I was looking at getting a Mac recently because of my interest and skills in creative fields (video, image/photo, music) because of the apparent exclusive use of Macs in these fields of work. Having looked at Apple's lineup of computers, the one that seemed to best fit my needs would be a 24" 2.4 or 2.8ghz iMac. I would need at least the 24" model for the bigger resolution (1920x1200) for editing. But looking at the prices was deffinately scary. Even the cheaper of the two is $1,800. That's quite a lot of money for a computer. That gets me a 2.4ghz dual core, but only 1gb ram (667mhz), a decent-but-dated video card, 320gb hd, and the complete inability to upgrade anything other than the ram. Without even building something myself, I can get so much more computer for $1,800. Just to get an idea (because I havent bought a desktop computer in four years) I checked out Dell and spec'd out a computer there. There, $1,800 would get me a desktop with a 2.4ghz quad core, 3gb of 800mhz ram, 500gb hd, 512mb nvidia 8800GT, and still have a 24" 1920x1200 monitor. Why do Apple computers carry such a premium on them? Being the frugal individual I am, its very, very hard for me to justify that extra cost for lower performance. But it seems I would need one to work in any respectable creative field; despite there being adequate PC versions of everything (Photoshop, Premiere, Pro Tools, etc).