h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The article offers a reasonably good and fairly unbiased comparison of "IBM compatibles" and Macs. Just a couple of points:

The difficulty of comparing processor speeds (the impossibility of comparing processor speeds) between Intel and Motorolla was less that successfully explained, I feel.

Whilst it is perhaps not possible to exchange a native AppleWorks document with someone using an Intel PC, AppleWorks offers a significant number of formats for saving a document, so exchange is no big hassle. And, indeed, sending .doc attachments (documents created using Word) is not to be advised -- it's an excellent way of spreading viruses! Normally, except in a working environment, attachments should be sent in generic and platform-independent formats: PDF, plain text, RTF... for example.

Working in the other direction, Macs can cope with most formats generated by typical Intel PC applications, so file exchange is really not very much more complicated that between two Intel PCs.

I, as a Mac user, have never had a problem moving Word files, or any other file for that matter. The problem that I have had is that my computer has a macro virus claiming to be the Melissa virus - it spreads to every .doc, and won't go away even with macros of and no matter how many times I delete it. It looks like the Melissa virus, actually - I looked at the macros.