There are tens of thousands of web servers running on Windows 2000 reliably. This site is hosted on one of them.
If Windows 2000 and XP crashed as much as Mac users claim, nobody would ever be online because half of your favorite sites wouldn't be accessible. The others run on UNIX, which isn't what OS X is, by the way, no matter what Jobs tells you.
Whenever I get the urge to upgrade my PC, I'm tempted to give Apple a shot. The designer in me finds the Mac aesthetic very pleasing.
Then my research reminds me what Macs cost. When I add up the expense of significantly superior PC hardware--including a pretty silver aluminum case--and find it costs much less, I come back to reality.
Then there's the one-button mouse with the weirdest clicking/tilting action I've ever felt. I can only conclude that functionality is giving way to the subtle sophistication of simplicity in this case.
The $499 price point of the Mac mini is exciting because of the form factor, not because of performance. An ATI 9200 with 32MB of RAM? Exciting, yes--three years ago. Probably a decent DVD/CD/MP3 player, so it would make a cool client for a media server. Rip all your DVDs and CDs to hard disk and feed them wirelessly to several Mac minis hooked up to the displays in your home. Nothing that couldn't be done with a PC for less money though.
Bossk makes a good point. Prebuilt PCs should work. That's what people expect when they buy them. However, there are significant differences between the PC market and the Apple market. As noted by a previous poster, Apple is the sole manufacturer of their primary hardware and the sole developer of the OS. That means tight control of most aspects of the hardware and far fewer possible configurations. I would expect superior stability with such a platform--which isn't what you get, but I'll touch on that later.
But when people talk about Macs, what are they talking about? They're talking about one company with one direction and one vision. When people talk about PCs, they're talking about hundreds of builders, not including the local mom and pop shops building PCs one at a time by hand. Hundreds of builders. Thousands of hardware manufacturers. Thousands of programmers. All writing their own little drivers and applications, 90% of which are hell-bent on wrecking your Windows installation thanks to shoddy development work. Microsoft took a step in the right direction with WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Lab) certification, but nobody's forcing developers to use it.
I could spout a ton of anecdotal evidence "proving" the superior stability of Windows 2000 and Windows XP to any Mac OS to date, including the current OS Apple stole and put a fancy evening gown on. I won't do that because it's total bullshit, just like the claims that OS X is the most stable OS ever.
I've heard just as many Mac horror stories as PC horror stories. The myth that Macs come out of the box crash-proof and ready to go needs to stop. Any perceived differences based on your own personal experience are attributable to bad luck and/or poor system setup.
If you're going to bitch about PC instability, don't blame the PC format. Blame builders like Dell who use motherboards with poor upgrade paths and Indian tech support you can't understand. Blame application developers who write sloppy code. Blame your office's poorly trained PC administrators.
And what about the usability differences? Academic. I've used both. Different but equal. It simply comes down to user preference.
Mac is a BRAND, just like Nike, Coca-Cola, and McDonald's. Steve Jobs is a marketing genius who knows how to exploit the Mac Mystique in order to sell the image. That little half-eaten piece of fruit is a status symbol that Mac owners love. That's why it lights up on their laptops; it must draw attention to itself.
The value of the brand will not allow other manufacturers to sell Mac-based machines. Rival manufacturers dilute Apple's profits right along with the strength of the brand. That's why they bought out Power Computing Corp. for $100 million years ago.
PCs aren't a brand. They're tools. A very different market.
Again, as a designer, I can understand why some people prefer Macs, but just once I'd like to hear a Mac user admit that the primary reason they like them is because they look pretty.