Comments on: Problems with the Mac promised land

Apple pitches the Mac as the anti-Windows PC that "just works." What happens when it doesn't?

[rapier1]

Oh dear lord

Someone says Macs are prone to problems (verifiable problems).
The Mac fanboys come out of the wood work to say that the
person is exaggerating, insane, a liar, a shill, or just trolling
because Macs are perfect. Windows fanboys come out to say that
this is proof that Windows is better. OS/2 is then mentioned by a
bot. All sides ignore that all the author was saying is that *all*
computers can experience problems and if the problems aren't
handled correctly it can turn people off the brand.

I really don't get the level of vehemence, vitriol, and partisanship
this sort of thing creates. Its like these people are willing to live
and die for a hunk of plastic and silicon.

[Matthew Hurst]

OMG! Mac OSX Not Perfect?

Yes, and Toyotas need to be repaired sometimes.

Apparently the Tooth Fairy isn't real.

Sometimes companies have commercials that make their
products seem perfect when then just might be slightly less so.

Used Mac OSX since it came out and I can count on one hand
the number of times I had to restart after a crash. Never, ever
had a virus. In the office I work in its half and half - every
Windows computer has had a crippling virus and the Macs have
never had one. Doesn't mean they can't or won't, but it does
show they are less likely to get one.

In the Pre X days, the saying was 'sure a Mac would crash, but
then you just restart it with Windows you are more likely to have
to do a reinstall'. In 20 years I have never reinstalled a Mac OS
on a company due to failure or corruption.

[3rdalbum]

Never had to reinstall Mac OS?

If you never reinstalled the Mac OS on a company computer due to corruption, then they never used the Mac.

I had reasonably crash-free periods on 7.1, and then a couple of long stretches between crashes on Mac OS 8 - 9.

But even so, a year would pass and you'd start up and get the disk with the question mark, or the folder with the question mark, both of which indicate that it can't find a valid system disk. Sometimes when you booted up from a CD the hard disk would still mount, sometimes it wouldn't.

Okay, you could run Nortons or Diskwarrior to fix the problem, but those utilities would destroy a quarter of your MP3s, and your disk would crash again in a few months time. The only solution was to erase and reinstall.

Back in those days I was a bit of a Mac tech, and I supervised a huge number of Mac OS reinstalls in one particular company. There wasn't anything wrong with the Mac OS in terms of reliability (when the alternative was the low performance of an advanced kernel), it's just that eventually, crashing programs would corrupt part of the filesystem and BANG!

I saw a Mac OS system in a lab which had been completely borked, and I'm sure it would have required a reinstall. I remember not being impressed with Mac OS X; every computer in the lab froze when the OS X Server did!

Rather than switch to Mac OS X (which meant a freaking expensive hardware upgrade), I switched to Linux; and somehow those Linux systems have never required me to reinstall them. Your mileage may vary.

[marcusmaedl]

Soooo much less pain....

I agree to many statements in the article. Of course it is "just a computer" at the end of the day.
Let me tell you, I have converted all my family and close friends to Mac users, simply because I became the "Family IT expert" - after having suffered through every evolution of Windows - starting at 2.1 on DOS. My credo is "If you buy a Mac I will offer my free support. If you buy anything else, you are on your own". That works very nice for all of us. Minimal support needs and quick fixes are the norm.

I guarantee you - it is MUCH less pain (not entirely pain free but much, much less). For example, my technologically severely challenged mother is still using her Mac that I bought her 3 years ago with me living 1200 miles away. I am very surprised and never touch the system when I visit her. Try that with Windows...

I also would take any bet that companies could save 50% to 80% in cost of end-user IT support if they would all switch to Macs in the work place.

I will continue my quest to get more Macs out there for two reasons:

1. it is the better solution
2. we all need a more healthy and balanced competition in the PC industry.

Get a Mac!

Marcus

[Tom Krazit]

Please Read This

I want to make one thing extremely clear to the readers of News.com.

No one from the business side of CNET Networks has ever come to me and told what I had to write, or how to write it, or to change something I had already written. Likewise, no editor has ever suggested that I write something because we need to suck up to one advertiser or another. The day that happens, I will quit on the spot.

I'm not going to address exactly what happened with Gamespot, and Jeff Gerstmann, because even after hours of meetings on the subject, I still really don't know. To suggest that my work is tainted simply because the CNET logo appears over my head, however, is ludicrous.

