Gadgetopia

I think you are right. I've always used Windows, but now I'm sad to say that my next computer will probably be a Mac. Even Lockergnome has gone Mac!

Wow; all that from Deane and not a word about Steve Jobs kicking puppies! Perhaps we really have turned a corner.

I've been watching this trend for a while and still wonder what is behind it; is it Apple's switch to Intel processors, making it possible to run any OS on the same hardware, or that Apple finally got things right with 10.3 & 10.4, or Vista's flop? Or a combination of all three? Whatever. Hurray for my team!

After 25 years on PCs, my next machine will likely be a mac.

I feel uncomfortable saying this because I hate single-vendor lock-in, enjoy the monkey-wrench way that PC's architecture gets advanced, and distrust Jobs immensely.

BTAIM, the three main factors for me are: the BSD kernel on the mac gives me a comfy feeling, more and more of my life is out there in netland (so the desktop is becoming less relevant,) and then the straw that breaks the back would of course be Vista.

The problem with vista is that the gee-whiz stuff is mainly under the hood; and sadly, made the mistake of thinking that Moore's Law will make up for poor performance.

That having been said, I do want to upgrade to Vista, mainly because of the 2 things that people hate it for - UAC and the new start menu.

I had an excellent reason to upgrade to Vista: I was running XP x64, and Vista seemed my only path back to a 32 bit system. It is much more irritating than any other operating system I use, since many actions fire not one but two or sometimes three confirmation dialog boxes depending on the activity. Oh, and there's the regular BSOD that kicks in presumably because I'm using a custom build that is outside the tolerances for Vista's built-in anti-custo^H^H^H^H^H piracy hair-trigger.