Peter Pan for 3 More Days

Tonight, tomorrow night, and a Sunday matinee. Then I get my life back. Maybe I'll find another picture. The term "Arrgh" is definitely leaving my vocabulary for a while. Anyway, to business, such as it is...

What gives with all the punditbots? Everybody wants to cook up some huge rivalry between Apple and somebody. Whether it be Google or Microsoft or Dell or Kitsho Inc, Apple has to be at war with somebody.

It seems to me that a lot of blogtards have played too many first-person shooters. Everything has to be an either-or proposition. You own it all or you're a loser. Sorry kids. That isn't how it works. None of the tech players has to be dominant to succeed.

For an analogy, there must be a thousand variations on the theme "vacuum cleaner." You can buy a basic (read: cheap-ass) model for around $100. At the high end, you can pay as much as you're willing to spend. Most of the companies that make vacuum cleaners are making a living. Like operating systems, they all suck. There are different standards for sucking, so the different models can all sell to people based on their different definitions of how much sucking is enough, and what constitutes the right kind of sucking.

We of the Apple Fanboy persuasion don't think our OS sucks. There are those who disagree with us. Quietly, among ourselves, after looking around to make sure we're alone, we call those people ass-clowns. Okay, sometimes we say it out loud, but we shouldn't.

We also think that those other operating systems suck hard. That's okay. We don't have to use them.

Linux must be pretty good. Lots of geeks love it. I'm not geeky enough for it, so I don't even try. I tried to install it on an older machine a few years ago. I found that I am far too stupid to make it work. That's why I think it sucks. It requires me to be smart.

I run Windows XP all day at work. Windows XP only crashes once in a while. It's pretty mature as Windows goes. I don't like it because of all the crappy, meaningless little details that aren't addressed. No single major point about Windows bothers me. There are a billion little things. It isn't as pretty (read: it's fugly). The windows look primitive. When an application crashes I have to go to task manager, which has a non-standard interface, to shut the application down. I have to click the "Start" button to shut the computer down. After I navigate three levels of menus to find the item I want to click, the computer asks me, "Are you sure?" Then it might not even give me a highlighted button so I can just hit "Return." If I have more than one application open and running, the dogdamn thing does everything slower. It simply cannot handle multiple processes. If there's a full page .bmp open I can type three or four words ahead of the display, and I'm a slow typist. The computer makes me understand the computer and compensate for its shortcomings. That sucks. I want the computer to understand me and take care of its own problems.

So like a good Mac fanatic, I prefer OS X. That doesn't mean that everybody should run it. In fact, I hope Apple maintains just enough growth to stay hugely profitable. I hope Google gets a good enough user experience from the Open Handicap thing to force Apple to keep innovating ahead of the curve. Linux needs to get it's act together, too. Somebody needs to do a user-friendly Linux distro that installs itself without a lot of confusing keystrokes on shitty little four-year old Acers. I wouldn't buy it, but I'd be damned glad to know it was there.

Apple doesn't need to be THE DOMINANT PLATFORM to win like crazy. Microsoft really isn't Apple's enemy. In fact, someday, maybe His Steveness will bail out MS with a friendly $150M investment. You never can tell about these things.

Time for a sandwich.