First of all if you actually read his post then you would know that he wants a PowerBook which is a laptop. So your bitching and complaining about Macs not being able to interchange parts is irrelevant. Second of all you sound like one of the PC idiots that doesn't know **** about Apple and only thinks they know everything about PCs. Don't be that person in a Mac community because you will loose badly! If you want to bad mouth Apple then this isn't the place to do so. Third he was asking someone who actually know about Apple products, not some PC idiot who doesn't know anything about Apple except thinking that all Macs cost $5,000 or that this isn't any software for them. Forth nobody in their right mind needs a 3.2 GHz Pentium IV processor for minor graphics, browsing the web, and e-mail. Its just plain stupid to think you need such speed because you won't even use half of it. You won't notice hardly any fast application launch times, it doesn't make the internet faster, and it doesn't improve much of anything for what he wants to do.
When you buy a Mac you don't feel the need to update your computer every 2 or 3 years because of OS X being an efficient OS. Apple has done an excellent job of making OS X run on almost all of its modern machines. Like I said in my other post my mom runs OS X.3 on a 233 MHz iMac and it runs just as good as OS 9.2.2 did. I'd like to see you run Windows XP on a 233 MHz PC and have it run as good as a 233 MHz Macintosh.
On most Macs you can change out things, but just like with PC, yes it doesn't void the warranty. In my flat panel iMac yes I can change out the hard drive, and yes I can change out the optical drive. You have to understand that the people who are going to buy an iMac are regular consumers that just want the ease of use, and don't care about the ability to change out the processor, or change the video card. Consumer end Macs aren't expandable because they pretty much already come with what every basic consumer needs. It comes with FireWire, USB 2.0, AirPort Extreme Wireless, Bluetooth, a CD/DVD Burner, good sized HD, and a pretty good graphics card for a consumer end machine. Especially considering that its PC competitors use shared video ram. Macs may be more expensive but as I've always said you get what you pay for. You can spend $499 and get a $hitty Dell with a slow hard drive that doesn't hold much, very little good software, shared memory, regular CD ROM drive, etc.. On the 17" iMac which costs $1799 you get a totally digital 17" widescreen display, with an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra going down a 4x AGP bus, a CD/DVD burner, nice 80 GB HD than spins at 7200 RPM, very good software with iLife '04, Quicken for you checkbook, Worldbook encyclopedia, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 4, plus LOTS MORE! The display its self is worth around $800.
Mac OS X is a very efficient OS compared to Windows XP. Microsoft makes bloatware. It always tries to do things for you to makes things easier when in fact all it does is make things 10x harder. The one thing that Apple can do that Microsoft cannot is design its OS around all of its hardware. There little things that take advantage of the PowerMac G5, and other things that take advantage of the iMac, etc.
Its very hard to compare the processors like I said before because they are totally different processors. The G3, G4, and G5 processors are RISC processors that put out PPC instructions. The Intel/AMD chip is a CISC processor that puts out x86 instructions. Each processor has its strong points and it weak points.
So you either need to find someplace else to whine, or quit whining!
All this talk about PowerMac speed boosts, the 3 GHz G5, and now PowerBook and iBook updates has made me forget about the display updates as well. 
