If your friend is literate enough to part it out he was literate enough to fix the hard drive himself. Macs are creeping up into pc's territory.. even in gaming they are becoming a stronger force, especially since the transition to x86 processing and being unix based. Macs are taking off software wise, and once more developers realize you dont have to buy thousands of dollars of development packages and software to program them and also become more widespread mac is going to become more dominant. the only thing hurting mac right now imo is their expensive somewhat proprietary hardware, but once again since their switch to intel processors that argument is going out the window