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When they constantly throw that in your face, its gonna get the customer thinking about how much of that stuff they actually do, at least it got me thinking about it.


Fair enough, they do promote iLife as a big deal because for a good chunk of consumers it is a big deal. While many programs out there in Windows land have sprung up to address the consumer media market like Picasa, none have the integrated nature iLife does. Import a photo, and I can then turn over to iDVD and crank out a nice slideshow disc to send off to the parents. Stuff like that. I personally use iPhoto all the time, where as iMovie and iDVD sit rarely used, and GarageBand and iWeb aren't on my Mac anymore. I don't feel removing them has detracted from the value of the system as it does plenty of other things I'm happy with.

Apple pushes other areas as well, they just don't market everything they do to the consumer. Very few consumers are interested in easy to code for frameworks for distributed computing and such. It is however there, and used quite a bit in the scientific community.

Asfar as the strong marketing, I tend to ignore messages like that when I want to buy something, since marketing doesn't do anything for me. The actual product is what does what I want, so thats what actually matters.

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It'd be great if I were uber enough to just drop into UNIX and do what I need to do cause Macs are just cool like that but I'd have no idea what I'm doing.


I also had no idea what I was doing at a Unix shell prompt in 1998, and had a Windows NT box sitting in a corner of my house as a file server. At some point though I decided that sticking to a Windows only view of the world was probably limiting my choices too much, so I reloaded the box with SuSE Linux and started learning. I had some rough starts with Linux before, but finally decided to put in the proper effort to use it. Shortly thereafter, I had a box that could file share, route my broadband internet connection to multiple machines, and running a web server for development work. Because of that decision now over 10 years ago, I've had new career opportunities open up simply because I stopped saying "well, I know what that offers is cool, but I'm comfortable here" and actually expanded my computer knowledge. I've seen too many coworkers stuck in a similar situation of comfort, and the ones that did step out generally ended up better off for it.

That last part isn't specifically there to try and convince someone to use a Mac, instead it's just there more as an example of how at some point, it might be worth it to try something new, even if on the surface it doesn't seem to be 300% better.


Interesting tidbit back on the Mac side. I've been noticing more programmers look towards Mac laptops as well for some reason. Here in my office, about 50% of the programmers have one, even though they spend all day in Visual Studio. Two of them are even working on a pretty slick OpenGL app for visualizing some of what our game servers are doing.