MAC: good or evil?

[Matthew Baerman]

Hello all
I have possibly dumbish computer question.  Time has come for a
new family computer, and my wife is lobbying for an I-Mac, which
is being aggressively marketed in Europe at least  (e.g. there's a 500
DM Christmas discount on them).  It claims to be super internet
friendly, but I found that it fails to do many of the things one has
already taken for granted for ages with the Multilanguage support on
PC Windows systems, e.g.:

--it does not recognize the text encoding of web pages;  you have to
set it each time on a hit-or-miss basis.
--even if you do set the encoding, it doesn't always work
--you can't make the fonts bigger by just clicking an icon, you have
reset the default font-by-font, and then even that doesn't work most
of the time.  Thus much ends up illegibly small.
--some sites use screwy fonts that are geared solely towards PCs,
e.g. the MakTimes font used on a lot of Macedonian sites.

Unfortunately our local (Tallinn) Mac dealer doesn't have a clue
about any of this.  So my question is:  Are the new generation Macs
really so bad, or is there some bit of software or some such thing that
our dealer forgot to activate?

-Matthew Baerman