As far as anything Apple goes, they are rotten to the core. (Pun intended) By the core I mean the kernel. New Macs come with 64bit Intel chips, but the kernel and drivers are all still 32bit. So why do the bad apples still sell?

For one thing, the apple company puts plenty of pesticides on its apples to make them look good. Take the case where one customer asked if his apple was prone to virus attacks. His post got deleted. I personally know 2 people who have viruses on their apple machines. One of them, my roommate got his apple blocked from the residence network due to a common virus being detected, but he won’t admit to it. (Yeah, apple users tend to have BIG egos)
More about that ego topic. First of all, apple puts an i in front of all their products. That, by itself is a subliminal message to influence consumers below the level of thought. An i turns everything that comes after it into a verb. Try this exercise for a minute: add an i to every one syllable noun you can think of. You will soon be dizzy. It’s a world of i ! and the worst thing is that you are trapped in it. That’s the explanation for mac users hating windows. The world of windows is about being practical, meeting real needs, and competing in a real market, so there is no i.
This leads to the second point. The world of the mac is conceptual, near perfect. (At least windows doesn’t pretend to be perfect, so users have more freedom) The desktop computer is made to look like an icon of a computer screen (no buttons to adjust brightness, color, contrast). The mouse is made to look like … well, a mouse? so users end up squeezing and dragging a toy to interact with their computer (yes, squeeze! because it only has one button and weighs as much as a mouse). But just look at the design: transparent plastic with a layer of glossy white plastic under it.
So what about the people who buy into it and why? People want to live simpler lives? On the contrary, I’ve observed that mac users make a mess of their rooms with the exception of those who dual boot windows xp. They want a leaner OS? one guy said Vista takes forever to boot. Actually, it doesn’t take longer to boot than the other OS’s, but it just loads files and programs after it’s done booting (called Prefetch and Superfetch). Besides, even when I do sit and wait for it to boot, I got something else to do. But the real performance issue surfaces when I do use my computer. In Linux, I often have to wait for programs to launch and files to load. In Vista, I don’t wait for anything, except newly installed programs that I havn’t used much. With Vista being as stable as it is, I have used hibernate everyday for weeks until I decided to install upgrades. Hibernate does make it boot faster.
So here I give the final attempt at explaining why some people I know like macs. Macs and iPods are often a christmas present. They look good at first glance, they meet the conceptual image that we only see in our dreams. An iPod has such a simple interface that it’s hypnotic (The music is hypnotic enough). That’s why the sellers of rotten apples first came up with the idea. An iPod? what’s thaaat? it’s too crazy a name. You can’t sell anything that’s got an i and Pod stuck together. The Pod’s gotta have something to do with portable music, but I can’t figure it out. That was my first reaction. So, with simple names, icons like the a compass for safari, it it’s the i that’s become a religion for i users. Why the compass for safari? It can’t be a reference to the Netscape Navigator (Internet Explorer, KDE Konqueror) because it’s named safari. It just doesn’t make sense. Just like how much those bad apples cost. They put you into a small little world.