Respect Sakura

I normally don’t respond to trolls, but sometimes - just sometimes - I feel the need to put the ignorant sycophant pigfuckers like Brandon LeBlanc in their place.

In addition to paying actors to fake buying notebooks, and complain about how Macs are a gazillion times more expensive than cheap, shitty, crapware infested shitboxes like AMD-based notebooks with no battery life and underpowered hardware, they’re now waving this whitepaper around by some guy they paid to write, like it fucking means something. Let me reiterate this for those in the audience that may have trouble dressing themselves in the morning: It’s tantamount to me stating “Hi, I wrote this totally unbiased comparison of the costs of cheap ass PC’s to expensive Macs that’s totally unbiased, fair, and not judgemental in any way, and oh yeah - Microsoft paid me to do it”.

Not to call anyone’s integrity to question, but Roger L. Kay, the author of this whitepaper, is A FUCKING LIAR, and Brandon “I enjoy cocks weekly” LeBlanc is A FUCKING LIAR AND A SHILL. Now that we’ve got that little disclaimer out of the way, lets see how the argument of these worthless faggots fails to hold water like Brandon’s mouth would fail to hold all that sperm he ingests daily.

Lets get to the meat of this argument, shall we? Page 5 states:

Upgrades. One place that Apple really gets people is in the upgrade department. An example is Blu-ray, the newest standard for optical storage. Although it is arguable whether Blu-ray will ever be adopted by mainstream buyers, it does represent the largest optical drive capacity on the market, suitable for several hours of high definition video content. Apple’s solution — a standalone player from Sony, the BDP-S350 — costs $300. A LiteOn DH-401S bought on NewEgg costs $95. That’s $205 for some fancy plastics and fairy dust. But it’s still better, right?

WHAT THE FUCK. No, seriously… what the fuck? Is that an Apple logo on that fucking Blu-ray drive? No? That’s right, it’s a fucking Sony product that happens to cost between $245USD to $432USD. Furthermore, the fucking thing isn’t even ON Apple’s store at the time of writing, so how does this become an Apple-endorsed product? Furthermore, what stops a particularly inventive user to purchase a 5 & 1/4 bay external USB or firewire enclosure and attaching said cheap-ass LiteON drive to said Mac? Fairy dust?

Another example: if someone needs a wireless router and more storage capacity to hold photos, video, and music — not an unreasonable scenario — a 1 terabyte Western Digital USB drive will cost them $150 and an AirPort Extreme Base Station fetches $180 at Apple’s online store, for a total of $330. For $150, the same person can buy a comparable Cisco LinkSys dual-band wireless router. Adding an equivalent 1 terabyte Iomega external drive costs $150 more, for a total of $300 for the same capability. The premium for the Apple setup is $30. Maybe that’s chump change to the cool.

Because we all know that LinkSys routers and Iomega external drives are incompatible with Macs. Furthermore, there’s a world of difference for a user setting up a secure, wireless network if they went with Apple’s Airport solution, in comparison to doing the same thing on the Mac side. Aside from personal experience that I can attest to, there’s also the unscientific study of how many unsecured LINKSYS, NETGEAR and DLINK SSID’s I see when travelling to work and back every day (quite a few), and how many unsecured “Apple Network XXXXXX” networks I’ve come across (none).

We can argue that this is mostly due to market share and all that, but the fact remains that to this day - Apple makes it much easier to set up a secure network, because when you plug the thing in, and point your computer to the Airport base station, all manner of helpful and intuitive wizards pop up and make securing it very unchore-like. If you don’t know shit about computers or wireless security (and lets face it, these people are the majority out there), isn’t $30 a worthwhile investment in making sure you’re doing it right? Furthermore, it’s not just restricted to those “cool” people out there with Macs - even PC users can use it, and take advantage of it. To be kind, I’m not going to mention how the USB port on said base station can allow a person to share said USB drive to multiple people on said wireless basestation, but I guess only “cool” people do that sort of thing.

