You know, it's not a good idea to taunt the admins favorite platform

Anyhow, I agree with the additude you have with the switch commercials. They seem silly to me, but are addressing the consumer market, and not the techie market. (The techies have commercials like what CDW is putting out).

But I don't agree with most of what you say about the platform. First, let me draw a very clear line. Mac OS 9 and below sucked. Back in the Windows 3.1 days, the platforms were at the same tech level. But the Mac OS never really advanced much beyond that. Mac OS X, being a merger of Nextstep, BSD, and some new technologies, is a completly different beast from 9. X is the main reason I decided to switch.

I mention internet browsing and a word processor because these are basically the only 2 things these people will be able to do on the mac).

Wrong. Out of the box, I can do more with my Mac then I can with my Windows box. iPhoto is my sole photo managment program, and all I had to do to set it up was plug in my digital camera, and hit import. iMovie has been used by a friend to create a rough cut of his movie in very little time. He's now considering Final Cut Pro once it's in full production. iTunes, well, it's used more by me then any media program was on the PC. If I wan't already set in my media managment ways due to the empeg, I'd probably use iTunes all the time for that. At this point, these are the apps that allow me to get multimedia work done without worying about getting the process to work right. Owners of a DVD burner in a Mac enjoy the same simple, but powerful iDVD to create DVD movie discs. And once I'm done getting work done, I can tinker all I want by either adding software similar to TweakUI, or by playing around in the terminal application, giving me a direct path to the Unix core. Once I get bored with that, I can come back and get some web development done. I open up my favorite editor, code some PHP, hit save, and use my browser to test it. The difference between my PC and Mac here is that I never had to upload the file for testing, I simply let the built in Apache do the server PHP rendering. When I do finally want to upload the site, I yet again just open a terminal session and run SCP. (As most servers I work with now do not allow FTP).

I now have my G4 cube at work, and it is used for everything I need. It integrates decently with the network (though Services for Unix on the Windows 2K servers would allow me to authenticate with the Active Directory as well).

If these people would stick with just browsing the web and typing their xmas lists and letters to grandma, they would have no problems.

My grandmother only does these things on her PC, but somehow it still implodes from time to time. Why? Well with the great insecurity that IE is, she simply clicks on a normal looking web link to cause all kinds of chaos. Or she reads an innocent looking e-mail, and yet again has a massive virus infection. If I could switch her to a Mac, I would in a heartbeat. Then, a simple lesson in not typing your admin password unless you know why it's being asked would solve so many problems if these type of viruses ever made their way to the Mac. (Mac OS X follows the general guideline that no user is logged in as an admin. They simply authenticate a process under sudo if necessary).


Now when they switch to mac, they are basically locked into 5 applications with less stuff to muck around with and find it much more difficult to find things to download and play with keeping them out of trouble.

www.versiontracker.com. Enough said there...

I know i'll already have replies from mac users sticking up for their fisherprice pc's.

Hey, that term around here is reserved for describing the Windows XP native interface