Not exactly a fair comparison, given that's showing an all-in-one mac versus a standard desktop PC.
One of the beautiful things about PCs is that you get choices. They make all-in-one PCs, too:
HP TouchSmart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Just run a search for "all-in-one pc" and you'll get plenty of machines made by several different manufacturers.
Not to mention that nowadays laptop sales exceed desktop sales, so that comparison isn't really even representative of the modern Mac or PC.
---------- Post added at 02:03 ---------- Previous post was at 01:20 ----------
It depends. You can "repair" a Windows install without losing data, but sometimes you simply have to re-format the partition and start over. Since most "store-bought" PC's have everything on one partition, that's a problem.
If you're smart, you will will have re-partitioned your hard drive, with the OS and applications (at least the ones that use the registry since you'll have to re-install them when you re-install the OS anyway) on one partition, and all your data (and app's that don't use the registry, such as Orbiter) on another partition.
Even with that, a virus can still potentially infect apps or damage data on your data drive.
This isn't exclusive to Windows, it's good practice no matter what OS you use. Many Linux distro's ( but not all - and the trend seems to be going to the "one partition" model) do this by default during the initial installation, I'm not sure with a Mac.
One problem with the "Separate / and /home partitions" model, given the way Linux does things is that you have to guess how much space you'll need for root when you set things up, otherwise you end up needing to repartition to grow the / partition, since anything installed through the package management system ends up in /. I still find it superior to having a single partition, but it is a problem.
As a general rule, Macs allow you to repartition your hard disk anytime you want as long as you have free space,
Linux pretty much does the same with software that ships with popular distributions, and I'm pretty sure that such partition editing software exists for Windows, even if it doesn't come included. The one limitation, which I'm pretty sure has to apply to Macs as well, is that you can't edit the partition that an OS is running off of while it's running, since you can't access a partition while it's being edited. You either have to run your partition editor from an OS booted off of removable media (CD, flashdrive, etc.), or one booted off a partition you aren't editing.
and most Mac apps (those that don't deal directly with the hardware, are OS maintenance and utilities, or interact with other software) are just drag and drop folders.
I'm not sure what you mean by this...
And if push comes to shove, we always have Time Machine (think of it like Windows Restore on steroids), which makes totally restoring a system (or transferring your entire system to another Mac) a matter of just plugging in your TM drive, dropping the Installer DVD in, and going for a walk for a couple of hours. As long as you don't have any virus, of course.
I must admit that that is a nice feature.