It is impossible to write about Apple and not provoke a tide of emotions. I understand that, although I still haven't quite gotten used to it. I have no problem if anyone disagrees with anything I say on this blog, or the conclusions that I make. Reasonable people can do that without resorting to conspiracy theories.

But it is absurd to accuse us of writing anti-Apple stories because we're on the take from Microsoft, or we need to generate a zillion page views a day.

Understand this: we're not going to write stories about Apple that always paint the company in a positive light (or a negative light, for that matter). We're not going to write stories about ANYTHING that always paints that subject in a positive light. That's just simply not what we do.

[Penguinisto]

Tom? You know you'll get no sympathy...

I am firmly of the belief that the Gamespot fiasco was indeed a black eye for tech and gaming jornalism.

That said, you and I both know that opinion (which is what this is) is not a review, and not a new item. I have a healthy cynicism of news items and reviews, simply because they have greater influence. Opinions? Well, you know the saying about opinions and certain bodily orifices... we all have one, and they all stink. ;)

About your article?
--------
In my personal and professional opinion, I respectfully disagree with your characterization of typical Mac and Linux users, simply because a "typical" user of any operating system --even Windows-- will still operate blissfully unaware of that's really out there. I stopped counting the number of Windows users who think their 6-month years-since-expired McAfee/Aymantec/etc trial A/V package will still protect them just fine.

Furthermore, a typical Linux user is well aware of security from the get-go, since the majority of them (for now) have more-than-average technical skill with computers in general...

Mac users? Well, I think you're doing two things here - overstating the threat, while at the same time trying to state that there will very likely be threats soon to OSX. I also disagree with your characterization that Mac users are somehow blissfully unaware of just how nasty the Internet can get. After all, Mac users are generally one of two types - the furry-toothed pre-OSX type who already knows all about the troubles that could be inflicted on the old MacOS, and thus knows a little about security already - and the new convert, who is more than likely going to carry at least some of what he or she already does to somewhat defend themselves back when they used Windows.

I agree with you that basic precautions are certainly required for any computer. OTOH, I don't believe (as many A/V companies do) that all Mac users should rush out and buy A/V subs just yet - it eats cycles, introduces instability, and otherwise makes no sense.

On the developer side of things, OSX and Linux have the benefit of being based on kernels (Darwin and Linux respectively) whose source codes are visible to the planet. If it ain't coded for security and checked for security (trust me, in both cases it certainly is)? Well, you get the idea.

The reason Windows got (figuratively, and one could almost say literally) raped over the years for security has more to do with the ease of compromise, than any demographics information.

Sure, if the numbers were flipped and OSX had an 85% desktop market share, folks would certainly try to pop it... but the skillset required is far higher, both in breaking in and in doing anything useful with the machine once you got your foot in the door.

Personally, I don't think you're looking at a naive populace in 'Mac land' (and certainly not in and mong Linux users). By and large, users are going to be users, no matter where you look.

/P

[LuvThatCO2]

Thats what you get for blaspheming

You blasphemed against Apple, and now all the mac-cultists are going to accuse you of this and that.

Its an interesting phenomenon, actually. You see it among all types of 'cultists'.

Basically, you arrived at a rational conclusion (whether its 'right' or not) that deviates from their dogma. To the mac-cultists your conclusion is impossible to derive because their mac is divine. Therefore, the only logical explanation for what you wrote is that MS paid you off. ie, you cant have actually concluded these things because Macs are objectively perfect... thus there must be some other explanation.

You see the same mind set among many cultists and conspiracy theorists.

[frank bruce]

Mac User since the FatMac 512k

And I can say that System 7 was better than System 4 or 5, or when MultiFinder was introduced not as an option to do some task switching, still was an OS with some bugs.

What was written in this comment was just an opinion, my opinion is that OS 10.5.1 is not perfect, but it does what I need it to do, and I can tell you that Your comment seems to be just that a comment, I did not see it tinted towards Micro-soft.
Tom I might disagree in some of your other comments (and I do) but this one has some interesting hints to be taken: Apple took less time than Microsoft (Apple being a smaller company than Microsoft) to address some issues with OSX, it created others, well, I wonder if I had them in the first place if I had run a clean install over an upgrade, maybe yes, maybe not.
Apple is working as other companies are towards achieving a better market share for their stock holders, sometimes it does it right, some times it does it not so brilliantly, check Europe.
That will not change my opinion regards Apple as a quality software / hardware integrator company.
-Frank

[J.G.]

