Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac

Interesting points from
Why I Will Probably Never Buy Another Mac - OSNews.com:

"When you joined Internet forums on which Apple was discussed, you became aware of an even more disturbing but related phenomenon. I only later realised what it was. The symptom was an increasing rudeness and intolerance and hostility towards any other platforms. And it was couched in lifestyle terms. Windows machines were ridiculed for being boring beige boxes. Windows users were the subject of snobbish jibes. Contemptuous references to Walmart appeared. Macs kept being compared to high end designer brands, in particular to cars. If you chose differently, it was because you had no taste, no class.

BMWs appeared to have a particular fascination for the Mac aficionado. You didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The chorus of people who seemed to think that Macs were high class, and that buying them was a route to social mobility, was astounding. Could there really be so many people who were so naive about how social class really works in America? And could so many of them be Mac users? I shivered a bit at the thought. You could understand why Hypercard had withered, if this was now Apple's target market."

I have seen this myself. What I find interesting is that its not really the difference between a BMW car and a Toyota.

Its more of a GAP vs Old Navy T-shirt comparison. They use for the most part the same hardware today (give or take) and folks still gladly pay a large premium for equivalent computer configurations.

The differentiating factor is definitely OSX vs Windows; but as its been better articulated elsewhere OSX might have less features, be simpler on the eye and have an integrated suite of "iLife" applications, but it can not run the majority of software without a Windows emulator.

I find it interesting that iLife would be such a big part of Apple's marketing. Considering that the iLife applications are really entry level applications which can barely keep up with the most mundane needs of users and many of these applications are "nice to have" but to the majority of people, they are as "nice to have" as having an oscilloscope built into the computer would be nice to have. Beyond iPhoto and iTunes, the rest are not really horizontal applications, they are fun to play with for a few minutes, but so is checking http://del.icio.us/popular, and del.icio.us/popular gets updated every day.

My XP comes with a media player and a movie editor. It does lack "Garage Band" and lacks "iDVD", but they are fairly vertical applications. In addition to the applications bundled with XP, most PCs come with fairly large bundles of extra software out of the box, which clearly Apple has decided to ignore.