I'm a mac. I'm here to liberate you from your money.

i told you in my first entry, one of the gifts that i would give you, free of charge, is extended stretches of time with no new articles. well the last time i wrote was before thanksgiving, so promise kept on my end (i did write something about barry bonds, but it was lousy, so i never published it...maybe when there are a b sides and rarites from my blog it will be in there..)

actually, as you guessed, i'm here to - wait for it - sort of kind of in a way defend microsoft. well maybe no so much defend microsoft as much as try and knock apple down a couple of pegs, but still.

when i was on hold on the phone at my desk this morning, i was flipping through the news feed on my facebook page (oh yeah, i'm on facebook now too) and one of the article teasers that came up was from huffington post, talking about how apple recently asked microsoft to stop running those ads where people go into a big box electronics store, and get to keep a laptop if they can find one they want under $1000.00. there's more to the story than that for sure, apple DID lower their prices a little bit so some of the claims are a tad exaggerated, but it's not like everyone doesn't exaggerate things in advertising. the point is, if the advertising didn't work, apple wouldn't have cared, so i guess it struck a nerve. personally, i'm kind of surprised it took this long for the pc market to not hit apple on the price thing because after growing up a pc boy and spending the last 2 years of my professional career on a mac, and after grazing in a lot of apple stores while my fiancee is in banana republic, i think i can safely say that while macs are fine machines, kind of like starbucks coffee, american apparel shirts, and pretty much anything purchased at crate and barrel, you're definitely paying as much for the brand as you're paying for the product itself. (NOTE - if you're a musician and use the computer to write and record music, this article is NOT directed at you, for that specific genre, macs are far superior and are pretty much the industry standard)

to further my point, i thought it would be helpful to look at some of apple's favorite talking points and explore them a little bit....

1. apples do not get viruses.

by itself, i think we can all agree that a computer that doesn't get viruses is a good thing, but if you listen to justin long (and really, who doesn't?,) you wouldn't be out of line to think that the reason that macs doesn't get viruses has something to do with the computers themselves. you'd be wrong. the biggest reason that macs get less viruses (and to be clear, macs do get viruses, the big ones just don't make cnn) has nothing to do with how macs are programmed or wired or any of that and has everything to do with one simple concept - market share. on their best day, macs make up 9-10 percent of all of the computers being used. now pretend you are the kind of person who wants to go to the effort to write, test and distribute a virus. why in the world would you go to all of that trouble to infect, in the best case of best case of best case scenarios, one in 10 people who use a computer (and even THAT is pushing it - when has a computer virus ever affected 100 % of users?)

2. macs don't crash

to put it simply. yes they do. i work on a mac every day. i've lost files i've been working on because "the application photoshop quit unexpectedly," and just like windows, if you're lucky, you're welcome to send them an error report that will be ignored. it's not really a huge deal, then again, it's not like any pc i've used has ever crashed in a manner that i would determine to be regularly. computers lock up from time to time -- even the hardcore linux fanboy probably gets the occasional lockup. the people who tell you that macs don't crash are the same ones who only use it to surf the web, use microsoft word and tweet about how their latte is to hot while sitting in the starbucks, and it's awfully hard to crash a computer when all you do with it is surf the web, tweet and write word documents, which leads me to...

3. macs just work

allow me to pull out my mac-shill to engligh dictionary and see what comes out - it's working...working...working...ahhh - something just popped up on the screen:"it just works"
apparently loosely translates to "i cannot give you a single substantial reason that this computer i just paid 1800 dollars for even though it only has about 1200 dollars worth of components in it was worth the extra money, but since you asked me why i bought a mac i don't want to just stare blankly at you and i remember reading 'it just works' on a poster in the apple store." boyyyyyy to mac users like to prattle about how their computers just work. you know what else just works? my coffee pot. you won't hear me telling everyone about how my coffee pot just works though (yes - i realize i did in fact tell you that my coffee pot just works - but i digress.) fact of the matter is, the stuff on the inside of a mac is probably made at the same factory in taiwan that makes the stuff on the inside of most PCs, and yes, the components of a mac do in fact eventually stop working, and when they do, you'd be better off owning a pc. in my case, the logic board on my work computer (only 2 years old by the way) is slowly dying, so if i turn it off, when i turn it back on, for the first hour of the day, it will shut down every 20 minutes or so. now if it were a pc, i'd just go to a computer store, put a new motherboard in it and be on my way about 150 bucks lighter. now go back to my mac -- our it guy confirmed it was the logic board and that fixing it would be $450.00, unless i want to buy a board on ebay (and it's ALWAYS risky buying computer components on the secondary market for a multitude of reasons) and that part of the reason the board was 450 is because i have to let an apple certified technician change the board for me.

full disclosure time - i'm writing this on a mac though i didn't buy it (my better half's office was switching to pcs and had a lottery to give out the rest of their clamshell imacs and she won) and i could just as easily if not more easily write another blog about what's wrong with pcs. it's just that, starting with the release of the ipod, apple, very wisely by the way, figured out that if you make something pretty and bright and manage to create a sense of community among your users, you can defnintely sell your product for a premium over your competition (the ipod is not the best portable mp3 player on the market, and by all accounts, the iphone is a mediocre phone at best,) kind of like a techie country club.

i'm not telling you not to buy a mac - like i said, they're perfectly good machines and if money were not an issue i would buy one. but the fact of the matter is that money is, and will always be, an issue. and in a straight, value based, function over fashion comparison, the pc will win every single time. i guess what i'm trying to say is that if you choose a mac, just know that a big part of what you're paying for has absolutely nothing to do with a mac itself, and everything to do with "being a mac."