If C/NET was really journalism

...your self-righteous posturing might be worthy of a longer reply. But, C/NET is not journalism. It is what those of us who have worked for traditional media call an ad rag. The only reason for its existence is to sell ads, and, in the Internet age, page views. Intelligent readers do not expect much from sites such as this because we understand the content is filler, often paid for on a per word basis. The caliber of writers and editors willing to participate is such that poor writing and analysis are pretty much guaranteed.

I believe there is an advertiser influenced bias at C/NET. I only had suspicions until I learned that James Kim was writing a book about the Zune at the time of his demise. That was revealed inadvertently, though journalists have a duty to disclose such relationships. Not surprisingly, Kim gave the Zune the best review of any tech site. (Please do not compare him to David Pogue, who does make timely disclosures and criticize subjects of his books.)

I consider myself an observer of human nature, so I will continue to read C/NET from time to time. But, I do not have any illusions about what I am reading.

[M C]

Knowing all that, surely you shouldn't toss off a half-baked opinion piece

Right? I mean, doesn't that just make journalistic sense?

It seems like you occasionally just toss your hands in the air and say "well, they're gonna mob me anyway, so why not have fun with it?"

You also have to battle the memory of Joris Evers and whomever in Editorial decides that, for example, an article on an Apple update must be called "18 fixes issued by Apple." So to combat this, you need your stuff to be even tighter. Except it really isn't.

While I don't think it's an anti-Apple bias, I DO think it's page-view driven and bad journalism.

[xdwoo]

MACs ARE JUST PCs

I have never been an Apple user and will never be one in my life. They are just PCs that target people who like trendy things but care little about the tech aspect of the product(s).

[m.meister]

comments like this are to be expected

Funny how it is always folks that have never used a Mac that are so
adamant that a Mac is just like a PC. That Mac OS X is no different
than Windows.

[RacerX7]

I was one of those that bought a mac...

No iPod or anything. I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about and up my knowledge level a little. Being all but ignorant of macs didn't seem to be such a good thing anymore.

Mac has it's own bugs and I feel like I just Beta tested Leopard for them.

However, it appears that Apple is much quicker to fix issues than Microsoft and the Apple community is very ready to help.

As an additional plus, I discovered something I had long forgotten in my 15 years as a network administrator...computers can be fun. Even though there have been bugs and issues, I've enjoyed learning about my Mac and what it can do.

I'm not even close to giving up my Windows based machines yet, and I don't buy fully into the whole "it just works" song-and dance Apple is hawking.

But I will say that I enjoy my mac and would recommend it to others. And I would definitely buy another one.

[frankwick]

agree / disagree

Agree: I realized that when I got my Media Center PC two years that PCs could still be fun. I was a corporate IT burn out who started to despise computers. Havinf a built in DVR with a 10-foot PC GUI was cool! It changed the way I use my PC and watch TV.

I disagree that Apple fixes problems faster. Apple release "new" OS like MS releases service packs. Both contain bug fixes. I like the monthly cycle MS has established with patch Tuesdays. With the avalanche of problems this year with OSX, Apple should consider a similar approach.

I agree that the apple community is willing to help. The Apple community always has the "let's prove everyone else wrong" mentality and want to help you with your issue so you don't have to admit there is an issue.

i helped my father with his Mac. He liked the commercials. after several weeks, he was ready to give Vista a shot. The Mac did not live up to the hype.

[awchandler]

Gotta love slow days at Cnet

Thanks for whipping out that mental junk food. I needed something to waste time while I ate my lunch.

Apple may have some problems, not that you mentioned any, but has no where near the issues Windows PC's have.

I switched to Mac because I was tired of all the problems (Vista was the last straw) and now I enjoy software that works great with hardware, long battery life and an OS with very, very few interruptions to what's most important... work.

[Boris714]

User error

If anything, new users expect everything to be like their old PC
machines, and when they don't know how to use a shortcut
function or simply don't (want to) understand the file structure,
they blame Apple or the machine. I don't know how many times I've
pointed out a really simple shortcut to get the "oh wow.. I never
knew" response. It's unfortunate that some "high profile" bloggers
and tech reviewers may slam Apple that other more experienced
users would have just said, Shift Apple 3.

[markorth]

Truth be told, a Mac is a PC!

I switched to my first iMac in February after a horrendous Vista upgrade experience blew away my rather large iTunes library on a realtively new HP Pavilion. Overall, I have been extremely satisfied with the switchover, but it has not been without its headaches and little oddities. For instance, one of the Tiger updates hosed my USB ports. It took me hours to rebuild. Now I keep getting reminders to update to OSX 10.4.x and I refuse to do it, preferring to keep my digital media engine stable for now. Of course, I still have lots of Windows PCs in my life, both at home and work, so I am walking in both worlds and I find that in the end, a PC is a PC, period. It will never work like a CE device.

