To be fair, you can find said IPS screen for cheaper than the $1000 premium that Apple charges. Even barring that, 90% of iMac users don't need an IPS screen, but are forced to pay for one anyway in buying an iMac.
Heh...if you want to talk about heat, there is no bigger offender out there than the iMac. At least a tower has proper heat dissipation for the components inside; the iMac is always so close to heating that Apple modified the firmware of its hard drives so that the extra power pin that ordinarily goes to the hard drive access LED on PC towers is used to connect the hard drive's own internal temperature sensor to the logic board. This is a necessity that no other computer, Mac or PC, REQUIRES. Also, if you want to talk about ugly design, try opening up an iMac, and you'll see that inside, it isn't very pretty at all.
As for noise, you know it isn't impossible to build a quiet tower, right? Even so, I'd rather a noisy tower with proper heat dissipation than a quiet iMac with poor heat dissipation.
I've worked at an Apple Authorized Service Provider, and save for the influx of people spilling crap in their MacBooks and MacBook Pros, the machines most commonly seen inside the shop are...you guessed it...iMacs.
Whoa, hey now. I never said that I was more pro-Windows 7 than I am pro-Mac OS X. I'm very pro-Apple, I'm just very anti-iMac. A Mac mini, to me seems kind of stupid, but I appreciate its existence, and for the people who want to buy it, it is the perfect machine. The Mac Pro even, has flaws that I'm not stoked on (for instance, crap GPU options and the necessity to hack a video card's firmware in order to get a newer one than is available from Apple to run). But that doesn't mean that I don't like Mac OS X or even Apple branded hardware designed to run it. I just have a narrow selection of Macs that I don't think are inherently stupid by comparison to their PC hardware counterparts. For instance, the MacBook Pro is the best notebook around. Period.
First off, if we're going to go with a car analogy, then I've got another one for you. Which is ultimately a more reliable car, a Toyota or a Mercedes? Last I checked, the Toyotas don't die. Similarly the hardware on a Hackintosh, provided you don't go with the cheapest stuff out there, likely won't die before you naturally replace the components anyway. Sure, the Mercedes costs more and looks nicer and probably feels slicker for a time, but there's no reason why you should need to spend that much more money on a car.
That being said, Mac OS X is an amazing operating system, and it is no less amazing on a smoothly-running Hackintosh than it is on an actual Apple-branded Mac. It's not like you suddenly lose the benefit of having moved away from Windows to begin with by opting out of using Apple's hardware. Does it require more work to set up, yes. Does performing your own oil change require more work than having someone else do it, yes.
Judging from what you say here, I'm guessing that you have never built a Hackintosh, or know what goes into building one, or how the times have dramatically changed for those building one.
I'll be happy to enlighten you. For one, there are no heat issues. Period. Again, no other computer out there has as much consistent heating issues as the Apple iMac does. Gaming PC laptops come very very close. Secondly, if you go cheap on the Power Supply, you will have a noisy machine. Otherwise, there are no noise issues either. As for hacks, the only software components that are different between a Hackintosh's installation of Mac OS X from a real Mac's installation of Mac OS X is a modified bootloader, and drivers. That's it. The kernel is (unless you are using way older hardware) stock, the rest of the OS is stock. Every time you run a point release update (such as 10.7.3), you download the update and before you reboot your computer, you re-file away your drivers, and then you reboot and that's it. No intense hackery. No nothing. I'm given the speed and power of the iMac along with the upgradability it never had, without the heat and hardware reliability problems it inherently has. Sounds like win to me.
Obviously, this route isn't for everyone. If you don't know enough about computers and if you don't want to know in order to use your damn machine, then by all means, get a Mac mini as they don't require you to do anything but plug the thing in and turn it on. But if you know what you're doing, you can still save money (even with an IPS display if someone so chooses) and get a machine that will last you much longer. Having once owned an iMac, I can attest that once your internal hard drive gets full, there's nothing you can really do except buy a new one and pay an obscene fee to have it upgraded by someone who may or may not be authorized by Apple to even do such a procedure (and given how complicated that repair is, you definitely want them to be). Sounds like a terrible deal to me. At least Toyotas can be modded.
As for "ugliness", I have two thoughts on that word when used in the context of computers.
1, my computer is a tool, not a fashion accessory. I'm not buying it because it looks nice; I'm buying it because it is the best thing out there for what I want to do. People on these forums tend to forget that when all is said and done, these are machines; we buy them to get a (series of) job(s) done, not to stand around and look pretty to passersby. That being said, if by getting a prettier computer, I'm sacrificing functionality, that sounds like too much form, too little function, and at that point, you miss the entire point of owning a computer to begin with.
2, I look at "ugliness" from a more practical design standpoint. When you open up a custom-built PC tower, while you might see wires everywhere (unless the builder uses twist-ties), you have immediate and easy access to every component should anything break down. (Laughably, this isn't typically true of name-branded PC desktops, which is why I am being specific to custom-built towers.) If you pick a pretty enough case, then as far as PC towers go, as far as JUST hardware goes, you have just as pretty of a machine as any Mac. Though, I'll clarify that by saying that the iMac isn't a pretty machine. Externally, it's gorgeous. But internally, it's a nightmare. And really, those two are two sides to the same coin; you can't judge one without the other and have a complete judgement of the thing. Sure, you may never open it, but that doesn't mean that it won't ever have to be opened; more likely than not, it will, and having been there before, I'll attest, from the fully exposed power supply that can shock and kill you if you are not careful to the necessity to pull the IPS panel you love so much just to even get that far, to how crammed everything is, it's nowhere near pretty in there. The Mac minis are bad about how annoying it is to get at internal parts, but they don't offend anywhere near as bad as the iMac does. The unibody MacBook Pro, on the other hand is as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside. It's as easy to get at every part as it is on a PC tower; just unscrew the bottom plate, and you have access to everything. It's great engineering, and is by no means, inside or out, "ugly".
