“You strike me as the digital version of one of those motorheads who spends more time under his car than behind the wheel, and sneers at anyone who doesn’t change his own oil. Some folks have better things to do.”
I do enjoy being under my car as well, and you are pretty close on your assessment. I would only add, that I sneer at those who claim to be above proficient, or who know better, while demonstrating that they know nothing beyond what they have read in a magazine.
This goes for any manner of subjects. I don’t spout off or claim to be proficient or well versed in biology, or poetry, because these are not my realms. In that regard, I am always amazed on the Apple threads to hear all about how Apple is so much better, usually by self-proclaimed computer experts, but they offer no technical comparisons, one way or the other.
My take on Apple is that it is a fine system, if that is what you need. But, it is like a train, compared to a car. Yes, the train can travel faster, yes, the train is more streamlined, yes the train doesn’t require any maintenance on your part, but the train only goes to certain stops. My car can go anywhere, and has no restrictions as to where I get my music, how I get it, what I visit, and it has many more locations I can visit in terms of games that my kids enjoy, applications that I need for work, and all around flexibility that I get from customizing my PC and upgrading and adding to it when I want and how I want.
I can’t do that to the train. But, yes, the train has its advantages.
I only mean to sneer at those who profess that the train is better in all aspects and anyone who drives a car is a moron. Those folks are brainwashed, and have a limited scope of the real world.
I’ve stated before, we have an Apple, and we have several PC’s. My wife loves her iPhone. It fits her, it suits her, it delivers on all of her needs, but this is not what the thread was about, it was about Apples proprietary control, and how the author of the article thought that was an asset to the company.
Just like the train being able to wiz through traffic with no chance of the wipers blowing out, he is correct in that sense, but just like my analogy above, the train doesn’t go everywhere I want to go, so it doesn’t suit me.
If Apple products fulfill your needs, then what more could you want? Why get angry at those who have more needs or desires then what Apple offers?
Have you ever used a Mac? The hardware is not as amenable to tweaking, at least in the iMac — the Mac Pro is a tower, and the laptops are usually easier to tinker with than Windows laptops (MacBook Air excepted).
On the software side, you’ve bought into a lot of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt arguments about how “closed” and “limited” Macs are. Mac OS is Unix. Not sorta kinda, but fully compliant, certified Unix. You want power and flexibility? Here’s a bash shell.
Windows is more popular, so there are more software titles. That’s pretty much the only advantage of Windows. On Mac, you’ll have a dozen word processing apps to choose from instead of a hundred — though on both platforms, the vast majority of users choose from two or three. PCs have more game titles, if that’s important to you.
Your train/car analogy vastly overstates the “limitations” of the Mac. Your PC “can go anywhere, and has no restrictions as to where I get my music, how I get it, what I visit”? Ditto my iMac. There are software titles I cannot run natively in Mac OS, but a minuscule number of files I cannot open and edit, servers I cannot connect to, and tasks I cannot perform.
In those rare cases, I can run Windows on the Mac at native speed. Programs like Parallels and Fusion are virtual machines, not emulators — they emulate the BIOS, not the hardware. I have Fusion, and can run multiple Windows versions, Ubunti and MacOS at the same time. The only time I use that is to test Web pages I’m building, to make sure they work with browsers (I’m looking at you, IE) that aren’t standards-compliant.
I know a lot of Windows support gurus. Unix admins and developers, techies of all stripes who choose Macs at home. They are certainly capable of building and endlessly tweaking systems, but choose not to. They have better things to do off the clock.