By: Alexander Kissinger
Macintosh users today are probably one of the most popularly growing crowds. Apple has sleek new looks, from their computers to their operating systems. But why are people so dazzled by OS X Leopard and all its iMac and Mac book friends? Well, there are a few reasons. I must stress that I am not referring to all Mac lovers out there, but to the ones that flame on message boards without logic behind their reasoning.
First reason: Mac users mostly love OS X because it is visually pretty. It seems everyone is always ready to buy the new upgrade of OS X (out of the hundreds) simply because they add some new visual feature. That’s not really worth the money in my opinion.
Second reason: Macs do not crash. I personally have seen a Mac crash only once in my life (which was during a partition creation), but I see Macs having errors almost on a daily basis. For example, our school has a Mac Pro in the Digital Media room that is still fairly new. I was given the task of installing Photoshop CS3 onto it. Note that most of the slower computers (PCs) have CS3 installed on them and they run. The Mac Pro immediately gave an error message saying that the processor did not have SSE2. SSE2 stands for Streaming SIMD Extensions 2, which is one of the IA-32 SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instruction sets. SSE2 was first introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2001). Now for those who have kept up with Apple’s history, they personally made Mac-compatible hardware that was not compatible with PCs on purpose. They did not want to be called PCs (as if trying to show some sort of imaginary superiority). Now why would Apple make a Mac and a year later release software that was not compatible with it? The truth is marketing. They allowed the release of that software so that you would be forced to purchase the most current Intel-based Macs to install it. This is what disgusts me.
The final reason is that—and note that I am not speaking about every Mac user—it seems that almost every Mac user is only interested in the hype and doesn’t have much knowledge about computers. Take Bootcamp and Time Capsule, for instance. Bootcamp is nothing new; you always have been able to install multiple operating systems on computers. And Time Capsule is cool, but it’s not revolutionary. You have always been able to backup and archive you stuff onto hard drives, but this is why Apple has great marketing.
