Just exactly what do you mean by that? If you're talking about hardware, which it appears that you are, Apple provides a range of price points that span a fairly large range: Mini, iMac, to Mac Pro and MacBook ($850 street price), MacBook Air, to 15 and 17 MacBook Pros. So what makes you buy more hardware than you need?
About that HP "top of the line" laptop. That's about $1800 or so and you can configure it but with how much more choice than selecting various flavors of a MacBook Pro. I mean come on, there are several levels of CPU speed and memory configurations available.
As for software, when you buy that HP running windows, I expect that you will need to shell out about $1200 minimum for the cheapest CS5 suite because Adobe licenses are different for Windows and Mac. A Mac CS5 license is invalid for Windows and vice versa as far as I know. Adobe may offer side grades (they used to anyway) but I expect that even that will incur some costs. Ditto for Office of course.
I have installed several open source applications on my MacBook Pro. Further, since OS-X is based on Darwin and has a X server layer, just about any open source application can be ported to the Mac with relative ease, to wit, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, Seashore (a gimp based app but toned down for new users) and several others.
Can someone that is not a Mac hater explain this to me?
I keep hearing about its "closed ecosystem" but have yet to figure out what people mean by that...
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