Mmmmmmmm Mac

Let's see here. It runs on a particular flavour of Unix - just with lots and lots of extra eye candy - all those drop shadows, and brushed aluminium, coloured glass beads, over-elaborate pretty-pretty icons that grow larger as your mouse rolls over them etc. (None of it is to my personal taste -but there you go.) It's soon to be running on Intel chips (a Mac-tel instead of a Win-tel) oh, and shhhh - don't tell any body but you can also hack an ordinary PeeCee to run the OS faster and better on it - for a LOT cheaper* - just without it being encased in (ugh, shudder) 'designer' white plastic or expensive titanium. Too many Mac owners find it so hard to understand that at it's heart a computer is a computer is a computer - they *all* consist of silicon chips, motherboards, graphics cards, soundcards, network cards etc. etc. all working together to do the various things computer do. Mac OS just takes more pains to hide more of the difficult technical things from the users (even to the point of taking away a second mouse button and scroll wheel just in case that should ever confuse the end user), and Apple charge it's adherents a lot more money for it all. This is called marketing. Apple spend a lot of money on that and packaging - which is why they have to fob it's users off with painfully under specced hardware - after all they've got to find the money to pay their designers, advertising execs and marketers from somewhere. I almost admire how they manage to make mac-users feel such rebels. Of course most work places use 'evil horrible machines' that run Windows - so at the end of the day you can go home and use your pretty-looking mac to do your very own things (email and web browsing) and feel like you're sticking it to the man as you do it. It's all so 'Rebel without a cause' isn't it? Except instead of making Bill Gates (and -insert name of a computer manufacturer) richer - you're making Steve Jobs richer... 'webel webel!'

But of course the real genuine proper computer rebels are building their own machines out of parts -all running Linux or yellow tab - or keeping older machines like Acorn or Amiga running... Personally I think it's pretty shitty that there's only Windows, Mac and maybe Linux to choose from. Each has it's strengths and weaknesses but we're still years away from an ideal OS.

*In the ooooold days I was told of a box Amiga that ran an emulation of a Mac only a lot faster and a lot more stable than a 'proper' mac. So this isn't the first time I've heard of other machines easily outplaying mac at their own game. But y'know - the marketing... powerful stuff. People will still buy over priced bottled water rather than simply drinking it from the tap...