//RANT warning: safely skip


...oooh apple fanboys...and girls.

They were awful in the old MacOS days when that horrible piece of c***p used to crash and lock up and even do infuriating things like refuse to eject your floppy disc. I had to sysadmin a PC lab with 22 of these awul things.

I had limited access to the Iris Indigo and a Sun Solaris 4 server and I used that time as therapy before heading back out to the "perfect" Mac world.

Then at my workplace and in the marketing industry all graphic designers used/use a Mac with Corel Draw and would often feel compelled to tell me about how much a Mac never crashes and how they are a lot faster...while their screen was frozen or their nice Quadra, or whatever came later just about ready for a reboot.

MacOS X is great however....because it is built on a Unix core so it inherently does the basic things right. The pretty and largely functional Apple UI tops it off.

Sometime in between all this Apple "invented" a portable MP3/AAC player with the iPod, then the "revolutionary" iPhone was released...and now the iPad continues the revolutionary legacy...

...to finish the rant. Apple fanboys and girls (there are "normal" apple users that are capable of rational thought and are thus excluded from this definition) are not computer savvy, they are not power users, they are generally very poorly informed about most things IT and struggle with other things too. Any of their protests about this not being the case are pointless as they just create a circular argument.

Thus Apple products are perfect for the masses and Apple will continue to do well since masses are called masses as there are many of them...

One last situation where Apple seriously annoys potential customers like me is through their "closed garden" approach. Owning an Apple product is like having to sign up to a cult where you do things the Apple way or "you just do not get it"...

(Disclosure: I use MS Vista, Linux and shortly Maemo5)