Firstly, I wouldn't buy a small form factor PC, because a full desktop provides better value for money and if I did, I'd get one with XP, because then it'd be a trivial matter to port all my stuff across. For a small-form factor PC, the Mac is currently good value for money, but as I point out on my blog, for the spec., compared to a regular PC, it's expensive. You pay extra for the flash looks. For me personally, the operating system criticisms don't hold water, because, upgrading to Service Pack 2 aside (which should be fixed by the BIOS patch I downloaded the other day - and even though each prior installation meant I couldn't boot Windows, it was easily fixed by starting in Safe mode and restoring - tedious, but no big issue), I've had no usability issues with XP. I've never suffered a security breach and what little spyware I get nowadays I can clean off with Ad-Aware (one of those pieces of PC freeware). Longhorn may render some XP software redundant, but I can still happily run software written for DOS, Windows 95 and 98 and the publisher of any serious application that gets knackered by Longhorn is undoubtedly going to produce a patch that rectifies the problem (as happened with XP). In fact, I'm fairly comfortable that Longhorn will actually close the gap on Apple, simply because I'd find it hard to believe that Microsoft won't have nicked some of their ideas. Being unfamiliar with Macs, I'm not sure exactly what they can do, that I'd want to do, that I can't do to a satisfactory level and for less cost on a PC. Hardware-wise you cannot compare Macs to PCs, it's nonsensical. There are crap PCs out there, but just as Apple have a reputation to consider, so does Sony or IBM. Judging by the laptop reviews I've read, the hardware quality of a Sony or IBM is consistently better than that of an Apple. True, you can make the generalisation that Macs are of higher quality than PCs, but if I buy a Sony PC, it's better than your Mac. Though if you can show that Macs can't run SAP, then I suppose that would show your argument has some merit.