The iSatan has never got a cent out of me, and that's the way it's going to stay.

Brad,
The dreaded one button mouse you talk of has gone one step even further. The current Magic Mouse which is wireless has ZERO Buttons.
You stroke it with your finger in the middle to scroll up & down and click center to position cursor in a line of text plus there is Left Click & Right Click for other functions.
The one button mouse was possibly the earlier things that had a scroll wheel and that drove me insane as any gunk on your fingers got into the things & stuffed up the workings. I went through 3 of those before I discovered the wireless meeces & would not have a scroll wheel thing again as being a bit of a grub I was forever getting rubbish into that scroll wheel.

The Mac shops about the place often flog off refurbished Macs bought from schools and although being a few years old have heaps of life left. In most cases they are priced about half the usual retail price.There is NO Fan at all and I really dunno how they keep the things cool with the speeds the processor runs at.
On the desktop the only space it needs is to handle the screen & keyboard. The DVD/CD's go into a side slot but NEVER push in one of those pint sized CD's that some programs come on...it IS a major job to retrieve it but can be done...Been there but was costly.

I am told that the reason the Macs are not usually targets for virus stuff is the (a) the OS is Unix based & (b) the programs are tidier than MS programs and less loop holes to exploit.

At times I have wandered into some odd ball web sites and not had any issues but your web browser also has a lot to do with what gets around the system & does damage.

Lindsay

I have to say that I am a PC man as I like to tinker and with Apple it's their way or the highway but with mobile phones it's a different story.

I have an iphone which I like very much.

I've had android phones and hated them.

There always seems to be an extra step to do anything but with ios it seems to know what you want to do before you do.

Brad:

"The stigma that only Windows suffers from viruses and other malware is also a false one."

Statements that Apple computers do not suffer from such attacks has always puzzled me. I could not see why they would not be, as you say, especially as Apple computers are seen as upmarket so the owners should be worth getting at. Why the school my daughters attended chose them I don't know, but they "ran" about a thousand of them including staff, and did not run any antivirus software on the laptops; there was however I am told blockage on websites considered insecure for whatever reason, operated through a proxy server. There may have been other invisible protections. But I never heard of security problems in the several years that my kids were there.

"I also suffer issues with using small screens. Using the internet on a mobile phone is more or less impossible."

The same. Have lost detailed vision in one eye: can only just read this post with my left eye. The right has good resolution but is affected by floaters and developing cataract. Have just forked out for a giant TV so that I can easily read the news headlines running along the bottom of the screen, after the old one started turning itself off and on again after first switch-on.

Re emails and I phones: I was overseas for some weeks recently and the only email with an attachment that I bothered to read on my iPhone 5S was a quote to fix a garage door that had packed it in. In other words only in absolute necessity.

Modern processors don't need the cooling they once did because they run on lower voltages. They still need some cooling but if the heatsink is well designed then at times that's all that is required. Phones have at least 1GHz under the bonnet and no heatsink or fan.

My laptop has a 10 core AMD processor and it hauls arse. It's heatsink and fan are just the standard issue though. It beats me how they get the layers so tiny in today's chips. Transistors are more or less sprayed on the wafers these days.

Windows originally was the main target for hackers as it is far more widespread than the other systems. But over time, many loopholes in unix have been found, which means macs and all the rest are just as vulnerable.

But remember, most identity stealing and fraud happens these days because people click on links in fake email, visit dodgy sites and catch malware, or simply have no idea about computer security. In other words, you did it to yourself.

Things have changed, one can actually use a laser or CNC cutter to etch a printed circuit rather than do it chemically. Basically the IC stuff is printed. Interesting as years ago they were a 8 atoms separation & were looking at four as achievable.

Clearly one wonders at that sort of separation how is it insulated as too much voltage, or it being in vacuum would result in flashover.

I have been able to pickup a couple of Dell 17" screen laptops on ebay only a couple of years old for less than $500 each.
I also need the larger screen size and use a 21" monitor connected through HDMI port.
I now only use Ubuntu Linux, its free and works much better than windows, wouldn't touch anything made by Apple.