You know, honestly, I was thinking about this whole thing while in the shower, trying to cleanse myself of my sarcastic, evil ways, and I realized something:
I really think that my problem with Apple comes from their price.
I don't think I would have a big problem with them if they didn't cost so much. Maybe people like Andrew could agree with me on this point if he hadn't worked for an Apple retailer and got his machines at a discount.
I'll face it, their UI in OSX is nice. It looks good, it's responsive, and it's fairly intuitive. Their programs work well, work together, and have nice features. Their hardware looks nice (though sometimes a bit pretentious), appears to be built fairly solid, and works well.
In fact, if the price was right, I would probably want to own one of their computers. And I'm certain that if OSX were available for the x86, I would at least give it a shot without thinking about it. I'd probably even enjoy it and praise it.
But I just hate the attitude, the lifestyle, the pretentious and condecending manner in which Apple products and their followers exude. Call it yuppie, call it trendy, call it hip, right-now, or "the fastest, most powerful, personal comput..."-ing experience "...ever". I think it's bullshit.
I guess if I were rich enough to not care, and the price weren't a factor, I wouldn't feel so strongly about it. I would possibly spend my money on quite a few
extravagant things. Nice champagne, fancy sunglasses, a plasma TV, and a sports car. So, I can see that if price is not a factor, why one would have no problem with Apple and their products, and one might even tout their superiority. Just like Trumpy brags about his private jet.
But if that's not the case, and you live a much more "modest" lifestyle, then price is
always a factor. That's what I like about Linux:
Linux is the moral highground.
Although that's probably not the reason I use linux. Linux, with it's many free distributions, and it's ability to run on a pleathora of hardware platforms has the ability to be used as a solution for almost every computer problem.
Chicago has a group of people (
http://www.npotechs.org/ ) who collect used computer hardware, get toghether once a month, install linux on those computers and then distributes them to non-profit companies in need of computers. How much does this cost? Practically nothing. But think of the rewards. They are potentially priceless.
Here's a few more examples of Linux being used in schools throughout the world:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5618
Because of Linux's liberal liscencing policy, the return on investment (ROI), compared to any of the other non-GPL'ed OS's, in a situation like the one above and many others, is enormous.
I know that Bill G. and Apple donate computers to schools as well, but I'm talking about folks like you and me who are able, through the use of Linux, to help their communities even though these people might not be independently wealthy.
In order to keep this from sounding just like I'm talking about charity cases, let me give you another example. At the studio, I was able to set up and run our own firewall, router, webserver, email server, file server, DNS server, print server, and so far, 2 work stations, all for little or no cost by recycling older computers and installing Linux. Tell me how much all of that would have cost if we would have had to pay for copies of Win2k Advance Server or buy new Apple XServers. Sure, maybe I could have gotten it up and running faster, or some of the setup would have been easier, and maybe things would run a bit smoother than they do, or whatever. But,
it would have cost a lot more. Not to suck my own dick, but
I WAS ABLE TO SAVE OUR COMPANY THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS by being able to do this.
And please don't think that I have some sort of computer science degree or something that makes it so I can run linux, but you probably won't be able to. I taught myself
everything I know about linux. How can you argue about the benefits of a machine and a platform that costs at least a thousand dollars to get started with against something that was free to obtain and allowed me to teach myself the skills I needed in order to save my company a good percentage of my yearly salary?
Apple might have the upper hand in user-friendliness right now, but it won't be long before the differences in user-friendliness between all of the platforms will be slim or none and what it is going to come down to will be cost and return on your investment. And it's easy to see that Apple is already a loser in both categories.
Thanks for reading this far,
russ