A funny side-note, every time Steve Jobs whined about how Bill Gates ripped off Apple I recall how Jobs ripped off Xerox. That’s right, Jobs practically cloned what Xerox had created and sold it as an Apple computer.

All of this aside, let me again say – the Apple OS is stable, strong, fast and generally good. It’s a fine product, just far over-priced and too restrictive for my liking.
In today’s world, both machines can handle just about every task. Both are fast, both are reliable. The Mac just costs four times more.

Oh, and Apple is better at graphics? No. In fact, PC’s have far surpassed the ability of the Mac in graphics. I have a friend who graduated from the Pasadena Art School, one of the two most prestigious art schools in the country – and he does all his work on his PC. The school used Mac for everything, but he is 100% able to do EVERYTHING on his PC that the Mac could do, just at a fraction of the price. It’s simply tradition that Apple and graphics go hand and hand. People are slowly realizing this is long past.

An avid video editor on Adobe’s forums was asked why he doesn’t use Mac to produce his videos. His response: “Price, performance, options, configurability, just to name a few.”
Let me try and wrap this up with a brief bit on the iPod/Touch/iPad/iPhone.

I will take my 6 year old Creative Zen vision:M over an iPod. Not only does the battery last longer, but it also supports many common formats natively. Divx, Xvid, Mpeg2, Avi, Mov, etc etc etc. This means when I want to transfer a video to my Zen, I don’t have to wait for it to be re-encoded in some stupid Apple format. Converting takes a LOT of time and results in a loss of quality. Why do I have to convert from common formats just to play a video on my iPod? Because Apple says so.

My Zen also supports many more audio formats that the iPod doesn’t.

What happens if you HATE iTunes like I do? It’s stupidly slow, it doesn’t monitor folders very well, it duplicates entries sometimes, it’s full-screen display is obstructive… on and on and on. So can I just drag-drop music and videos to my music device like a flash-drive with the iPod? Snope.. I can’t. I HAVE to use itunes to transfer things. That’s just dumb. I’ll stick with my Zen, just drag and drop my music onto my device without the need of any bulky slow apps. I can even drag videos to it!

Guess what else I can do? I can drag files OFF of the device back onto the computer. That’s right, if my computer crashes (fat-chance being a computer guy… but for other peeps out there), the music can EASIALLY be copied BACK to your computer. Try doing that with your iPod/iPad without having to hack or use third-party tools designed to hack your devices against apple’s will.
Now let me say, Apples support is FAR better than anything you’ll find in the PC world… unless of course you call me. Dell, HP etc offer poor service at best. Apple employs people whom actually speak English, are knowledgeable and quite friendly. You won’t find that in the PC world. Of course that’s probably because you are paying 75% less for your computer, and therefore they need to cut costs. That’s a tradeoff I’m ok with.