Quote - My first home system was an Apple IIc that my mom won at work..

Well i will raise you a C64 with a tape drive :) As in actual audio tapes ! God i loved that thing, would sit for hours, ruining my eyes in front of the tiny TV at home, amazed at how it could do 64 unique colors LOL. Or was it 128 ? I forget. Much later our school bought a bunch of 286s which was my first introduction to a 'real' PC. Cutting edge turbo button and all hah ! Those were the days when we would drool over amazing 100 Mhz 486s with 2MB RAM, 400 MB hard disks and this new fangled thing called '3d' We even persuaded our Comp Sci teach to spring for 1 MB RAM on one of the boxes so that we could install Win3.1 on it. All of it on 10 floppies :p

And now we have quad core 2GHz monsters with 4GB RAM and an OS (VISTA) that takes 500MB RAM starting up and 8 GB HDD space just to install. Not sure if you can call it progress or not..

But yeh i do understand how some people just want a PC 'appliance', not a lifestyle. DELL and other vendors like them fulfill this need. And actually IIRC, DELL pretty much built their business on giving better customer service then their competition. Its sad to see how far they have fallen.