I just went through this. My circa 2000 laptop is barely alive any more, after several years of abuse (including a 2 year old dancing on it!).
Before that, though, all I'd buy was a mac. I still have one sitting at home that rarely gets powered up, but has photoshop and many other goodies. If I ever get around to it, I'll put Linux on it. But I digress.
For a new machine, my choices were either the mac or a machine with XP. Or pay a pile extra for Win2K. Neither option was appealing.
Hmm. OSX is BSD-based. It comes with Java support. Heck, it has X11 support. Eclipse and OSX are beautiful. It comes with apache as the web sharing layer. Plug and play really works.
And the powerbook G4 comes in a sleek, machined-aluminum shell. Much more durable than any PC laptop you'll find without paying a pile for a "ruggedized" box. (Remember the 2 year old dancing on my last machine.)
Hardware upgrades on desktops are a cinch--much easier than any PC I've seen even the new Dells (which are very nice indeed).
Upgrades on laptops are just as easy. Take out the battery, unscrew a panel, and slip in a SO-DIMM.
Anyway, to sum up: I found my way home. cd, so to speak. I bought the PBG4.
A piece of advice: Don't pay to have them add extra memory at apple. get it from an online reseller. It's much cheaper. For $500 extra I could have ordered it with 1GB. Instead, I let them send me the 256MB version and bought a 1GB dimm from
http://eshop.macsales.com for $250 and popped it in next to the 256 MB to have a 1.25GB machine.