If it breaks, you go to Mac.
Which is a positive. Apple provide some of the best after-sales service of any manufacturer, made evident by their consistently high performance in user satisfaction surveys. Of course, there are many more third party Apple repairers than Apple themselves.
If you want to upgrade it (do people even upgrade Mac, or just buy the newest model -- which is released every other week?) you go to Mac.
Wrong. I'm typing this on a Mac Pro which is connected to 2 Dell monitors, 4 various external hard drives, a Digidesign audio interface, Bose speakers and a Wacom tablet. It contains 16Gb of RAM, a second Nvidia display card, a second DVD burner and 4 Seagate hardrives I bought and installed myself.
Mac’s greatest advantage is appealing to the casual user [often by demonizing PCs]. If you are such a person, than a Mac might be just what you need. If you just want a computer to go online, maybe type up a report for school, or listen to music, than you might be very happy with a Mac. I wish you the best.
Wrong. Mac computers are the preferred professional standard in most media related companies. Video editors, audio engineers, photographers, designers etc. I'm a video editor and motion graphics designer, and I move more data and crunch more numbers in a week than most users do in a year. A typical job for me may involve 2 or 3 Terabytes of data and 24 hours of rendering using 4 x 16-core networked multi=processor Macs to process high definition 3D graphics. Macs perform consistently well in performance tests and benchmark studies.
However, in my opinion, a true computer is something that welcomes you to understand it, inside and out. Mac computers are very hands-off.
Sounds like you just don't understand Macs very well. They are highly configurable and controllable, particularly if your a *nix geek and comfortable with CLI control.
Their DRM is insane, their control over what software the user can implement on computers (hope you don't like Flash) and prehensile devices is ridiculous (have an iPod Touch? Hope you like Safari! If you don't TS.), and their hardware is largely in-house none-for-you exclusive.
You're talking about iPhone/iPad but the OP asked about laptop computers. There's no more DRM on a Mac computer than on any other platform. If you choose to buy video content from iTunes on Windows or Mac, you'll get DRM video. Same if you buy video from other online sources, like Xbox Live. That's it. None on music. On a Mac computer you can run Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, even IE6. All of which support Adobe's shabby implementation of Flash. The video DRM in iTunes is laughably easily to circumvent anyway.
Like Open Source software? There's plenty for OS X, like OpenOffice, Handbrake, VLC, browsers, mail clients, torrenting software, XBMC, Plex, etc etc etc. To suggest Apple has any "control" over the software written for its OS is ill-informed. What's more, you can install any flavour of Windows or Linux if you choose as well.
Hell, a MacBook costs the company about $60 to manufacturer in China, and then they slap a $1200 price tag on it in North America.
Wrong again. The netbook market is currently struggling with the ridiculously low margins they're competing with. Some manufacturers are actually losing money on models just to push into the marketplace. Nobody but Apple really knows what it costs Apple to make a MacBook, but it's a lot more than 60 dollars. In any case, it's irrelevant to a retail customer what anything costs to manufacture - it's what it costs to buy that counts. If a MacBook satisfies a purchaser's needs at the price it costs, that's what counts. Part of the purchase price covers great included software, and great after sales service. And if you have access to an Apple store, free classes, free one-on-one tutorials and problem solving etc.
Remember: depending on your real needs, a $400 NetBook might serve you just as well.
Personally I'll keep my PC. I built it myself, I can upgrade whatever component I want, buy it from where I want, and the software welcomes customization. I can even install whatever OS I want.
That's the first accurate comment in your post. Your opinion and personal requirements are perfectly valid.
