Apple is the worst company on the face of the planet.
I remember back in the 80's when there used to be Apple clones. What happened to them? Apple sued to have complete control over their hardware.
In the early days of the home PC ( the days of dos ) 70-80s Apple took things a step further by requiring licensinging (and I believe royalities). One couldn't really develop apps for Apple except by jumping through hoops.
Then in the 90's Apple announced they couldn't write an OS for the systems, so they licensed (Copland ?) an os from a 3rd party vendor.
Also in the 80-90's many people were introduced to "the bomb" error "-zyx" which no one ever really knew what the error meant, or how to correct the issue. Don't forget the AppleTalk stack.
On the verge of being wipped off the face of the planet, Bill Gates stepped in and allowed Office, ie, and outlook express to be ported to the Mac, and bought several million dollars worth of shares to keep the company going.
This past year, Apple returned the favor by prohibiting wm to play on their Ipod. How long did Apple resist allowing their products to be sold in places like Fry's, CompUSA, Microcenter, and many other places?
Let's not forget that Apple's offical release of OS 10 was a beta, and not compatible with many software applications.
But what about software? Well thanks again to Apple's restrictive policy you only have two choices really cheap or extremely high end. No room to grow as a user, no room for stages.
Is their product more stable, well yes, but you can't do as much, you don't have the freedom to pick what you want ~ any color as long as it's black attitude.
Apple is more of a monopoly than Msft ever will be.
This is not to say I don't think Msft should have been kept together ~ I liked the idea of the OS, Office, and Internet solution.
Here's what I get with Msft. A win95 machine that will burn DVD's, can Apple's 1995 software do this?
Msft solicits hardware and s/w vendors about compatibility and standards. They want to have as open and flexible environment as possible. They provide free api's and software. They give error messages that can be looked up.
I can choose between pegasus, sonic, expert, dazzle, adobe, mgi, roxio, and many other vendors when buying software, or I can write my own. As my abilities progress, so can the sofware I choose.
On my Xp Sp2 system I have software from 1994 to the present, which costs anywhere from free to $3000 USD.
It's like calucalators, some people use small credit card sized with only +-*/, others want square roots, some people need larger display, some need financial, statistics, graphicing, and then there are the HP 48 GX people. One buys calculators based upon needs. If Apple made calculators, there would only be small +-*/ and HP 48GX's.
Apple has a 30+ year history of being a dictatorship. It's their way or no way. Of course by doing this they have increased stability. It's really easy to keep things stable when you only support 10 manufacturers. As for security, it's a myth. Nobody cares about macs, so people don't attack them; is Swaziland (yes it is a real country) more secure than the US?
Does Apple have an easier environment? Of course they do, they can't do as much. Life is simple when you live in mud huts... don't need to worry about HVAC, plumbing, utilities and everything else.
As for the iPod, it's just a portable hard drive that can play certain types of music. I buy media players to play media, not to play certain types of media. Sony, Dell, and Creative have far better solutions, for that matter, so do some cell phones.
I could also go into job creation. If Silicon Valley depended upon Apple, the valley would never exist. Apple is slow to update and change, progress is shunned, and the freedom to innovate is abhorred.
Hi. I'm a new memeber of this forum as I made a switch back to Windows after using Mac OS X for 4 years. I read your post and agree with it completely. Usually my first posts introduce who I am, but I felt compelled to chime in so here goes.
The thing that bothers me about Apple computer is the dictatorship mentality that you mention. You have very limited choices in the hardware line, and as was mentioned you either get the very low end or very high end--and even the high end does not compete with what you can get in Windows land. The most recent update in the Powermac line left many mac pros fuming, as the performance increases were minimal at best, after almost one year since the last power mac update. Many won't forget that Steve Jobs promised a 3Ghz G5 within a year...of course that was in 2003. What are we at today? 2.7 Ghz.
Remember the megahertz myth? As an act of desperation to salvage the G4 and explain away not having a system--and when I say "any," I mean the top-end $3000 systems--clocking in gigahertz territory, Apple drummed up a phony marketing slogan and ran misleading benchmarks on how an 867Mhz G4 ran all over a P4 2.4 Ghz. We all know where this mantra ended up.
Regarding pricing, I've always used the example of buying a notebook. You go to Apple's site as of this posting, and look up the price of a 15" notebook computer and you come up with one: the 15" powerbook with a G4 processor and combo drive (no DVD burner/Superdrive). I won't go into detail about the other lackluster specs, but your total price comes out to a whopping $2000, plus tax and shipping. Why is this so for a 15" laptop? The iBook is supposedly a consumer line, but even that is a joke (I've used a 12" iBook G3 as my main system for the past 4 years). You have the option of a 12" or 14" screen, but guess what? Both only support a max resolution of 1024x768. That's ridiculous!
Apple is all about marketting. Selling the sizzle and not the steak. Slick packaging. Chic looks over performance and functionality. And the same goes for OS X. OS X is a far slower, more resource and hardware intensive than any previous Mac OS, and the reason is simple: too much eye candy. Unfortunately, Apple in their infinite wisdom doesn't allow their users to adjust the interface in favor of performance out of the box--you have to resort to third party hacks that might make your system unstable.
In windows, I can right click "My Computer," pull up properties, click the advanced tab and performance button and I can choose if I want all the eye candy and graphical junk, or if I want to drop all that use a faster no-nonsense interface.
I've spent time around Apple users, and if there's one thing in common about them, they all hate Microsoft. But I'll say this: if there was no MS Office for the Mac, I would have never in a million years made the decision to switch to a Mac. Pure and simple. Apple is the gadfly and Microsoft is the cow. One depends on the other.