I havent seen the spinning beachball in years. But on the PC I do have the spining circle, the interrupts, the shutdowns and the forced shutdowns, application hangs, etc..... Friday was a perfect examples of chain problems while on a call with a customer. Had to call him back later when the PC was stable
If you have all that on the PC, it's your own fault cause you haven't a clue what you're doing. The good thing about PCs, besides the fact they're a billion times more user friendly than Macs, is they're incredibly easy to upgrade either through software or hardware. Most Mac lovers hang on that virus free BS but viruses don't even concern me. I built a PC for my kids to use for school and what not. It never gets a virus cause I have downloads blocked for them so if viruses is what scares you, there are very simple ways of severely limiting your chance of getting them. I, on the other hand, download all kinds of shit. Still rarely get a virus and if I do, I don't care. I'll just use the progs, mentioned by Ares earlier, to get rid of it quickly.
The point is that the majority of users dont really know what they are doing. You are the exception that can build your own computer.
What you say about the majority of users not knowing what they are doing is 100% true but if they just took a little time to learn, it's not hard at all. I had a person saying they were throwing out a netbook cause it wasn't usable anymore so I asked them to let me see it. In about 20 minutes it was like new again and she couldn't believe it. Have had several family members who thought their desktop PCs were ready for the garbage, and it's always been an easy fix whether it was just a hardware part or malware that needed to be cleaned up.
Branded? How about this: having retired from the world's largest PC manufacturer I would have been able to get my PCs for nearly free, but I chose to pay for an Apple
But the average user is going to have an easier time with a Mac than a PC. You may think it's fun, cool and an accomplishment to be an expert with your PC, I don't. It's not worth my time
No, time is finite and you have to prioritize your interests. PC sys admin is hardly in my list of priorities. Making a conscious choice to spend my time on something else is hardly stupidity. Frankly, your response is one of the worst I have seen in awhile and if you had put any thought into it, you probably wouldn't have written it.
I'm saying it doesn't take much at all to be as much of an expert with a PC as you seem to think. #1 thing you have to master, to keep your PC running smooth all the time, is handling malware. Just take a couple hours to learn how it gets on your computer and the best available programs to remove it and when you know that, you're golden. Macs are severely overpriced and treats its users like kids, restricting what they can do and turning what should be easy quick tasks into much more tedious projects. For all the hype of OS X, most Mac users don't even realize it's just a stolen open source Linux program that was locked down and corporatized. Windows can be locked down too but that would just make it way more unappealing to people who want to have power over their OS and not the other way around.