I switched to an iBook 14-incher just over a year ago, having relied on a noisy, dusty, monster piece o' crap desktop running Windows 98 for the previous five.

The difference between the two experiences, right from the instant I took the thing out of the sweetly designed box, was like walking to your first day of school ever with your mom, being met by a lovely, warm-spirited teacher in elegant clothes, given a school tour, a delicious snack, watching an orientation movie and getting a nice massage, all before classes began ... versus the Windows experience: walking to school alone through a Congolese ghetto at night dressed in a pink tutu with a sign on your back reading, "Punch me, stab me, shoot me, bugger me, take my money, and don't forget to leave me in the dirt, fully bled."

I sang lengthy ballads that extrapolated each of my new machine's million virtues, as though I'd found the truest kind of love that only the ancient poets understood. And I did so to all who'd hear me -- friends, strangers, clients, my poor, confused parents, whom I'd only recently dragged into the world of Windows-based computing, and for which they will certainly never forgive me.

I took the iBook with me to Asia for seven weeks, along with newly purchased iPod, 5-megapixel digital stills/video camera and my rock-climbing gear. I watched season one of "The Office" on Railay Beach in Krabi, Thailand, nightly. I made a home movie I called "Southeast Asia in Thirty Seconds" made entirely of the half-minute clips of digital video, in stereo, furnished by my little camera. I got admiring glances from hot backpacker girls whenever I whipped out my jet-white, gleaming machine in public.

Windows to me now is like some awful junkie girlfriend you finally shook off after being together for a too-long, toxic misadventure that came close to sapping your imagination and patience of all usefulness and merit.

The iMac is my therapy, my platonic wife, my go-to universe for countless things creative, fun and communicative.

I'd sooner lower my testicles into a vat of boiling acid than even use a Windows computer again -- let alone own one.

I guess that's about all I can say in Apple's favor.

-- Paul Fenn

I must admit I'm still slightly bitter over Farhad Manjoo's (terrible, in my opinion) election articles. But this was a good and interesting article.

The point made toward the end -- that the only hope (open standards) for loosening Microsoft's grip on the world is coming more from the free-software camp than from Apple -- is a bit of an interesting paradox. For Apple itself adopted a "free software" operating system (the Unix variant known as BSD) as the basis for its current operating system. It also adopted a "free software" Web browser to integrate into the desktop (KDE's Konqueror became Safari). And, from my reading, Apple has more or less done a pretty good job at cooperating and feeding back fixes and new code to the free-software projects that it has taken large elements (indeed, the very core) of its current platform from.

This may be a little too on the technical side to matter to most people. But it is to say that in the strange case of Apple's recent evolution, the lines between the proprietary company and the free-software world have become interestingly blurred. It may not be an either-or proposition as to whether Apple or "free software" poses more threat to Microsoft's monopoly ... they may be working (separately) together on this front.

It is also interesting how Apple has now captured mindshare among both extremes of the computer world. It maintains its loyal base of the near computer illiterate (not intended in a derogatory way, of course). But now with OS X, and its powerful Unix underpinnings, combined with (it can not be denied) beautiful physical and GUI designs, it is in many cases the laptop of choice among the extremely technical crowd (at least among those who can still afford it).

-- T. Middleton

Overall I appreciated your recent article about the MacMini and Apple in general as being vastly more insightful that most of what I've read on the subject. However, I did want to set the record straight on one matter.

In the last page, you commented that Apple was just as defensive of its code as Microsoft and so was unlikely to be able to help drive the acceptance of open standards. Certainly it is true that Apple has been famously (and sometimes excessively) defensive of its brand, secrets and trademarks, but in terms of standards and of code, Apple has been making great strides toward openness.

In particular its release of the core operating system code in open source (Darwin) is something that you would never see from Microsoft, and every copy of the operating system sold comes with the developer tools necessary to make modifications. Beyond that, Apple has embraced open standards even where the code has been closed. Behind the proprietary DRM, the music downloaded from the music store is encoded in a standard MPEG-4 format, and Apple is embracing open video standards as well. Both of these standards are in direct competition with Windows Media formats, which are entirely closed and allow Microsoft to dominate decisions about how they are used.

Apple, and even more so the open-source community, need to be encouraged to strengthen this tie, rather than dismiss the gulf as too big to bridge.

-- Michael Boyle

Excellent piece, overall, but with one glaring omission, especially considering the emphasis on the importance of "appliance computing" toward the end. Jef Raskin was the cheerleader for appliance computing at Apple during his tenure there, and he has continued to develop and promote advanced user interfaces in the years since. To leave his name out of the article seems more than a little unfair.

-- Matt Glass

Thanks for such an amazing and eye-opening article. As a frustrated IT director of a prominent Boston architecture firm (on Windows) I can attest to the fact that the Windows OS has lost its way. So far has this OS and its company gone into the dark forest that there is little chance they can be saved from themselves.

As for Apple (and our future)? Their defeat in the great platform war was the best thing that ever happened to them: it made them wiser, smarter and deeply focused on the future -- a future that, in their vision, looks a lot more promising and -- dare I say it -- sensible.

-- Anthony Frausto

Bigger than Jesus? Farhad Manjoo is really dating himself with that one. For the hordes of angry readers trying to burn their copies of an online magazine, here's a tip: Hold a magnet to the screen. The effect isn't permanent, but the psychedelic distortion will take you back.

As for me, you won't be prying my Mac or my iPod from my cold dead fingers. I may be old, but I hope to live long enough to see the implantable, bionic model!

-- Bill Garrett

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