My thoughts on best and worst change around.....I mostly hang out in the realm of x86 IBM Compatibles, but I've messed with Mac stuff some.
First off, my philosophy is there is no "perfect" computer. I've owned over 100 different examples over the last 20 years - Macs, Commodores, IBM Compatibles, Tandy this and that, and they all had some kind of fobile to them. Some like the Commodores I have very limited experience with. Like I said, IBM Compatibles are my mainstay.
My thoughts on Macintosh is that they are very solid, very reliable machines. Their achilles heel is three areas - yellowing/brittle plastics, ease of service on the machines, and generally, making it as usable as an x86 IBM Compatible of the same vintage on a mixed platform network like my own. Sure, I could ultrabrite them, but then I run into the problem of taking the darned thing apart, especially early AIO Macs. I spent a long time early on chasing around a super-long star tip driver to get the cases open, only to resort into a really janky McGyver setup using multiple extensions that were thin enough to actually fit in the holes. Then there's the whole CRT issue on those models, if you're not comfortable discharging CRTs - something I've only very recently gotten used to dealing with - they're not something you'll be very comfortable with upgrading the RAM, replacing batteries, doing board level repairs, and even doing something as mundane as replacing the HDD. Then there's the whole functionality standpoint. Network cards, especially PDS and NuBus, are EXPENSIVE. That's why I have a Mac SE FDHD that has yet to see more than a month a year of usage, because when I find an ethernet equipped PDS card, it'll be over $100, I'll need to get some special driver to remove the back, discharge a CRT, and then take the motherboard out to install the card. If it was an IBM based system, I'd be in and out in 5 minutes. Then there's the whole chicken/egg thing with STuffit that I run into every time......Stuffit comes in a SIT file, which needs Stuffit to "expand". If I don't do it with a SIT File, the Resource Forks - more often than not - get boggled up. IBM? I'd just plop the drivers on a Floppy or a Cd-ROM and install them and be done in like....15 minutes, including card install.
I've owned a LOT of IBM stuff, tons, PS/2s, PC-330s, I've gotten to work with an on the original PC 5150, and XTs, and ATs. I've even used and worked on their late 90's Aptiva stuff - and the famous ThinkPads - which I even hold current Lenovo models in almost as high a regard. To me, they are the best, but they do have their flaws too. The original PC only has 5 slots and used wider slot covers than the other models. The PS/2s can be a real pain if you have hardware in certain ISA models that does not have ADF files for them - like the Ps/2 Model 30 286 I've had 2 of - which I stuck a Diamond TeleCommander 2300 modem/soundcard into, and my god that thing ran great surfing the web via NetTamer and playing DOS games with sound using that setup. Just an annoying error message. The Ps/2 models of course have the achilles heel of being proprietary and hard to get parts for, especially upgrades like soundcards and network cards, and the parts are often expensive. My ThinkPad 755CD was easily on par with my current NEC Versa P/75, and just like the NEC, the 755CD cracked to pieces but kept working the whole time, and I was not hep to all the various chemical tricks we have learned now. Also, today, IBM is BLOODY EXPENSIVE - back when I got those systems, I was paying $5-30 for them. Now tack an extra zero or two onto those prices.
I'm also a HUGE Compaq fan, especially the early Deskpro. But those too are expensive, going for about $200-300 now. But they were probably the most elegant OEM PC design I've ever seen before or since. Modular power cables for all the drives, a set layout for the drives in front, a power supply with a single ribbon, all eight expansion slots, memory cards that were fully 32-bit in the 386 models. I mean, I could run Windows 95 on my 2571 Deskpro 386 - a computer from 1986 that could run an operating system 9 years newer....that's insane good engineering. I also never crashed or hung a Compaq. Heck, the keyboard port was in the front - and being as I was swapping/testing keyboards a lot at the time, those Deskpros were quite handy. Heck, I may still have my Deskpro 286 at my childhood home....not 100% sure though. The Presario CDS models are my second favorite AIO System (next to the IBM EduQuest). And I'd love to own a Compaq laptop, and have toyed with getting one but they are so expensive.
NEC is my newest favorite because they are Compaq/IBM quality currently, at 2001-era prices. The 1st generation Versa (Ultralite/E/V/M/P models) are ALMOST as good as an IBM ThinkPad. Their only achilles heel is the plastic and I've figured that out now because I found out the Backing Soda Superglue trick works on NEC's plastic like practical plastic welding. They run as fast as my best IBM systems - like my PC-330 or PS/Valuepoint machines did. I can still get parts for them as easily as you could a ThinkPad or LTE or Toshiba Sattelite/Tecra from the early 90's, and I have yet to hang any of the four I own (40EC, V/50, M/75, P/75) with software at all. They travel well, you can still get batteries, their power consumption is on par with some cheap modern laptops, and the later models have sound. Also, because of the industrial nature of the screens, getting pinouts and figuring out solutions like upgrading or downgrading your panel is an easy proposition, not to forget to mention that ALL color models were Active Matrix except the V-series. I also have a Ready 9522 Desktop, which despite being made by "Packard Bell" - it seems they used far more upscale components. Unlike the Packard Bells I've had, which are finicky about RAM, Hard Disks, and had a CMOS battery that already melted and ate up the Motherboard traces by 1999, the NEC has a Dallas Clock chip, I stuck in Parity RAM (it only takes NP RAM) and it uses the Parity Chips as a part of the regular memory - so I have 136MB in that computer which is insane for a Pentium 100. About the only bad I can say about it is the Alliance Video chipset is anemic (my 486 DX4-100 desktop with an S3 805 2MB VLB or my Versa P or M/75 eat it for lunch in DOOM Frame rates).
For 286 and older, if I go OEM, another favorite of mine is Tandy. My first PC was a Tandy 1000 SX in 1997 (yes ninetey-seven, not eighty-seven) - and since then I've owned quite a few Tandy machines and all of them have been so solid even the worst issue like a failed chip, would not kill the system completely enough. Right now I have a Tandy 1000A setup that's just killer - Deluxe Mouse, NEC MultiSync monitor, XT-IDE with a 3GB HDD, and it's a sleeper too (dual Floppies). I'm building game pads and a light pen for it eventually. It's also my favorite box for BBS surfing.
The two worst vintage OEM's I've dealt with were a Transitional period Dell 325SX (I got a PC's Limited Branded monochrome VGA monitor with it) and a row of Packard Bell models very popular in East Alabama in the early 90's. And even then, those were not that bad. The #1 problem was that they did not think about where to put the CMOS battery in those machines and so most of them had some ruined traces on the motherboard I either had to bodge back together, or work around with add-in cards. I had one PAckard Bell that lost it's HDD controller due to this, another one that would not POST so I had to hack-in a Zenith motherboard that had the same issue but instead now, the VGA chipset had memory problems. There were a few "Franken-Bells" running around at the time too, like an AST Pentium 60 living in the Dell's LPX case, the Packard Bell Legend 843+ tower with the Zenith motherboard in it that had Ethernet and a replacement ISA SVGA card, or the PBM - A Packard Bell with an IBM PS/Valuepoint board in it. All these had some interesting "redneck mods" to the cases to get the riser cards to fit and work.
If it had been feasible, he probably would have locked down software development too, despite IBM PCs and clones taking off in part because anyone could write whatever they wanted unrestricted and run on an increasingly wide variety of hardware.
