The fine folks at AOL Shopping, in their infinite wisdom, have summarized a quarter-century of debate in their feature on whether you should buy a Mac or a PC.

The bottom line? "You should buy a PC, if you already own a lot of PC software that you want to continue using. [...] If you want to do artistic work on your computer (photography, video editing, graphic design), you'll find Macs much more intuitive." Of course, that glosses over the fact that Apple makes excellent Windows PCs that will happily run your legacy Win32 applications.

Still, this seems almost reasonable, until you get to this (practically throwaway) sentence: "If money is not an issue, go with a Mac."

Yeah -- 1991 called, and they want their talking point back. Study after study has shown that the total cost of ownership of a Mac is less than that of a comparable PC. This includes post-purchase factors like software, repairs, and upgrades. Agreed: the up-front price is higher (in many cases), but over time, you spend less money owning a Mac.

AOL Shopping suggests the opposite is true, simply due to Microsoft's sluggish OS release schedule. Having to update your OS once every seven years, to them, is less costly than upgrading every year or so. They neglect to consider the cost of your time in support calls and aggregate ease-of-use savings.

Even so, if their poll is any indication, two thirds of their readers still plan on buying a Mac.

Disclaimer: AOL is the parent company of Weblogs, Inc. and TUAW.

ComputerWorld's Preston Gralla posted a blog entry titled, Five reasons why Vista beats Mac OS X. Clearly, this was link-bait, but you know what, I'll bite.
And although I vehemently disagree with the post's title and assertion, I want to make it clear that I'm not coming at this from the typical rabid Mac-fangirl stance. Until August of last year, I still used a PC as my primary computer (I used Macs at school and for creative work); I used to work as a PC technician. In our TUAW backchannel chat, I'm usually the first person to take the "don't knee-jerkingly attack the PC" stance.

Still, it was impossible to read the post and NOT respond. Let's take a look at Mr. Gralla's arguments and dissect them one-by-one.

Apple's seeming refusal to demonstrate actual features of the Mac in their advertising is a common lament amongst the Mac Faithful. Sure, the Mac v.s PC campaign is lots of fun, and it does at least draw attention to the differences between the two platforms, but where are the ads actually showing someone making a photo book with iPhoto (instead just mentioning that it is possible)? They are no where to be found, however, the new iPhone ads are all about showcasing what the iPhone can do and how it is done. The UI is the star of the show as we see two hands navigating from playing music to watching videos to answering a phone call with a tight shot on the iPhone's screen.

The iPhone ads make me want to buy an iPhone, though I might be more in line with Apple's target market than most, and really isn't that the point of advertising? I wonder if this heralds a sea change in the way Apple advertises, or whether they are taking the more hands on approach with their consumer electronics (the Apple TV ad also shows the product in use) while keeping Mac advertising more high concept.

Then again I might just be reading too much into this. What say you, TUAW readers? Are the new iPhone ads more effective than the Get a Mac ads, or am I comparing Apples to Apples?

You know how it goes. The dumpy guy is supposed to be the PC and the cool guy is the Mac. Right? David Letterman decided to redefine the Mac vs PC conflict, enlisting Chris Elliott to play Mac. Here's Letterman's take on the whole phenomenon. Let's just say that Mac doesn't make out quite so well as he usually does. And Chris Elliott is no Justin Long.

David Sobotta has a new post up about a topic close to my heart - those times when we're all glad we have a Mac.

The two key points Sobotta references as shining Mac moments are the ability for Mac OS X to create PDFs out of the box, with no additional software required, and the OS X Migration Assistant which helped him recover from a mistake that had left his G5 unbootable and resistant to all the usual tricks. Catastrophes and problems are not unique to Windows users. We Mac users have our share of problems. One of the things that sets us apart from our Windows brethren is the ability to get ourselves out of a jam somewhat gracefully with most, if not all, of our data and working environment intact. I am reminded of these niceties more and more every day as I spend more and more time supporting Mac users who are now running Windows via Parallels or BootCamp alongside their OS X environment. Somehow I'm supposed to find Windows less painful just because it's running on Apple hardware, but I'm not really finding that to be the case.

Just the other day I had an "aha!" Mac moment myself. In one of the cross-platform corporate environments I help support, a Windows user needed to get some images off her camera and onto her PC. I was the only one around so instead of finding someone far more proficient in Windows to help this person I opted to help her myself. How hard could it be? Well after 10 minutes of trying to suppress the Windows dialog boxes telling me that the camera I just plugged in wasn't recognized and needed some unknown driver from an unknown location and the having it say the same thing about the CF card reader I'd plugged in instead, I told the user that I could get her the images she needed much more quickly if I took the card, popped it into the card reader that was already attached to my Mac (no drivers required) and plopped them onto the file server for her to access at her leisure. And about 90 seconds later I'd done exactly that, saving us both what would probably have been 10 or more excruciating minutes of trying to accomplish the same task on her Windows PC.

Have you had one of those moments lately when you've been reminded why you chose the Mac? Tell us about it in the comments.