Mac's are not twice as expensive as PC's. Mac are the same price or cheaper than PC's IF you match them feature for feature. Do a quick check on the web there's lots of Mac - PC price comparisons out there. Mac's even with the same chips are often faster than PC's, thanks to Apples great work on Panther. Poser is one example where on the Mac Pro it now renders faster on a Mac, (would someone like to prove me wrong:-) The Mac is currently experiencing a software renaissance and as the growth in users gathers greater traction we will see this grow. I think with Vista and Leopard moving further apart in the core services we will also see more and more great software that is Mac only. But as has been pointed out if you do need all those PC only tools, there are 2 options Bootcamp with runs Windows natively, so it just thinks it's running on any other Intel computer or Parallels which uses the chip level virtualisation to allow Windows and OS X to run at the same time, this has a small performance hit. The Mac has a growing and active Shareware and Freeware community, there are lots of free or low priced software for the Mac, check version tracker for more details. I work on Mac and PC's and with the Intel Macs I will never need to buy a PC again.