These discussion never go anywhere, because its generally the million year spin straw to gold, and back again stuff... but.. "If quality is any part of your decision process for anything, you're way off base here." Price has nothing to do with quality in that comparison. Bottled water from Le Pierre La Poo Poo, may cost 10 dollars. Its still water. "Software support skimpy? Compared to Microsoft? Huh." You missed the point there; He meant software availablility. As for computer support, which is what you were referring to, I've worked in retail computer support and had to field calls for both platforms. Percent wise ( i.e. the number of systems sold vs incomming calls) Mac users have just as many problems. "They'd have absolutely no motivation for even second-hand innovation." You didn't read further down my post. I would wager that as far as hardware goes; Intel is paying far more attention to AMD, than Motorola. Nvidia is trying to fend off ATI, not Apple. And Microsoft is far more afraid of Linux than OSX. In fact I doubt Microsoft even cares, as you will remember them shoving money Apple's way to pick them off the ground. Business wise they probably find Apple a useful smokescreen. "Second, Apple has often been called "Microsoft's research division"," Maybe a long long time ago. I mean really that was ages ago. Apple isn't the sole owner of all new programming talent that has been born over the last 2 decades. And well... "Xerox has often been called "Apple's research division" because without those talente, wonderful people at Xerox, not Apple, the mouse and gui wouldn't exist. Apple just knew how to take someone else's idea and capitalize on it. Oh but I forget, thats exactly what MS did.. huh.