Simon Willison’s Weblog

Apple rant

20th June 2002

John C. Dvorak: E-Mac, i-Mac, No Mac. This is so poor I just had to link to it. John claims that the Mac is on it’s last legs and deserves to be put down, which is a complete contradiction to almost verything I’ve read about Macs in the past siz months. I’ve never had a Mac and I’ve had few chances to use one, but I would jump at the chance to own one at the moment. Why? Simple, OS X. Apple have taken a truly world class operating system (FreeBSD) and added a truly world class GUI—a combination that I don’t think is matched anywhere else in the computing world. They’re innovating like never before—AirPort and the i-series of software are great examples. John completely fails to back up his viewpoint at any point in his article—in fact the worst he does is to criticise Apple management of running Apple “like a tire company”.

I’ve probably fallen for this deliberate troll hook, line and sinker, but it really annoys me when respected columnists come out with this kind of unsubstantiated claptrap. Especially when they accompany it with such fallacies as I’m not writing this column as a Mac basher to get attention, although plenty of people will accuse me of doing that.

Related reading: Slashdot discussion on John’s column, Apple’s 10 reasons to switch to a Mac, Scott Johnson on how impressed he was with his partner’s new iBook.