TECH: Unicode and Macs

yet another question from me :P

my computer isn't very good, and i'm thinking of getting a laptop to
replace it with.  having suffered for 8 years with junky
constantly-freezing DOS/Windows-running computers, i'm thinking of now
getting a Mac.  Do any of you have a mac (with the latest version of the
operating system)?  What's your experience of its handling of unicode and
other conlang-necessary things?

I tried out a mac running OS X10.2 today at my father's workplace, and it
seemed okay.  One problem though was that the Hebrew keyboard layout
didn't match up to what i'm used to - all the major letters were in the
proper Standard Israeli layout, but the diacritics were all in different
places.  Also, i'm used to the "US-International" keyboard layout on my
computer now, and the 'Special Characters' or whatever they called it
layout seemed a bit confusing.  I'm sure i'd eventually get used to it,
though.  I also couldn't find any guide to the keyboard layouts, like a
pop-up onscreen keyboard image or anything like that.

But anyway, anyone here with a recent-OS mac?  Do you get unicode emails
through the Conlang/culture lists properly?  I remember hearing that
there have been problems with some non-[Modern]English characters,
especially thorn and edh, with Macs.  Are those still a problem?  Every
so often people send random unicode characters through here, such as
Chinese place-names, text in Russian, Hebrew or Arabic, or the Devanagari
|th| on Conlang from a few days ago.  Have you been able to read them all
properly?

zhoutzíí wa'esh,  (thanks) [which should have two i-acutes in it]

-Stephen (Steg)
 "if that's all you will be / you'll be a waste of time"
     ~ from some pop-punk song my brother likes

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