I know very little about Macs other than it's unix based, the hardware integration is much smoother than windows, and is good for audio/visual applications. Something I was wondering - is there such a thing as building a mac computer from scratch ala NewEgg and the likes? Or do you always buy it prepackaged? Also, I read some Macs support NTFS5 formatting, but then you only have read-only permissions, which kinda makes getting a drive on a Mac formatted that way useless. With XP/2k NTFS allows a lot more features.

macs look sexy

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This is what you want:

The biggest advantage of the Macs, back in the day, was the PowerPC processor.

It used a Reduced Instruction Set Co-processor(RISC), so it would have to run fewer instructions on each piece of data it processed. This made it a much more efficient processor architecture to use for streaming files and processing video files.

Since Apple has gone with the exact same Intel processors that Windows machines have available, there is no longer a hardware advantage for using a Mac. It now all boils down to software and how efficiently the operating system can handle user requests.

The performance advantage is almost non-existent anymore, but ease-of-use is their big selling point.