For my old Windows machine I spent $200 on the Windows home version Office (2002, I think?) because my wife insisted on having Excel (for basic household budgeting).

When I bought my Mac, I tried the pre-installed eval version of iWork '09 and got my wife to play with the Numbers spreadsheet and we have not looked back.

iWork makes Office look *decidedly* dated in most respects. And iWork '09 only costs $79.

Me too. I bought a MacBook after Christmas, and since then I bought CSSEdit, Espresso, the recent MacHeist3 bundle, iWork, and I'm that close to buying OmniGraffle (except that one's a little too expensive and I'm getting by fine with the free eval version).

I can't remember the last time I actually *bought* software for my old Windows machine.

Mac OS X gets lots of press, but the people who build these great little software apps for Mac should get more praise.

IE was a massive money pit for Microsoft, and its only purpose was to protect Windows as the dominant application platform. It worked.

But with the rise of Web 2.0 and hand helds like Blackberry and iPhone, Windows is no longer the dominant application platform -- no one is actually building applications for Windows anymore, as far as startups are concerned, it's a "dead" platform.

Therefore whether Windows ships with IE or not is now moot. No one (with the exception of Opera) is trying to make money that way anymore. That ship has sailed.

But what I'd like to see is the tasks rated with the time it took, not just ranked 1, 2, 3. I mean, is the difference from #1 to #3 just a couple seconds, or it is minutes? 10 seconds versus 13 seconds to copy 100 megs is negligible, but if it's 10 seconds versus 110 seconds, then that's something care about!

Also, do all the tests on the same hardware. And so the tests for Mac Leopard and Snow Leopard too. NOW that would be a cool article!