Certainly there are specific occasions where perhaps you might prefer a biege box. Especially if you live over seas and have to pay way more for the hardware. In the US the Mac Mini is 900 dollars and is comparable to any PC when you take into account the features and software that comes with it. If the issue was simply that you were a unix developer, I would still consider using the Mac ad then installing a virtual machine on it and doing all you developing in the virtual environment. The benefits include: - one machine to do both development and personal stuff (as long as there are no security or proprietary issues with what you are working on) - Multiple snapshots for you to return to different save points so that if you go down the wrong road developing you can easily go back - by using virtual machines you can have them networked so that you can essentially have your own development network even if you are not attached to a physical network. That means you can have your unix VM running as well as other oses and see if they play nicely while you are on some mountain top enjoying the view As far as gaming is concerned, i have the mac book pro which was still cheaper than the desktop mentioned in the original post. When i was dual booting I ran Half-life 2 seamlessly. It was really a joy to play on. And so, I agree with you as well, that there are some times that you might be able to go to Mac, (in this case overseas cost issues) but i think that is an exception as opposed to the rule.