Is the Mac a PC 2585

Mike

True. But Apple is doing an excellent job with its current offerings. I'd love to be able to put together an OS X box from parts from newegg...

...but you can't findanymajor OEM doing what Apple is doing with the Core Duo right now, so I will reserve total judgement on Apple's strategy when their Conroe boxes come out.

I think they will be solid values, like the mini, iMac, and MacBooks presently are.

AFAIK, Apple's $1100 MacBook is the cheapest CoreDuo laptop with DVI-D out.

See, Apple doesn't have to make a million different SKUs. 90% happiness is good enough given the extreme happiness (over the decrepit WinXP UE) that OS X affords; there are sweetspots in the product line, and I think Apple is hitting them well. Cheap consumer laptop -- VERY good value, would be best of clbutt if it had a graphics option; cheap SFF -- best of clbutt, easily, high-end laptop, best of clbutt.

This is the same dynamic from the late 80s, when Apple was, like it is now, 5+ years ahead of the Windows UE. Sure Apple only made 3-4 good boxes, but the OS's superiority made up for the lack of hardware variation, and Apple hit the sweetspots well.

The issue comes with integrating eg. digital audio, firewire, 802.11b, video.

XP SP2 still can't burn DVDs out of the box. What a poo UE. XP doesn't have anything approaching Apple's integrated consumer media apps.

It is if you are looking at improving your computing experience. Apple has been releasing very good upgrades in this department late 2002, late 2003, late 2005, while Redmond has had the proverbial thumb up their butt over this timeframe.

Lollers. 2007 is going to be *5* full years of OS stagnation from Redmond.

I don't give a crap about businesses, and neither does Apple.

Geez, guess what pal, you're totally wrong here.

shows that XP has gone from 50% to 75% installed base over the past 2 years.

Besides, straggling home users that don't care enough about computing to stay with *Windows 98* are totally irrelevant to any meaningful discussion about platforms and markets.

People too poor or stupid to run Win98 don't buy software, and probably have difficulty finding the power button on their machines in the first place.

I had originally thought that LH:XP as Win95:3.1, but I guess you are somewhat right that people are used to the Win2k system and such slick UE improvements that LH and OS X afford aren't on the radar for most people (IOW, XP is the 80% solution that is 'good enough' if you don't care about having the best).

Still, I don't care about "most people", I only care about me and my customers, and the Mac is going stronger than ever for us, while Windows has been falling further and further behind this decade.