hmm I've owned 2 macs and 4 PCs since 1993. Yes I've made due with 4 PCs. I just upgrade the ram and video system every other year and keep on trucking..
I had some somesoftware crashes with win 95 but ultimately it was always my fault for tinkering around with the OS and buying cheap upgrades that always seemed to have crap drivers.
I've never had a software crash with win2k or XP but I have had a few powersupplies die after YEARS of continuous service, one motherboard failure and 2 harddrives but I bought cheap and that's what I get.
I've figured hardware out for PCs, buy decent powersupplies(with warranties) and buy Seagate harddrives. Most motherboards are good enough these days.
Above all, they are cheap and parts are plentiful as well as the driver base being much much better than it used to be.
Now for the Mac side of things.
They do crash. My old one did it but again it was my fault. It ran for years as well. I couldn't upgrade the hardware then but you can now for big$$. The OS doesn't let you do much (unless you like doing FreeBSD scripting) which is actually a good thing for most people because it keeps them from being able to tinker and screw up their OS much like I used to do before I learned better. It finally died, the powersupply just like a Windows box, but it cost too much to fix so I just did without. As Animatic said, it was weaker for processing things than a winbox so I just did without it and didn't really miss it much.
After being compelled to return to a Mac for certain things that you just can't do otherwise, (like use devices that were designed specifically for usage with a Mac and nothing else.. :roll: ) I did a lot of research on used macs and found a huge bunch of problems that people were having, mainly with the laptops but with some of the more trendy desktops(that use the laptop hardware internally) as well. After working on my G4 Ibooks a number of times to get them running, I realized that while the design was decent, the build quality was terrible. It looks great on the outside but at the board level I'm surprised that they last as long as they do.. But apparently not since most of the ibook owners I read about and have since run in to complained about their laptops dying all the time.
It seems that the "pro" stuff is better quality, the cost is certainly a concern now that the hardware is essentially the same. Back when Motorola was supplying the processors there was no question that intel/AMD beat the pants off of Apple in every benchmark but now that Apple uses intel, there isn't much difference but the price and OS.
So it really boils down to what OS you want to use these days, not processing power(unless you want to go AMD and get real processing power.. :green: ). It's still too early to tell if the intel based macs will last, I figure in the next year or so we'll either start seeing failures.. or not.