Johnny66's Profile

I think Brummel is doing his signed artists a disfavour. I had stopped buying CDs long before the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) was available in Switzerland. The main reason being time, effort and cost of discovering new music. There was hardly any possibility of listening to extracts of the album before commiting myself to a rather large investment(albums are often sold over CHF 30 here). Since the arrival of iTMS, I've bought over 150 songs, including some digital albums. How does this hurt "art"?

Try out an iMac (dual core intel) at your nearest Apple store. It comes with all the softeware you need for a digital multimedia lifestyle. Be creative on a computer without the hassle. Have you ever looked forward to working with your computer (in the sense of treating oneself to some computer time)? If not, then you will with a Mac.

If I could run OS X at least as well and reliably on a "Dell", then the answer is "depends on what I need the laptop to do". For low-end computing (web, email, text) I'd buy Dell if it were more than $100 cheaper for similar features. Truth is, today a 12" ibook is already competitively priced as compared to a similarly featured PC laptop. For myself, I'd love to owns a 15" Powerbook if I could afford it. Your question is really "how much would you pay for good design". My answer is "as much as I could afford without it hurting me financially".

Here is the link to the tech note I mentionned in post 11: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300224

My wife calls my computer "Mrs Mac" and is a bit jealous of the time I spend with it. I, for one, would be happier with a new 15" powerbook!

I don't think is is so much of a Cult thing. It is a normal reaction to want to help people when you see them suffering. Friends of mine are seriously thinking of selling their recent "digital life" acquisitions on Ebay. All they want is to email, print or look at their digital pics and to easily cut some footage from their dv cam tapes and burn it to dvd. They have little time for computing and want to spend it productively. They long for the return of the days of their analogue camera, where they'd just send in the film and get prints they could look at and show. Their problem is a virus and adware ridden, unpatched Dell PC running Windows 98. The words they use are "I spend more time making it work than anything else" and "it is too complicated to get the results I want". I do a lot of evangelizing, but try to keep it from getting on their nerves. A practical way to show them the advantages of Mac OS X for example was to edit and burn a video I made of their last B-Day party. They love showing it off to their friends. They now have their eyes set on a PB, but can't spend the money yet. Of course I've proposed a Mac mini or an iBook which would be a cheaper entry into the Apple world. I'm wondering what else it needs to get them to finally ditch their PC. I guess it should just stop working. One thing is for certain, it requires extreme pain for a PC user to finally decide to switch.

"Writing a hack for a small number of computers evidently isn't worth the effort. " In fact the incentive of writing the first real virus for Mac OSX is huge, because it will ensure the virus writer enormous publicity (PC Mags and Mac Mags, including all the main newspapers would surely write pages analysing every bit of the code.) and probably eternal fame. It would almost be like the first step of Man on the moon.