It's time to butcher another Sacred Cow! I call the short ribs and brisket!

This time Apple will be the subject of my ire. Not so much Apple themselves, as I have a hearty respect for their marketing staff which has succeeded in making highly desirable products merely by sticking a lowercase letter in front a noun (any noun) and encasing them in fancy white plastic.

But let's get down to it, shall we?

1. Using a MacBook Makes You Nothing More Than a Technology Consumer
Mark that. Owning an iBook/MacBook/iMac or whatever does not make you, inherently, any of the following:

• Intelligent
• Creative
• Discerning
• Stylish
• Ahead of the curve
• Environmentally friendly
• Quirky or unique
• Productive
• Attractive to the opposite (or same) sex

2. A Linux Distribution You Have To Pay For
Apple ditched 17 years of its old operating system, Mac OS, to create a Unix based operating system in OS X. You want Unix? Get it for free in one of hundreds, maybe thousands of different Linux distributions. There's nothing particularly special about Mac OS X versus other Unix-based operating systems other than a few bundled freebie apps with clever "i" based names. And with base PC laptops for only a few hundred dollars with a free Linux OS, how much was it you paid for that MacBook Pro?

3. Get Over It, Apple Is Not Ahead of the Curve
Apple has done the about-face a number of times, and each time they move further away from their own independent path and closer to the mainstream of Microsoft and other companies. Examples include:

• The final inclusion of right mouse buttons
• Ditching Apple's PowerPC processor for mainstream PC Intel chips
• Again, the dumping of Mac OS for an OEM-branded version of Unix
• AppleTalk to TCP/IP

4. Don't Be Evil
Apple consumers tend to feel that Apple is a much more peaceful, friendly, and non-evil corporation than the Dark Lord Gates and his MS Empire. I'm not sure where this impression comes from...perhaps the friendly looking Happy Mac icon on boot-up:



But seriously, Happy Mac notwithstanding, you're talking about a company that mass-produces electronics in China, and is more restrictive than any other consumer software company in existence about what hardware you can use. They've relaxed their stance on this slightly in recent years (see Point 3) but Microsoft simply provides an operating system and allows you to install on any system you want, with generally open standards on what parts are inside the computer. Apple is much more restrictive about you buying their parts. Forcing consumers to pay out the nose for Apple authorized accessories sounds a bit like a greedy evil faceless corporation doesn't it?

5. Apples Don't Get Viruses?
Well, neither do these: