Penny Arcade exposes the pink underbelly of Apple, inciting gay tendencies in a hilarious strip. But then the smoke clears from the geek holy war and we see the spoils from our crusade. The bodies from both camps pile up and we need to present a sollum press release. It will never end. Everyone has their preferences, sometimes you can prove technical superiority but most times not.

Gabe and Tyco have ordered iMac, macbooks, all the new Intel gear and I guess their embracing the platform now because of Apple’s willingness to change. Eh.. I guess a lot of people are doing the same.

I have ascertained is not that PCs as we know them lack good design, but that PCs as we know them have hardly any design to speak of. I’m not trying to be insulting. Use a Mac for a week, and we’ll talk again.

Thank you, amen. A lot of the arguements against Apple are warranted. I hear complaints of price, you don’t need to use a Mac for a week to know that you pay more upfront for a Mac. However, Windows don’t even come with an Exchange compatible email client. Exchange. The Microsoft product. Windows. The Microsoft product. Windows can’t connect to Exchange without buying office. OSX comes with Mail that connects to Exchange, without calendars, out of the box. Does it justify the price? Meh, the arguement continues. I don’t mean to solve this debate. It won’t be solved.

However some things just can’t be understood without using an Apple for a while. Putting your computer to sleep. Plugging a usb mouse in and not seeing “Windows is configurorzing your mouse!!”. Ok, please just do it. Uninstalling something by moving it to the trash. Running something out of the trash, in Windows you can’t operate on a file in the Recycle Bin without right-clicking and selecting ‘restore’.

In fact, if you have a shortcut to an app and you delete that app. The shorcut still works. Because the shortcut points to the inode and not the path. It’s a much, much smarter filesystem. I was so excited to see WinFS come out for the same features but it’s delayed a bit.

I didn’t even understand that’s what was going on until I started to write this. Like men who love the wilderness for its savage and untamed qualities, I believe many of us are drawn to this stark brutality. That frontier living, the self reliance, the adversity. The Mac, like The Alliance in World of Warcraft, was easy mode.

Ouch, now we are really getting close to home. WoW and Apple. I do play the Alliance mostly and I suppose this is a knock on how easy it is (not easy just maybe more popular) … well maybe if you play on a PvP server. Sorry, most people pick the Alliance because they look better. The Hord have undead whose jaws are falling off. Why would I want to level a toon (character) in WoW to make them an über ugly freak? Very, very relavant to this topic, perhaps.

I see his point though on PC being frontier-like and OSX being a cruise ride to the Virgin Islands. Although I guess which is better is very subjective.

Return Fire

Apple is hippy gay stuff? Apple has Trash. Windows has Recycle Bin. It goes both ways.

God damn it, OSX is Unix. Hardcore BSD/Mach, manly shit. In a dress. None of this visual studio flower-girl stuff. OSX has ruby, perl, gcc. Object Oriented interpreters bang strippers and eat their meat. OSX is a destroyer of worlds dressed up in a pink schoolgirl outfit. We raped football. We invented the steak. But we also have a new prada bag.

Stereotypes

Did you know you can’t buy radiohead on itunes? You know why? Because everyone at Apple just assumes its there. Like when you started a job, you ordered a laptop but not the moon. “Oh, you don’t need to order the moon. It’s probably outside floating right now.”

Normalization

Time to give props to MS. I’m looking forward to Vista, honestly. The latest build is far beyond what I expected. They are keeping their gadgets idea (Apple copied Konfabulator and MS is copying Apple), which is great. The interface is actually less bulky than the earlier things I saw. IE7 is meh.

The performance control panel applet is neat. You can see Windows ratings of your system and actually see your vid card, cpu and memory all in one place (under XP vid card model is only under display properties or the sysinfo program). Decent cleanup, I don’t think it’s as easy to use though. They have a lot more overwhelming menus and stuff but it’s a nice step. Hopefully WinFS rules.

Apple isn’t perfect

They are fixing my biggest problem, performance, with the Intel move. However a few things are still borked IMHO. They intentionally stay behind on graphics drivers. So you’re never on the bleeding edge, of course this also means that you don’t run into weird bugs.

It’s crazy hard to try to hack up your system. I don’t know why you’d want to run Linux on a Mac but you can, but it’s hard .. or at least harder to do than the PC.

Aliases (shortcuts) to network shares didn’t work for crap in 10.3 or 10.4 but it’s fixed now. Sometimes these weird ass bugs just show up and you have to deal with it.

OSX Mail refuses to work with courier-imap. Seriously.

I read that every icon on OSX’s desktop takes up as much memory as a finder. So if you put a million icons on your desktop, it’s like having a million Finders open.

… anyway. Funny crap.