Madmax_br5 - I was pretty sure I read that Toshiba made the motherboards (to Apple's specs of course). The only other thing made to spec is the CPU,and apparently Intel didn't want to budge and change THEIR specs. Everything else is that exact same hardware you can get for all 3 major OS's - it's the drivers that make them work for each particular one - but I could take an ATI graphics card out of a Mac and slap it in a PC, download the correct driver (if for some odd reason it wasn't on the CD-ROM that came with it) and it'll work just fine. As far as the "few would disagree" - few MAC users would disagree. Windows users just don't care - that's the difference. Very few Windows users get up in arms over this argument - and the ones that do are loud enough that you'd THINK it was all of them, but most just don't care at all. They just want it to run their software, and be fast and cheap. Outright competition makes this possible - you've got to make it better-faster-cheaper than the next guy to stay on top. The lift from Xerox wasn't an exact copy - they merely took the ideas of grab, drag, and drop. They had a get together of designers and engineers to hash out every idea they could possibly come up with to make it user-friendly. Microsoft merely took THEIR ideas (just like Mac w/ Xerox) and hashed out their own. Both Mac and Windows are designed so that your average 8yr old can sit down and figure it out. I can't remember if it was Rolling Stone or Washington Post but there was a FUNNY article where the columnist sat with 2 MS technicians behind a one-way mirror as there were 2 teenagers on the other side with a set of tasks to complete on Windows and surfing the web - they were taking notes on how the teenagers did it and screwed it up so that they could come up with even more multiple ways of doing the same thing - the interviewer was stunned they weren't furious - they just shrugged and said this is what ALL YOUNGSTERS do, which is how you make it better. As far as "this one is easier than the other" - read just about EVERY post asking which 3D software is easier to use. "I tried using X but it was just this jumbled mix of icons I couldn't decipher - so I finally settled on Y because it's so much easier!" And the VERY next post reads, "I messed with Z but just got tired of pulling my hair out, but X was SO INCREDIBLY INTUITIVE!!" And yes, the G5 was Apple's jump to make theirs the top speed demon again, but it fell short - it actually WASN'T as fast if you read independent testing - the only thing it beat in the tests were machines supplied by the manufacturer that didn't seem to realize it was a speed test - you saw 2.4Gh (and without Hyperthreading) single processor machines with only 1Gb RAM in there up against the dual 1.5Gh G5 w/ 2Gb RAM. They're leaving IBM's chips behind because IBM just couldn't break the 3GH barrier. The first chip they came out with was only 1.25GH when Intel AND AMD were both over 3GH - IBM just couldn't compete on par with them. I think Apple can make software for other OS's (they do for LINUX anyway - just not Windows). And I think it has nothing to do with the dream - it's because Apple sees themselves as a "hardware" company - and in order to use their software they want you to be buying the hardware. When, in fact, if they just sold the software they'd make more money because they'd have a much bigger revenue outlet. Look at the iPod - I'm a product photographer and I can tell you that every OTHER standard MP3 player has the same digital inputs (and I'm not talking about USB or Firewire - think of chargers for each brand of phone). The iPod has its own specific digital connection if you want to plug it directly into a more "boombox" like player. When you buy the iPod, they want you to only be able to buy the APPLE hardware to play it a boombox.