Next in our series will be our piece on the Apple Corporation in general.
Apple is generally considered very innovative and user friendly. And they are. They innovated the first PC user interface, for the most part. And that interface was very user friendly. But what Apple left out was the usefulness. While Unix computers were involved in UUCP and early popular TCP/IP networking, Apple computers were doing something called hyper cards or something. While powerful unix editors such as VI and EMACS were being perfected, Apple had, er, well, I don't know what they had until Microsoft came out with Word, but I'm sure they must have had something, and I'm sure it was useable. When Microsoft started catching on to the whole Internet thing, providing crude and barely functional TCP/IP networking, Apple provided even cruder and even less functional networking capability.
In fact, by the time Apple caught on firmly to the whole networking thing, they were already an also-ran. This is when they became obsessed with lawsuits and this silly, Albert Einstein, pot-smoking, "different" image that was supposed to somehow elevate them above functional computer systems.
Move ahead a few dull years, and we come to Mac OSX.
Now Apple decides, understandabley, to scrap their, useless, Mac OS in favor of something that works and that is free and that they can integrate with a bunch of pretty icons and sell for lots of money.
This was a good thing for Apple users who were already used to spending lots of money on pretty icons but weren't used to an OS that actually did anything. Now Apple fanatics had an OS with pretty icons and a functional operating system. But in the spirit of previous Apple OSs, Apple locked this thing up and prevented developers from easily developing Apple applications. They also neglected to contribute back to the community from which they took (the open source community) and refused to contribute their own software (itunes, the apple gui, etc.) back to the community).
I hear from folks that OSX is very pretty and has lots of nice wallpapers. I've seen it. Yes, it's very shiny and sparkling. Folks claim it's very stable, and I have to agree; FreeBSD has always been a very solid OS. But is Apple now much different than M$? They take other peoples technology and re-package it. It doesn't work very well, but it's "more stable" than the previous version. It's locked up like a drum, but should somehow magically be comatible with stuff that shows up a year or two from now.
Apple/Mac is no better than Microsoft, they just smoke more pot and spend more on fancy billboards on the 101.
Next installment: Why I hate Redhat
