Ill post this here since some silly x86 zealots may want to post some of this information but in a less biased way
CONS:
1. Price.
2. Driver support in OS X.
3. Mac zealots.
4. Lack of upgradability. This is not much of a problem for everyone. I dont do much more than buy new hard drives and ram. I dont need to upgrade much more.
5. Not a gaming platform. While I consider this a plus, there are plenty of people that still play games. I bought a ps2 so I could use my computer for more important things. But I will include this as a con since most people around here are gamers. To each his own (which is also how I feel about which platform you choose).
6. Mac OS X is still slow. Much like the driver issues, this is a problem. Of course, this is almost a totally new OS, so these issues need to be worked out. 10.1 was an *INCREADIBLE* leap in speed inprovements and from the benchmarks 10.2 will be too. I look forward to it.
7. It still ships with ie but not Mozilla. I dont mind having ie on my system, but it would be much easier if I didnt have to use it to download my choice of browsers.
8. "Closed" hardware platform. While I dont think this is much of a problem, some people like a *HUGE* variety in what hardware they can purchase.
9. OS can be tough for Windows people to understand. I could not figure out OS < 10 for quite a while, but I figured it out once I had the time to play with it for 10 min.
I dont think anyone should buy just one platform. What fun is life if you dont have any variety? To me, owning a PC would be like only having blondes. Yeah, they're cheap, fast, and you can play with them all you want, but without brunettes (sparc maybe) or redheads (definitely Mac, cant say why ) they just arent all that special.
Mac PROS:
1. Network administration. And I dont mean that "ghey" (what a kiddiot word) Windows crap. I mean the hardcore UNIX network. Try adminning one of those from a Windows machine without downloading third party tools or using software from your OS vendor that did not come with your OS.
2. Photo editting.
3. Movie editting.
4. You get away from the old POS backwards compatibility of x86.
5. Mac OS X makes sense. I cant say the same thing about Windows.
6. Mac users will like it better than a PC.
7. Plenty of good and free software.
8. Owning a Mac makes it easier to piss off stupid x86 zealots.
9. Beautiful cases.
10. Beautiful OS in both looks and usability. The speed will get much better with 10.2 (much like 10.1 was MUCH faster) because of gcc upgrades.
11. Mac OS X has been much more stable than Win2k was for me. The Win2k problem was a hardware one, but with the "closed" platform Apple uses, the stability is mch easier to obtain.