Reply #19: I hear ya...

[Deja Q]

Especially as standard PC notebooks using Intel CPUs and chipsets run $600~1500 and Macbooks and Macbook Pros are $1200~$2700... my Asus laptop with 8GB of RAM cost me $1700 net including the 3 year warranty plan w/accidental coverage - and its specs blow the $2000 Macbook Pro out of the water (save for the Macbook Pro display, but I wouldn't do image editing requiring color precision out in the field and I don't see doing that for a few years yet.)

It's still a valid point, the costs, depending on the situation at hand, though the quality of the 24" monitor, combined with the support of Adobe corporation, was enough to get me to switch. Your typical 24" monitor is a crappy TN panel that displays colors poorly. Even those that boast 92% NTSC gamut are getting poor marks for poor brightness and color tone changing... TN panels are junk and are not worth 500 pennies, much less 500 dollars...

I'd love it if Apple opened OS X to non-branded hardware (it's a green thing to do; my current hardware just sits and nobody is in the market for a high end Q9650 home-built system, so I might use it as a server after replacing the video card and power supply to something less extreme).

There are valid reasons TO use certain Mac branded models, especially higher end iMacs and Mac Pros... then again, Mac's strong points have always been graphic design/visual arts... but OS X is a heckuvalot better than Vista or XP...

what specs were you looking at? I could homebuild a dual quad-core system for about $1800 - a similar Mac Pro is $2200, but with 2 instead of 8GB of RAM. By the time Winbloat licensing comes in, the platforms are on par again...