Re: A2Central News

["Terry Olsen" <tolsen64@hotmail.com>]

> It's happened to me that I've been considered a brainwashed idiot for
> going from the Apple II to the PC rather than to the Mac.

I don't get this either. Back when Apple was in the process of dumping it's 
loyal II users and trying to convince them to jump on the Mac bandwagon, 
there was serious hatred for Apple. On the BBS's I frequented, people were 
swearing never to buy another Apple product. The cry of the day was "I'll 
turn Blue before I ever buy a Mac". The word "Blue" of course was referring 
to Big Blue, IBM. One of the BBS's I was on was called "Sculley's Hatred". I 
don't know if that was referring to Sculley's Hatred of the Apple II, or 
Apple II users' hatred for Sculley.

I'd like to know what happened to those people who swore never to buy a Mac 
and then did. What was it that swayed you? I never took a 2nd look at a Mac, 
so I don't know if it would have been the "platform that fits me best".

I went to Best Buy last night looking to see if they carried any of those 
$50 VRFM9 USB/MP3/FM Modulators. The 19 year old kid then proceeded to start 
preaching to me about the iPod and Macs. When I told him I preferred PC's, 
he laughed and remarked that I must not mind the BSOD. I told him that I 
haven't seen that since Windows 98 & Windows NT. He laughed again and 
practically called me a liar.  He then called his buddy over and asked him 
"Have you ever seen Windows XP BSOD?" to which came the reply "Oh, all the 
time!"  It takes an idiot to do that to XP.

He then went on to tell me how the Mac is "un-crashable". Well, maybe he 
hasn't crashed his, but there's lots of blogs out there with stories of 
crashed Macs. Of course, they all blame 3rd party software or hardware for 
their particular crash.  All examples of the "Apple can do no wrong" 
mentality.

He also told me how there weren't any viruses on Macs. I called him on that 
one because I know that there have been. See 
http://antivirus.about.com/od/macintoshresource/. Then he told me that "all 
I have to do is reboot and the virus is rendered useless."  That's funny. I 
thought there weren't any viruses on Macs, and isn't rebooting considered 
faux pas for a Mac user?

Then he boasted about how he had Windows XP loaded on his Mac. Hmmm... I 
thought Windows XP sucked. Why would he load a piece of crap like that on 
his beloved Mac? "So...", I replied. "I've loaded OSX onto a PC." 
"Ahh...but can you dual-boot?", he asked. Why would I want to? For me, 
loading OSX onto a PC was just a novelty. So that I could play with it for a 
while. I found nothing spectacular about it and moved on.

The point is, a computer platform and an operating system are what you make 
of it. You can be a smart user and avoid crashes & viruses. Or you can be a 
stupid user and have all kinds of problems, no matter what your platform of 
choice happens to be.