Nice article, and I really like the spirit of the site.

If you want uber cheap computing, buy a three year old PC laptop and stick Ubuntu on it. Linux certainly is not for everyone, but if as you say you are a computer geek, then the learning curve should not be intimidating. And at the end of it you will have a reliable and modern OS.

If you grab something that is four, five years old, you might get it even for free. No worries though, just use one of the lightweight window managers, or use one of the repackaged versions of Ubuntu like Linux Mint. I have two machines I got for free, one i use as a NAS, web server and LAN services box, and the other, an old Tosh Laptop is used for www, email, IM/Skype, etc. The only cost is a small amount of my time (no more than maintaining XP or Vista takes) and some electricity. I will keep the OS’s updated, which means an upgrade cycle about every three years and replace them when they stop working, which won’t be any time soon. Obsolescence in OS comes much faster than hardware failure.

That said, I spend money where it has impact. I have a fairly high-horsepower machine for dicking around with games but this as far as I am concerned is a luxury not a necessity.

I have subscribed to your RSS feed and Kiva is a mighty fine org.

I have only owned Apple ‘puters in my life time because they are sexy.
Michael [OpenKyoto]´s last blog ..Kyoto Kitayama Lumberjack Sushi

If you really don’t need portability, the iMac offers amazing value and performance. Otherwise the lowest end MacBook will only run around $1k. Mac Minis offer terrible performance compared to the other 2 options, and if you then want to add a decent monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc you’ll be way over their prices with a puny machine.

I love hackintoshes when they work nice, and have been hackintoshing since 10.4 to mixed results.

I will be moving back to a real Mac laptop next big purchase and pop in the same Intel X25-M SSD which is blazing away in my Aspire One A150 Hackbook now…

oh yeah, and the Mac will definitely save you money and time as you can focus on being productive, not learning how to deal with antivirus software and everything inherently wrong with Windows and which has stayed the same since 95 through to Win 7.

Unfortunately I’m not sure whether I would buy another Apple laptop when the current one needs replacing, the MacBook-style keyboards aren’t to my taste at all. Also, at over 2kg they’re a bit heavy to carry round all the time, something I often need to do at the moment. Which is why I’m typing this on an HP Mini netbook, which is not only light and small enough not to be really noticeable as an item of luggage, but has a nice keyboard. Also, Linux has improved enough that it only took me a few hours (rather than a few days) to get the damn thing running properly. (Apple, if you’re reading this, I’d happily pay 8~9 man yen for a netbook-sized MacBook with a keyboard like on the old PowerBooks. And a decent battery life, of course).
ThePenguin´s last blog ..Passing-out ceremony

i started on a mac mini just to see what it was all about, and i already had a spare monitor/keyboard/mouse etc.

if you want to go the cheap route and dont mind getting your hands dirty and maybe following some tutorials, you could get a hackintosh netbook like the MSI Wind U100 for around 20,000 yen on auctions. Only problem being, there isnt an official hackintosh disk for snow leopard yet, only leopard 10.5…

what does everyone else recommend?