Both the hard drive and the CD drive in my ten-year-old Mac crashed and while I'm replacing them I'm stuck using my Windows box for both business and personal use. Windows XP drives me crazy and everyone I know warns me not to even think about Vista.
I spend at least thirty minutes every day being a damn software mechanic. Don't you just love that polite little message: "We're so terribly, terribly, terribly sorry, but Outlook has encountered a teensy-weensy problem so it's going to have to SHUT DOWN AND LOSE YOUR WORK. But if you like we'll automatically send an e-mail to Microsoft so they can analyze the problem."
Microsoft must have an entire file cabinet with my name on it and I'm sure they just sit around and laugh at it because after all I'm only a stupid customer and I have no rights. One of their stupid programs crashes, on the average, ONCE EVERY FUCKING DAY. Outlook, Internet Explorer, Word or Excel. That's all I use, AND THE DAMN SHIT DOESN'T WORK! A spreadsheet, a word processor, a browser and e-mail, and those overpaid incompetent bastards in Redmond can't make them work reliably??? Oh but it gets worse. Sometimes Windows itself hangs and I have to re-boot the damn computer, which takes five minutes and sometimes longer. I like to check my e-mail, make my daily contributions to the charity websites, and read a few comics that my local newspaper doesn't carry, over breakfast. On these Windows-failure days, I CAN'T DO THAT. I'm lucky if I can get into Weather.com to find out if I need to wear rain boots.
A Macintosh is an appliance. You turn it on, you push a few buttons, and out pops perfectly toasted data. It doesn't do anything fancy, but the damn thing does what it's supposed to do and does it right every time, and rather quickly. The only thing that ever crashes on my Mac is the goddamned Microsoft-for-Mac software I had to buy to share files with my office. It boots in about two minutes and I can click on four program icons and it will open all of them in about one minute. (Try that on a Windows box and you'll hear grinding noises and smoke will come out the vents.)
A PC is... well it's either a toy or a hobby or a science fair project or a delicate laboratory instrument, but there's no way you can call it an appliance. You never have to think about your appliances, they're idiot-proof, they put up with a lot of abuse, and they need to be fiddled with once or twice a year. A PC collapses if I type too fast or if I lose my place while I'm waiting for it to respond and do something illogical. And I have to be my own software mechanic because the damn thing is always losing my files or crashing in the middle of an update so I don't know where I am. The menu structure is bewildering and totally illogical.
PC's and Microsoftware are pure shit. They are designed by computer geeks who assume that everybody is like them: We love troubleshooting, we love complicated menus, we want a whole lot of features that have very little practical use and are difficult to learn but they look glamorous, and basically we want to devote a whole lot of our precious time to fiddling with our computers.
And you know something? I WAS A COMPUTER GEEK FOR MANY YEARS! I wrote an operating system. I debugged programs for computer programmers. I taught assembler language. I wrote a simulator for testing online programs in batch mode. But I'm TIRED of that crap! All I want now is a computer that does what it's supposed to so I never have to think about it.
When I was a kid I liked to overhaul carburetors. Now I just want my car to get me from Point A to Point B because I have more important things to do than monkey around with my damn carburetor.
Well guess what. I also have more important things to do than monkey around with my damn computer. So I will ALWAYS be a Macintosh man.
Fuck PCs, fuck Windows, and FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK BILL GATES. The man is a mediocre engineer and a totally incompetent project manager. I wouldn't hire him to sweep the floor in my computing center. He can't even spell "QA." The only thing he's good at is being a salesman, and unfortunately I live in a country where that's all you need to be successful.
To hell with PCs. And the .00005 percent of the human race that has the time, aptitude, temperament, training and patience to get any meaningful work out of them should go off to their own planet. The other six and a half billion of us are better suited for Macs.