Moving along before this gets locked...
1. 'Macs are expensive' - Yes they cost more but in terms of the overall price you pay during the life of your computer, they actually work out cheaper.
That's a marketing ploy, nothing more. That's like saying the three-year warrenty from Dell is worth the cost. It's not; if you're competent inside a case then you only pay half as much in the event anything fails within the warrenty period anyway. Macs are more expensive, and their hardware has proven to be no more reliable.
They are more reliable - in my experience...
2. 'There are no Mac games' - Wrong again! there are thousands of games - Doom 3, WoW, CoD, Quake 3, Sims, blah, blah, it may be nowhere near the number on PC, but usually only the best get ported/cross-platformed anyway, and they are usually bug-free...
I will admit that my experience with Mac games is limited and somewhat out of date, but every game I ever played on a Mac had issues of one kind or another that made them painfully unstable or downright unplayable. Though as I said, it has been a number of years since I was using a Mac for that purpose.
They work, basically you have the same cards - Radeon 9800 etc as the PC version
2a. I have an XBox and PS2 as well, so
3. Viruses - I don't even have antivirus software installed....
Probably not the best idea, actually. Macs are hardly invulnerable to viruses, and though while they are rare there are plenty of exploits that can be taken advantage of on a Mac. Granted, it's not the gaping hole of vulnerability that Windows can be, but then not much is.
People don't write viruses for OSX, it's hard to make them work inside the System
4. Spyware - what's that?
5. Windows Service Packs - don't make me laugh, OSX gets regular updates which pretty much work, without the pages of 'this may cause problems' crap that you get from MS. And when there is a major upgrade - like the upcoming 10.4 'Tiger' you pay a reasonable amount for it....
You're kidding, right? Other than SP2, which is the exception, not the rule when it comes to MS service packs, I've never had a service pack break anything. I have seen Apple Updates cause other programs to stop working correctly. I've actually seen Apple updates completely bork the system. It's not worse than the Windows equivalent, I just don't think it's any better.
SP2 is what I was talking about, and the jump from 4.2.2 to 95, and the jump from 95 to 98, and Win ME - Nothing is perfect, but Apple software changes have been progressive with one exception - OS9 to OSX, simply because that was a totally different OS, not based on the one before.
6. Working - Less downtime = more productivity, that's a simple message for business.
7. 'Macs are not compatible' Another bit bull****, I use Office - 100% compatible with your version, Photoshop - again 100% Vectorworks (CAD) dual versions on the install CD, Firefox and IE browsers, GoLive, Illustrator, Imageready, Acrobat, Lightwave, Freehand, Quicktime and Windows Media Player, as well as iRC, ICQ, YIM, and other misc crap.
IE Mac blows... so much that Microsoft discontinued development for it. Plus Macs hace a bit of a niche in the imaging industry, so naturally there are going to be more programs available on that platform to do that. But if you need a small app to perform some random one-off functionality, the odds of you being able to find something that isn't going to cost you an arm and a leg for probably a one-time use is slim.
But what most of us have said is "Macs are not backwards compatable", meaning there have been programs that simply would not work in a newer version of the MacOS. Sort of like pure DOS apps in WinNT/2k/XP, except only removed from the OS release by a year or so. This has gotten better post-OSX, but the whole existance of "classic mode" is a bit of a poster child for non-backwards comatability.
Maybe so, but there is some virtue in moving forward and having better applications that are OSX Native rather than moaning about old crap that wasn't all that good anyway.
True you can't directly use Win programs without an emulator, but there's nothing I really need to do that would require that...
8. Keyboard shortcuts? wtf? there are more shortcuts and cool tricks with the keyboard than you can possibly remember.
And therein lies a problem. Keyboard commands should be functional first and cool second - Macs tend to put the "cool" shortcut keys on the easier mappings, and something like "get info" on something more obscure. Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing sometimes.
The lack of keyboard shortcuts though includes things like tab not automatically selecting the next push-box when you press it from the last text tab. I know you can turn it on, but I can't do that at 90% of the Macs I sit down to on a semi-regular basis. I use the keyboard a lot, and this one problem has driven me up walls.
*shrug* That's more your problem than a software issue...
9. Features - The Dock, it's just so much more than a program launcher, you can drag anything down there, programs, games, files, films, your whole HD and instantly retrieve it. If for instance you are playing a movie and minimise it to The Dock, you will see a tiny window of the movie playing down there which enlarges as the mouse moves over it. Titles are also retained, I can minimise this window and moving the mouse along pops up the title 'Hard Light Productions Forums - Hard Light' (In slick shaded text) In all, it's about the most easy and intuitive interface ever designed... and it can be placed left, right, or bottom of the screen.
And I have little boxes with the name of the current app in them so that I don't have to drag the mouse over each one.
Other cool stuff? there's loads, but the one I use most at work is the ability to create PDF files from anything it's soo easy - click 'Print' click 'Save as PDF' and you're done. That feature alone has probably saved thousands where I work..
10. Stability - It's very rare to have an issue, but the System will protect itself, say for instance you have a large Photoshop file which causes Photoshop itself to crash or hang, you can 'Force Quit' which shuts down Photoshop and leaves everything else unaffected, and you go on working with no problem.
This is a bit of a gripe for me. Since the days of Windows2k, I have seen more Mac BSODs than PC (yes I know it's not actually blue on a Mac. It's the bomb on OS9 and with certain errors on 10, or the transparent screen with "the machine needs to shut down" printed on it. Who thought that letting you see your work sitting there without letting you get back to it or save it was a good idea? What am I going to do? Take a picture?!?). And I work with far more PCs than Macs. I should also note that the Macs in my school's clusters are the most crash-prone systems in the history of graphical OS user interfaces. If you use one for anything over the network for more than 3 minutes, you are guaranteed to get a complete system failure. I don't blame Apple for this one because our OIT department seems incompetent most of the time, but the point still stands.
11. Hardware - Macs use standard SATA drives, standard RAM, pretty much any USB device you can name, most printers, you can get gamepads, joysticks, tablets, external drives etc. etc. oh and iPods also the build quality of he case is the best, I mean solid aluminium panels, clean design internally (no cable clutter) and there are USB + Firewire ports on the front! who'd have thought?
You're telling me that having the hard drive cables PERMANENTLY INTEGRATED INTO THE CASE is the mark of superior design? Especially since the case is a disposible item (it's the biggest fricking thing on the entire computer. Why? But it is) that the apple techs won't even touch if there's something wrong with it. So that means that if something ever happens to that SATA cable, you're buying a new case (or apple is, if it's being covered by warrenty). Tell me that makes sense. Or that if you ever need to change the power button - just the button, not the motherboard circuit that it controls - you have to completely disassemble the entire system (processers, disks, PSU, motherboard) just to get to the little screw holding it in place? The case looks cool, but that's image only.
The case is NOT disposable! that's the whole point, you are buying something that has been designed, not just thrown together by some junkie in the far east...
Everything is easy to access, repair and replace. Next chance you get, actually take a look inside a G5, it's quite an eye-opener, it makes all other comps look like crap especially older Macs...
My point about ports on the front and back still stands, it's just a tiny feature that someone has actually put some thought into for a change.
