I am, despite what people may think, rather neutral on macs in general. I'm also hardly a Microsoft booster, their O/S has its problems too and yes to keep it working well you need to put in a small amount of effort and learn about threats. But as far as I'm concerned this is just an example of the saying "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" - if you're going to buy a computer no matter what kind you should take the time to really learn how to use it. Even many mac users don't bother with this...
What pisses me off about macs is the unbelievable (and IMHO not justified) fan-boy-ism that they generate. The majority of mac users are such evangelists for the Mac platform and typically for the wrong reasons. My actual complaints about apple:
- Overpriced. Say what you want, but given that apple machines are now essentially built upon an intel-based platform and we can compare them more or less apples-to-apples with PCs, these machines typically cost more than a comparable IBM-clone PC for the same amount of hardware.
- Limited configurations. What if I want 4GB of ram in my laptop. Nope! Too bad, apple offer 4 configurations and 4 configurations only. To say nothing of video ram, additional hardware, etc
- You're limited to apple support, apple hardware, etc. Not all Mac users have great experiences with apple support, and if you have hardware failure you often have to send the machine back to apple for week at a time. Dell provides 3 or 4 year on-site tech support. Nuff said.
The thing that REALLY sets apple apart in terms of user experience is the operating system. Now I will say up front that although MacOS is less susceptable to virii and to a lesser extent spyware, it is HUGELY vulnerable in terms of security holes. Our security group at work have personally found 2 security holes in MacOS (10.4 I think it was) that would allow a remote user to get complete access to your machine remotely without your knowledge.
In addition, MacOS _still_ does not have even remotely close to the number of software packages available as windows does. Of course Mac adherents will say "just get parallels or bootcamp and you can run windows on a mac" but then why not just buy a cheaper, more configurable, PC? Sure you can get MS Office and Photoshop etc but there's way more interesting homebrew and shareware packages out there for windows or linux than MacOS.
I know lots of people like Macs, and I like the fact that it's based on unix, but the fact of the matter is there are even better versions of unix out there.
Anyways, buy what you want. If you like the MacOS platform and you're ok with shelling out the money, fine. But PLEASE don't become one of those holier-than-thou mac fanboys.