While the history of PCs is interesting, the history of Apple computers is more so. Although Apple only hold about 2% of the computer market, that's still a lot when you consider how many millions of computers there are in the world.

Apple is, arguably, the inventor of the modern computer graphical user interface - the windows, icons, menus and mouse pointer that you're using right now (although this is disputed, they certainly did it before Microsoft Windows did). The first Macs were out and getting things done with a mouse in 1984 - one year before the first version of the then-useless Windows, fully six years before Windows 3.0, the first half-decent version.

As it had the advantage of being first and of being a very high-quality machine, the Mac gained a large following that it has never lost. Today, Macs are used mainly by creative professionals, such as artists, writers and publishers, and especially the film industry, as the Mac was both the first machine to offer desktop publishing and the first to come up with desktop film editing software.

So why use a Mac? Well, to begin with, Macs today come with one of the best operating systems around: Mac OS X. It's basically Unix (a very old, stable operating system) with a whole load of pretty multimedia stuff bolted on top. It is far, far less susceptible to viruses and crashes than Microsoft Windows, and allows you to get things done quicker and more easily. Apple laptops - iBooks and MacBooks - are particularly admired, for their attractive looks, their high build quality and their low weight.

Although Macs still suffer from a lack of software - the gaming situation is especially dire - they are otherwise very good computers. If most of what you do is using the web, email, writing or multimedia-based, you would do well to consider one.