than the Windows version. When Adobe releases a new version of PhotoShop, where does it go first? Mac. Same thing with Macromedia products. Do a fresh install of Windows, and try playing every audio and video format out there. Can't do it. OS X has everything right in there, with iTunes, QuickTime, and a whole slew of other stuff. And for the developers, OS X comes installed with Perl, Java, C/C++ compilers, and many other development tools.
"Well it sounds cool, but I wanna run a server" - The personal version of OS X comes with Apache, FTP, SSH, and SMB servers built right in. To turn it on, check a box in the preferences. OS X Server is tuned for serving, and has a ton of remote server management tools. The
XServe is a regular rack mounted server, that outperforms servers twice its cost.
"Too [censored] expensive" - PowerMac G5: $2999. Comparable PC: $4050
"They're not as fast" - Check out the
benchmarks . Let's start with the G5 processor, which is currently at 1 Ghz clock speed. That's the equivalent of about a 2.8 Ghz P4. Now throw two of them in a machine. It's 2.2 times as fast as a 3 Ghz P4. Now make the processor 64 bits. How about 8 gigs of RAM? And a 1 Ghz frontside bus...on each processor. Use the PCI-X slots which run at 133 Mhz instead of 33, increasing the troughput from 266 MB/s to 2 GB/s. Then there's the 8x AGP slot. Oh yeah, FireWire 800, optical digital audio and video, and the bandwidth to transfer 6 gigs of information through memory in one second. Gee, I wish it could compare to a PC :\
They also last longer - my friend's been using the same machine for graphical design for 8 years now. I guarantee your PC will not be able to do that in 8 years.
So Macs run all the software, they run it better and faster, they're more powerful, more stable, last longer, and even cost less. A lot of the challenges against Macs were true 3 to 5 years ago. Now they're just invalid.