Then clearly you haven't bought yourself a Mac tower. We don't need to put in new motherboards and a new processor and change the whole machine out for this reason...we already have 5 times the processing power you have in your new just off the line pc. The only reason PC manufacturers list their processors as being these absurdly high numbers is because they are behind on pipeline technology. Consumers are easily duped into thinking that bigger numbers means better, though you are comparing two completely different and unique architechtures. pipelines are the real measure of cpu speed. PCs generally take over three times as long to process information than macs because of their design. There are so many delays in processing with a pc that it isn't funny. so a 300mhz powerpc g3 with a 100 mhz bus speed is faster than a 1.2 ghz pentium 4 with even a 200 mhz bus speed. For example, get a state of the art pc with a 52x dvd drive and a g5 tower with the same and burn a dvd to the hard drive with the same roxio product. which is done faster? which one crashed? Sinve you don't do graphic design, applynthe same test to a simple cd rip in itunes. Try copying a few gigabytes of music to your ipod and time it. (You can't possibly be referring to an ipod as a mistake. i got the square nano and i still use it for over 6 hours a day. battery is as good as the day i bought it 6 years ago. besides the updates and one reset due to a bad download, it's perfect.). also, we can over-clock the cpu on a mac for free. all you do is move a few jumpers and add a fan to deal with the extra heat. I did it to mine and gave myself 30% more power and only had to buy a $5 fan to keep it cool. The reason you can buy a Mac and trade it back in almost a decade later for roughly a third what you paid for it (vs being told "i don't want that crap" by any reseller when you bring in your pc a year later) is because you can put a new version of linux or unix on it long after the version of OS X you are using becomes obsolete for browsing and completely reclaim your machine (and if you're really good, capitalize on the power. and linux is free!). Don't believe me? Ask Microsoft! They use Apple machines to produce their system! They also contracted Apple to fix the problems with their Xbox360 so they could release it, which has an OS oddly similar in look and feel to Windows 8. And it still crashes.
If you bought a mac in the mid to late 90s (before the g3 and return of Steve Jobs), i feel for ya. I literally have an apple museum in my office. My least favorite are the power pc 603 & 604s. My favorites are the pizza box 68ks and g3s and up. I even have a few Umax clones, basically build it yourself Macs filled with tons of SCSI hard drives, flashed pc video cards and crammed full of games, obsolete graphic and web design programs...etc etc etc....ome has an internal Jaz drive. Cost me lots of money circa 2000 to have a 1 gb removable disk. So yeah, in 2000, I built myself a bad ass mac, which was also considered a supercomputer at the time. And I'm no geek. Just smart enough to figure out computers in 1995 when I messed up my uncles power mac 6100 and had only a half hour to fix it before he came home and beat me.
Windows users are typically content to defend their choice because of the money they put into it. PCs are a scam. It's $20 here here here and here and it seems like it's cheap until you realize 4 years later your machine is half the speed it was when you bought it and you've spent thousands of dollars on software and hardware that you can't use in your next one. That and the mysterious slowing down of the processor. (As an example: my g3 tower is still running at the same speed it came with in 1999. and it was a grade school computer. i got it for $5 at a school auction and it had a forest green crayon lying on top of the video card which was all but fused to it with dust.). And building a file system around files floating in free space is stupid. File system first! That way you can repair a fragmented drive and not compromise every last file on it, not to mention the issue of corrupted and unrepairable system files which leaves you with a shortened hardware lifespan and countless hours redownloading every update after you reinstall from the system dvd for the hundredth time.
As far as your phone goes, at least you didn't get the magical exploding Galaxy S3. :lol:
You obviously know absolutely nothing about anything but Mac computers. That's OK, most people who own PCs know absolutely nothing about them. Most geeks do not have the problems of which you speak, because we actually know something about what is inside that box that mystifies probably 95% of the American population. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I love Microsoft products, I don't. Mainly because each new O/S is less geek-friendly than the last, and they really don't care about us. But we really don't make them money....it's the huddled masses that do that....so I understand and work my way around their O/S.
I don't really know anyone that spends the "thousands of dollars" you are talking about, excepting people needing particular specialized software that isn't included with a Mac either. Most "off the shelf" computers come with everything the sheeple need. A Mac comes with more, but for the money spent, it better. But even then, you are going to spend big bucks on specialized software. I.e., you can easily spend $3K on an Avid Pro Tools HD 11 system, and still might not have everything you want....
Gamers spend big bucks on games, maybe that is what you are talking about. They are a small portion of the PC market.
I have not owned an "off the line" computer since 2000 (the dual-processor Mac workstation I bought to do music production, I sold it a couple of weeks later). The three year old computer I am sitting at (one of five) is much faster than anything you can buy from Apple for under $4K-5K and if I had bought the parts (I spent seven years reviewing high end PC gaming equipment and got most of the parts for free) I would have spent maybe $1600-$1800. Of course, I know that most Apple owners are not technically proficient enough to build their own computer, they don't need to be. Neither are nearly all PC owners, and they don't need to be either. You already said that you once built your own, I'm not talking about you.
Just be aware that you cannot buy what I build in a store, except a shop that custom builds computers, and they charge about a grand just to build one. (of course the unsuspecting buyer doesn't know that)
I am really not beating up Apple. They build a fine product for the people who have to have them, but not me. I'd take a 12-core workstation if it were given to me. But I'd probably end up selling it to one of those people who have been duped into believing that if they can't have a Mac they don't want a computer at all. (yes, I know people like that) And take the proceeds to make a down-payment on a new car...or nearly pay my house off.
You can go the open-source route with a PC too. I don't, mainly because I don't need to. I did make a server out of the first PC I built and used Ubuntu (probably not the best GNU product to use for a server but it worked fine). Not too long afterward I realized that I really don't need a server, and have never messed around with Linux-based O/S since.
. Not to mention that it's pretty complex and your average hacker can't write code for it, hence the lack of viruses.
