I've been working on Windows or Microsoft OS powered PCs since well, I knew what a PC was. We had the Apple IIe's in school, but to me they were big heavy slow pieces of crap compared to what a PC was.
To me PCs were IT. My dad used them, so did my mum (finance and engineering parents) as a PC was really the only thing the industry used and would run applications made for the MS OS.
I got into PCs and built them, became a PC tech in secondary school, and later a network admin. Learned Linux, and just about every version of Windows available, and would talk down about everything Mac as it to me then was an inferior slow pile of over expensive crap. After knowing how PCs failed all the time, I just kind of accepted the fact that having Windows run your computer you were just going to have to deal with it. Kind of like a car dying for no reason when you push the throttle down a bit harder than usual, or making it climb a hill.
I met a quite a few people over time that were really into Mac, but my stereotype of them were just overly rich snobbs that well, I really can't give you a great one. Just some negative thing my mind made up because it didn't like the Computer so naturally I couldn't like the people who used them. Called them Macintrash and every other derogatory name you can think of.
A few years later I talked to people about MacOS PCs (they are personal computers after all) and they couldn't say enough cool things about them. Being a bit older, more mature, and open-minded I thought, well let's give it a go sometime. I walked into an Apple store and decided to play around wth one. Holy **** they were cool. Expensive, but very cool. The capabilities they had were just amasing. The things they did out of the box were theoretically possible with a Windows PC, but would take weeks of configuration and possibly programming. Then a couple employees at the Apple store told me that unlike Windows PCs, MacOS just worked. Everything was ready to go out of the box. You don't have 20 programmes that are trialware and will expire unless you pay even more money. Making a very long (so far story short) I was now envious of MacOS and wanted one, but didn't have the money.
Yesterday I met a bloke at a car show near me who drove a Ford and couldn't tell me enough good things about the company (he does a LOT of research on the brand, so much so that I thought he worked for ford). Then I said something about I'd like to get into MacOS but really can't afford an $800 computer right now. That's when he told me he was selling his 6yr. old PowerMac G4 (didn't have a clue what that was) for $150 for the screen, keyboard, mouse, well everything really.
I went over to his flat, looked at it. Saw how absolutely mind-blowingly simple it was to connect another screen and have dual monitors. He then said, Apple designs their products to work. If you connect another monitor to your Windows PC it gets confused as to what you want it to do. MacOS thinks that if you connect another one to your PC, you obviously want to use it, so it turns it on and does what you think it should do.
It's turning out to be a bit of a learning curve so far. There are some really simple things that I have no idea how to do, but I'm learning everyday.
So right now, mine is:
1.25ghz dual core
512mb ram (upgrading very soon)
like $80gb HD (going to 500gb soon)
stock video card
and MacOS 10.2.8 (upgrading to 10.4 asap)
Sad thing is about that setup. My Windows PC is:
Pentium 3ghz
4gb ram
500gb hd (yes ripping it out to go into the mac)
stupid realtek sound card
GForce something video card
Windows XP Pro
And it's still slower than the MacOS PC that is running less than half the hardware. I also needed something faster to run Ableton Live 7 on because the realtek sound chip is absolute rubbish (HD my ***) and even recording audio would cause the sound to skip horribly.