avoiding the cult

The “Cult of Mac” is a group of Apple fanbois that refuse to acknowledge downsides to Apple products. While I own a MacBook Pro, use a MacBook at work, and talk/listen/play on my iPhone, I am not a member of that cult. To be a member of the Cult of Mac, one needs to be able to ignore the shortcomings of Apple products while blindly praising those same faults or flaws as “innovative design.”

Case in point, the MacBook Air. It has worse specs than a vanilla MacBook, costs nearly twice as much, has only one USB port, no RJ45, no firewire, no optical drive, a slow-ass 4200 rpm harddrive, and a user-non-replaceable battery. Look at everything that you don’t get for $1800! Oh, but it’s thin. The only up-side is that it is the first MacBook available with a solid-state harddrive. Unfortunately, that would bring the cost up to over $3,100. At that price you could get a 17″ MacBook Pro with FAR better specs, ports, massive fast harddrive, superdrive, and an iPhone. Or, you can get something that’s really thin.

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Nevertheless, the Apple fanbois eat this shit up. “It’s clearly for on-the-go businesspeople who don’t need cables!!1″ they say, nevermind that businesspeople who are on the go and stay at hotels which provide ethernet access but charge extra for wireless. Nevermind that they are still shackled to the wall since users cannot replace their own batteries, and so must charge up a single battery over and over again until someone from an Apple store replaces it for you — likely having to ship it to California first to do so.

The next most popular theory is that it is for use as a “second Mac” — clearly not as a primary machine! What, exactly, is the benefit of it as a second Mac when compared to a MacBook? The MacBook is nearly as small, faster, has firewire for direct-connecting to another Mac, video out, ethernet, an optical drive, etc. The only thing that the Air has going for it is that it is thin, and unless you routinely need to shove laptops into inter-office envelopes, that is a completely useless trait when compared to the perfectly acceptable thickness of the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines.

And now, I move on to OS X. Touting it as the “World’s Most Advanced Operating System” is abso-fucking-lutely retarded. All it is, is a lovely front-end for a *nix system and that is why I use it. There is one application which makes OS X worthwhile, and one only — Terminal. If Terminal were removed in a patch, OS X would become completely useless for anyone who desires to do something beyond reading their email and browsing websites in Safari. Terminal grants you access to all of the functionality which all UNIX/BSD-derivatives have but which the front-end in OS X refuses to let you even see. Perhaps OS X will be able to legitimately claim to be the “World’s Most Advanced Operating System” when they start enabling power-users to utilize the full functionality of the underlying operating system without having to rely on Terminal to do so. Instead, we get a fucking 3D dock with window contents reflecting off of it. Wow. Windows XP Pro is more “advanced” than OS X when it comes to features an average user has access to.