[oncfari]

Macs just work?

First let me say that I'm NOT what I refer to as a militant Mac user. I'm an engineer who started out using PCs with no intent or desire to change until the first time I saw a Mac in action and was hooked. Are Macs perfect and never fail? Of course not!! In fact, the pre-OSX OS's froze and crashed all the time; not as often as Windows, but a lot. OSX, on the other hand, is rock solid: 1 freeze and 2 crashes in nearly 4 years of use. So, let me say this: The more I read of your commentary, the more inclined I am to believe that you are indeed a Microsoft shill. Sorry, but I'm also a writer, and despite your claims of being unbiased, your thinly veiled prejudice still comes through to me, loud and clear. And, on the outside chance that you really believe that OSX Macs are just as problem-prone as Windows PCs; well, that's your problem, not mine or that of the growing numbers of Mac users who prefer computers that do just work - most of the time.

[rapier1]

Addendum to Godwin's Law

"The first person to accuse someone of being a shill loses"
reductio ad shillum

[close5828]

Hubris

Hubris always gets in the way...

Hopefully someday the Apple Evangelicals will figure out what the rest of the world already knows....Apple is neither perfect, or their only option.

[GreySkies01]

Tech Companies and their fans

After reading the comments here and a couple of other stories, I went and found this article that I read a while back.

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13506_1-9796264-17.html?tag=bl

Why? Because of this comment.

"And yet, no matter what you say, every group will believe you're a member of the competing zealot faction. After a while, it actually becomes quite comical."

[-hh]

@OlsonBW: IT support

OlsonBW writes:
>
> The people that we support that use Macs
> clearly, on average, have a lot more
> technical programs on their computers
> their our average Windows computers yet
> we have less calls from them than average
> Windows users.

In other words, they're "doing more", but you get fewer support requests from them.

> And FAR less numbers of calls from people
> that have a very close equivalent
> software ...

And a huge difference if they're not "doing more".


> Could it be because Photoshop just works
> better on a Mac? Could it be ...

Back when I did local IT, we had a similar experience: Windows required ~3x more care and feeding than the Macs.

I do think that part of it is attributable to the system, but there was also another factor in play: the user's faith in his machine.

I found that Mac users tended to self-help themselves more, because they believed in their machine. The good news is that they needed less IT support...but the bad news is that if they did ask for help, it was usually something major.

Similarly, the Windows users *hated* their machines, and when a problem was encountered, would give up much more quickly and call for IT service.


> Macs are not perfect. Nothing is perfect.

Agreed. The reality here isn't that they're perfect, but rather that they're clearly "less bad" than Windows.

The real danger that Windows has is that people have grown to accept its low quality and reliability, but may not forever remain so complacient. If we hearken back to the mid/late 1970s, we can see Microsoft's situation as similar to GM, before America started to realize that hmmm... maybe those Japanese cars weren't so bad afterall.


-hh

[-hh]

Reminds me of...

...a conversation I had this summer with my Nephew.

He's just started working for Comcast, doing new network installations & service. I had my Mac Powerbook with me and was doing some iPhoto work, when he mentioned how he hated it when he got 'stuck' with a customer who had a Mac.

I asked him, "Why is that?"

His reply was that Macs were a royal pain to set up the network configurations, as the only way to do it was from the command line in the Terminal.

(Only from the command line??? What the...!)

I asked: "What couldn't you do from the 'Network Settings' Control Panel?"

He replied: "Macs don't have a Network Settings Control Panel".

(Egads)

"Here's the Network Settings Control Panel".
"You can select DHCP Networking Here"
"DNS settings, Here"
"Want Static IP? Here".
"Need a special Subnet Mask? Here".
"Need [etc]? Here."

Boom
Boom
Boom.

"Are there any other Network Settings that you need?"

Silence.

I think he was stunned. We talked some more and two things became evident:

#1: Comcast provided him **ZERO** training for supporting cutomers who owned Macs.

#2: Similarly, they provided **ZERO** tools (such as Remote Desktop) for providing service to Mac customers.

Now I can understand how some Corporation may make a business decision to not support some obscure and gross minority OS, but there's two fallacies with this.

First, by doing absolutely nothing, their techs are wasting a lot of time on that "5%" customer.

