Why is it silly to compare a computer to a car? I spend more time in front of my computer than in my car; why shouldn't I then apply aesthetic judgement to the purchase? A car is a complicated expensive piece of high tech equipment that gets you where to need to go on the highway. A computer is a complicated machine that gets you where you need to go on the information superhighway. Most people use their computers for games, e-mail, browsing the web, watching DVDs and listening to MP3s, and with the exception of games you can do this stuff better on a Mac than on a PC. And you can put a Mac in a living room without embarassing the furniture. If you want a cheap, fast, homely, standardized machine, get a PC. If you want an elegant, hassle-free machine, spend the extra money and get a Mac.
Apple is the company that -- while they didn't invent these all these technologies -- first popularized them: the 3 1/2 inch floppy, the CD ROM drive, the mouse, the graphical windowing system, the laser printer, the DVD recorder, plug and play, plug and play peer to peer networking, multimedia, digital video, streaming digital video, digital video editing, WYSIWYG editing, wireless networking, all-in-one computing appliances, firewire. Even the World Wide Web had its genesis in Apple's Hypercard. The only technology, other than raw computing power, that first appeared on a PC that I can think of is USB. Quite simply, Apple is the most innovative computer company in history. It is the R&D arm of the entire PC industry. It is worth billions of dollars, and the man who started the company in his garage with one other employee and is now still running it is personally a billionaire. And this is how you define failure?
You buy the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. Apple stole (borrowed) most of these items from other companies. Apple OS sucked when it came to real work like memory management and multitasking. The PC left the MAC in the dust in the early 1990’s and now all that is left is a pretty good but grossly overpriced computer they sell and resell to the same 3% of people that are willing to believe a computer case can be elegant.
Whatever turns you on. If you need to get work done – If you want a career in the computer industry – If you want unlimited options – get a PC.
You know what I really love about this argument of theirs, that size = proof of superiority? The only reason the PC/Intel/Windows industry is a giant behemoth today is because of two total twists of fate 23 years ago:
1) The dumb luck (for Bill Gates) that Gary Kildall of Digital Research was so arrogant and stupid that he refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement with IBM when they were practically on their knees begging him to let them use his CP/M OS on the original IBM PC. (To make it even more ironic, they were at Kildall's feet because Gates had personally recommended they go with CP/M. At first, they only wanted Gates to write up a version of BASIC they could ship with the new PC. Gates wasn't particularly interested in creating an OS from scratch anyway.)
2) After Kildall gave IBM the cold shoulder, Gates relented and, still not wanting to build an OS from scratch, instead bought the rights to something called QDOS for $50K. He then made the necessary modifications so that it would work on the PC, and renamed it MS-DOS. Then, in the other bit of pure stupid luck, IBM decided to simply license MS-DOS from Microsoft instead of buying the rights, leaving Gates free to sell it to whoever else he wanted.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with Windows' technical superiority or the lack thereof. The entire Wintel behemoth is based entirely on those two strokes of plain old luck that occurred well before the first PC even shipped.