What Jay said about Macs seeming over priced if very true. Often you an amazingly sleek and powerful little machine for a very comparable price to its PC counterparts. The Mac Mini is actually a very good machine for the price, sure they are quite under powered, and you need to find a monitor to go with them, but if you are just looking for a system for casual computer use such as email, word processing, music, pictures, buring CD/DVD etc., it is an ideal system. At $599 it is really is not that expensive. OSX is way better than anything MS has to offer, not to mention the fact that through bootcamp you can install XP or Vista, assuming you have them lying around somewhere.