Second, their bean-counters need to wake up to understand the customer demographics better: my wife works for a Fortune 50 company and they're *increasing* their support for Mac OS because their consumer research has found that Mac OS users are a more desirable demographic group because they're more profitable.

Granted, this doesn't have a particularly direct bearing on having the OS's in an Enterprise setting, but a basic lesson still holds: just because you're set in the way your IT group does things today doesn't mean that it is automatically still the best, smartest or cheapest way of doing business.


-hh

[Renegade Knight]

You Hinted At Something

PC's or something that acts as one will become the digital media hubs and that's going to mean that both Mac and PC are going to have to work on the "just works" angle.

We need Windows JW (Just Works) much more than we need Vista. Same thing on the Mac. I do plan on using my computer as a digital media hub. I'm tired of various and assundry electronic claptrap cluttering up my house. My PC can do the job, but the OS needs some help to do it right.

[jimafrost]

I guess I'm missing the point here

So is the point of your article that yes, Mac customers do actually have problems once in awhile? While that's the case, I can tell you from repeated first-hand experience that the magnitude of the issue is greatly reduced versus Windows PCs for the average user. It's not even close.

I forcibly switched my wife to a Mac in 2001 after yet-another-reinstall; I was just sick of spending 14 hours every 3 months reinstalling everything because something went strangely, inexplicably, irrecoverably wrong. (Usually with the Registry, which of course is the thing that makes Windows computers a cast-iron ***** to back up.)[1]

There were glitches, but they were along the lines of forgetting the printer configuration. The experience was so good that I bought one for myself, replacing a Dell. The biggest problem was that we had to abandon virtually all of her application suite, finding (and repurchasing) suitable substitutes.

I was shocked a year later to realize that I no longer used the Windows PC, even though it was vastly more capable than the little 12" G4 Powerbook.

It's now been six full years running OS X as the primary OS and the number of glitches my wife, myself, my niece, my nephew and my in-laws (all running Macs I purchased) have encountered can be counted on the fingers of one hand -- and so far there have been zero cases where the glitch was not recoverable without rebuilding the thing from scratch.

I've seen I think three cases where the system cache got corrupted, yielding pretty weird behavior (things like disk images failing to mount). So when I see weird things it is now my first practice to blow away that cache and reboot. It's quick and easy to do, and something I can guide a novice user through over the phone. (In recent releases Apple has become much more pro-active in doing this themselves.)

The worst problem yet was with the Leopard upgrade; we ran into the admin-account-created-before-OS X-10.2-that-has-8-character-password issue. This of course wouldn't affect any new user, but it's the first problem I have run into that took some real effort to solve, something I couldn't have possibly fixed over the phone. Still, that's way less time than I spent just trying to figure out where Vista put my father-in-law's scanned pictures[2].

If you want to complain about Macs, you could complain about the hardware. In recent years the failure rate has gone way up; every one of my Macs purchased in the last two years went back to Apple for some defect or other (including: hinge switch malfunction, keyboard failure, optical drive failure, wireless card failure). Their warrantee support has been terrific, but it would have been better if those things hadn't failed.

Even so the experience with Apple has been way, way better than it was with Dell. Apple actually honored their warrantee.

In the final analysis I find that if it is possible to use a Mac for the job (it isn't, which is why I still run Windows PCs for some things), it will be far less effort to keep the Mac running than a Windows PC. That is a fact learned through extensive use of both, it isn't a marketing message. I had high hopes that XP would improve things for Windows, but that was even worse than Win95. The jury is still out of Vista, although the clumsy behavior of UAC leads so many people to simply disable it that I am not convinced we will see anywhere near the real-world value that I hoped. (Plug: Use UAC! Really! It is your last line of defense against malware and it works!)

jim

[1] These days I snapshot the whole installation when I finish. Unfortunately that is not possible using provided tools; I had to pay $100 for that feature. Apple has provided a simple command-line utility sufficient for doing backups, ditto, but my Mac back-up strategy was always "drag-and-drop the user folder." Time Machine, however, is phenomenal -- its underpinnings are the first real advancement in OS design I have seen in at least fifteen years. It is worth jumping on Leopard just for Time Machine.

[2] We ran afoul of a feature. When applications attempt to write files into program install areas, Vista redirects the files into a (hidden) area in the user's directory. The application doesn't even know this is happening. This is intended to improve stability by making actual program installs read-only, a laudable effort.

