In my own experience, being the owner of an os x machine and a nice dell laptop, I really enjoy my dell more... windows xp is superior in my opinion to os x, I find it more responsive and better organized...I only use OS X to go online, due to the bad staff targeted to windows by malicious users...for the rest, photos, audio and video my xp dell is an enjoyment...

I've owned both PCs and Macs for several years. My current pair are a Core Duo iMac (20 inch 1GB RAM) and a DELL Dimension 8300 (P4 3.4 HT, 2GB DDR 400, 400 GB SATA HD, 256 MB Radeon 9800XT). Both have their moments that irk me a little. The iMac startup chime sounds clipped at the start compared with older macs and it takes a long time to mount DVDs and CDs on the desktop. The Dell, has 3 very loud fans, cables all over the place, occasionally refuses to boot and logging into windows now takes about 2 minutes before the Hard disk stops churning. The Dell has had several viruses, and none of the anti spyware/virus programs I have can get rid of the lop program that my brother installed with microsoft plus. In terms of maintenance and administration, the iMac is much easier. The preferences directories are actually named as such, and individual preference files are named after the application that installed them. My Dell's registry is full of cryptically named entries. I'm not sure what most in it does! I guess, the final point of my evaluation would be, Does the OS do what you tell it to do, most of the time? Mac OS X: Yes Windows XP: Not if you have been running anything more complicated than Office or IE. After playing quake or running boinc, my dell will not shutdown, log out or reboot unless you ctrl-alt-delete and kill a few crashed processes. Then it will turn itself off. Mac OS X shuts itself down in less than 15 seconds. period.

I've been a life-long mac user who is currently working at a PC-centric store. The fact that windows can run on a mac computer doesn't really concern me, but i can say that it has little appeal outside the obvious ability to use a huge amount of windows-only programs. I use all flavors of windows all day long, and i have yet to come home to my 733MHz G4 tower and say "Wow, i sure wish i had a Windows system!" OSX just feels like a quality product, whereas winxp feels more like a K'nex playset.

To be quite honest, i find that having been a Mac user since i was a child, i find this XP on MAC as a new era for Mac users. Consider the reasons why you are with Apple, a Shiny Titanium box with the nice Mat grey apple symbol on it ... No, that's not why your with Apple at all, hardware differs only slightly between the two "sexes", PC and Mac. But the one shining aspect of Apple computers, isnt the computers at all, it's the operating system they run. I'm sure that many people will agree that running XP on a mac is not only Alien, but it's Unholy. Untill the drivers are calibrated for seemless mac/pc integration between switching Os's im sure not many people will be bothered, unless they want to go play Source or COD2 before it arrives on mac, in which case they will have to code the drivers themselves (laughable). My thinking is, all these people are trying to get XP running on a Mac, spending many hundreds of hours doing so, here's someforethought for you . . if you want XP, go spend $900 ona full pc computer and don't polute your HD with dodgy .exe files on a system that is still for the most part based on DOS prompts - but have been nicely disguised behind the "aqua" background. When i said that i believed it would "Dawn a new era" fo Mac users, i ment that it would most likely strengthen the every day Apple users love for Mac's, As i have to work with PC's at my Job, i find it a relief to come home to a system that is just plain friendly.

...when asked for the reason why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, Mallory replied "because it's there". I feel the big hype about running XP on a Mac was mainly driven by the desire to achieve something that looked feasable but hadn't been done before. The need for an XP bootable Mac is probably restricted to (niche) Mac users which happen to need to occasionally run some Windows-only program (e.g. games, streaming video). What would be much more interesting is to understand whether the switch to Intel might ease somehow the transition of existing XP emulation / virtual machines to the Mac: being able to run XP inside a VMWare machine on OS X would open up the possibility to frequently use XP apps alongside OS X onse, which is very different than having to afford and bring around 2 machines.

There are many people that prefer OSX over XP but have to use XP because of work. A dual booting Mac is a great solution. Unlike the hacked version of OSX running on a PC, OSX will automatically update on the Mac as will XP. Yes you'll pay a bit more for the hardware but it is worth not having to re-hack the OSX install on you PC everytime there is an update to OSX.