You pay a premium for it being trendy and being a mac. Not to mention, I much prefer the windows OS. I'd say avoid macs.
Sure, Macs are trendy, but that isn't the reason the majority of people own them. I can't understand why anyone would recommend to avoid macs though. It's just a personal preference, some people like them, some don't. I used to work in a Mac training centre and we used to get a lot of people who'd switched from PCs coming in for advice and a bit of training. It always made me smile when they would later contact me and tell me what they were doing on their macs. An example was we had an 84 year old lady switch to Mac. She was a computer novice, and jusy used her PC for emails and browsing. Within no time at all she was using her mac to edit movies and make DVDs, which she then sold through the local tourist board. Something she would have never done on a PC.
I love the Mac OS. I find it very intuitive, and having the unix base is really sweet. I can use Windows, but I find it awkward, clumsy, unstable, very poor at font rendering, far too suseptable to attacks and very ugly to look at. But in defence of Windows, I'm no expert in it, which would probably mean I simply don't have the knowledge to overcome those problems.
No Virus (so you don't have to keep paying for Anti Virus). Sleek Design with robust OS & the way the products are branded makes all the difference.
apple is more expensive because your buying the brand. apple also has a kind of design/creative culture associated with it.