I remain to be convinced about costomisability. I haven’t played with a Mac enough to really know about the stuff you’re talking about, I should preface all of the above with ‘I haven’t had all that much time with a Mac, but..’. (Maybe you should ‘loan’ me a Macbook to ‘educate’ me )

So I’ll defer to your superior experience on that one. But one of my favourite ever OS setups was Fluxbox running on Slackware, which is pretty antithetical to the Mac user experience.

Oh, and have you met Gnome-DO?
http://do.davebsd.com/

Macs are expensive, generally not more expensive than equivelant PCs though…

e.g

http://www.themoderndaypirates.com/pirates/?p=366

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9023959/Mac_vs._PC_cost_analysis_How_does_it_all_add_up_?taxonomyId=12&pageNumber=1

http://technologizer.com/2008/10/19/is-the-new-macbook-expensive/3/

Obviously there’s never going to be conclusive evidence, but the main point I think is choice. Apple have a very limited choice. If what you want is only available on a higher end model, and you don’t want a load of other stuff that the higher end also gives you, then yes it’s expensive. But on a like for like basis, most people who’ve investigated (who aren’t Microsoft making “laptop hunter” adverts) seem to come to the same conclusion…

I also disagree on customisation (software-wise). Apple make it easier. Things like applescript and automator mean you can spend hours tinkering with things, making things happen automagically -passing data/running one app from another etc. (e.g the applescript I wrote so if anyone deleted any of the photos from the laptop at our wedding, there would already be a nice backup copy hidden away out of site etc.)

Quicksilver is another example… that thing is unbelievable powerful…

Anyway, as I said, I’m a fanboy (for now…) so I’ll stop

What about Math/maths then?