The points you make about cost are all true. I was giving more of a theoretical answer to a theoretical question. In the real world of dollars and cents, I think the era of new radical processors and hardware is probably over since off the shelf commodity processors are "good enough" 99.9% of the time and are the most cost effective way to go, and with the time and costs involved in development I am sure that in the near future we are just going to see tinkering and incremetal improvements in what exists already- much like the tinkering and cost consciouss imagination-less thinking that still has the internal combustion engine carting us all around still after 120 years with only minor changes in design and better maufacturing techniques and metallurgy. I think the era of proprietary processors and Unixes is well over- something akin to the great die-off of hundreds of smaller auto manufacturers in the US as the great depression hit. My aim was just to point out that there once was a time and an age before the x86 became ubiqutous, when it was possible to do things without MS's help and indeed most groundbreaking things- like that disney movie TRON, for example, and almost all computer animation we all enjoy so much was done on non-x86 and non MS boxes. I totally agree that any non MS computer that wasn't a Mac that you would buy off the shelf today would be outrageously expensive for what a home user would use it for, and that goes for many businesses as well. Even those old SGI's etc for sale on ebay are (for most home users) nothing still-useable relics from the pre-commodity age of computing..
