BJWanlund said:
Vista was just plain awful (and I used it too, and it was as awful as XP was stable).
XP was much less stable than Vista and took three service packs to get to a useable and reliable state. I think it’s funny how everyone forgets just how terrible XP was for the first 4 years of its existance. Vista become stable and mostly reliable after the first service pack and with SP2 it’s even more so (statistically) than XP SP3.
BJWanlund said:
The Mac is definitely a good machine (for the money). And because it’s on a Unix base, it’s about as stable as XP was (and that can only be a good thing).
For the money, Macs are terrible machines. They cost about 75% more than their competition with identical hardware. OSX is only stable until some tiny little thing breaks then it’s pretty much a reformat every time.
Also, did I mention Macs come with terrible gaming performance for the price? A $1500 Dell will get you a hell of a gaming machine but $1500 of Mac can barely touch solitaire.