Be prepared for strong opinions on both sides of this. It will be obvious from the responses that this is a religious issue, not a technical one.
Having said that, I can give you a very personal recommendation. I use both operating systems, myself, I've got a PC laptop as my main machine and both a desktop PC and desktop Mac at home. I've managed for a long time the end-user technology issues for a group of more than three hundred people, most of whom use PC's and the rest Macs. I know exactly what the support and maintenance costs for both platforms are, in both dollars and staff time, because I have to budget for them.
For anyone who wants to do the kinds of things you say you're interested in, the choice for me is clear. The Mac is going to be much, much easier to use, especially for music and image management. As a company, Apple has better customer satisfaction than any other, by a considerable margin. Your satisfaction with a platform is going to have more to do with the software than the hardware and Apple's applications are still dramatically more intuitive and elegant than any of the PC copies of them.
Compatibility issues are actually quite rare. Again, there may be a specific application that you must have a PC for but, for the average person, that's not an issue. Our folks happily exchange Word, Excel, graphics and Powerpoint files across platforms with no problems, whatsoever.
If your computer guru is willing to be on call 24/7 to deal with your issues then the PC might be an okay choice. If he's not, I'd go with your idea of the 12" iBook. It's an amazing machine for the money and the bundled applications, iPhoto, iTunes, etc., are genuinely fun to use.
Having said that, I can give you a very personal recommendation. I use both operating systems, myself, I've got a PC laptop as my main machine and both a desktop PC and desktop Mac at home. I've managed for a long time the end-user technology issues for a group of more than three hundred people, most of whom use PC's and the rest Macs. I know exactly what the support and maintenance costs for both platforms are, in both dollars and staff time, because I have to budget for them.
For anyone who wants to do the kinds of things you say you're interested in, the choice for me is clear. The Mac is going to be much, much easier to use, especially for music and image management. As a company, Apple has better customer satisfaction than any other, by a considerable margin. Your satisfaction with a platform is going to have more to do with the software than the hardware and Apple's applications are still dramatically more intuitive and elegant than any of the PC copies of them.
Compatibility issues are actually quite rare. Again, there may be a specific application that you must have a PC for but, for the average person, that's not an issue. Our folks happily exchange Word, Excel, graphics and Powerpoint files across platforms with no problems, whatsoever.
If your computer guru is willing to be on call 24/7 to deal with your issues then the PC might be an okay choice. If he's not, I'd go with your idea of the 12" iBook. It's an amazing machine for the money and the bundled applications, iPhoto, iTunes, etc., are genuinely fun to use.