Clearly you dont know that Intel only just recaptured the lead over AMD where CPU power is concerned. Prior to Core Duo, AMD had the best chips on the market. It's just a matter of time before they retake the lead again. When that happens Mac users will be scratching their heads...again...and be left eating dust...again...

And I'll say it again..with a Mac you're stuck with the Mainboard and CPU....Just being able to replace a C2D with another C2D doesn't count in my book as a real upgrade. With a PC i can move to triple core or quad core from dual on a whim. And as long as your apple mainboard remains the same you only get limited performance boosts using module upgrades. When you change the mainboard in a PC you get improved performance of your modules and daughter boards as well and you can buy modules that take advantage of new features in your new mainboard. AND WITH A MAC YOU LOOSE YOUR COMPUTER WHEN YOUR MAINBOARD GETS FRIED!!! Why on earth would i settie for that? If i fry a PC mainboard i just get a better one.

Yes you can run OSX while I still can't. And yes, your computer will run only as fast as a PC with the same components now that you're using intel...But that's my point - your computer's components don't compare to the best that the PC World has to offer on any given day, so your Mac computer will always be slower than mine.....I'm already using DDR3......you can only watch...END OF STORY...

And yes, upgrading hardware is a piece of cake, especially since the days of pin config are long gone...but the real challenge is in the tweaking...what? you thought that just sticking hardware in there was all it took to get the most out of your system? At the end of the day you've settled for a good OS on a mediocre machine. I'm not moving to OS X until Apple allows clones of its mainboards to return to the PC market. But Apple would never allow it because PCs running OS X would outperform anything they could sell themselves.

"Do you really consider two years ago "only just" recaptured?"

Of course it is! The war for the most powerful microchip has been raging for many years. Two years is nothing compared to the length of time we've been having a chip war. AMD will be back in charge before another 2 years passes. In any case you should be thanking all of us PC users for the opportunity to use an Intel microchip. Had it not been for the war between Intel and AMD that WE fostered, you would still be trying to jump-start a G5. Competition in the PC market pushed CPU specs outside the range of Apple's developers' capability to match it. It was only when Apple realised that the innovations of the PC market were leaving it behind that it embraced Intel to stay viable.

"I seem to remember reading a few articles about people upgrading their G3 CPUs to G4 CPUs and Core Duo processors to Core 2 Duo processors."

I throw my head back and laugh again...You still dont get it. Can YOU upgrade a G3 to a Core 2? NO...Can I change a Pentium 2 to an AMD XP? Yes i can! By just swapping chips, boards and DIMMs! YOU can only upgrade your chips as long as the upgrade CPUs share the same socket architecture. I can switch to any new socket type that i choose, even across chip brands, by simply switching mainboards. And before you try to distract again...no..i wouldn't choose an AMD today because Intel rules the benchmarks (for now), but at least i have the choice to do so whenever they come up with the next Intel crusher. Your fate is that of Intel's so you have to hope that they can contnue to dominate. We can switch to whomever takes the lead.

"Why would you believe that the logic board on a Mac is non-replaceable? It's as easily replaceable as in a PC."

No it's not. Your narrow mind is thinking only along the lines of physically taking it out and putting in another...that's not what i meant and you know it...You can obviously take one out and replace with another. But that's where the similarity ends....*APPLE DOESN'T SELL REPLACEMENTS FOR MAINBOARDS!!!....*the only way you can GET a replacement is to buy an old rusty one on ebay or buy yet another COMPUTER from Apple. I can go anywhere on the planet and choose from a selection of mainboards the same way you can choose underwear!

"You might want to check out some PC World benchmarks of Macs running Windows. Apple builds some of the fastest Windows capable machines on the market."

