Apple has been known to build solid products, but remember that support and extras will cost a great deal more.
Again another misconception. Why would extras cost a great deal more? What kind of extras are you referring to?
If you're talking about peripherals, any USB peripheral will work, even those that you had for your PC. If you're talking about apps, then you're in for a surprise here.
All Apple systems come installed with iLife which is a suite of programs:
iPhoto - Best consumer level photo organization and productivity app out there.
iMovie - Easiest way to get your digital video camera's footage off tapes and into well produced little movies.
iWeb - Easy way to build your personal website
iDVD - Make great looking DVDs with professional looking menus and slideshows.
GarageBand - This app has been known to be used to produce entire music albums for amateur bands. It's quite powerful for a consumer level app.
iTunes - The well known music/movie organization app and online store.
... and if you're wondering. You
can buy Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac but you really are better off not spending hundreds of dollars on that. Instead look at iWork. If iLife is digital tools for your life, iWork is a set of digital tools for your work:
Pages - Word Processing. Using templates, this is the easiest and most uncomplicated way to get great looking documents.
Numbers - Excel done easy. Excel was the last remaining Microsoft stronghold in my applications folder but they finally lost me to a third party application called Cells. It was easy to use, very straightforward and outputted great looking spreadsheets.... then Apple brought out Numbers and took it all to a whole new level again.
Keynote - Powerpoint has nothing on this app. Make cinema quality presentations with beautiful transitions. I know of offices picking up a Mac just for this purpose. Powerpoint presentations will just seem amateur after you've seen something done on keynote.
... iWork only costs $79.
What I love about all this is that OSX is so seamlessly integrated. Any of these apps (or third party apps) can access resources from one another. You can effortlessly integrate a photo from iPhoto into a Pages document or grab a spreadsheet from Numbers and drop it in Keynote.
You'll also have access to system level resources such as contacts in your Address Book and calendar items in iCal.
Everything has their place in OS X and it all flows so well to other apps. Come to think of it, I think this is why I've adapted so well to OS X from Windows. I like everything to be organized and to be able to access my stuff easily. OS X provides that.
Now to support:
Support is amongst the highest in the industry by the way. Their support centre is not in India or China or wherever Dell and HP outsource theirs. Apple has a support system unlike any other that I know.
If you have a problem or even just a question, go to the Apple Store's Genius Bar. Face to face. High paid professionals will certainly know how to answer your questions. These aren't your Futureshop $8 an hour teenagers who are looking at the clock so they can leave to go play X BOX (or are already playing it when you need their help).
Before you leave home, go on
www.Apple.ca/retail and select a time slot so when you get there, you're taken care of. It's free. $0.
Personally, I don't know anyone who's had a problem with Vista on their laptop, but such users obviously exist. It all depends on what you want.
Just look to the topic of this thread and you'll have your answer. Syn, I guess you don't know too many people. Everyone who I know who's installed Vista on their machines has gone back to XP. Everyone I've known who's bought a brand new system with Vista thus far, is asking me for my old XP disks (unfortunately for them, I've lost track of those long time ago).
I know that eventually, Microsoft will fine tune Vista and hardware will eventually catch up, but there's something wrong with a company that takes 5 years (??) to launch an upgrade to their most popular product and then needs to cut out major features and hurry it out the door (several times late). Complacency?
As for my passionate defense of Apple, you gotta ask yourself why Apple users are so passionate to begin with. Gotta wonder why they talk about OS X as if they've just discovered a gold mine... gotta wonder...