Do some research will you? When I walk into Staples or Best Buy and buy increasingly larger hard drives to put in my Mac, they don't question me at the checkout stand about hardware platform to determine my price for the drive. Get real.
Research? Certainly!
www.bestbuy.com
www.gateway.com
www.dell.com
www.apple.com
www.newegg.com
www.compusa.com
www.amazon.com
www.tigerdirect.com
www.microcenter.com
www.bhphotovideo.com
There's more places I visit to research price levels, but that should give you a good start.
I can't vouch for Staples, but I can completely understand why the blue-shirt wearing folks at Best Buy don't question you. Unfortunately, it's not because of your level of knowledge regarding computers and hardware. Rather, it's their complete LACK of knowledge of anything other than what happened last night on "The Real World" or how Madden 2008 is awesome, but Madden 2009 will be so much better. In my experiences in Best Buy stores in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, the kids that work in the computer section of the store are fairly decent at pointing out general areas in which to find what you are looking for. After that, you're on your own. Even then, you need to speak in as few syllables as possible, using only the simplest of terms. After all, some of them very recently learned what primary colors are, and that's a lot of information to retain. Please go easy on them. Incidentally, if you want to have some fun, ask someone at a Best Buy where you can buy an external 1 yottabyte hard drive. I once had this poor kid searching for 15 minutes before I told him to forget it.
As far as hardware selection and availability, it's gotten a lot better, but it still has a ways to go. Of course, hard drives are more or less universal. I was referring more towards things like RAM, various video cards, sound cards, and other internal components that aren't as readily available as their PC counterparts.
I too was an Apple hater until 2005 when I got my first Mac (and still my only one). It still boots in about 30 seconds after 2 major OS upgrades and all the software I have on it. Can't say the same for my XP laptop bought around the same time frame. It used to boot up in 30 seconds or so but now, more like 3 or 4 minutes. The registry is the curse of Windows. And true to form, after a year of having the Vista machine, it's taking longer and longer to boot.
Are you maintaining your Vista and your XP machine properly? Do you surf the net and use your Vista machine for anything other than video editing? Maybe it counts as a point towards Macs, but running any Windows machine requires some periodic maintenance that's a little bit more in depth than emptying the Recycle Bin. Plus, do you have lots of programs set to start when your machine boots up? All those little virus scanners, Sync Center, App Scheduler, instant weather, Quicktime plug-ins, etc. that start with Windows all take their share of the resources. I'm sure that if you had all those same programs running on a similarly equipped Mac, you would notice an increase in boot time.
The price/performance ratio is a lot more even than it appears just by looking at the sticker on the box.
This is much truer now because Macs are for all intents and purposes, PCs in a "cutesy" enclosure.
Look, I really don't care what anyone uses, but I do get tired of ill-informed people trotting out the same old bulls***t that applied to Apple computers in the old days.
Frankly, it really doesn't matter to me what people use either. I've grown to become a halfway decent editor with FCP over the past several months, and I do consider it valuable experience because I never know when I might need to use it to get a gig for some director or producer who worships the almighty Mac. The main point I'm getting at here was already put very nicely by patssle. You don't like people coming here and spouting off disinformation, and I don't like people coming in and idolizing a machine and giving the notion that one doesn't need to have much - or any skills, talent, or knowledge to do what we do because the machine can do it for us. And that's my personal impression of Apple's marketing strategy and their software. I totally agree with your saying of it being the indian- not the arrow. However, I've noticed an increasing number of folks out there who don't know what they're doing, but yet they're completely reliant and dependent on a machine that they think can do it all for them.
Both are pretty much equal now, its the skills of the user that makes a great video, not what platform they use.