To their credit, they mention the current bullshit situation involving graphics cards for the Mac Pro. You can usually disregard this, due to the fact that the Mac Pro is a workstation computer, and not your average consumer PC- and that if a guy’s gonna throw out 4 grand AUD on a system, then the $90USD price difference between card vendors is going to mean fuck all to him. To me, it is a particularly painful sticking point that I’m restricted to a particular choice in graphics cards due to the whole EFI issue with the Mac Pros.

But then I remember that the issues I have aren’t necessarily the sort of issues that most Mac Pro owners face. I still enjoy gaming, and that means I prefer nVIDIA due to the quality of their Windows drivers, and the fact that they’ve always supported very fundamental things that ATI simply haven’t wrapped their head around yet - like correct 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratios on a widescreen monitor. For people who use Mac Pros for professional work, this isn’t a hassle. Furthermore, if you buy all the hardware in the one spot, then you only have one place to go in terms of a support channel. Imagine buying a video card from NewEgg, slapping it into your Dell or HP system, and then going to them for help if you run into issues.

Furthermore, the sort of person who’s comfortable swapping out video cards every 6 months is usually not the sort of person who owns a Mac Pro - or if he is, he’s probably got a PC dedicated to gaming somewhere, anyways (which, to rub in Microsoft’s face further, undoubtedly runs Windows XP). People like me are a rare breed in the Mac community.

So, the second argument in the piece is software. Roger Kay goes out and decides to “re-buy” ten tons of shit on the Mac, yet expects software to magically sprout out from Microsoft for free, or that the user going from XP (an eight year old operating system) can expect everything he owns to run trouble free and have no incompatibility issues with Vista. Well, there’s one thing he’s gotta buy every year on the PC - antivirus. While there’s a world of choice out there, lets assume he goes with the usual suspect - Norton AV. That’s $79.99 USD to start off with, because he’s moving from XP to Vista, and probably needs to buy a whole new AV package due to incompatibilities - and then there’s the subscription - $69.99 a year.

Then there’s the accusation that every Mac user has to go out and buy MobileMe, formerly known as .Mac - for no apparent reason other than Apple offer it. What’s the argument here? Because Dear Leader said you should? The fact remains that most Mac users don’t want or need MobileMe, and usually don’t go out and buy it. I happen to have it, but that’s only because I own an iPhone, and find the convenience of automatically updated calendars, contacts, and mail across all my systems and the iPhone a service worth paying for. If not for that, I wouldn’t need it - Gmail and Google Calendars work far better than any Microsoft solution.

Then they’re also forgetting that we actually can run all of our old Windows software on the Mac as well. It can with the cost of XP (or Vista) and using Boot Camp for free - or you can be even smarter about it and pay for VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop and migrate all your old software easily. Hell, both have tools to migrate your old XP PC straight across - and if you bought XP retail, then there’s no need to buy another copy as moving it from one system to another is in the license. That way, you don’t need to rush out and buy everything again - just wait however long you normally would to update software to the latest versions.

So while we’re on the topic of weak excuses, lets move right towards the conclusion with this one:

The mockery of the “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” ads will have faded to a faint echo, as Windows 7 addresses many of the specific jabs highlighted in the ads. So, why, again, was the Mac so much cooler? Oh, the CEO was a better public speaker. And? Uh, the system never crashes. Right, Windows has that, and? The plastics are prettier. Have you seen the XPS One? The Mac boots right up. That right? Shall we benchmark?

Being a beta tester for Windows 7 doesn’t hold the same cred as being a Vista beta tester, now that Microsoft handed the Win7 Beta out to everyone and their dog - but it does allow me to state that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the current release of Windows, and their next release around the corner. Windows 7 is nothing more than a few UI changes, and speedups to Windows Vista. The fact that the version number is 6.1 should clue you in on this. The difference between the two OS’s is the same as Windows 2000 and XP when it came out. The only difference is they’ve had two years of failure with Vista to learn from, and that all the hardware and software vendors have now had time to catch up to make Windows 7 a trouble-free release. This isn’t a new operating system, folks.. it’s Windows Vista Second Edition.

