Perhaps I am not a typical Mac user because I am not Mac-addicted. My history of PC started wtih a Texas Instraments running TI-Dos and a Wyse PC running Wyse-Dos. Both were had floppy drives and something like 20 or maybe 40 meg hard drives. The year, 1982. Windows was not commerically viable at the time. The next computer was a Compu-Add, it was a 286 machine and it ran an early version of Windows. I was hooked. Devoted to Windows.
Not sure when, but I started doing some real graphics work so I looked at Apple. The Apple Lisa. Too damn expensive so I passed. Later I looked again, and eventually bought an Apple. WOW it was different. It did graphics at screaming speeds and saved me a lot of time. Using emulators I was still able to do work on the System 36 IBM too. I needed conversion software to read Excel and Word documents, but at that time, Word was not that standard word processor used by all businesses. So even a lot of Windows people could not trade documents because the standard was still not set on Word. I switched back to Windows at work only because I needed a piece of software that only ran on Windows, the Apple came home and continued to work flawlessly. The Windows computer, crashed constantly, I'm pretty sure it was a Dell. I suffered with it for too long lost a lot of work in the crashes. A year or two later I bought an Apple G3 Tower because my old Apple was sitting at home, going strong and NEVER had a system crash is it 4 or 5 year life. Then an Apple G4 after that. Then an Apple iBook. Then a G4 PowerBook. Then the new MacBookPro I am using now. Simple reliability is why I bought what I bought. Price be damned, they do cost a bit more, but if I can have a computer that is faster than a bat out of hell and doesn't crash, that is what I will buy. What is the real expense? An extra couple hundred $$$ over a 2.5 year life? That is not much. Now both of the Apple towers are still working and used but not by me. My daughter has the G4 PowerBook, my wife has the iBook.
The old G4 PowerBook got a new battery but the screen is starting to dim. Its 3 years old my screen was on 14 hours a day, every day. The screen is still easy to read, but I actually changed to the MacBookPro for a larger screen size.
The iBook was a re-furbished deal, it has had a few minor problems with the power manager not re-charging the battery. It was something I have been able to fix by following the re-set instructions (it has had to have this done 4 or 5 times in the past year). It works fine when plugged in, and now works fine with the battery.
While owning all these Mac computers, I've still been using Windows computers and teaching people how to operate Word, Excel, Publisher, PageMaker and other programs on Windows computers. All during the process, I see people have their PCs crash and my Mac doesn't. All during the process compatibility has improved so that documents & spreadsheets now trade seemlessly between the operating systems. I can use iCal while the office staff uses Outlook and we can trade appointemnts, events, etc.
For me it was reliability. But I appreciate the ease of use too.