The downside to this virtualization is that the virtual view is limited to the single application writing the files. In my father-in-law's case he had been saving his scanned files inside of the application's directory (a stupid default, but it's an old application). He'd save them, he could go back in that application and find them and load them, but whenever he tried to find them in some other application they were simply not there.

We tried using Windows Search to find them, to no avail.

It took me awhile to remember about the virtualization feature, and longer still to locate where the files got virtualized to. Once found it was easy to recover them and retrain them. But we're still talking about an hour on the phone and another hour sitting in front of the PC trying to figure out what is going on. It was no wonder he was confused.

[cheshirkat]

Macs just work...

...and Windoze peecees just don't. Corporate America, in denial and
ignorance, has been pretending that WinPCs "sort of work" for
years. It has been very expensive (through system failures and
increased maintenance costs) for "the rest of us".

-CheshirKat

[Proustian]

WinPCs work just fine

90% of the problems that WinPCs seem to have are user errors. Clicking on the wrong link, installing too many programs, deleting system files, installing virus/trojan infected programs off of file sharing networks, surfing too many porn sites and getting trojans.

WinPC users who avoid those activities end up with a stable system that works just fine.

Corporate America pays an IT staff to keep their WinPCs running and give their users the "limited" account that cannot install or remove anything. Apple looks like "Bozo's Big Top" to Corporate America, and Macs look like overpriced toys to them as well. Why should they pay $1900+ for a Mac Pro when a $700 WinPC with the same hardware features as a Mac Pro works good enough at a fraction of the price?

[internetworld7]

Pure Propaganda

No Macs anywhere in the world have problems.

[Sarath.C]

It's true what you said

I was a hard fan of Mac and Steve jobs previously. Also enjoyed
their commericials. There's no point in "Give up" on Windows
Vista. Microsoft doing their bussiness in the right way. I dont
know who said it _There will be bugs and issues if you have
newly developed a software" it's a common fact. Windows has
clear and right product line.
Mac Introduced their new office suite. what they're trying boast?
These things have been already there at Windows Side. They can
say "Yes we too have this product" nothing else.
They're just forgetting the fact the Mac is still a PC. Just a PC.
There's big Windows Developer community out there. Most of
the developers either based on Windows or Linux. Mac is not at
coming in the scene. What the heck the 300 features
introduced? What's the meaning in that? Then I can also list
down as many features of Windows. I can say like WIndow Tab
Will switch between tabs. Live Messenger enables video
conference, text chat... things will goes like this if we starts
about the features.
Apple we loves you.. but don't think that you are above someone
else. Do your best bussiness. Prove the security, reliability,
stability, usable features of your product. Then ask "Give up on
Vista"

[SuttoXXX]

angry bunch?

Apple fan boys are hilarious. Reading through a few of the comments, it makes it sound like they didn't read the article, or maybe didn't understand the point. The best ones always start with either "I've been a MAC user for X years" or "I'm not a Mac fan boy, but..." Really funny. They just read the title of the article and immediately assume there might be some negative comments around any Apple product and then pounce.

It sure seems like there is a disproportionate amount of Mac Fan boy comments no matter if the article is about Microsoft or Apple. Even weirder when you consider that Apple?s market share is generously 6 or 7%. Bashers of Vista when it?s MS related and praisers of whatever Mac product the article is about. What are you guys doing all day? Sifting through CNet and all other tech news sites to find the next Mac article to comment about? Well I know what you're NOT doing. This would be playing just about any of the most currently badass computer games. Now it makes more sense.

A computer for me is 90% gaming. Anybody with any type of machine can surf the net and respond to email. If you have issues doing this, it?s not the machine or the OS buddy, it?s the space between and the chair and the keyboard. Its games that really set the Mac and PC apart from each other.

And for the record, sure, if the better games and upgrade paths were present on the Mac, I'd be running one. But for now, the only Apple products I?ll be using is my large array of Apple iPods. If there is one thing Apple does incredibly well, its MP3 players. And I'm starting to come around on the iPhone and I will buy one when the big 5 flaws are resolved in the next version. That would be a no brainer.

[kool_skatkat]

Point of view.

Even weirder when you consider that Apple?s market share is generously 6 or 7%.

From a hardware point of view, that's a lot. Especially if the machine are not targeted at the low end, which tend to be where the majority of market share is.

What are you guys doing all day? Sifting through CNet and all other tech news sites to find the next Mac article to comment about?

Of course not. Not just Mac articles. PC marketing guys must wish they could create such love for their products. Apple did it!