Robin Charlton wrote: > It's true they do cost more than a Dell or any other value beige-box > shifter, but compared to a Sony or IBM (I'm thinking mainly laptops > here) the pricing is competitive. A nice spec'ed iBook or iMac costs > around a grand. Not sure I agree with that. You can get a pretty nice PC laptop for about ?400 these days - reasonably fast, 15" LCD, built-in wireless 802.11g and DVD writer. An equivalent iBook is nearly twice that. The Mac Mini is a good deal though - ?339 and it looks gorgeous. But you do get something for your money - the bundled software suite is really good and if you just want something that you can plug in and use without endless worries about viruses and spyware then a Mac could be your best option. Office is available and costs about the same as the PC version (and the document format is the same so you can exchange documents with the office). If you work for the NHS you can get it free for Mac or PC. > Next year all Apple machines will be based on Intel CPU's and will > almost certainly be able to run Windows (although they'll of course > ship with Mac OS) so it'll be even easier to switch should you be > tempted next time you replace your machine. Remains to be seen whether Apple will do that. Frankly, if you want Windows, buy a PC. Tim