Also, people seem to forget that Apple does have an advantage here. It has complete control over the hardware. Essentially, it is a hardware company. A GNU/Lin

Also, people seem to forget that Apple does have an advantage here. It has complete control over the hardware. Essentially, it is a hardware company. A GNU/Linux system on the other hand needs to work with everything. Older hardware and newer hardware. This is a maintenance nightmare if you don't have the hardware specs. Which a lot of manufacturers don't/won't release. As for the browsing/email/administrative use of a system, then i find any modern distribution would do that with hardly any configuration. I use Ubuntu, but Redhat/Suse are also fine. Any desktop-centric distribution that is.