Mike,
with all respect I have to disagree, these machines were not dreadful at all but very reliable.
I used my first Mac II for office work (until the Quadra came out) but had several siblings in the lab, a MacSE and a MacIIfx. The SE arrived in 1988 together with an instrument under its control (a 96-well microplate reader if you want to know) and both were still functional and very useful when I retired in 2007! Never replaced the hard drive, or either processors (it also had a floating point co-processor). The only problem I had was that the IT group did not allow the computer to be linked to the first local net when it was installed since these guys were all Microsoft brain-washed (but a smart grad student figured out a method to beat them anyway 
)
When I bought my second reader 5 years later the company had decided to couple its newer version with a PC. Why? Because they liked the fact that they could sell a very expensive maintenance contract - the reader didn't make trouble, no the computer always needed to be worked on because every time MS changed something (which had to be installed as mandated by the IT department) the interface was screwed up and a company technician had to fix it again. 
Nice little racket - wouldn't you say?
Alfred, you
usually disagree with me anyway! But nonetheless, in the CEPS front end applications, where we were working with early versions of Quark Xpress, and other proprietary software for imaging; Adobe's first products, PostScript in its early generations, expensive fonts, and file sizes that were
orders of magnitude greater than
any laboratory or office application--the MAC's were dreadful. I was there. But, nothing had been ported yet to a PC. The problem was really that our needs were far greater than the hardware was up to; and the software wasn't there yet either. The limits of hardware and software were being pushed; we were on the edge. Aside from security issues prevalent today because of the internet, all the foilbles that people complain about with PC's and their operating system, the system crashes, etc. were
all there on the Mac. Just because
you didn't experience them doesn't mean they didn't exist. It just means you had simple applications, in a relative sense.
This was the dawn of the digital imaging arena. JPG didn't exist. File compression didn't exist. Color images coming from room sized scanners and were hundreds of megabytes in size. Remember this is a time when main memory was typically 640K. Disk drives topped out at 300MB, and those were enormous and cost $15,000. We had to use virtual drives with images spread out over several drives. When it came time to create a PostScript RIP, our vendors chose a UNIX system running on a PS2--the MAC just could not cut it at that time. They chose Unix because they needed real-time; they chose PS/2 because its expansion bus, though proprietary was superior at the time to generic PC's. These kinds of problems were to be expected--we were porting what were mainframe applications to the desktop world, and the first to do so. I worked for a firm called Scitex, and then independently serving their customers for many years. (N.B. you can go to most file format lists and see something called "Scitex CT"; yes, that's the original full color, 32-bit, CMYK digital image format). Scitex was created by a man who saw commercial applications from the digital imaging work he did for the Israeli Defense Forces and the U.S. Government with satellite imagery in the 1960's. Scitex's team of brilliant Israeli engineers invented digital imaging as we know it, and developed all the core products that feed that market today--scanners, image processing, ink-jet printing, CTP, imagesetters, platesetters and related. They stuck with proprietary hardware and it eventually killed them--but parts of them live on in HP and Kodak today. The photo below shows a mainstream mid-1980's CEPS system--this is the back end of what the Macs were used for on the front end. It took 10 tons of air conditioning to keep the equipment cool, and a 50 kVa power supply. The photo is at Parade Magazine, which was an early adopter of the technology; I trained the entire company.
But as I mentioned, that was then. Tightening of the software, and the introduction of things like file compression (JPG) and skyrocketing capacities of memory and disk drives made everything work. You should note that Apple abandoned NuBus, SCSI, their proprietary memory schemes, etc, and finally went to more robust and lower cost peripherals made popular on the PC platform. They even abandoned the Motorola processors and use--gasp! I N T E L!!
And the purpose of my post was to explain WHY I had abandoned the Mac early on; not to point at any present problems. Now the issue is I've been away for so long, I have to really get smart before making any kind of purchase decision.
I'd never go with an integrated unit--I change monitors too frequently. I know I need a LOT of memory to work efficiently. Folks, some of the PHOTOS (single photos) used for the Pagoda Style book are in excess of 20MB
to start; when they get layered in Photoshop they grow, sometimes to
100MB. Disk I/O speed is paramount, since every time you update or save, you are
re-writing these enormous files. Processor speed (net useful; not just speed in gHz) is paramount, too. One digital photo filter I applied recently to Gus Monahu's page took nearly
10 full minutes of computation to process. Of course when you sit and wait for this to happen, those 10 minutes seem like an eternity. These are applications and procedures that dwarf most internet surfing and office apps.
So, I'm listening to all these things. I am appreciating all the advise and suggestions, which focus my search efforts. And when I can beat my way past the teeny boppers with their iPhone issues, I'll visit the Mac store. One thing that still is dreadful about Macs is their distribution model.
For a company with less than 20% market share and nowhere to go but up, with generally acknowledged better hardware and user experience than the collective PC world, that distribution model is holding them back.
