I Like My Mac, But ...

I'm really enjoying my PowerBook. It isn't perfect, but if I had it to buy again I wouldn't hesitate. But you know . . . it's just a computer. Visually more elegant than a Wintel or Unix system, and far more secure than any Microsoft OS, but just a computer.

I simply can't relate to some of the "fans" that comprise a segment of Apple users. At Overclockers.com they joked about gutting a G5 Mac and replacing the insides with a PC and they got death threats! A new store just opened in San Francisco and you have a magnified version of the A&B Sound boxing day sale. Too bad someone from Overclockers didn't show up at the store opening offering conversion kits to the people in line. It's San Francisco, they could have called it performance art. Mac users are all about the art, right?

At work, where I support a web based course delivery product, a Mac user flamed us because of a bug (er, issue) that affected a small segment of our Mac users on specific versions of Safari, an unsupported browser. It wasn't like he couldn't use a supported browser. Never-the-less, we were "derelict" and he would push his Institution to move towards "one of the many alternatives." Ah, retrain an entire Institution's teaching and technical staff and endure the pain and cost of product turnover because less than 1% of their user base is having problems and are too inflexible to switch to a supported browser. To borrow a phrase from A Cute Toaster, "Jeebus". Turns out we'd issued a patch that fixed the problem 2 days previous.

I like my Mac, and hope Apple has a long future of providing their computing vision - perhaps even at a reasonable price - but it's just a computer.

Books:
Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett