At one point, I lived on windows and did most of my computing on windows boxes.  Then one day, a few years ago, I bought a MAC in order to do FinalCut Pro video editing.  I literally had the MAC G4 laptop in the box for over 1/2 a year, waiting to get to the video project. Eventually, we got around to the project, and we stated actually using the machine.  What I discovered over time was:

  1. My system admin time I spent on the MAC was zero,  the machine just updated itself perfectly and I never seemed to have driver issues or reload issues.  The box just seemed to work, all the time.

  2. It has a unix shell and complte posix compliant OS underneath.  So you get a great GUI machine, plus unix built in.  All the unix stuff is there, things like uuencode,  compress.. top.. you name it, the OS was really starting to impress me.

  3. The GUI grows on you, as you learn how it works, you just get very powerful results from the desktop features. spaces, expose.. once you get

the hang of it,  it is amazingly productive.

  4. Multi-media with my other devices, cameras, ipod, and now iphone was smooth and amazing, not like my  windows experience at all.

But really, the biggest thing for me was the "zero" admin needed to keep the computer going.  I have 4 kids and a wife, and back when I was running windows, I spend 1 day a month doing admin on all our machines.  Over time, I switched to MAC, and now admin is a thing of the past.  I got 1 saturday back, and I can't remember the last time I had to do admin on any of our machines now.  All my kids and my wife now run MACs, and it's wonderful.

Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer can have their software back, I will take my saturday back.

Eric

(This is my opinion and my opinion only...  not that of my employer, church, family or friends)