There are now six people I know, including the local vicar, who have switched to Apple in the year or so following my personal technology switch. (To be honest the vicar converted, the rest just switched). None of these switches were iPod inspired—they were I've-had-enough-of-Windows inspired. Most home PC users lose three days or more each year to Windows and suffer significant financial expense too.

The reality is that most people simply do not have sufficient knowledge (or motivation) to fix Windows when it gets its knickers in a twist. What do I mean? Well, the knickers of Windows are prone to twist in a variety of ways. Here's a few:

1. Stuff Interferes With Stuff (i.e. stuff happens). You load something new and your PC no longer works so well. This is usually caused by DLL changes but there are other causes. The problem is that the symptoms often take a while to manifest, so you are really not sure which “straw” that you loaded actually broke the camel's back. You have no idea what is wrong and no way to find out (unless you have geek genes).
2. Memory Just Leaks Away (a close cousin of “stuff happens”). Your PC just keeps hanging every now and then and sometimes you lose work and end up “cursing Bill Gates unto the third generation”. This is a problem that most often besets users of programs that really need memory, like Photoshop. Photoshop itself seems to manage memory really well and it may be that it has no memory leaks anywhere, but quite a few programs do, including Windows itself I believe. If you chew up a good deal of memory with one app, memory leaks impact you faster. Add that to the fact that Windows simply doesn't try to defrag memory and a reboot is inevitable after a while; usually every few days, sometimes every few hours. If you're smart you learn to reboot as soon as Windows appears to be going slow.
   Anybody who is without geek genes isn't even going to understand what I wrote here. To them, it feels like they bought a sporty little car and now it won't run above 20 mph, unless its going down a steep hill.
3. Virus Infection. As the common AntiVirus products rarely stop new viruses (mostly because the virus writers test their viruses against these products before they release them) most home PCs eventually pick up a virus. Sometimes this stops software working as well as it should (the damage done depends on the virus). As a number of viruses take care to disable the AV product that is running, the poor home user never suspects that it's a virus that has mangled Windows. Anyone genetically endowed with geekness quickly understands and fixes the problem.
4. Adware/Spyware Infestation. This is probably the most common PC killer. It is often caused by a teenager loading some music-stealing software or a game found on a “doubtful web site”—but it can also be self-inflicted. For the uninformed user this can be a nightmare, but a geek would simply remove the Adware and keep on file-sharing. In reality it is not too serious a problem, (as long as you can solve it) because Adware isn't written with the intention of disabling the PC, it just does sometimes.

There are many examples of people simply buying a new PC to try to rid themselves of Windows software problems that are easily geek-soluble. (It has been estimated that there were a million such purchases in the US in the last two years). But nowadays many such users are turning to the Mac, because “It just works”. It's more expensive but in the end, it's an awful lot cheaper, because you don't need to replace it so often and you won't waste days trying to fix it or waiting for it to be fixed. The better user interface is simply an added benefit.

So blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit Windows. (If they don't bail out in favour of Ubuntu Linux or get the hots for OS X).