A Dell/Apple story...from a different perspective
I'm a recent switcher from a Dell Inspiron 4100 notebook and a homebrew Athlon PC, to a 12" PowerBook and a 1.6GHz G5. My experience has generally been the opposite of what everyone has described in this thread.
When I ordered my Dell Inspiron 4100 in January 2002, I heavily customised the system. The system was still delivered in the promised 10 working days. It was absolutely flawless in its operation day-in, day-out (it was my primary work machine), and was carted around all the time, and on several overseas trips. About 13 months after purchase, the IBM Travelstar hard drive started making some weird noises. A Dell technician was on my doorstep the next morning, replaced the drive, and even left me the old drive for 7 days so I could attempt data recovery. Apart from that, I never had another problem.
Now...my PowerMac G5. The system was horribly late (it took over 2.5 months from order to delivery), and my ETA was changed numerous times (don't attempt to make a CTO order if you want your system in any reasonable amount of time). Apple even stopped updating the delivery time on their web site, and I had to start calling Apple directly when the quoted ETA was 3 weeks past due...and was fed a variety of interesting excuses and story changes. Anyway...the system eventually turned up...and then started crashing immediately, with kernel dumps and lockups. After 6 days of troubleshooting it couldn't be resolved, so I had to pack the thing up and take it back to an AppleStore (no on-site service from Apple). It took 3 weeks for a replacement system to be sent to me, and now that replacement G5 suffers from the 'black screen of death' where the Radeon 9600 video card doesn't send the wake-up signal to the CRT on cold-starts or when waking from sleep, meaning I need to restart my G5 3-4 times to get the monitor to come on, and I can't use sleep. I still need to muster up the mental strength to make a full backup of my system, and then send it off to Apple yet again for an indeterminate period of time, when they may (or may not) send me a properly functioning G5.
So as a complete counter-example, my friends and family have all been turned off buying Apples for life, and think Dell is the epitome of reliability and customer service. To be fair, the 12" PowerBook (not bought directly from Apple, but from a reseller where I can go and yell at them in person when the thing eventually breaks) has been really good. But the damage had already been done...I don't think I could get one of my PC using friends to touch an Apple with a 10-foot pole after my experiences with the G5, yet a number of friends have ordered Dells after having seen it ''in battle" day after day for almost 2 years.
Just thought I'd throw that in for a counter-example.
