Lemmings Republicans 2001 Congress

Very cool. Is the woman with the sledgehammer wearing an ipod?

Oh look, more examples of Apple computer users superiority complex. How unusual. I guess you have to give them credit; they have built their whole marketing campaign on manipulating people's egos and every MAC user I know (sorry Jeff) has bought the company line hook, line and sinker and is more than willing to pay twice the price of a comparable PC to prove it. These commercials are actual pretty ironic when you think about it, because MACs whole campaign is Orwellian (anyone who doesn't use a MAC is inferior, you don't want to be inferior do you? All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others). Jeff and I love to debate this, but sorry MACs are not better and easier. They are different. For a 30 year PC user like myself, MACs are decided more difficult, less intuitive and confusing. It's all what you are used to.

I loved the ad.

...and I've been a mac person ever since.

I lived through the up and downs, the triumphs, the dark days, the clone days, the few glitchy operating system versions, the departure and return of Father Jobs.

I've preached the gospel of mac to deaf ears for 22 years, and even lamented the passing, just recently of the power PC, in favor of (dare I even say it?) the intruduction of a heathen Intel chip into my newest beloved computer.

Thoughout all these years, I've kept the faith myself and been duely rewarded for my loyalty by only rarely even having had to open a manual, never being tainted by a virus or a even single bit of spyware. I have truely LOVED every one of my eight macs, not one of which has ever spent a day out of service until it was replaced by a newer and cooler younger sibling.

I am so very satisfied with my early decision, partially prompted by the very ad you've posted.

So why then, did I never buy stock?

Grrrr.

My being a Mac user gives me no superiority complex whatsoever.

In 1984 at CMU, I made a choice. I chose to buy a Mac instead of a PC (the PC-XT had yet to emerge).

I disagree, Noeliebear, on ease of use. Ease of use is what I do for a living. I can demostrate any number of things that make life more difficult for Windows users than Mac users. One has only to look at what Microsoft considers "usability". They pump feature after feature into all their products (Zune included), and call that "usability". There's a whole lot more to usability than feature-sets.

Ease of use depends only in part on "what you're used to". Otherwise we'd still be using rotary dials on phones and only manual transmissions in cars. Users learn as they go. The fact that Microsoft has forced the learning of any number of arcane things that stand between the user and his/her goal doesn't make the Mac more difficult. It makes the ease of the Mac non-obvious.

As a digital music lover and Windows user, you're used to thinking about files. Entities that exist in a filesystem. iTunes deals with SONGS. You don't need to concern yourself with the filesystem entities that CONTAIN the song, nor how the song was encoded, or even encoding in general! You just have SONGS. you play songs on your computer, or on your home stereo via Airport Express, or you put your SONGS (not files containing songs) on your iPod.

When was the last time you cared how your iPod organized the music on its filesystem? Or whether the metadata (artist, album title, etc.) was stored as ID3 tags or in QT atoms?

But on Windows, one has to organize your music files in a certain way because some files don't have metadata attached and you preserve that metadata in a directory structure (more filesystem entities!)

And finally? How you do Shut Down a Windows Machine? Oh yeah, the START Menu. Or on Vista, I guess, the Start Button.

There's progress. :)