The cost arguement is too 90s? Dude, he said up front that he doesn't want to pay a lot.
Get on the internet, word processing, look at pictures, not cost a lot. You don't need all the fancy stuff in a mac.
And as for price. the Macmini STARTS at $600. sheesh. Read what he said. "Reuse our monitor and stuff and try to try and save a couple of bucks."
I like your first line up there Swa j-Ten. Let me try: Apple is all shit. There, just as authoratatvie. You really turn someone on to your product by calling the others shit while backing it up with lame excuses. I've used my desktop at work for 3.5 years and never defragmented the disc and it worked just fine for "photos, word processing and internet stuff". For what he's planning on using it for, even a fragmented drive won't matter much.
Mac elegant design....like not putting a fan in the macbook pro. Ask the guy at work about his macbookpro that is too hot to put on his lap and the keyboard is too damn hot to type on halfway through the day!! Same guy....power adapter fails. He goes into the store thinking it will be the best way to get back and working. Nope. They say they'll send him one in *two weeks* and that he can buy another one and just return it in the mean time. Greaaaat. So, how much is this little power adapter? "$96, please"!!! WHAT??!? This is on top of paying $350 for AppleCare. Great, he spent $350 on a warranty that got him a $96 power adapter in two weeks (yes, it did show up in 12 days, but who's counting).
Now over to the same problem at work with one of our Dells. We paid less for the next day warranty. I call up Dell and state it's bad after giving them the serial number. They check the address and by 10am the next morning it's on my desk.
Flash further back to the iMac I'm using now (yes, I own both and am typing on a Mac now). There's another one of their 150MB updates coming out, just like Microsoft. I install it. Mind you, this is to correct the fact that my iMac's sleep light is WAY the hell too bright (the good part here is they got complaints probably from college kids who have their iMac in the dorm room and can't sleep with the thing fading in and out so bright, and then they actually acted on it, so kudos to them for that). The install says it needs to reboot, I say "ok". It reboots, doesn't make it into the OS and turns all the fans on high, for 4 hours!!! Elegant.
Anyway all computers are crap. there is no Holy Grail. Apple, Dell, Gateway.....they are all just companies who really don't care about you, just your money. Unless you work there.....maybe worshiping any given manufacturer isn't a good idea.