Some of the fastest? That's my point...the very fastest computer possible is ALWAYS a PC, because your hardware becomes outdated a month after your gear gets released to market... and your Macs gets more and more outdated as the year passes until the next models appear..And yeah, you're going to say that you can stick modules in to make it faster, but those boosts are modest as long as you stick with the same mainboad. The key to boosting PC performance is the mainboard..you improve it and your PC gets faster, even with the same chip in place. Two PCs can have the same CPUs but the one with the best board will most often be the faster. PC users have access to combinations of the best boards, the latest and fastest ram, the fastest harddrives, the best possible graphics cards....so our benchmarks climb all year long as new technology enters the market, while yours remains flatlined. While your macs improve yearly, our PCs improve daily. A Mac will never ever best a PC because the latest hardware is always inside ours.

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  My points could never be valid in your mind...you and I are used to different levels of hardware freedom...I'm making sure that PC users who are used to upgrading their gear know that a switch to a mac limits their options and takes away their freedom to upgrade in any direction they choose. Simply put, the Mac way threatens my freedom to upgrade as i choose to.
  

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  Two years is a long time in the Mac World...we live in separate worlds with different choices available to us...i've got more choice, you've got less. Just because YOU and other Mac users are satisfied with having less choices than i do in hardware and upgrading doesn't mean that i should make the same stupid choice. The world benefits from this choice that i've made, only apple benefits from yours. Moore's law is the reason why AMD will eventually take the lead again. In case you haven't noticed, neither company has ever managed to dominate indefinitely...such is the nature of competition.
  

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  ??? G5 superior to P4...your G5s never came close to outperforming P4s in graphics..Only in Aps requiring more floating point. Furthermore AMD's XPs outperformed P4s for years! P4 was crap.
  

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  Primary components again... as predicted:^0 *
  
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  yeah , keep trying to evade the mainboard issue, because you and i both know that you have NO answer to that. More cost effective to buy a new machine?? Only in the Mac world, dude. A PC user only needs to buy a mainboard with a suitable chip and ram to match the FSB and swap the old ones out . Presto, you've got a much faster system. And you can do it for hundreds less than the cost of a new PC and a save a thousand by avoiding a Mac, while still matching or exceeding the performance of Macs...You keep your display and all other peripherals instead of having to buy them all over again from Apple. And to lower costs even further, you could still sell the old parts too! If you don't need ultra high performance you can get a much cheaper deal using an AMD CPU and save hundreds more on the upgrade as well as pay less on your light bill due to AMD's power-saving features...
  

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  Yeah? PROVE IT!!! Show me one link to a site or a store that sells BRAND NEW Mac mainboards. There's no such thing. I can google up 100 links to forums with people trying to find a replacements for their ruined boards and getting their hearts broken when they realise that they have to fork over the cash to Apple yet again.
  

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  So What. Systems with a top-end PC mainboard and exactly the same CPU and modular configurations will outperform it!
  

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  Upgrading your HDDs and ram without upgrading your mainboard gets you very little...a ram upgrade only helps if you do alot of multitasking, multimedia and gaming...after a point there's no benefit at all and the CPU then becomes the bottleneck in most cases. The capacity of your mainboard to efficiently channel data limits any benefits derived from just upgrading ram and using another harddrive...each board has it's data transfer limits that are affected by numerous factors intrinsic to the boards design...For instance, a friend of mine bought a board that had performance degradation once he filled up his PCI Express slots. Newer system boards are designed to maximally use the latest hardware, are corrected for design errors and can squeeze more performance out of both old and new components....some new components can actually degrade performance when installed in older mainboards. Upgrading both CPU and mainboard will always guarantee a significant boost in performance because it will allow other components such as the HDD and graphics cards to work with greater efficiency and fewer system bottlenecks will exist. In any case, upgrading your CPU alone will always give you more performance benefits than upgrading the HDD and ram only but a mainboard upgrade maximises the CPU upgrade and increases your overall upgrade capacity.
  

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  Your revisions don't make any real changes to the architecture of the mainboards, only to the components seated on them. That intrinsically limits the performance benefits. Mainboard design is far more dynamic and progressive in the PC market. New and improved designs are always available.