Maybe I am just too lazy to fight with people anymore over the PC vs. Mac thing.. old age and all getting to me... but I use this analogy if someone really wants to know what I think.
AOL claims to have nearly 30 million subscribers. That is 30 MILLION times $24 a month. ($720,000,000 a MONTH, or $8,640,000,000 a year) If that is the case, I think their stock holders need to have a word with them. Anyway.. they are counting the total number of people who have EVER signed up for AOL, not people who currently USE AOL. Dell does the same thing when they talk about how many Dell users there are. (To be fair, I think Apple dabbles in this sort of fuzzy reasoning, too) The numbers that matter, in my opinion at least, is how many people have bought a SECOND Dell after using one for a few years? I work at a place that buys and sells used computers (as well as new ones) and I can tell you that from talking to the people who are selling us their Dells (most of which are quite new, less than 2 years old) ONLY the customers who have servers or high end machines would even consider another Dell. The low prices Dell pastes all over the back of every PC magazine and their twice-hourly commercials are for machines that almost no one seems to buy twice.
On the other hand, the few macs we do get are usually either old, (beige 603's and 604's) or iMacs (mostly Bondi's and early fruits). The people selling them, though, with few exceptions, are either buying another iMac, or selling their iMacs and going to CompUSA next door to buy new PowerMac towers.
In my more cynical moments, I attribute this to the customers having hardware and software that is Mac, and they are stubbornly sticking to their investments. The problem is, if you have a beige 603 or 604, none of the stuff you have will WORK with the new Macs, unless you drop hundreds of dollars on adapters. (Firewire->SCSI, USB->serial, USB->ADB, etc) So the truth is, people buy second, third, fourth, etc Macs because they LIKE them.
Most of the people that DO buy PCs again and again buy a different brand each time, or thinking there is some magic in custom machines, switch from brand names to having a clone built. There are two clone shops within walking distance from us, in addition to CompUSA and Circuit City. We trade PC customers like kids trade Pokemon stuff. Each customer through the door tells us how the machine that "XYZ CloneShop" built for them is crap, and they want us to build them a new one. We do, of course, because business in America in the 21st century means you smile and nod and gouge the stupid people. We do a fair job, I think, of researching what they want the machine to do, and build what I think is a good PC. I am not so delusional, though, as to think that in a year they won't be at the next shop down the street saying that we built them a crappy computer and they want THAT place to build them a new one. PC's are every bit as disposable as toasters to most people... because they have been trained to believe that you have to seriously upgrade or replace them every 18 months... or at least every time a new version of Windows is released.
In short, try to save your sister the grief of buying any PC, be it Dell, Compaq, IBM, whatever.. but don't make yourself crazy doing it. If they buy one, just know that you'll have another chance to convert them in 18-24 months, and you'll have lots more arguments in Mac's favor then... "hey, remember that time I told you to buy a Mac? Wanna LISTEN this time?"
