That's teriffic news about Auna!!! I can't tell you how happy that makes me! She went down a rougher road than most people will ever see, and I know it was family members like you that helped her get through it. For that Kell, I will always have the greatest respect for you.
As far as computers are concerned, I think your nuts. LOL.
Kell, I don't base things on what is on the Apple website, I base things on first hand experience. You and Sky kept going on and on making inane statements which made it obvious you had no clue about the new G4. You kept pushing and pushing, unable, it seemed, to type the 8 letters that make up apple.com, so I wnet there and did it for you. 10 minutes out of my day. I do like to go there to see what's new, but I don't base my feelings about the Mac on what they say at all.
The fact that you've been in and around PC's since you were 15 speaks volumes about your opinions. My first experience was in a county run PC repair class in 1995. They taught us to make fun of Macs, even though the only one we got to use was so misused and uncared for, I'm shocked it worked at all.
I learned DOS, and 3.1, and Win 95. I wanted my own computer, but couldn't quite afford one. Then, for my birthday in 1998, my Grandmother bought me a computer, but she bought a Mac. I was disappointed because I didn't know any better. In less than a week, I knew there was no comparison. I laughed at people who still used Wintel boxes. This was how a computer was supposed to work.
Anyway, I guess our experiences have been very different. In my world, and all the people I know in it, PC's are crap. I don't know why it is that they have such a high rate of mechanical failure, other than perhaps the average user is sub par, I really don't know, but the facts as I know them, and as I have seen them, have Mac leaps and bounds above any PC.
Then again, I'm not into video games or solitare.
LOL. Something else I think is a riot is when I took my seciond pc repair and networking class, the entire 8 months was like going back in time. Floppies were so critical, whereas the new G4's didn't even have a floppy drive. This was also when getting a nic card with an ethernet port was such a big deal! Macs have had them for years, and I just had trouble with how foar behind Wintel machines really were. Not one machine always worked with plug and play, and it was accepted as normal to have to install a driver several times before it took. Unbelievable!
As far as your friends having trouble with their Macs, they must not be too bright, and they must be using OS 9 or older. Those OS's where very RAM dependant, and since those were the days when RAM could cost $1 to $3 per meg, Apple was very stingy with how much they gave away. But, any problem your Mac had was easily solved by increasing the RAM., and if you did that in the first place, it was very unlikely you would have any problems.
However, since OS X came out, it's all over. MS needs to worry more about being AOL's main competetor instead of Apple, because they cant touch it. In all fairness, it wasn't Apple's genius that made OS X the best OS there is, it was Unix, combined with the minds that create Apple's awesome GUI.
Every friend I have drools over my bottom of the line Mac, and I can't blame them. When I go to their houses, the computer becomes tedious and cumbersome. Especially in comparison.
As far as the processors go, Apple got kinda screwed in that Motorola has been having business problems, and as one of their customers, Apple suffers. My understanding, though, is that this is now behind them, and the G5 is on the horizon. Kinda funny in a way, having your processors, that compete against IBM compats, being made by Motorola and IBM.
As far as "real world" bench tests, like I said, my 233 smokes my neighbors 1000MHz cow. My friends don't believe me that it's only got a 233 in it. I can only imagine what that new dual 1.25 must be like!
Anyway, have fun in your world, Kell, because I'm having a blast in mine!
Take care,
~Chris