Gears of War

[The Former DMiller]

Same for one-button Mac mice, the lack of removable media drives in those things, etc... I know that Apple has advanced on some of those fronts, but they still just have one button...

I agree the one-button mice were terrible, but they have been shipping with multi-button mice for a while now. As for the iMac, it is really meant for a different market than the computer user who upgrades their system every few years. If someone has very little computer knowledge they can get an iMac cheaply and forget about it. It's still a quality product, though, as we have an iMac in the family that's going on 6 years old now.

Nintendo hasn't gone the whole way on the Apple front -- they don't do the "highly overpriced products that make us more money because we know our devoted fans will pay them anyway"; Nintendo does overprice things ($250 for the Wii?), but not as blatantly as Apple where you can get equivilantly powered PCs for a lot less money (and with three button mice... :D).

Macs have never been much more expensive than PCs when you compare system to system, but this myth propagates because there are no bargain-basement Macs, and you can't really build your own Mac out of random parts like you can with PCs. Macs nowadays are no more expensive than PCs if you compare their features.

And, of course, Nintendo actually cares about games, in marked contrast to Apple (seven and a half year PC? Yeah, not much gaming power there... I know I'm not much of one to talk, running a five year old PC that can't run most new games, but still, it runs lots of stuff and I like it for it. And when I replace it (by next spring I'm sure) it'll be back up to par. Anyway though...

I can't argue the games thing because it's true, and one of the drawbacks of owning a Mac. The next version of the Mac OS had pretty solid Windows emulation, though, so playing games meant for PCs will be pretty easy in the future. (Technically it's not emulation, but I won't get into the specifics.)

I guess that part of why I dislike Mac style is because I dislike MacOS and so I say "and I don't like their design either", but I do think that Apple puts too much focus on design and not enough on function... (*recalls old debate about MacOS having fewer features*) ...

I know you don't want to have that old debate again, and I'm not going to convince you that OS X is better than Windows since it's a matter of opinion, but now that I use PCs everyday at work it has convinced me that the Mac OS is better. The most recent frustration I had was trying to take a screenshot in Windows. I wanted just a portion of the screen, which in the Mac OS can be done by pressing a key combination and then dragging the cursor over the section of the screen you want. In Windows I have to press Alt-Print Screen to take a picture of the window and then paste the picture into Microsoft Word so I can crop the section I want. Then I can save it in the format I want it. That's just one example of how something that is simple to do on a Mac takes extra steps on a PC.

As for the iPod, I have never used a portable music device, so I don't know which ones are good... I know the iPod is popular, but don't know if it's because it's actually better or just because it became popular and so everyone said "I need the popular one"... I'm sure it's good if it's so popular though. I just know that there's a lot of annoying incompatibilities between the various players and the various services that sell music online, but that's a different issue...

The iPod is a pretty good product. I bought one not because it was from Apple, but because it was the first small MP3 player with a decent capacity. Before the iPod if you wanted a player that stored 5 GB you needed to carry around a brick. And the scroll wheel I mentioned was not the scroll wheel you see on mice, DJ, and the newer iPods don't have the scroll wheel anymore.