If your Bestbuy sells Macs than its GeekSquad division will have technicians trained to support Macs because Apple doesn't support them unless you buy the extended warranty.

If you want Direct Apple support, you need to buy from an Apple Store or online.

If you buy a Porsche, do not go to the next cheap mechanician garage to make a repair.. go to the Porsche shop.. :) even if the cheap mechanician is happy like a kid to repair your engine... lol

I have a friend who bought a macbook at Bestbuy in Glendale California. She needed support and Apple would not provide support. She had to take it back to the store and if needed then Bestbuy could receive support from Apple on the computer but they had to do all the grunt work including shipping and handling.

Welcome to tiered support. Your analogy is kind of flawed. Car dealerships are independently owned businesses. They have a license to sell products from certain manufacturers. This license requires them to provide all support as well. You do not get support from the Manufacturer on your vehicle but from the distributor. This is exactly how Apple works.

the point is that BestBuy and FutureShop and the other resellers are not supported by the manifacturer... this is one of the pathetic things with Apple... for Apple, if a reseller offer support, it is THE reseller who have to learn to support... it's 3000$ per support staff session at Apple Genius. i know about it, i paid for this session once, and i suppose it raised in the years.

vista 32 bit 19"

But ive gone into the apple store and they have replaced my ipod battery even though i purchased it online

vista
mac
and ubuntu in our house :)

You're assuming there is an Apple Store nearby or that they have the best prices. I wasn't talking about someone purchasing at an Apple store but at a third-party vendor. Believe it or not, there is a big difference.

Now I am using Windows 7. Really like it. Took a little getting used to the new taskbar but now that I have I really like it and the way you can switch documents very easily with it. Hopefully more applications get coded to use it to its full potential (looking at you Firefox) and the new jumplists soon. Performance wise, Windows 7 takes half the resources that Vista did and takes advantage of my dual-core processor better. Normally I find myself running 20-30 applications including things like Ventrilo, Skype and sometimes even multiple World of Warcraft instances without noticing a drop in performance.

Lets see windows do this...

I am a man damn it. My machines (slaves) run anything that catches my interests. :p

I can count the times that I have encoded video on no fingers. I can't count how many times that I hear Mac users saying they have to run XP/Vista in Bootcamp or use Parallels to access functionality in a specific software package.

Really it all comes down to personal preference. I used to use Macintoshes exclusively. I don't anymore. They don't serve my purposes and haven't for several years now. Even with that, I am a little leery of the Koolaid that Jobs is selling.