....it's all iPods though, nobody seems to be talking about Apple Computers \

That would be because the story is about iPods.

Reality fragmentation alert.

I agree that the younger computer buyers of today could be a core market for Apple's computers as well as ipods and other "hip" products. They don't have the same prejudices against Macs that the older PC crowd has. I know because I never thought I would EVER buy a Mac after years and years of being a PC user, but then OSX matured and that was the end of it.

The beauty of the Mac for me is that it looks "hip", and it just works. No messing about with spyware, and no reinstalling the operating system every year.

I can just sit down and do the work I want to do, without wasting time fixing things. And it does everything I want. The few games that I do play (UT 2004 currently) run fine. If I did want a gaming machine, I would build myself a PC for that.

No, you just have to re-install your OS after every new 10.3.x release!

And I don't know what you people call fun, but I spent 8 hours clearing off spyware/viruses/worms/malware/trojans from my boss's laptop. Do you actually think you could find something better to do with that time???

BTW, MS stupidity alert. If you have a virus-infected computer where even logging in is an adventure in spyware, what would you logically think of doing? Easy! Reboot into 'Safe' mode, install and run the virus scanner. But wait! When in Safe mode, you can neither install the latest virus software, and, even if you could, you can't run it! How daft is it that you can't clean your system when your in "Safe" mode. In order to clean it, you have to boot into "unsafe" mode. Gack!

I maintain our office, which currently has 7 Mac's along with a number of PC's. I have never, and I repeat never, had any problems with any of the Mac OS X updates posted (well, not yet anyway). And that's even though in some cases cheap RAM was used, third party firewire drives, and so on.

I don't doubt that some people do have problems after updating, and that is something Apple needs to better address, but those issues are vastly less than what I see in Windows.

As a platform, Mac OS X really does let me just sit down, do my work, and not waste time fixing stuff or wondering why things got broken again.