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Thursday, July 15, 2010

I'll be honest, it does kinda piss me off when people bash Macs.

The main reason is that most of the time it's ad hominem misinformed anti-Apple rhetoric, such as the following. (Keep in mind that this topic is about Macs, the same arguments may or may not apply to the iPhone, iPad, iTunes Store, etc.)

"It only has one button!"
Apple mice have had two-button capability for about five years, and even before that you could plug in a standard multi-button mouse and it would just work.

"The platform is so closed down."
This doesn't really apply to the Mac at all. You can install absolutely anything you want. The biggest limitation is the ability to install OS X on Apple hardware only. Personally I think it's Apple's prerogative to enforce that, and I don't have a problem with it. Every time I hear this no one can cite me a specific example. (Again, iPhone is a totally different story. We're only talking about Macs in this topic.)

"Macs are not very powerful, they're only for the computer illiterate."
This one bugs me the most, because under the hood, Macs are just UNIX. You have a shell and you can go crazy with grep and tail and top and all that stuff at the command line if you want. And the great part about being UNIX-based is that many open-source packages build without much effort.

"You can't customize the UI."
There have actually been several projects in the past to theme the OS X interface, but most of them have died off, mostly due to lack of demand. People seem happy with the way OS X looks. I know a lot of Mac users personally and I don't know any of them who even desire to theme the interface. If you really care about this, there are a few other fledgling projects in the works like Facade and Macnifique as well, and there is sort of an underground community of people who hack together OS X themes by hand.

"Macs are greatly overpriced, you have to spend at least $2000 to get a good Mac."
I am typing this on my MacBook Pro that I bought for $1100. It's got a Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, and pretty decent graphics. Honestly at the time I bought this I could probably have gotten a PC with equivalent specs for maybe $900. So yes, there is a slight price premium for Macs if you're just equating hardware on a spec sheet. I have no problem admitting that. But it is not nearly as much as it used to be, and the thing is, you don't buy a Mac all for the specs. You buy it for the hardware design, the little details like the trackpad, and the seamless experience with OS X.

"Macs only sell well because of marketing."
Apple has good commercials and marketing, no doubt about it. But I honestly think the biggest draw for new Mac users these days is word of mouth. People buy a Mac and love it so much they tell all their friends. That speaks volumes more than a simple TV commercial.

"Macs don't run games."
This is definitely the most legitimate argument of the bunch, but now that we have Steam on Mac, I think that you'll see a ton of games get released for Mac and PC at the same time.

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