Or for some people a significant degradation in the quality of the user exepience, combined with a significant increase in the cost of the hardware required. An

Or for some people a significant degradation in the quality of the user exepience, combined with a significant increase in the cost of the hardware required. And what benefit does the latter give the ordinary user? Nothing, that I can tell. I have Win XP running on a 4-year old laptop and it's fine. My mom bought a new laptop with Vista about a year ago, and it's horrible. So horrible it literally makes me yell when I'm forced to help her with it. It is so bad I can't help but think that whoever made it does not "eat their own dog food". Apple eats their own dog food. That is probably why their user experience rocks. Because of the above, I will be getting her onto a Mac laptop as soon as I can.