AntiMacFanboism as a Religion

Dave asks in my WHS Unplugfest post if hating Mac’s is a religious bigotry:

Why are you turning your nose at something that a) works and b) does what you want. That’s religious bias…

He is right. AntiMacFanboism is a religious decision but I think it has more merit than the MacFanBoism where hordes of people line up for no reason at all to buy a device just because of its design. When confronted, they always compare their current Apple Experience with the crashing and blue screens of Windows 98. Yes, “It Just Works” because you have no choice but to run anything but the Apple software and when you try the other options they crash just as ugly as they do on Windows.

My AntiMacFanboism stems from tying software to their overpriced hardware and trying to lock content down to their software. No ability to legally use Mac OS X on a system that can hold 4-6 hard drives in a single chasis with my choice of RAID controller makes MacOS X absolutely useless to me. I don’t buy music on iTunes because I cannot move those songs to other devices. That, IMHO, is moving backwards, not forwards. It doesn’t matter how pretty your device is if you can’t swap the extra battery on your own on a long trip.

I’m not saying that Apple hasn’t done a great job of creating the baseline applications that most people use and dumbed them down to the core so that anyone can be immediately productive without problems — what I am saying is that everyone I know that exists even an inch off that computer newbie level is virtualizing Windows on top of their Mac anyhow. So what’s the logic there, pay for an overpriced Apple device and virtualize Vista/XP just because Vista/XP didn’t perform marvelously on your underpriced/underpowered Dell?

It’s not like I’m a naive Mac basher, I have two Mac’s in my office and use it every day, so far, nobody has been able to clearly and eloquently demonstrate to me that Mac is better on equivalent hardware.

It’s all the huge gaping unreasonable holes in what Apple delivers that really hold me back from taking them seriously as a platform. At the end of the day, they are both trash. For example, “just works” doesn’t apply to our Apple G4 iMac in the front office. It came without a wireless card so we bought a third party one from Dlink. It blows. It’s unstable. The iMac is visually stunning, but it’s CD no longer works. It has spots on the screen.

See, it goes both ways. Both are broken. AntiMacFanboism side is just more affordable, more versatile and on the OS merits alone more relevant since most of the other religion virtualizes out religion to begin with.