So, with that out of the way - what’s so good about Macs? What is it? Prettier looking boxes? Aluminium? Hypnotic Apple logos? The desire to please Dear Leader? Why don’t you actually go out and ask them? The answer, as it always has been, is MAC OS X. It’s what it’s always been about. It’s why we’re paying more, and gladly doing so. If you’re buying Apple to be “cool”, then you’re as big a fucktard as you would be if you used to write a blog about how awesome Microsoft is, and then got hired by them to do that as your day job.

Now.. the horrible truth of the matter is that I actually use, and enjoy, both products. I had very few issues with Vista when it came out, partially because I was in the beta, and partially because I did my research beforehand, and ensured that the hand-built system I had at the time of Vista’s release was ready for it. I eventually migrated to the 64-bit version in January 2008, and despite a few teething issues - was able to overcome them successfully. Vista wasn’t a failure for me - it actually worked out fairly well, despite me spending most of my time in OS X nowadays.

But what did fail was Microsoft’s marketing. Vista wasn’t perceived well, because the initial hardware it came on was shit, or underpowered. Furthermore, the press blew the fact that corporations weren’t moving to it on day one out of proportion - and forgot that it’s the same fucking thing they did when Windows 2000 and XP came out. Then, there was the announcement of Windows 7 - and with it coming so soon, our company decided “fuck it, we might as well wait until then”. Only now are we implementing Windows 2008 servers, and only in specific instances ($40 a pop for each PC in our company? That’s a lotta cash, considering our company is Australia-wide and enterprise-sized).

On the other hand, Leopard was extremely well-received. I factor a few reasons for it - first of all, it was mostly the same to Tiger in terms of user interface - whereas Vista’s biggest complaint amongst my peers was “Where the fuck did they put xyz now???”. Changing the IP went from a 4-click process that took barely 7 seconds, to a 7-click process that can take up to 20 seconds. Flip 3D was added in response to Mac OS X getting Expose back in 10.3 (2003). However, Microsoft failed to see beyond a fancy 3D task switcher, and take usability lessons from it at the same time. Out of all the “ripped off” features, this is the one I wish Microsoft did properly - I can’t even begin to describe how much I miss Expose at work. That’s the key point between what was nice about Leopard, and what sucked about Vista. In Leopard, the only things that were changed, were done so for the better. In Vista, it felt like they changed things for the sake of change. While people like me would get aggravated by it at first, and adjust - others not so computer-savvy (the great unwashed masses) hated the everloving fuck out of it.

Not to mention, we also forgot to talk about the Microsoft tax. What’s the Microsoft tax, I hear you ask? It’s the tax you pay when something like Conficker gets onto your system and anal rapes it in every which way but Sunday. When you start getting popups warning you of fake viruses, or adverts for Swedish penis enlargment pills coming up all the time. The time taken to remove this shit, or the cost of taking it to Dodgy Bros computer emporium down the road, because HP and Dell tell you to just flatten and reinstall - but you want to keep your precious Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and you’re just not computer savvy enough to back these things up yourself. You’re also afraid, and misinformed, and may think that virus can infect documents and things as well, and that $70-a-year piece of shit virus scanner has done more harm than good, and failed to protect you from the Big Bad Internet, so you get reamed, creamed, and double-teamed by some guy at a mom n’ pop computer store, purely because he knows just that little bit more about computers than you do.

Not that the Brandon LeBlancs and Paul Thurrots of the world will accept this. They’d rather stick their heads in the sand, and continue in the land of make believe where Apple is the same company they were in 1997, Vista is well received by the consumers and press, and Microsoft are still the benevolent demi-gods of past, ruling the PC industry with an iron fist - and that viruses & malware were just this occasional pest of a thing that’d crop up once in a while.

Oh, but I forgot - we’re comparing unfairly here, like how Microsoft like to compare price, but not value. So, to sum up my argument - the head honchos of Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer. One Steve is well known for changing the way we use computers, the other Steve is known for this. Who would you buy a computer from?

Hey Brandon, Steve Ballmer just called and he’s got four words for ya:

ON.
YOUR.
KNEES.
BITCH.