This is the last pro-Apple rant. I swear. It’s just that… just that It’s hard not to say anything in the face of blatant, pigheaded stupidity. One of the Mac-haters in my current class did, to his credit, state that he just didn’t like the platform:

"I like PC’s, never liked MAC’s, probably never will. It’s just a matter of choice I guess. I have always hated the proprietory nature of MAC’s."

Well, fair enough; I can’t stand liver, don’t care for Sony laptops, and wouldn’t use Memorex optical media if you gave it away for free. I am man enough, however, to know that not only do other people have diametrically opposed opinions on these topics, there’s probably a webring or three devoted to folks who specifically enjoy consuming liver while burning Memorex CDs on their Vaio. Hell, I’ve been around long enough to know that there’s probably a terabyte of slash fiction written on the topic floating around on alt.sexuality.eatingliver. I do know more than to post garbage like this on a serious IT discussion board:

I have heard this from some MAC users, but my contention is if they are so great, why aren’t they more widely used?  Ok, some may say Microsoft is soooo big that they held them back, but I say people in the market place buy what is most reasonably priced, works relative well and is easy to learn to use.  This does not seem to happen with MAC.  Maybe some day, but they better hurry because MS is not going to sit around and do nothing to improve their products.

Well, dipshit, I’ve never owned a BMW, but I hear they’re pretty decent machines. Why aren’t the roads filled with them, then? They must truly suck when compared to PCs. There must be something wrong with them since their market share isn’t as large as Toyota or GM, right? Right? Hello? Of course, you must be right… everybody is always talking about how the Mac is so buggy and difficult to use (not to mention full of security holes), so that must be why nobody uses one. Plus, Microsoft is always right on top of all those security exploits, as we all know. Am I right yet?

No?

Well, maybe it’s because Macs are so much more expensive. Because everybody knows PCs are dirt cheap; look at what Dell sells. Well, I mean, before you start adding things like RAM and useful applications that a comparable Mac already ships with. Once you’re there, the prices are about the same. At my last systems administrator gig, I found, to my astonishment, that the price point of tricked-out Apple XServes and XServe RAID boxes beat Dell’s prices for comparable rack-mounted solutions by a factor of some 8%, and XServe prices have dropped a bit since then. So… it’s not really price any longer, either.

What is it? Apple’s still paying for the business decisions they made in the 90s when personal computing exploded, and their prices remained higher. This has been common knowledge in the business community for, what, 15 years? I made all these point, and then declared the thread finished, stating that I had tired of defending the concept of viable choice to an audience that relied on gut feelings and 15-year old data points to make IT decisions, even if they were hypothetical.

That did indeed end it. There was no rebuttal. How could there be, when they couldn’t be bothered to perform even the most cursory research?