Mod this one up. Seriously. I'm the de-facto tech support guy for my entire extended family. I've convinced nearly all of my family to upgrade to the Mac, and my tech support calls have gone from several calls per week to one call per month or less. Any problems which have cropped up have been easy to address. I went so far as to buy a mac mini for a particularly troublesome cousin, and it was money well spent - she upgraded to a macbook pro recently (and on her own dime this time).

The "but macs are so much more expensive than PCs" argument doesn't hold water - a couple of trips to the local PC repair shop to "tune up" windows renders this particular point mute. I've always insisted on quality components in my PCs, so in my case the initial out-the-door price is really not that huge. I was lured into the world of Mac when the Mac Pro was initially released in 2006 - I was in the market for a serious server-class machine and bought the machine with the intention of replacing MacOS with Linux. Used it for a couple of weeks as-is and have never looked back.

I briefly experimented with Ubuntu on family machines - it was fairly well-received and *generally* solved people's problems, but the lack of Microsoft Office was a show-stopper for several family members. Like it or not, Linux is still a solution for geeks, by geeks, and inconsistencies abound.

Windows is still a colossal pile of suck. Even with all patches applied and kept up to date, training users to modify their behavior (using webmail, not clicking on binaries, disabling passwordless admin access, etc), the OS *still* grinds to a halt after 6 months or so. I have not found this to be the case with the Mac.

It's the frameworks. Seriously.

Win32 is an ancient, kludged api, still showing its Win16 and OS2 Roots. In some cases, there are dozens of different calls that *can* be used to accomplish roughly the same task, each of which has its own dependencies and peculiarities. Walk through the API sometime - foo, fooEx, fooEx2, etc. It's a mess. The API and underlying system architecture was showing its age back in 99, and yet MS has continued to build more and more complex products upon this crumbling foundation.

Apple made a hard call from a business standpoint, not only coming to the realization that their existing APIs were horribly outdated but actually biting the bullet, tossing the whole enchilada out the window, and starting over from scratch (yes, they heavily leveraged BSD and NextStep). This is *extremely* unusual in this industry, especially in a marketing-driven company. They then provided a clear migration path (via Carbon) and designed some of the best frameworks available on any platform. Framework integration is a breeze, with a straightforward API, clear, complete, easily accessible documentation. Ever tried to add VBScript capabilities to a Win32 application? Massive licensing fees, terrible, outdated documentation, lack of knowledgeable technical support from the integration provider, and a buggy library implementation to boot. Adding AppleScript capabilities to a Cocoa application is a walk in the park in comparison, and much easier on the pocketbook - like the other frameworks available to Mac developers, it's license-free.

Besides, Visual Studio vs XCode? No contest. Like the aforementioned Win32 API, Visual Studio is terribly bloated, overly complex, poorly documented, and still carries early 90's baggage.

Sorry if I'm coming across as a slavering Apple fanboy - it's not my intent. Until very recently, I was exclusively a MS developer; I've paid my bills via MS-based x86 development for twenty years now, from DOS to Win16 to Win32, etc. There's really no excuse for MS to produce such a buggy, unstable product (Please, don't tell me about how "stable" Windoze has become; our windows 2003 data center servers still need to be power cycled at least once a week to avoid mysterious crashes, memory issues, etc, and they only run MS software.) I've switched from PC to Mac out of disgust, as each product released gets more bloated and unstable; meanwhile, MS hasn't addressed some of their worst problems (eg, system works great after a clean install, but six months later is slow as molasses and unstable as can be)

There is some indication that MS is willing to scrap existing technologies and start over from scratch, at least in the Mac Business Unit; Office 2008 is (supposedly) re-built from the ground up. Office for Mac was desperately in need of an overhaul. There's still a whole lot of us Mac users out there that need Exchange access, and Office is the only game in town (yes, you can get mail access with other products, but the existing calendaring integration solutions fall quite short).

If Apple was able to pull this off, MS could as well, but they would have to get over their not-invented-here mentality and embrace stable, mature technologies.

Ain't gonna happen.